meterplech

Why- Columbia is a big rich bully in this situation. Sure, they are a non-profit, but they have a 6.5 Billion dollar endowment that they are using to lawyer up and kick people out of their land. And, the article is right to note that the people who mostly benefit from this are the mostly affluent students and professors at Columbia. Yes, they are paying them "fair value," how would you feel if someone supposedly wanted to use your startup/company/car and decided took it while giving you an amount they determine as appropriate?

This is a slippery slope that shouldn't be encouraged.

Not sure how this works, but the way they describe it they say that they don't really store them, but your internet finance provider stores them and they only access via some credentialing. It does make sense that just adding someone to the equation adds more possibilities for risk

I was wondering about the no use of Mint. This post (by mint itself) says that they don't store passwords and only provide a read version of your data. http://satisfaction.mint.com/mint/topics/is_my_data_safe_wit...

Could you/someone who has more knowledge of this than me explain how this is safer (if it is) and then possibly explain if/how someone could hack mint to get my information.

I always thought of mint as just as safe as using online banking, is this very flawed?

It's really interesting that two of the (only?) magazines that seem to be doing well are the very intellectually focused Atlantic and Economist right now. Ironically this is a piece in Atlantic about the Economist's success: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/the-news...

From what I can see Epic has a landfill of problems that probably aren't related to just hiring liberal arts majors. Moving from that particular example, I think that most startups are not willing to take the risk of hiring someone right of of college who doesn't have an incredible personal portfolio showcased on their amazing website, with years of internships/personal startups.

I agree with the blogpost that colleges aren't doing a good job of transitioning students to the challenges of startup/modern tech workforce. But, it seems to me that the solution would be a number of big employers like Google and others who are more able to take the risks should hire up the most qualified and teach them those skills. Simply, if the undergraduate education isn't good enough, someone's gotta teach em.

Slate has a weekly segment on the New York Time's bogus trend of the week (http://www.slate.com/id/2259817/). Not 100% sure that this is the case, but this article didn't really ring true to me for two reasons:

1) All of my friends majoring in engineering or CS or anything tech are already deciding between multiple job offers all over the country. AFAI can tell there is a huge shortage of qualified candidates for tech positions; at least companies are recruiting heavily at my somewhat well known state school. I have talked to friends in other disciplines and it is definitely harder for them- but they are usually the ones much less interested in entrepreneurship as well.

2) While I see a much higher level of enthusiasm for entrepreneurship in general, I really don't see any higher level of students taking the plunge and actually doing it. Most people (like me) are deciding that given the high cost of college and their lack of savings/debt the prudent thing is to save as much as possible by working. Again- those who are considering entrepreneurship tend to be tech students with job offers they are turning down, not turning to as a last resort.

In short, the recession seems to either be ending, or just not particularly relevant for people with tech degrees, and I would obviously love there to be a ton more students diving into entrepreneurship when they graduate, but I think the trend is overstated in the media.

Fair enough- I would definitely classify that as other information. Didn't mean to be overly judgmental. I just know that TechCrunch recently had an article about foreign startups aiming for funding and not building a business, and was thinking of that.

Wait, did they choose to shut down because they weren't accepted to YC? I haven't applied and can't exactly put myself in their place, but I feel like the most successful people would continue to try to grow their company anyway. Or is there a bigger story here I am missing?

Edit: grammar

Absolutely great series- my first real sci-fi series ever in middle school. I don't think I fully grasped its depth though- gonna have to reread.

I'm impressed by how small the teams remain at Facebook. His profile shows that he worked on this profile revamp with only 6 other people, as well as Chat with 5 others, and the iPhoto exporter himself at a Hackathon. While there have been reports of Google's teams burgeoning in size, it seems that at least for now Facebook is keeping them small. Obviously, these products have had perhaps less depth than Wave for example (which had a 30 person team http://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-cant-build-instagr...). But, still, it says something about Facebook that they are attempting to keep team size small.

I think that this is completely true- the best innovation comes from new people looking at a problem in a different way. This is most marketable right now while people are so disenchanted with the financial world. There are a lot of people who may not trust this at first- but those are not your intended early adopters. I know that in my group of friends no one interacts with a bank ever. Our only physical use of finance is at ATMs

I find the number of poeople who end up not working on the startup interesting. We also saw that on a few of the other yc posted apps recently. As a college senior I try to put myself in their shoes. I think a good barometer for startup success could be how good the offers they are willing to turn down to start it. If nothing else, the need to validate their decision could add extra motivation

Sounds like you saved yourself a lot of pain. A nice rule of thumb for jobs can probably be- if you get axed from a job by doing something completely rational like this you should never work at that company. You got to remember once you get hired you have to work there.

I think that it looks overall very good- but under "Great Features" the page doesn't look very polished. The white on blue headings don't differentiate well from the italicized white on blue. And, it's tough to get a feel for the main features at all. Clicking the "Features" link only takes my to this cluttered section. I think if you had a link to screenshots/ more clean features page that would help.

Also- I think the "Integrates Seamlessly" section is too wordy. Simply saying "If you can copy and paste, you can use DropJobs. Similar to Google Analytics, simply copy and paste the DropJobs widget code into your company's existing website and we do the rest. Listing jobs and accepting applications has never been easier."

With a link to your other features somewhere would get the major points.

Overall, I think this is a really nice idea for small to midsize businesses and seems like a really great service!

Depends on what you mean by torpedo'ing your career. Yeah, maybe your options are worthless but you will learn a lot about what does and doesn't work in startups. You can use this in any of your future endeavors. Also, the relationships you form and network you create could be invaluable. My dad worked for a startup that failed about 15 years ago and his friends from it still meet every once in awhile to help each other out and network.

Edit: FYI- he had mentioned working for an unsuccessful startup would torpedo your career.

I think this post doesn't recognize that you should match the problem you are solving to the paradigm you are using. Functional programming is extremely useful for many types of financial analysis, and other big data problems like pattern matching and data verification. Sure- you might not want to write a mvp for a lean webapp in Ocaml, but saying people don't use functional programming anymore is just not true.

If you have access to K (or you can use the free J), this is exactly the type of problem they can solve. If you put the file into a list x, ?x is the only command you need to get a list of uniques.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)

I think that you might want to say picture or media message instead of mms. While most people on HN, and many techie users will know this-they are also the type to have the knowhow and time to set up their facebook privacy settings just right.

why do random versions of how to turn $x into $y in z time seem to be the most common Ask HN of late?

He realizes your point- he remarks "We just gave back a lot of cash to the investors."

His point is that companies that can't find better ways to use capital than a buy back aren't innovative enough to succeed in the long term

I know there has been a lot of Facebook privacy stuff just all over the HN lately. But, figured an op-ed by Zuckerberg himself might be interesting

While that philosophy is valid (especially as the higher expected value also obviously comes with higher variance), if you are an investor who invests in dozens of companies over years it seems like an argument worth considering. Obviously though, these events get more media coverage, blog attention etc... than the ones that fail.

Also, the article doesn't consider the extremely unlikely long-tail results. I.e the Facebooks and Googles it is trying to explain. In addition to the 1% 20 times return, there is the opportunity for a .1% 100 or greater fold return. If the initial 500k investment in Google Peter Thiel made diluted to even .01% of current Google stock that would be worth about $170million in current market cap. A return of 340 times initial investment in around 10 years. Obviously these exits are extremely rare, but the long tail possibilities of a distribution can be very important in calculating expected value(like when they predict colossal mortgage failures).

I think a better takeaway is that they are attacking a unique niche in Venture Capital. Allowing for people to cash out before IPO, as well as allowing those who understand the company to run it.

"Oppenheimer: We’re not focused on making a lot of money on the App Store — with the iPad or iPhone. We’re just above break-even."

That's interesting to me: that may explain the desire to keep the App store "clean" and the occasional hurt they put on developers. The App store reels people in; if they aren't making money on it the risks of bad publicity is higher than the risk of losing some apps

I think that that is proof that Foursquare should sell... to Facebook. Their valuation is still stomach-able enough if Facebook wants to use their current operating profit and cash reserves. It would immediately make Facebook the mobile leader, and take Foursquare to millions of users.

The idea of people being "overemployed" is described in the Peter Principle which states that people rise to their level of incompetence. Maybe it is reversing itself a little. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

Yeah, but he is showing how easy it is to leverage it for your own small business

Well, obviously. but I was hoping for a more chat-like method of communication. Something similar to BBM, text message, AIM and the like

Having ulterior motives doesn't necessarily make something wrong. Even if Google had business and other reasons to stop censuring and get out of the market the lasting effect is to focus peoples' attention on Chinese human rights violations.

Sure- it might in the end help Google too, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth applauding.