not_paul_graham

Energy Future Holdings pretty much demonstrates what might be wrong with private equity.

All players, namely Goldman Sachs, KKR and TPG pretty much recouped their investments in the company so at least they broke even. The suckers might be the folks losing jobs for these companies to come out of bankruptcy.

Also a lot of times PE firms start buying the debt when the company is doomed to fail and trading at a discount to actual value and they have another go at the company post bankruptcy restructuring.

I really hope that these top posts on HN influence at least some employees at Dropbox to resign publicly because Dropbox's core (meaty revenue generating) users aren't HN readers anymore, but the mass market & enterprises that aren't going to care.

Reasons this might be a great move for Dropbox:

1. It will help them secure major enterprise clients, probably the govt. or with ties to the govt.

2. Great selling point to institutional investors come IPO time.

3. Navigating foreign business opportunities.

Although I'm not a fan of this move by Dropbox, it is important to note that Stanford has hired Rice as a professor as well. No one is abandoning Stanford, and the hits that Dropbox is going to take are going to be minuscule in comparison to the upside. This is just the hard reality.

Rice does have a lot of experience that is relevant to Dropbox and students at Stanford and I'd just like to leave it at that because at the end of the day, connections + experiences that come from being Secretary of State trump pure meritocracy or idealism.

My question is completely off topic, but I have some questions regarding your site, if you don't mind answering:

How long have you been operating englishforums.com ? Is this your full time engagement?

How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number ? Was it purely organic or some paid advertising ?

And is the site profitable?

Thanks.

I know that $140 million sounds like a lot, but when they IPO after rejecting the 2 billion acquisition offer from Google, Goldman Sachs will peddle QUOR to institutional investors, and surely they will be able to recoup the $140 million investment + a 10x return if the stock pops. </sarcasm>

On a more serious note, Quora users have a better profile for advertisers because they are likely to be in the top brackets for income and education and unlike an English Q&A site the topics on Quora are limitless. You could target ads at 20-40 year females that have a PhD and live in New York very easily.

Also from the looks of it the decision might not purely be for financial gains. Adam D'Angelo is apparently one of the smartest people around (as referenced by Mark Zuckerberg in some interview) and also independently wealthy so keeping yourself in his good graces might lead to future positive outcomes not entirely related to Quora.

Also Tiger Global is run by a youngish hedge fund manager born into old school money family and he probably pals around in the same circles as Zuckerberg, Adam D'Angelo, Charlie Cheever, other young SV entrepreneurs with FU money and this seems a lot like friends helping friends (this is just a hypothesis which might not be true).

It can also be that the investors know something compelling that we don't know or are hoping that Quora will be the next big social thing after Facebook / Pinterest / Twitter / etc.

There is a place for Quora because it has helped build a community of users that provide extremely valuable advice / answers in a nicely presented format. I'd pay atleast $10 USD per month to save Quora if there ever was need for it.

Unlike reddit or yahoo answers, answers are often provided by real members as opposed to hollow or anonymous accounts and it also serves as a collective wisdom center for past experiences of other humans that you can refer to.

I'm unsure what the correct mix is, but Quora is at the sweet spot of:

twitter + r/askreddit + yahoo answers + ask HN

-> Want to know how to transition from engineer to a job at a VC firm? Well you have folks like Leo Polovets (Current VC, early Linkedin employee /Engineer at Google, Factual) provide extremely detailed answers that are well written and more or less permanent. You know the dude is qualified and is somewhat credible [0].

-> Want to know how Stripe got its name? Well you are in luck because Stripe CTO tells you exactly how [1].

-> Where else can you ask about the evolutionary purpose of menstruationand get a response from a PhD in Zoology? You know its on Quora [2] (unless you want to get trolled on reddit).

[0] http://www.quora.com/How-does-one-move-from-being-an-enginee...

[1] http://www.quora.com/Stripe-company/How-did-Stripe-come-up-w...

[2] http://www.quora.com/Menstruation/What-is-the-evolutionary-o...

That is not the only scenario. More people want to apply to the best colleges than ever. Also given that these schools are targeting students/schools in road shows nationally & internationally it is likely that the increase in number of applicants is also due to the a larger percentage of the sample population's interest in attending these institutions.

As an anecdote, I recently took the GMAT and had MIT as one of the schools that my score was sent to. I scored well above the 95% which is a decent score. Since then I've been getting extremely targeted emails from MIT almost weekly either about an online chat / forum, some resources, etc.

Regardless, this seems like a huge PR win for Airbnb given the recent news about crackdowns in SF/NYC.

Kudos to them and best of luck!

It is likely to keep hitting new lows unless these colleges drastically increase the number of seats that they have on offer (which is unlikely if they want to maintain the aurora of attracting and educating the best and brightest).

More students want to attend college than ever. The ease of the common app takes the pain out of requesting "paper applications" from colleges individually and college ranking lists are available for all to see. Most students have colleges segregated into:

1.) top choices; 2.) middle of the pile; 3.) safety schools

and it is mostly always the case that a lot of students are qualified enough to be at these institutions, so it is likely that this group will apply to the top 5 or 10 colleges because he fits the profile of the student most likely to attend these institutions. Almost 30% of applicants are applying to 7 or more colleges and these low acceptance rates will only perpetuate the increase in this ~30% figure because students are afraid that they won't get into the top two college categories.

From the article:

> Students applying to seven or more colleges made up just 9 percent of the applicant pool in 1990, but accounted for 29 percent in 2011.

> ..students send more applications than they once did, abetted by the electronic forms that have become nearly universal, and uniform applications that can make adding one more college to the list just a matter of a mouse click.

On another note I was recently talking with a CS professor and he mentioned that rankings are highly correlated with the years that an institution has been in existence which is worth thinking about.

I'm confused why this is on the front page. The title left me with the impression that this post was about someone quitting to live for Monday aka the start of the work week in most parts of the world, and doing something else.

On clicking the link, I found a blog post with 50 reasons the author of the post came up with for shuttering his business that was called "Living for Monday".

I didn't read the list, just skimmed through the top few and there was nothing profound there.

Just fyi for others.

Does FB require similar permissions on iOS?

Also, the permissions they ask for seem like FB is angling to figure out a way to play a bigger role in your life and not just restricted to advertising such as sending out a text or placing calls to most frequently dialed numbers when they figure out that you've been in an accident.

But is seems more likely that the US govt. to do any of the following if they make new laws that are an iterated version of the FISA, etc. laws that give them unrestricted access without any need for disclosure:

> Someone is lost, kidnapped, in an accident, law enforcement can figure out ways to subpoena this information.

> Send fake texts or calls on your behalf and then use that as grounds to detain / question / imprison you.

> Data mine text information to figure out if a revolution is happening in a dissident country and perpetuate this by sending texts to a wider network (similar to starting a local twitter clone in Cuba). If this is a friendly country, you can warn your allies and have these people held as political prisoners in countries such as Saudi Arabia, etc.

> Lots of other scary scenarios.

In Atlanta, even if you observe all the rules, wear a helmet, use bike lights, wear reflecting clothing, you are more likely to get hit by a car than not; or atleast you might know someone who has been through it. I'm basing my assumptions that Boston is like Atlanta (aka terrible public transit, everything is far away, college campuses are in the middle of the city).

On college campuses (like Georgia Tech) a lot of bikers who are college students ignored traffic stops, rules of the road and signals. So it is likely that people from poor households are also equally or more likely to ignore traffic laws.

Also, lots of roads don't have bike lanes, and riding in the middle of the street is going to get you a lot of honking, stuff thrown at you by rude drivers over-taking you, etc (from personal experience).

On another note, London, a city whose mayor is a vocal proponent of making London bike friendly, has had many fatalities that were bike riders following the rules so this risk for fatality is a very real problem.

I didn't have access to a (personal) computer till a few years before starting college.

I'm currently using a 3 year old machine, granted it's still pretty fast for my needs, but if I saw a program that was only for girls, and there weren't any alternative for boys (at the age group this is targeted at) I would have been quite disappointed.

I don't bear any ill-will towards this program, but I feel that kids are mostly prejudice free, and this makes them see some form of gender discrimination.

What is next, you'll ask for funding for programs targeted at girls that are only hispanic or indian or black?

Muslim Brotherhood was a democratically elected party in power.

The past year has been the most violent in Iraq in terms of civilian deaths and targeted attacks. A lot of my Iraqi friends mention that Iraq was more peaceful under Saddam (despite the fact that they didn't like him as the ruler). A lot of tribal leaders that supported Saddam switched alliances when the was was eminent and so a lot of these individuals are still in power.

In certain parts of Afghanistan, the Taliban is already clawing back to power, and it is very likely that they will come to rule major parts of the country again (without continued intervention).

This almost sounds like something that someone would make up.

Why the hell would the US Govt. want so much unrest all over the world? Haven't they learned from their screw ups in the past [0]? US supported Egyptian army is doing god knows what in Egypt; the US has been involved in the two biggest wars in recent memory (Iraq, Afghanistan), and in not-so-covert operations in countries like Pakistan, Syria and the like. Seriously what is this obsession with unrest and wars.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat#U...

Congratulations.

Did you do this while having a job? or were you studying full-time?

I mistook this site to be that of Mark Suster [0] at first glance. Pretty similar domain names. Just fyi for others.

[0] http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/

Everyone does not have access to the link that you've just posted. Also in fields other than computing, you can't get hired (of course there are always exceptions) to design mission critical systems unless you have an aerospace / mechanical / chemical engineering degree.

Good luck studying on your own to want to work as a chemical engineer because MegaCorp will totally hire you to work with chemicals and there aren't many startups hiring ChemEs.

Also, kids are quite gullible and everything for most kids suggests that you need to go to college. The path goes somewhat like this:

born -> pre-school -> school -> middle/high school -> college

There are a lot of people that take 6 figure loans to study photography, or major in english. That I don't get.

Surprised that Georgia Tech is not on that list.

GT has consistently ranked among the top 5 colleges for ROI on most of these lists that are published.

Depends on what you want. Toss a coin for heads = Berkeley and tails = UPenn. When the coin is mid-air decide which face of the coin you are wishing for. If you aren't sure still. Go to UPenn, get good grades, start a campus club and then transfer to Harvard or Yale.

Coming out of Berkeley you'd have more access to SV given that a lot of people will choose to stick around in CA. I don't think it'd make a difference either way as they are both good schools. Everything else depends on you. Study hard at either schools and BigCos will want to hire you if you participate in their recruitment process and ace the interviews.

Here is a different perspective. Figure out why you want to choose one school over another. If it is purely for vanity, go to UPenn/Berkeley and transfer to Harvard. If it is for learning, either are good enough, the rest is up to you. If you want to work in SV Berkeley buys you better access + larger network that end up working in Tech.

Anyways you should read this article [1] by Derek Sivers, I wish I had when I was going to college. If you want to get the most out of college, here is my advice: kill it in your academics; join a fraternity/sorority that you'd rank as the top three on campus; learn outside the classroom on your own; join a max of 3 clubs and get deeply involved (sky diving club, salsa dancing, etc); join a public speaking club; make lots of friends your freshman year, become the initiator of campus outings/group outings. I didn't do a lot of these myself, but if I could go back, these are some things that I wish I had done [Georgia Tech 2012].

[1] http://sivers.org/kimo

It seems like Marissa Mayer is trying to do something similar with Yahoo!'s acquisition binge. Perhaps a lot of it is for talent, but she did make one big play with Tumblr. Only given Yahoo's market cap (vs. Facebook & Google), she can't make bolder plays in the range that Facebook/Google can.

I think Mark & Marissa are similar in that respect that they see the past pattern of BigCos ignoring the start-up's potential to grow and haggle on price and want to make a bet anyway because the technology/users/growth is there to pan out in the future.

In this example Yahoo (under Terry Semel) missed out on buying Facebook. In 2002 (or 2003) Yahoo missed out on buying Google [0] also under Terry Semel's leadership. Obviously it is easier to point this out in retrospect and Yahoo did make acquisitions that didn't pan out on the scale of GOOG/FB, but in the case of missing out on these breakout companies, it was a result of haggling on price. Of course in an alternate universe Yahoo could have made the bold plays with Facebook + Google and could have been one of the most valuable companies in the world (Hindsight is 20/20).

Mark Zuckerberg has been there and seen first hand of what the other side of the table looks like and what founders of young super-growth companies want. He perhaps also has some of the smartest people advising him. And I think that is why Zuckerberg is going to leave his acquisitions alone (Oculus, WhatsApp, Instagram) like the press releases mentioned because he realizes that these "subsidiaries" of Facebook might have a better chance of succeeding as stand-alone teams than as a merger with other facebook staff teams.

Also, I'm not sure how much of it has to do with the fact that Google & Facebook are run by founders vs. Semel who came in from Warner Brothers and wanted to personally enrich himself as much as he could (He made north of 450 million from his 6ish year tenure at Yahoo). If I'm making so much money at a company that I didn't help start and I'm already in my late 50s, the last thing I would care about is what the future of technology might look like and how I can capture that value by paying billions of dollars to young companies. Perhaps the case of misaligned incentives?

[0] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html

Is this their official channel?

This comment is a bit off topic, but one of the ways to keep underrepresented minorities and women engaged with computing at the undergraduate level is through constant encouragement. Research [0] from some computing professors suggests that:

"Without encouragement even high ability women and under-represented minorities were unlikely to persist in computing."

And this really sucks because one of the professors from this referenced research has said that CS access in High School is limited to affluent students (who are mostly white and asian) and the only place in the education pipeline where the playing field is even is in college, but without encouragement a lot of women and members of the minority community lean out.

The second issue is the fact that these fields are dominated by men and you can't control everyone's behaviour. Sure we can figure out clever ways to encourage and engage when this group is most at risk of leaning out, but once they are already in the field, I'm not sure what can be done on a larger scale?

[0] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2361276.2361304&coll=DL&dl...

Didn't he get rejected and have to re-apply with Arash?

Thailand is definitely great and affordable, so is Vietnam.

Kozhikode and Mangalore in India.

Also coastal cities in Goa, India as well.

Several cities in Sri Lanka might work too.

Also Playa Del Carmen + Cabo San Lucas in Mexico.

To me it doesn't make sense for FB to buy Kickstarter. FB wouldn't gain any particular advantage by buying Kickstarter. It isn't in the social space and there is little Kickstarter can do to disrupt FB (unlike mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp). Also FB can afford to buy successful projects that Kickstarter kickstarts like they did with Oculus.

Now if they buy a company like GitHub, that'd be a game changer but I hope that the GitHub founders hold on to it and never sell because from what I can tell GH are already profitable with a nimble team and already have investors like a19z if they need more funding. Besides the only reason to sell would be for founders wanting to become instant billionaires, and I hope that they recognize GH as something that they can work on their entire lives as inherently more valuable than a billion in the bank.

GH is the only social network that has the most developer mind share and is likely to be worth 1.5x or greater than WhatsApp from my perspective.

Isn't this article stating what is an obvious conclusion from a ton of other links currently on the HN homepage?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7470097

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469237

How much recurring income does it generate?

> A good place to start when creating a new social app for the first time is to build upon these normal concepts, and then add your own twist. Much success has been seen on the Internet by doing this.

But you have to break out of this pattern to create ground breaking innovation, no? What Dave Morin is saying is that you take a particular product in a particular category and then improve it a little, and iterate over the process.

This only works if someone else has created that product/category in the first place. This article is perhaps about social networks, but someone must have initially imagined social networks on the internet when there were none and tried to create one. Of course it follows that innovation follows from many false starts in the same space and I can see his argument making sense for things like Myspace improving upon Friendster; and Facebook improving upon Myspace, etc. But if I come up with a better facebook (Super Normal), there isn't any interest or mindshare because facebook has a majority mindshare and there is only a certain minority that might choose my super normal app vs what already works.

Also, this pretty much fails in a lot of real world applications. For example you could argue that people were social to begin with and TELEGRAM was an improvement on that process. But then the TELEPHONE came along. Was the Telephone an improvement on the Telegram (it's super normal) or was it a new product category all together. Were Personal Computers the super normal to mathematics/games/writing or an entirely new product category?

I'm not sure if Dave currently reads Hacker News, but if he does (and this might be an unpopular opinion on HN) I'd like to ask him what his motivations behind continuing with Path are? Surely he is financially secure enough (w/ FB and now Path), and Path is mature enough that it could live on as a functioning experience on its users phones, but is this really his life's mission? I mean he is smart, financially secure, perhaps has awesome friends and familial relations, but why make another social app at all? I mean how much can you optimize the user experience? What happens after you can't optimize further? It's not like users will jump on your platform because they find their current social apps sub-optimal. Surely smart people have some end game in mind, so in this case is it just more money?

That's great to know, will definitely consider applying in the near future.

Thanks for answering!