huangm

Because you can express that sentiment with an upvote, a comment should probably have more substance than just the fact that you "liked" the parent comment.

What is the best advice for a startup applying to Y Combinator? http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-advice-for-a-startup-a...

Why does Quora use MySQL as the data store rather than NoSQLs such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc. http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Quora-use-MySQL-as-the-data-st....

Why did so many successful entrepreneurs and startups come out of Paypal? http://www.quora.com/Why-did-so-many-successful-entrepreneur...

What were the 4 or 5 key decisions that Larry Page and Sergey Brin made in the early days of Google? http://www.quora.com/What-were-the-4-or-5-key-decisions-that...

Why has FarmVille been so explosively successful http://www.quora.com/Why-has-FarmVille-been-so-explosively-s...

What was the interview process like during the early days of PayPal? http://www.quora.com/What-was-the-interview-process-like-dur...

My points above are not meant to convince you that Quora is good, but that it is worth checking out. It was in response to comments like 'I saw connect with FB and bounced.'

Appeals to authority and hyperbole are rhetorical devices used to accomplish a goal, which here, is to convince people who are reading all the "meh" comments to give Quora a legitimate look. It's interesting that you feel the need to crusade against a pretty harmless opinion post.

"In other words you don't mind using Facebook or Twitter to log onto Quora and you want to slag people who do and want them to have to "come to terms" with your attitude. Way to go. If "no one cares" why are you making such a song and dance about it here?"

No. The fact that lots of people don't mind connecting with Facebook and Twitter means that if you want to build products for those people, you have to come to terms with that.

And like I said in the paragraph right below, if that doesn't resonate with you, then feel free to ignore it. It's OK if you're not building stuff for "normals".

What's with all the negativity around here? It's easy to look at a product, have several quick gut reactions, and then simply write it off. For all the open-minded-ness that the HN community prides itself on, it certainly doesn't seem to be showing through in the comments here so far.

In my opinion, Quora deserves more careful consideration and suspension of judgment for a variety of reasons:

1. Quality of community - Quora has managed to assemble an incredibly high quality set of founders, VCs, angels, hackers as extremely active members of the community. These are probably some of the busiest and hardest to engage and please people, and yet Quora has been able to elicit extremely candid and detailed responses from them about topics unseen anywhere else. The breadth and depth of information in some of these posts dwarf all the random Mixergy, Founders At Work, etc interviews seen here on HN. For one example, search for answers by Reid Hoffman, cofounder of PayPal and LinkedIn.

2. Amazing UI/UX design. There are so many clever small details to the user experience that it is impossible to really understand without actually getting your hands dirty and trying the product.

3. Pedigree - Cofounders Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever were former CTO/VP Engineering and Head of Connect/Platform at Facebook, respectively. They've managed to secure a massive investment at a huge valuation from a very highly-regarded VC firm - before launch. Regardless of how much confidence you put in these signals, they are meaningful enough to warrant some suspension of judgment.

4. No one cares that you won't connect with Facebook or Twitter. Most people aren't like you. And if you really are interested in "building things people want," you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that this is the direction the web is moving in. I don't like Facebook's cavalier attitude toward privacy, but I'm willing to connect to Quora to see a great product and community in action. The potential for learning greatly outweighs any philosophical stance for me.

Obviously, there are a lot of unstated assumptions underlying these points, so I'll add the caveat that if none of the above appeals to your sense of curiosity, then maybe Quora really isn't for you. But I just wanted to balance all the negative comments so that someone that would enjoy Quora doesn't get turned off by all the "meh".

Hedge fund incentive fees are taxed as ordinary income.

1. What matters most to you: team, market or product?

2. You've said that you typically don't lead rounds and let others lead instead. What other angels do you respect the most?

3. Are there any deals that you regret passing on?

I know the author's intent is to weaken Jobs' arguments, but to me he seems to strengthen them. The vast majority of people driving cars never need to drive on country roads. Anyone that needs to drive on country roads is by no means forced to drive an iCar - they are free to choose whatever car they want.

The author's thesis is that Facebook ads are bad because they can't harvest demand the same way Google ads can (no purchasing intent), so once Facebook has exhausted its share of 'gullible' or 'naive' businesses who give ads a try, their profitability will fall like a house of cards.

This is flawed in two important ways:

1. Just because people don't click on banner ads doesn't mean there isn't a place for advertising.

2. Facebook isn't only monetizing with ads. For example, they've proven themselves to be a killer platform for social games and Facebook Credits seems to have a promising future.

'Overpaying' is just an opinion. Obviously we can only speculate, but many people scoffed at Google's share price at IPO - anyone who bought-in despite that now looks like a genius.

Also, as outsiders, it's impossible to know enough about what the exact funding situation for Facebook looked like at the time to make conclusions about overpaying.

Drew tweeted a link to his actual ppt: http://bit.ly/bVOSfw

I think he meant: 'do the things that only you are capable of doing.'

It would be great if all minimum wage did was 'prevent exploitation.' But the simple fact is: minimum wage cuts jobs.

He just means the hard drive with the OS would be in the tablet.

The Obama administration has already passed legislation for incentive payments to hospitals and doctors that adopt electronic medical records starting 2011, so they are not as slow as you think.

While I am sympathetic to the author's thesis, the discussion is pretty meaningless unless you acknowledge that there is opportunity cost to doing a startup. Sure, you learn a lot and set up good contacts even if your startup fails - but the risk is in what other opportunities you might be missing. It's not sufficient to just be better off than when you started.

Where is this negativity coming from?

No claim is made that the factors they lay out are the only important ones. I'm sure they assume many of the user experience differences are well-understood, and they are just laying out the costs.

The tone of all of your comments makes it clear that your beliefs about minimum wage are unchangeable. My guess is that people wouldn't downvote you if came across as more willing to hear another side.

This is clearly something you feel very strongly about (which is interesting to me personally, because I see no substance to the argument in favor of minimum wage), but discussion is more productive if you are open-minded.

How is this in any way taking advantage of people? Cha Cha is offering an opportunity to make money from doing simple online tasks. People wouldn't do it if they thought the money wasn't worth the time.

As a side note, the evidence against minimum wage as an effective policy is staggering. The only reason it persists today is because it is politically convenient.

Summary: Guy from unfortunate family background becomes a highly successful silver thief, stealing millions in antique silverware from high-end homes in the Northeast. He evades capture for years, as he is meticulous, patient and leaves no trace behind. Eventually he is caught through a series of small breaks. People close to the thief speculate that his motivation was more for the thrill of stealing than for the money itself.

The moral here is that the more colorful you try to make your logic puzzle, the more implausible the correct solution will be.

Graduate school and start working on startup fulltime.

1. A puts amulet in the safe, puts lock on it, sends to B. B puts lock on it, sends back to A. A unlocks his lock and sends it back to B. B unlocks and receives the amulet.

2. Take 20 coins aside, and flip them - this is one group. Take the 80 remaining coins - this is the second group. If there were X (0 \leq X \leq 20) queens in the first group, then there were 20-X queens in the second group. Since we flip the 20 coins in the first group, there are now 20-X queens in the first group as well.

This is a desirable property of a voting system. If we prefer X over Y (X > Y), then adding Z can give: Z > X > Y, X > Z > Y, or X > Y > Z. Adding Z ought not change the ordering of X and Y.

And to relate specifically to Instant Runoff Voting, IRV fails to satisfy monotonicity. It also fails to satisfy the Condorcet Criterion (a commonly held desirable property that the person with the majority #1 votes should be ranked 1st).

There exist `better' ranking systems such as ones involving markov chains (http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/577/), but I'd imagine that the Oscar Committee requires their voting/ranking scheme to be palatable to the general public. Using IRV is a good step in the direction of `better' voting, while still being explainable in a few sentences.

9. Went in with high expectations, and they were exceeded, which is rare for me. Most of the criticisms of Avatar are for its somewhat trite storyline, but for me, it definitely worked. The movie runs long at ~2h40m - it takes its time to develop characters and show off its fantasy world, but never does it feel like a drag. I can't recommend it enough.

It looks like Dropbox's selective sync is right around the corner, which would fully handle that use case.

I'm not sure I see a difference between preparing answers to 'What is your greatest weakness', and preparing answers to any other interview question.

Any interview question loses its information value once enough people know about it / blog about it / etc. And I certainly think the spirit of the question is useful... Maybe the interviewer can ask a differently worded question in the same spirit, but this question definitely doesn't deserve such contempt.

url should be: http://warvo.com/2009/12/36-creative-design-blogs/

He's assuming YC has 6% equity in the companies. 2.6 * 15k = 0.06 * 650k.