So? 50 get accepted out of every 2,000+. They admit their prototype wasn't well-polished.

This is like the relative of a famous celebrity (or scientist) not getting into an elite school and admitting some part of their application - essay, scores, whatever - wasn't as well as it should have been.

Am I the only one insulted by this article? If anything, it's also irresponsible of SF Chronicle of sticking both of these girls in the limelight. Imagine if she wasn't Zuck's sister; should your rejection somewhere be published in a major newspaper?

""I once asked her to enter a long long list of names into an excel document. Arielle came back and asked me if it was alright if she wrote a program to do it automatically...at which point i told her she should just do what she thought was best at all times," says one of Zuckerberg's former colleagues."

That made me giggle... Any programmer would do that:

    echo "Name,Age"; tr -s ' ' ',' < list.txt
    Name,Age
    John,19
    Carl,34
    Pedro,56

(Is that "WHOA" needed? I understand it's in the original headline, but having it in all-caps on the Hacker News homepage is slightly annoying.)

Anyway, I don't find this strange at all. If I was going to guess who, if anyone, would be objective and focus only on merits, I'd put pg and Y Combinator near the top of the list.

"On sheer clout alone, the pair seemed like a shoo-in."

I don't think the author is familiar w/ Y Combinator.

Interesting. I wonder if she tried to convince big brother first?