jsteele

awesome!

I have to agree. To me, it seems naive not to expect problems when mixing business and personal banking (corporate veil: pierced), not having the correct paperwork available, using not-on-file email addresses, etc.

If PayPal or a bank didn't insist on these strictures, imagine the outrage when someone's accounts are cleaned out by some fraudster with flimsy, half-good credentials.

Especially when traveling (especially to Africa!) you have to arrange things carefully in advance. Maybe someday things will be smoother, but it's still messy in 2009.

Hackers: Learn to hack your finances, too.

I hate to belabor the point, and I'm pretty sure you get it anyway, but it's not the general subject or tone of the story that matters, it's the exact wording, which would be very hard to guess, especially for longer excerpts. It's not a matter of finding a "story" that's hard to guess, it's a matter of finding exact wording. I'll guess there's going to be some kind of trouble with the space shuttle next week, but that doesn't help defeat rsync.net's scheme.

> I don't know, that probably could have been written a > week ago.

No, it couldn't have, unless you have a time machine and a friend on the NYT's national desk, because it was in the Times today, not last week: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=In+opening+remarks%2C+a+Democratic+sena....

"Skeptical readers can savor the irony that Shockoe Moto [his motorcycle repair shop] specializes in imports."

Working on non-import (i.e. US-made) bikes would be the specialty. Otherwise, it's like writing that some restaurant specializes in salads made from lettuce.

10 years ago was literally, 1999ish.

I think Noam is a pretty cool guy. eh kills pomo and doesnt afraid of anything.

I introduced some of my friends doing a company to Fred, and had one of the CEOs of a current Union Square investment (that is doing well) also recommend them by email. He said to me he would meet with them, and never emailed them back.

Fail. We don't need another subprime lender. This country has seen enough shenanigans from IndyMac, Countrywide, and the other clowns on Wall St. Entrepreneurs, find something else to create because this is a lousy way to make money and taxpayers are done with bailouts.

If you still want to do finance, see this link from HBS for ideas on how to build a nontoxic, sustainable form of it:

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/04/manifesto.htm...

I'm not going to agree with SM but I have to agree with their general point: Hacker News isn't the best design, aesthetically or for usability.

The problem of finance isn't that its results are intangible, they are tangible. So I agree with you on this point. Its that it's an industry with strong political ties, like automakers, that is simply not allowed to fail and is propped up unnaturally by taxpayers. Failure must be part of the way we do business, bailouts cannot.

Its not anti-banker populism. Its the bailout mentality that these bankers have that's disconcerting. A startup that fails disappears the way its supposed to, but when a big bank fails we all pitch in the bail them out. That's the problem.

"TwittyPic acquired" "Pet Holdings hires TwittyPic Developer"

Which headline is more truthful? Which is more interesting?

I doubt the latter would make it to the top of HN since it doesn't jive with the startup mythos. Congrats to bemmu, but I doubt he is swimming in vaults full of gold coins. This was simply an aqu-hire.

There is some really good stuff in this article though: "five million page views per day, with Huh predicting that the sites will top two billion page views this year." "I asked Huh about the irony of an Internet company turning to stuffed animals and printed books for revenue." "It gives you a little bit of sense of how hard it is to make money online using advertising,"

We should be talking about that.

Jwesley has 1 submission in his history. universitiesandcolleges.org. I have a domaintools account that shows in the past it had the whois of "John Wesley"(it's on private whois now). But w/o the paid service,just to prove my point: Check the IP of the other domains I mentioned (abutterdish.com for example). Those both resolve to the same IP as universitiesandcolleges.org and are not on private whois. And what do you see as the registrant? "John Wesley". He's a fair amount of the domains on that IP actually.

These are all just restructured wiki articles. Not selling anything yet, though probably eventually going up for sale since there's no other plausible reason for their existance. http://abutterdish.com/ http://bodyfatgone.com/ Also owns Affiliatehunt.com if there was any doubt he's an affiliate. He has a fair number of domains so I'm not going to list them all. They're pretty much all the same thing as those 2 though. There's a few like http://degreeaccess.com/ that are just markoved text. I'm not going to out any real domains, but those are enough to get the idea.

Hey there hypocrite. You have your own weight loss domains. And ever better, you have several spammy websites about online colleges. They may not be right, but neither are you.

Except that you don't use the full MD5 sum, so it's not a simple matter of brute-forcing it.

When "85.7% of the population [of India] was living on less than $2.50 (PPP) a day in 2005" is it really that surprising that they are only at 2.8% penetration?

Many people in India are just trying to make enough to eat and survive. You think they care about using the internet?

Source: http://econ.worldbank.org/external/default/main?pagePK=64165...

I guess I'm just trying to point out that the 2.8% really isn't that bad when you consider how many people are living below the poverty line.

Once internet access via cellphone becomes affordable to the masses like voice is, expect this number to explode.

Ahhh good ol' Kulveer. Time to revisit my old comment from 292 days ago:

---- As the first poster said, don't believe everything you read. The media is all about hype and thousandaires don't roll off the page.

The details: the acquisition price was $5 Million which was made up of $2 Million Cash and $3 Million Stock.

There were 3 founders, Harjeet Taggar, Kulveer Taggar, Patrick Collison. Each founder held 20.89% of the company at the time of sale. YCombinator held 4.38%. Paul Graham personally held 0.96%.

20.89% of $5 Million is $1,044,500. Of course they only have 40% of that in cash and the other 60% is in stock. The stock was $2.69 the day the deal closed. It's now trading at $2.40. If they still have their shares, they are worth 10% less which is a loss of $62,670.

That is all before tax. Factor in capital gains tax of 10-15% before the stock drop and you are already out of millionaire territory.

On an unrelated note, each of the founders are now making a base salary $100,000 at Communicate.com. This does not include bonuses, options, etc.

Source: http://www.edgar-online.com/bin/cobrand/?doc=A-1108630-00011....

----

So: Cash (40%): $1,044,500 * 40% = $417,800

Stock (60%): March 25, 2008- LIVC 2.69 $1,044,500 * 60% = $626,700 $626,700 / 2.69 = 232,974 Shares

January 23, 2009 - LIVC 0.41 232,974 * 0.41 = $95,519

"to dot-com millions in Silicon Valley - all in just over a year" - article

Yeah right. I hope he sold his shares in March, cause your stock is down 83% and that means he made barely over $500k, before tax!

look into caching rss readers. They're very nice.

I didn't get through the whole article, but "Google is building a new secret weapon that has more to do with the brain than search."? Google published their MapReduce paper in 2004... http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html

"Your current group has no one with 100pct of their networth on the line." false, warren buffett's wealth is on the line. from this forbes magazine in front of me, he also has the MOST wealth to lose too. and i'm not sure having desperate types on board give the right balance. me personally i suck at making good, sound long term decisions when a colt .45 is pressed to my head.

Now just a damn minute. If the article you linked to is correct, then the World Bank is playing a devious game of sleight of hand: They got the idea that the US must have "intangible wealth" because of the fact that the domestic resources and domestic production don't account for all the wealth. The sleight of hand is in the fact that they never consider the fact that the USA's rich classes operate in dozens of countries. The US imports most of its natural resources, and it even imports a large portion of the finished goods. All of these imports benefit American investors. About the only thing they export are the costs: Those who aren't part of the rich class have to constantly worry about their jobs going to China, India, Jakarta, and Indonesia, where labor is cheaper.

All "intangible" means in this case is "Oops, we missed it!"

You hit the nail on the head: This whole essay is based on a false premise (which nonetheless is strongly believed by PG). Cambridge only seems to be a "smart" town if your social group consists of people associated with MIT, and you're only likely to end up in that social group if you were part of the middle class when you moved there.

A Firefox extension to turn off the AwesomeBar has been out since February.

Oldbar https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

No offence Tarquin, but what's the purpose of this test? It cannot possibly tell us anything about our own sites, or the sites we work on.

Like many of us, I've already tracked the time it takes for Google to index the changes to my own sites - about 14 hours. I work on sites that the Google robots hit only once every 2 weeks - less content, and fewer updates, though some of them earn 10 times what my more 'frequent' sites earn.

Good O, Hacker News! Which means sweet F all to me, all of my customers, and pretty much everybody else on the planet.

By the way, how long IS a piece off string?

"Never use the same login for 2 websites"

I call BS to that. Fair enough for websites that use your banking or credit card information, but for the rest? I don't think so.

For irrelevant sites such as Hacker News, Reddit, whatever other minor web 2 site you can think of, you should ALWAYS use the same password. Why fart around with a ridiculous number of passwords for websites that are nothing more than minor daily distractions?

A million's a big number. As a User, I'd have to say that a hundred or so passwords sounds about right - and I live online 24/7. For most users - a dozen, tops.

As the first poster said, don't believe everything you read. The media is all about hype and thousandaires don't roll off the page.

The details: the acquisition price was $5 Million which was made up of $2 Million Cash and $3 Million Stock.

There were 3 founders, Harjeet Taggar, Kulveer Taggar, Patrick Collison. Each founder held 20.89% of the company at the time of sale. YCombinator held 4.38%. Paul Graham personally held 0.96%.

20.89% of $5 Million is $1,044,500. Of course they only have 40% of that in cash and the other 60% is in stock. The stock was $2.69 the day the deal closed. It's now trading at $2.40. If they still have their shares, they are worth 10% less which is a loss of $62,670.

That is all before tax. Factor in capital gains tax of 10-15% before the stock drop and you are already out of millionaire territory.

On an unrelated note, each of the founders are now making a base salary $100,000 at Communicate.com. This does not include bonuses, options, etc.

Source: http://www.edgar-online.com/bin/cobrand/?doc=A-1108630-00011...

Thanks for pointing this out aston! I can't believe I missed that.

I think this is the first public break down of a ycombinator company ever.

For all those interested: http://www.edgar-online.com/bin/cobrand/?doc=A-1108630-00011...