skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was confused at first, as it seemed like he was pulling magic numbers out of the air, but I worked out most of it, and thought others would be interested. And also to see if I mis-understood anything.

I get that we start off with $100 mil with the "2 and 20". 2% annually for funds under management, and a 20 percent incentive fee for returns that exceed the 4% benchmark.

And I think here, he uses part of the $100 mil to sell $0.10 options, which if you sell 110 mil $0.10 options, you make $11 mil. So far, you have $111 mil, as long as the event doesn't happen.

So he uses $110mil of the $111mil to put into an investment guaranteed to give him 4% in one year and he uses the remaining $1 mil to spend on geeks.

So after one year, he'd have $110 mil * 0.04 = $4.4 mil from interest. So far, all together he has $110 mil + $4.4 mil = $114.4 mil, and he spent $1 mil on geeks. If you count just money in fund, and not money spent, it's $115.4 mil ($114.4mil + $1mil)

So all together, the return is $115.4 mil (total) - $100 mil (original money), which gives us the $15.4 mil, of which $1 mil is already spent on geeks.

The $2 mil comes from the "2 and 20" mentioned before, which he gets 2% of the original $100 mil for management fees. Here, I'm guessing it's the remaining amount that exceeds the benchmark of 4% of $100 mil. So $15.4mil - (4% * $100 mil) = $11.4 mil. And he gets 20% of $11.4 mil = $2.28 mil. So in total, he earned $2mil + $2.28 mil, of which he spent $1 mil on geeks so $2mil + $2.28mil - $1mil ~= $3mil

I can see why he says the fund manager's not doing anything. The extra $15.4 mil return that's paying the fund manager, geeks, and investors mostly comes from betting on sure thing for options to get $11 mil of the $15.4mil and a guaranteed $4.4 mil from treasure bills, mostly on the strength of having the $100 mil in the first place.

"Making $110 from $100 is hard work. Making $110mil from $110 mil is inevitable"
Try this one after that: http://youtube.com/watch?v=sEbgB6X6S5c
What undermines this argument is that Palm acheived such domniance in handheld and smartphone with no background threads.

That's not exactly true. There was a single background thread which handled (surprise!) comms.

Both the Palm and the Newton also had a sophisticated notification frameworks to deal with asynchonous messages.

It isn't as convenient, but it can be done. Heck, I've done it! And it retains some control by the platform, which is the point.

And while I love the premise of Android, I think that developing for 10 000 000 iPhones rather than 0 gPhones may be a prudent business move.
what temperature does the MBP reach (in F)? I have a PowerBook and it gets to 145 F and I think that is too hot.

I'm interested in how hot MBAs and MBs get as I too am in the market for a new mac laptop.
Thanks, glad you like the site. I completely agree -- many ideas can be boiled down to a few key concepts, yet most of the time we're taught to plug and chug (and inevitably forget).

It surprsies me how often "cram and forget" is the operating mode for education (I had my share of that). Yep, I think measuring performace with tests is a big part of it.

You hit the nail on the head about student interest as well. Many people end up hating math because it is often taught in that rote, formulaic manner.
I agree. I had an iBook and then a PowerBook which I still use. I have never been as happy the PB as I was with the iBook. Weight, battery, heat.
Songza: Listen to any song
I agree there are difficult issues, this thread has unearthed several!

I will be honest though -- I thought of this in the context of poppysan's post, in which he or she claimed significantly greater-than-zero value for an idea. My own personal philosophy would be opposed to the idea market I proposed above, though. I believe that if someone is unable to execute on an idea, they should give it away. For that reason, I'd be unable to execute on constructing an idea market. My heart wouldn't be in it.

If you do play with it, I bet many people here would be interested in the result.
I'm pretty sure that sole proprietors can write off business expenses as well.

Of course, depending on what you try to write off, the IRS might be very suspicious -- but that's true for corps, too. The rules about what constitutes a "business expense" still apply to corporations.

It does make the bookkeeping easier to have a corporation, and it may affect the odds of being audited, depending on exactly what your profits and expenses are. Again, there is no cheap substitute for a real accountant's advice.
I can't wait to play with this.
Restricting the iPhone’s platform might work for Apple as long as they stay on top of innovation. When Android is released with hardware and start seeing innovative products and services from other companies, iPhone can easily become irrelevant.
This is absolutely shameless. Why should Main Street pay for Wall Street's mistake?
I think I'll have to make a prediction: By June the iPhone developers will have a mechanism for running a lightweight background process. Only one application runs, but you will be able to have a sentinel of some kind. It probably exists now but hasn't been finalized and documented.
Sorry to break it to you, but your Flash website sucks.

I think the author of this article is being unnecessarily mean with the author of that website. He has a point, but that's not the way to tell it IMHO.
This may be a silly question, but just so I'm clear, I'm assuming that you can't write off anything from the firm until it is actually generating revenues. Is that right?
I did some Googling this morning and found this:

http://matrexblog.blogspot.com/

I haven't played with it, but it seems to encompass a lot of the ideas I was thinking about in the car yesterday.
Misleading headline; the article says nothing about historical returns being a poor metric of fund performance. The scenario presented is a standard example of high-risk investment which can easily (and fraudulently) be presented as ingenious investing.

The problem here isn't historical returns being used as a metric for fund performance, it's transparency. Strategies like these will not yield a high return over a period of, for instance, 20 years. The only reason this works (for now) is that these funds only live for about 5 years, which is not enough to provide a good statistical sample for the events being observed.

If investors were actually presented with the raw statistical data (10% chance of no returns, 90% chance of 10% returns) both manager commission and the clientelle of these funds would look completely different.

Pricing deficiencies are probably present to a high degree in derivatives markets like these. But these markets are too young for investors to have any confidence in the actual probabilities of these events and how to relate to them. If one of these funds survives over a period of a decade or more and its practices look solid, that would be a sign that the managers know what they are doing. Regardless, the nature of derivatives markets is more akin to gambling and less related to the creation of wealth.

As I have said before, I have a bit of a problem with the bashing of "historical returns". In many cases it is certainly the case that the returns are based on dumb luck, but saying that a good track record over a long timeframe is worthless is equivalent to saying that all fund managers understand the pricing of their market equally well. Frankly, I find this notion a bit ridiculous. If the performance of funds was truly random, there might be one or two investors in the world that beat the markets over a decade. In fact, there are a lot of such investors. Some of them operate public funds, but unless they happen to have an altruistic streak, each of them has a lot more to gain by just managing their own fortunes.
For now, yes. But I'd rather develop for an open platform than for one where Apple holds all the cards.

It's the mobile version of the Mac vs PC war. Apple is again setting itself for a 5% market share.
I agree 100% on this.
not impressed
not catchy
not aesthetic
Has an accountant blessed the idea of writing off your meals? You may be setting yourself up for an audit at some point where you have to explain how exactly that meal was business related.
The most defining aspect of working on a startup that never strikes success, that you usually don't hear about, is having all but your very closest relationships deteriorate and friends all drift slowly away. This loss you can never really get back, unless you're wildly successful.

That's the highest cost of bootstrapping, if you ask me.
People know what to do with native widgets. Use them. Don’t make your users think.

This excellent quote summarizes the article nicely, and explains why good graphic design is so often at odds with good user experience design.
No. Business expenses can be deducted even with no revenue: milage, business supplies, equipment, lunch about business dealings, etc.
u should post this as a normal yc post; never seen it before
The real problem is those companies that (1) grab up all those slots en mass (2) pay the workers they bring over next to nothing (3) charge massive fees to these poor workers. Everyone loses.
I bet his html version of his site does 10x better in search engines than the flash. The only decent use of flash I see for the full site was Pandora (and even then i would prefer the player just to be in flash)
http://kluster.com/home/questions

here might be the marketplace for ideas, idea you had. So another factor in valuing an idea is, who had it first and executes on it.
>Misleading headline; the article says nothing about historical returns being a poor metric of fund performance

Sorry about that, I thought that was an immediate and obvious implication of the article, namely that there is a problem with historical returns as a metric (not that they are a poor metric).

In any case, I didn't mean to imply that historical returns are useless, just incomplete. And I thought this article did a great job of illustrating an example where that is the case.
I was putting myself in the mindset of someone looking for a job, and I was extremely disappointed after viewing both awesome snaptalent ads that I could not click "Browse more". I wanted to see all your listings.
It doesn't sound like everyone loses if the companies get cheaper labor, the workers get a chance to work even if for less than they would if they were US citizens, and the more routine tech jobs get filled which probably creates more interesting jobs for those who are actually passionate about their field.

I'm not familar with any information about US companies charging massive fees to the workers. Is there a source for that part of your comment?
http://www.notebookreview.com/dellCoupon.asp

You'll find a good deal of Dell coupons there. They change regularly too, so if what you're looking for isn't there now, it might be soon.
New Federal Report Urges Changes in Teaching Math
1,700 Bands, Rocking as the CD Industry Reels
I think he is not being mean enough. Personally I've taken even more radical position towards flash-only web sites: they endanger all of us, because they're going with a closed, proprietary platform over open standards, allowing (ultimately) corporate agendas to dominate the WRL "web runtime library". The author of the original flash site is an asshole. Here, I said it.

I don't want to live in the world, where I will be forced to install Java(FX), Flash and Silverlight (all fatty runtime downloads) in addition to perfectly fine HTML/CSS/JS.

Think of how much pain will it be (already is) to introduce new and innovative web-hardware, like an iPhone. You'll be at mercy of Adobe/Microsoft/Sun to release their stupid players for your architecture. And yes, by the way, Adobe prohibits you from reverse-engineering their player.
Correction, the companies that I have experience with were not US based.

I will elaborate on why everyone loses. The workers lose because they are paid less than if they were free to find the highest paying job, and have to invest a large amount of money to get here (points 2 and 3.) America loses because the workers are forced into earning less money than they would if they didn't need to go with these companies to give them more than a remote chance of getting a visa. This undercuts American workers (point 1.)

The governments may let these companies do this is because the companies pass off their process as selecting higher quality visa candidates. Immigrants like them because they know they will not be turned down for a visa if they go through the company (and getting turned down causes problems later - what the hell??). Still, bad.
Can you give an example of a similar ad you think is better?
Python traits: improving composability of object oriented programming
Interesting. Do you deduct those expenses from future revenues or from your personal income?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
Kind of speaking of background processing. If I open multiple pages in Safari on the iPhone, will they load simultaneously, and lead to time saving for me, or do the pages wait to load until you're on them?
Xpra (screen for X11)
And the "vote down" button should be removed until the voter has commented on the post. Getting fed up seeing worthy comments down-modded without explanation.
It's hard to summarize traits in the headline.

Here is an academic paper describing them:

http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Archive/Papers/Scha03aTraits.pd...

They were originally built for smalltalk, but apparently there is now a python library. I gave it a try, it's actually pretty nice.

Basically, traits provide reusable components of behavior that are not tied to classes. It's pretty sweet. It lets you do things like delegate data members/methods to other objects.

For instance:

class employee(HasTraits):
employer=Trait(company)

class manager(employee):
hire=Delegate('employer','hire')

This code causes an employee to have an employer data member, which MUST be a company object. So far, just static typing (checked at runtime).

The manager subclass of an employee has a "hire" method. But a manager doesn't hire employees himself; instead, he hires employees on behalf of his employer. So boss.hire(emp) is delegated to the boss's employer, and is equivalent to boss.employer.hire(emp).

It has lots of other cute features like this as well. Take a look.
Orkut under attack
This looks like progress!
having done it myself, I think to do lists are the web's hello world... albeit longer and more complicated (this was the same advice I was told the 1st time I publicized my 1st rails app on YC); you actually have some good ideas though

quick suggestions:

-for the basic to do ui though I'd check out http://todoist.com

-instead of the current quick entry ui u have now, why not just make it less clicks to enter any tasks (like an always showing add to do)

-it would be nice for projects to have to do lists (a la basecamp)

Until you get your UI stuff worked out I'm not sure you can charge yet
In my experience, people who disagree can best cooperate if they emphasize accuracy in their statements -- thus quickly finding the areas of agreement and disagreement.

That you thought the statement "good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ" was the most important part of the article is a valid opinion I can respect. That you found the standing-still experiments an interesting way to measure child self-regulation is also a valid opinion I respect.

It is the pairing of the two opinions into the unsupported statement "Standing Still Predicts School Success Better Than IQ", and then the promotion of that dubious statement to the key position of headline, that I find objectionable.

Alternate approaches I wouldn't have objected to:

* contribute article with original headline, but post a first comment with "I found it interesting that the article suggests ability to stand still for longer may predict executive function, and thus school success, better than IQ."

* contribute article with original headline plus appended pot-stirring question: "Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills (Does standing-still predict success better than IQ?)

Or, if HN were to someday allow a comment-with-submission or subhead-with-submission, that would be a great place for highlighting an opinionated takeaway from deep in the article, even though the article's main thrust is something else.
He's an asshole because of the technology he choses to publish his own content? How can you say that? That's a very personal attack against a person that is making a very personal choice to publish his own content. I think you could only attack him if the content he published was of a different nature, say scientific data, government documents or general public stuff. But he can share his own data the way he wishes too, and I don't think you have the right to call him an asshole for that.

I understand the sum of personal choices can generate a problem for the general population, but in any case you can't attack the individual choices: you can't either regulate them by law (as in many other cases where individual choices get regulated for society's common well), or just let them be.
Ideas of people have a history of execution are worthwhile. Also, these people may vet ideas proposed by others. This is essentially how YC works -- the prototype is the idea displayed, not executed -- PG is the veter.

One can simply move this to an earlier stage. One must establish oneself (or one's group) as an expert in a specific area, then have persons submit their ideas to your organization. You review them, and offer them to sale to interested parties.

This is essentially how VC works but I believe it could be re-encapsulated at an earlier stage, esp. with software engineering projects which are primarily idea drivien.

To the doubters out there, this is simply specialization of labor in a growing industry. Not everyone should attempt to do anything. Compare journalism. Editors, Writers, Editoralists, Proof Readers, Managers. All work to some degree with the text. We have only one job at the moment - coder/programmer.

It is time to take this to the next stage.
Anatomy of a flame war
if u r going to apply to YC (or anyother YC clones) then they suggest/prefer not to inc. this is b'cause they (YC) help you with all these formalities in the best possible way - they have lawyers lined-up to help you.

But if u want to write-off ur expenses then its better u meet an accountant, most possibly he/she will suggest to inc.
Of course, MOST of us are going to have a difficult time trying to develop for the 10 000 000 iPhones. You see, you can download the SDK and do all of the testing you want . . . good luck running your code on an actual iPhone though. A lot of developers read the fine print, and skipped over the finer print. To try out your newly developed games, or virtual worlds, against the actual iPhone accelerometer you have to be accepted into the OFFICIAL iPhone Developer's Program. Guess how many of the 100000 developers who downloaded the SDK were accepted into the program . . . Oh . . . So then you read the article already . . .

http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/03/15/apple-to-100...

The short version is that Apple is giving its strategic partners a head start, EA, Salesforce, AOL, Epocrates, Sega . . . and Apple quoted a quite a few more the press release Intuit, Namco, Netsuite, PopCap . . . you get the idea. Good for Apple, its partners, and probably the iPhone . . . Bad for startups who happen to compete with something one of the partners wants to do. Guess which app will get the splash page billing on the iTunes App store, the startup's or the partner's?

There is SOME good news though, if someone is willing to search past the first page of the iTunes app store to look for your app, they will probably be able to find and install it without much trouble. Of course that is ASSUMING that you are allowed into the OFFICIAL developer's program, which there is no guarantee of either if you are making an app that competes with a strategic partner.

Cheers!
Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics - full book online
Initial, "first 3 seconds" impression of the front page is a good one. There are few things though:

The "JOIN NOW" part of the login section needs to be toned down. It looks like a desperate attempt to grab an attention of 80 yrs old with an eyesight problems. Besides you are using 3 font sizes in this section, which makes it look clumsy.

"Signin" should be "Sign in", "Logged out sucessfully" is misspelled too.

Try resizing your browser window and see how the page looks at wide and narrow widths. It does not look that good and this needs to be fixed.

Upon logging in however I can't say it's ready to go live. It just feels like a prototype rather than a shippable product. Even not considering the functionality, it's just not polished enough and does not look visually appealing.

If you launch now, I can pretty much guarantee you it's going to be a failure. However, if you are at liberty to treat this project as an experiment, I'd suggest to go ahead and launch. Learning from the failure is one of the best and quickest ways to get a real world experience.
A laser experiment to show the Uncertainty Principle [video]
For a PC laptop its simple: Get 1 GB or more of memory and a dual core processor. Everything else is up to your personal preference/needs.
An idea is not worthless! It can give you insight, highlight your gaps in knowledge or spark another idea. but, unless executed you cant see it in action and it wont give you money.

An idea is a thought and execution is action - clearly these are different things.
The Common Lisp Directory finally crashed after 823 days
I have tried it at various width of 1024 * 768 and above. Wat width did you have problem with. (We are not really targeting 800 * 600 really)
well there's a non-free tool assoc with it that spits it out in dif file formats (html, word, pdf, ...)

http://www.readysetpro.com/
They didn't have to release an SDK and open up the platform at all :/ Something is better than nothing...
I don't see all the mystery: people no longer beat their kids to the extent that they did 60 years ago. Maybe if they made the request as part of a game instead of as an order from an adult there would be more validity (but you can't go back in time to the '40s to make them change the experiment as well).
With a very wide window the front page is all clumped to the left side of the window, which looks odd. With a narrow window the "Sign In" dialog jumps to the bottom of the page.

It's OK to assume that a visible area of the page should be X pixels wide. But it's not OK if the content starts jumping around when the window is resized.

For example, I never have any of the browser windows maximized, so they routinely end up being narrower than 1024 pixels.
I guess that's true :(
My new MBP is remarkably cool. My 2-year-old MBP could fry an egg. Things change.
I find this interesting because I actually had a friend who worked the night shift there one summer in college (around 4 years ago). He was paid hourly.
Ask YC: who decides how many points u get on your submission on this page and how is it calculated?
I'm wondering how the points are calculated when you comment or submit a discussion on this site. I always see different points for different people, i dont see any logic here - am i missing something?