skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A better approach:

Get a job at at a startup run by those MIT elite. Kick ass and make yourself invaluable. The next time one of the founders starts their own thing, they'll bring you along at the very beginning. Use that role to get more involved with the business and network like crazy.

Wash, rinse, and repeat.

Depending on your effort, by the third time around you should have the connections and experience necessary to do your own startup - get VC funding - and make the deals necessary to give it a good chance at success.
@maxklein Would love some feedback on a specific case too. The tax-for-dummies book idea has value, but it doesn't fit into the "optimize for time" strategy you advocate.

For instance, while working in tax law for a number of years, I created an annotated Google Custom Search Engine for my own research purposes.

As evidence that it's an under-served niche, the website where it's published was cited by a UCalifornia Law Library and a number of other related websites as a useful resource for tax research purposes.

Besides adsense, how would you generate income for this?
> A project that makes $1 a day but is impossible to modify to make new projects is not a valid project.

Ok, this reduces the number of 'possible projects' considerably.

> A project that requires an hour of maintainance everyday is not a valid project.

Obviously, because at 1 hour of maintenance every day you'd be doing less than 15 projects total if you need some sleep.

But even the most trivial piece of software requires some maintenance. And at 400 projects you can spend no more than half a day per year building and maintaining, and that includes saturdays and sundays. Better hope you're single, if you're not you will be by the end of that year.

> For this, you have to automate - it is the first step of time optimisation. If you are not automating, or automation was not built into your plan before you started, you are doing it wrong.

This more or less limits you to very superficial sites that do nothing but aggregate other content or that are extremly thin variations on a theme.

Which is possible, but then it becomes hard to make that 1$ / day.

> What you have is the first iteration - my method would take all the ones above $1, then optimise the time spent maintaining it till it became minimal.

That sounds very theoretical, I think instead of keeping in the theoretical realm that you should actually do this, and write about how well it works. That would make for some very interesting reading.

> If it were not possible to optimise it in that method, then someone external can be brought in, who maintains it for half the income, giving you absolute free time to make the next project.

Why would they maintain it for half the income, if it was trivial to build they could build it themselves and keep 100%?

> I did not speak about bad performers yet - the projects who do not make the required $1. It's not possible to follow this system without hitting some duds.

Count on the majority, not just 'some'.

> You spend a reasonable amount of time trying to bring it up,

What's a reasonably amount of time here? A day ? There goes at $50 / hour one year of your income, assuming this is not a dud!

Again, I've been trying to do this, yes, using adsense, that old and so 2006 method of making money on small sites.

But I've yet to find something that works better, in spite of trying several different ad networks. And other monetization schemes are a lot more labour intensive.

This is a great idea in theory, but trust me it is very hard to execute in practice.
Well... COBOL and Fortran have been going the dinossaur way for far more than 10 years and show no sign of disappearing...
The article is from the future. (February 15, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 21)
Just as a sidenote, there really aren't that many tech startups started by MIT people, at least relative to say Stanford or Harvard.
I haven't done C++ in a while but is it possible to allocate an fstream object on the heap instead of the stack? If so and you do not explicitly call delete on it then will it still close the file when going out of scope?

Something like:

#include <fstream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
{
fstream *f = new fstream( "test.txt", ios::out );
f << "Hello" << endl;
} // memory leak and non closed file.
// ...
return 0;
}
Cartoon: IE6 RIP
Could you find time to spend on 400 things, though?
Digital asses in the computing industry
Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap.

The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that hard. Give 2 hours per blog post per site. And in a 9hrs day, you can cover 3-4 sites, averaging out to about 2 blog posts/month per site--which can be profitable in the big scheme of things.

When quality is not a huge consideration, you can get a lot of cheap stuff done offshore.
The truth about loosing weight and diet
I have no strong opinion about using PEVs to feed the grid, but I have to respond to the first point the article makes, about PEVs making the grid too complex to manage. I was at a NIST/EPRI summit a few months back (we do some security work for smart grid devices), and small/home generation was a top of mind issue --- not from PEVs, but from renewables and small generators.

The grid is eventually going to have to deal with millions of small generators one way or another.

PEVs actually complicate the grid in worse ways than this article discusses. For instance, grid operators seem to believe that people will plug their cars in at friends houses, and that people will want a true accounting of their own power usage and not just that of a house.
"I don’t think that Facebook as a company is doing anything unusual or exceptionally bad."

Yet he offers an example in the article of Facebook prompting for the user's email account password, which, in my book, is insidiously evil. Sending sensitive emails to someone may not be wise, but it's hardly an example of making your data public. Facebook claims to be harvesting email addresses (which is bad enough), but the potential for abuse is enormous, considering that the company is dedicated to monetizing the private details of people's lives. Facebook shouldn't even ask for passwords, and this is one of the main reasons it's banned in our household.
Take a look at goldbasis.org. It's a very simple way of taking advantage of overall economic growth, while alternatively protecting yourself against inflation and instability. Nothing fancy.
I appreciate that you said you aren't angry at people who complain that your product isn't given for free. I hate it when developers are angry at people who want their software to be free.
saw pretty much all these in college calculus series. often it would turn out that the error went all the way back to some hole in the student's knowledge of pre-calc topics.
It's amazing this discussion took that long to enumerate those simple possible, not all of them viable, solutions.

Of them all, #1 (the "plug your codec here") is the easiest. h.264 is not even protected in the whole world, so, those who can will enjoy it and those who don't will, perhaps, lobby their representatives.

#6 is also nice because with sufficient funding, Ogg can become a decent option and everyone would benefit.
I'm working as an analyst at a HF, here are some thoughts:

1. First, be aware that most financial advisors make their money by charging you fees. These can come in a variety of ways, some will take a simple 1% off the top, others will try to persuade you to invest in CDs and other products like mutual funds -- the actual returns on these vehicles may be mediocre and the advisor may earn fees for selling you the products.

So just be aware that their incentives may not be aligned with your goals of wealth protection.

2. Decide if you want to be a passive or active investor.

Passive investing means putting your money into index funds. John Bogle of the Vanguard Group has a series of books out on the topic, there is a slim one called The Little Book of Common Sense Investing.
-I'd recommend reading some of his work.

Active investing is more difficult. To be honest, most people simply lack the time and effort necessary to invest intelligently in the market. They wont know how to read a balance sheet yet will buy the stocks of companies that they are familiar with. This is sort of like driving blind and it is not something I recommend.
-If you want some I'll suggest some books for this area, but like I said, it is something that requires a big commitment from yourself.
Definitely don't put it in the hands of third parties, keep an eye on people charging you for 'maintaining' your funds.

Diversify.

Be very careful, don't follow any advice, including any of this without triple checking.

And remember that what 5 million today will buy you is a significant multiple of what it will buy you in 20 years.

Inflation is hard on money that you've got, simply maintaining purchasing power is already an issue.
That question is addressed A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel (which the OP should read ASAP). If I remember correctly, he suggests figuring out a decided asset allocation and then buying into it over the course of a time period (say 20 months), on the first day of each month.

In this case, that would mean investing 250k per month. The idea is that if you buy a fixed amount dollars worth of whatever, you get more of it when it's down and less when it's up. The idea is to get at least the average of the market over 20 months and avoid being burned by a crash (of course, you might miss out on a market surge). By doing it in a methodical fashion you avoid the temptation of trying to time the market.
I would be pretty interested in seeing quantified results as well.
You can allocate an fstream (or any) object on the heap, and if you do not explicitly call delete it will not close the file. Resource-acquisition-is-object-instantiation (RAIOI) is a common C++ idiom, and it only works on stack variables.
I'm not going to build this because I looked up asthma search count a while back and didn't like what I saw. There is another chronic disease with far more searches and a lot more competing software. I'll be building for that soon, and though I won't explicitely say the name anyone who is interesting in pursuing the niche should feel free to.
Android doesn't give you as much choice as the author implies. OS updates are handled by the carrier/handset maker so you don't really have much choice there. I'm stuck on 1.5 with no options to upgrade unless I want to root the device, install a third party ROM, and unfortunately lose GPS & Camera functionality because there are no drives to make them work in 2.x yet. The OS update I get from my carrier may or may not include multi-touch support in the third party apps. This is a choice the carrier/handset maker impose on me. They will also bundle carrier specific applications that I have no choice in. For Sprint, with the HTC Hero, I cannot remove these applications without rooting the phone. (I can delete the shortcut and pretend they're not there but I can't remove the binaries) I can't do wifi tethering on Android without rooting the device because Google blocks those apps in the Android Market. Android presently offers more choice by default but still imposes a lot of restrictions. So if we're ultimately comparing Android and iPhone on the basis of needing to jailbreak/root the devices there isn't a whole lot of difference.
I agree completely, $1 a day times 400 sites is simply not feasible.
This article is terrible advice, the kind that will probably lead you to failure. I have a fairly successful affiliate marketing business (I make more than I would if I had a day job), and it seems like every day I talk to people who are taking this approach and making $1-$2 a day. The article's logic is flawed- if it were that easy to make projects that do $1 a day on autopilot, your competitors(and big corporations) would already be scaling that model.
The truth of the matter is that nothing runs on autopilot for long. Even with SEO, you constantly need to be producing fresh content, building links, and keeping abreast of ranking changes. And most of the time, these kinds of small-time efforts will still fail and lead to making $0 a day.

On the other hand, every millionaire Internet marketer I've ever talked to (and I've connected with many of the big ones) has succeeded by focusing on a single market/product and scaling it up instead of running around from one failed project to the next like a chicken with its head cut off. Oh, and most of these people are "normals"- they don't have popular blogs or lots of Twitter followers, they're quietly grinding every day and making a killing online.

Trust me, taking one project and not giving up until you MAKE IT WORK will be much more profitable in the long run.

Oh, and I've just gotten into AdWords a couple months ago( most of my previous experience has been with social traffic like Facebook) and am doing very well with it, so anyone who tells you it's too late to get in is either a competitor who doesn't want more competition on a traffic source, or doesn't know what he's talking about.

Talk to people who are actually succeeding online about their strategy, and you'll quickly see a pattern emerge. I bet very few of them got rich by making 400 AdSense sites.
No. But you can put a smart pointer object on the stack.

#include <boost/smart_ptr.hpp>
#include <fstream>
using namespace boost;
using namespace std;
int main()
{
{
shared_ptr< fstream > f( new fstream( "test.txt", ios::out ) );
*f << "Hello" << endl;
} // File gets closed
// ...
return 0;
}
Curious, how important do you feel a good domain name is for these mini-sites?

Imagine that a highly relevant name could significantly reduce your marketing investment and get you more traffic.
I have not a huge startup experience (except my first two jobs that were kind of startups), but someone following this track should be careful about avoiding burn-out.
But following on your own theory, if it is trivial to clone the concept on to something related then you'd have to do both anyway. After all, changing the concept and marketing it for two or more different diseases is exactly what you are advocating, and doing it only for a single disease would be the opposite!
I don't really know how ads work, so I've never actually used them. A tax search engine seems to me like an ideal place for affiliate selling of books on tax, and ebooks that other people are selling.

You have the terms people are searching for, just match a book to the term and offer to sell to them. Something like that, but I have no idea about the market.
I will test a few projects over the next 45 days and report back.
I was referring to the "MIT elite" mentioned in the original link. Basically - if you haven't gone to a school where you were able to make great connections (Stanford, MIT, Harvard), you'll need to make those connections on the job.
This is why we need a decentralized P2P equivalent to Facebook.
Quite frankly I am surprised by the tone of some of the advice here. I see the point for informing yourself, but following it should undoubtedly teach you to never try to beat the market and "do it yourself" - unless you plan to make this your life.

Instead, I would shift the advice slightly to: inform yourself, find someone who knows this kind of stuff and give them your business, trusting but also verifying them. Far too many people think they can build that one model which guarantees success only to be burned. Granted, using a professional can still get you burned (uncertainty is a fundamental principle of our life and universe) but you at least increase your odds.
An Open Letter to Oracle on the Topic Of Accessibility
Under no circumstances does a post on TechCrunch 'make or break' a business.
I like the very first one about teacher hostility and arrogance because it is completely true. Out of 10 random professors there may be 1 that's not an asshole.
I played a bit with code and I think you could benefit from reading:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/forms/

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/models/#many-...
so where the hell was there any mention of turk, or scraping in the link/post...

is this what's meant by troll??
The email contact importer thing on facebook is something that many people in my social circle thought was really neat because it made finding their friends so easy. I'll admit, that I used it when I first joined facebook a few years back.

In retrospect I wish I hadn't used it, as this article mentions, I not only gave away pieces of my personal information, I gave away personal information that didn't even belong to me, it belonged to my contacts. Now, it seems quite dubious that facebook has the gall to ask for my email password. It is true that hindsight it 20/20.
I personally agree with much of your picture of the world, but I'd like to point out that building up a single picture of the world and investing based on that exposes you to a lot of risk that your model is wrong. And over a 20-30 year timespan, virtually all models of the world are wrong. The world is just too complex to model effectively: you're at the mercy of black swan events that completely invalidate all of your assumptions.

I'd also take issue with your advice to put your money into hedge funds or private equity. There is little reason to believe that the average hedge fund manager will outperform the market, because they are the market. By definition, the average fund manager gets average performance (actually slightly less than average, because investing returns are a skew distribution where the best hedge funds get outsize returns and there's a long tail of slightly-below-average funds to compensate). The best fund managers will outperform the market by a large margin, but you have no reason to believe that you'll be able to pick the best funds. You have less information available in choosing a fund manager than you do in choosing individual stocks. Past performance doesn't cut it - you might be looking at the particular fund simply because they have randomly beaten the market over 20 years.

And you'll get eaten alive by the fees, which are the one predictable part of the financial industry.
Cool, that's really interesting.

The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference but in practice there is.

Now we'll get some hard data on how big that difference is in this case, which is very valuable information.

The difference between the plan and reality is one of the hardest to quantify elements.

Best of luck with this, I really hope that you'll be able to put down a method that actually works.
Good quote from Warren Buffett:
> You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long
> as you don't do too many things wrong.

I agree. You don't have to be too bright to be a good investor. In the long haul, you'll be ok if you don't do something stupid. So aim for loss MINIMIZATION rather than profit maximation.

Also, the markets are very, very tumultuous now and I believe it will get worse. The federal reserve just pumped a massive amount of US dollars in the system and the long term effects of this will be a staggering amount of inflation. So in my opinion, you should invest in assets that are not denominated in US dollars, such as gold bullion and other commodities.

Beware of commodities that are traded fractionally. Meaning they sell you more of the commodity than they actually have.

Finally, diversify, diversify, diversify. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Beware of mutual funds that are diversified but charge exorbitant rates. Index funds have the same amount of diversification but at rock bottom prices.

- Stever

PS If you are worried about a major market crash (as am I), you might want to check out the Black Swan fund: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124380234786770027.html .
Funny thing is, I just sent them a request a couple days ago to see where they were at w/ Cloud sync. Glad to hear its being worked on.

Love those guys.
"The normals lack any of those attributes. They may be 50 years old, or have gone to community college, or may have learned programming on their own, or may come from Bulgaria or some other distant country."

That is, frankly, racist.
OK, then I think the answer is that yes, of course it is possible for an individual to beat the market. It just takes luck. It's nearly impossible for you to know if you are winning because you are truly better at picking stocks than the market or if it is just luck -- but most of the time, it's going to be luck. It is a very rare investor that can consistently make much more than the market as a value investor by buying and holding long.
It might be good to read the whole discussion, particularly noting what I personally have said, before making conclusions about what I want.
what risk does someone with $5m confront of not seeing 2% ($100,000) annual return (before tax, adjusting for inflation) for the next 40 years?

i ask because i'm going to spend the next hour or so fantasizing about being in the ops position.
Degree vs. Deviousness: Story of an Investment Banking Wannabee
Una ricetta da neve di Leonardo Romanelli
While I agree that increasing your stock to fixed income ratio as you grow older is a good idea, the 1% more each year seems to be based on a shorter lifespan. At 60 there is a reasonable chance you will be alive in 35 years so you still need to be fairly aggressive or inflation eat your nest egg. Also a major issue with bonds is taxes which can significantly impact returns.

The other major investment issue is fees which can dramatically reduce ROI over your lifetime. Do the math on what 1/2 of 1% will cost you ~13% of your returns over 30 years. 1-((x-.005)^30)/(x^30)) It works out to around 13% for most reasonable ROI.