skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I partially agree with the conclusion, some of the explanation doesn't really cut it:

The “vehicle to grid” concept would mean that grid operators would need to know the status and availability of thousands or millions of tiny generators.

Obviously there is a requirement that any household participating in this has some method of communication to the local utility point about the availability of power from here.

They’d need to know where they are located and whether the local transmission lines had the capacity to transmit electricity to the areas where it is needed.

Unless you are micro-routing, the utility is likely aggregating power from one "zone" to and external need. If there was capacity to charge the car, there is by definition the capacity to use the power from the car.

They would need to be able to communicate to each of these vehicles and throttle them up and down, calculating, in real time, which ones were suitable for use.

Well, the calculation would be done at the car--nobody else knows how much power is left. So that computation is local to the car, and yes, it is done in real time.

Power would be flowing every which way. Residential areas would be generating some of their own power while transmitting some extra to commercial areas, which would be simultaneously getting some of their power from centralized power plants.

Every which way. From the point of view of the residence, power is either going in or out to the line in the alley. Which is connected to the neighbor as well. The grid is not any more complex that it is today--there is the same connectivity.

Some residential areas would be drawing power and then five minutes later, they would have surplus power. Industrial customers would be drawing power from numerous sources at once.

Industrial customers draw power from the line (ok, some have TWO lines) that go into their building. They don't know, don't care, can't tell that it is from lots of places.

The complexity of frequency and phase matching to the grid would need to be taken care of at the residential end, not centrally.

The best point made here is that of an overnight load that leaves customer's batteries drained when they come out in the morning. I suspect that the plan was to have the vehicles plugged in by the time the evening meal/entertainment cycle pulls from the grid, and once all go to sleep to be able to charge them from the now less-loaded utility.

This is an interesting enough problem that a more disciplined article would be appreciated. There isn't really enough here to form a nuanced opinion, and I don't agree that it is in-depth as TFA claims.
We are still very ignorant of the subtle workings of the body.

Not at the atomic level, we're not. Photon interactions work the same way in your brain as they do anywhere else.
Average faces are not more attractive. Their skin is just smoother
Yeah. That's a great idea too.
Much appreciated
> E.g. I believe safe municipal bonds are now returning around 3% after tax. If you want to get more than that you have to buy bonds with a higher risk of default.

I heard California bonds had jumped because of debt/credit problems, and recently mentioned the option of buying such bonds to my parents who asked a similar money management question. They both cracked up laughing. I told them their reaction illustrated why our state had such borrowing problems. I would not have seriously advised getting the bonds but apparently they yielded annualized tax-free 4.7%. (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2009/06/californias...)
I agree with all of this.

I'll also chip in my usual recommendation: Bernstein's The Four Pillars of Investing, which will tell you everything you just heard, only in a different and slightly more recent voice. ;)
If you want some I'll suggest some books for this area

Please do. Thank you.
So what?

I love dancing and took classes and was the only male in a class of more than 30 women. I didn't tell them "you have a gender problem". I accepted that in a free world nobody should force anybody else to do what they don't want to do.
With all due respect, I think you're asking the wrong question.

(a) Think of investments like a function with two inputs: risk and return. You've picked a desired level of return but haven't identified a desired level of risk, so by definition nobody can recommend an investment strategy.

(b) There's no such thing as a "steady 4-5% annual return from $5 million" for any meaningful definition of "steady".

(c) Where did 4-5% come from? Without understanding the thought process that went into those figures, it's hard to make any suggestions.

If you want to get the most out of free advice on HN, I think you should rephrase the question along the following lines:

"I recently inherited a little over $5 million. I am Y years old. I plan on working until I am R years old and expect to live until L years old. My current monthly expenses are M1 and I expect those to grow to M2 over the next 10 years. I want to use my inheritance to ______. What would you do with the money?"
Here's an IT Conversations interview with Sal Khan -
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4386.html
Why is it racist?
Good points. I ought to clarify: back to the idea of rebalancing. It is really about checking your assumptions and trimming your sails a few times a year.

As to fund managers: i think that is the case with mutual fund managers. But it certainly isn't the case with hedge funds or VC. VC for example guarantees you will lose money uness you chose a handful of funds whose identity you know a priori.
As for hedge funds--they cover a broad church--of which two remain specially interesting: Special situations/global macro -- where you need to know and understand a manager (who is essentially a business man) and find someone who has decent risk management in place as well as a really good investment process.I like Paulson for this.
The second interesting area is the the high frequency systematic trading if highly liquid instruments (CTAs, if you will) which have a very different risk/return profile especially in chop markets and actually have a distribution benefit.

Eaten alive isn't very precise--you can actually model your fees and work out how much of you will be eaten.
We're moving from an information-poor world to an information-rich one. There is really no way to stop the loss of privacy. The draconian legislation required would, themselves, create a tremendous loss of privacy.

We've moved from file sharing "piracy" to personal information "piracy." And, ultimately, neither is preventable.
* I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons*

Sorry, but what's "the 'mfa' route"? Couldn't find anything on this.
BTW. In case I wasn't clear the site I run focuses on on passive investing strategies relating to the Permanent Portfolio asset allocation. You can read more about it here:

http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2010/02/06/permanent-portfolio-...
Eben Moglen's talk 'Freedom in the Cloud' from last Friday might be relevant in this context:
http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
Recommended reading: The Intelligent Asset Allocator (Bernstein). My implementation of an asset allocation strategy includes a well-constructed bond portfolio using primarily individual bonds. see www.marylandcapitaladvisors.com, for example.
When you are into a social network you don't want to see ads, you want to see friends. Otherwise when you are on google your mind is on "search mode" so you really want to see ads related to what are you looking for.
This is old news. Celebrity males have always been able to do this, and a subset of attractive women will always go for that kind of thing (groupies, anyone?).

For most of the people in the dating game, this stuff is irrelevant.
From your article: I once made a video hosting website and put 30 ninja videos on it. Adsense money was about $1 a day.

From your post above: I don't really know how ads work, so I've never actually used them.

Huh? Which one is true?
Buy and read 'the long and the short of it' by John Kay, it will give you a decent amount of knowledge of your different options.

That said, any advice on a strategy is going to be mostly guess work (ie predictions of the future based on an incomplete model) because we're living in interesting times.
"However, I get the feeling that they're not Ruby's strongest feature."

Perhaps the strongest feature is the underlying architecture that allows for blocks, the general idea that behavior is a data type you can pass around.

And since you can alter the properties of objects at different levels (instances, classes, meta-classes), you can alter not just the more conventional values (int, strings) but an object's (and system of objects) very nature.
I'm in a similar situation as the original poster, but with less money. I have been thinking about passive investment, but I live in Switzerland, so I wouldn't want to have all my money in Dollars or even Euros. So if I want passive investment, I first have to take the active decision of what part of my money I invest in which currency. It's probably not a good idea to have everything in a swiss franc index, this would mean a big exposure to very few big swiss companies.

Do you have any idea if there is a 'passive' way to choose between currencies?
portman makes a good point.

Usually, targeting returns is kind of a sucker's game. That's not to say that it is impossible to achieve the kinds of returns you are looking for, but rather that it creates a mindset that ignores risk.

The poster should first try to think of his $5M as money that stands to decline in value as the frictional forces of inflation approach.

The goal here should not be so much targeting 5% returns but at least initially, preserving that $5M. It's not as simple as parking money into gold either, because gold itself fluctuates based on when you buy it. Yes, people have lost money by purchasing gold in the past, at the wrong times.

TIPS aren't great either, because the calculations used by the government often understate inflation.

So to me, when I see questions like this I often advocate scrutinizing the individual's current personal finances and then doing like portman says with projecting goals and expenses. Then, you look at investing and target how to invest with the appropriate time horizon.
Is he advocating splogging? I didn't gather that at all from his post, and if so that's on par with advocating spamming.
I believe it would be 'made for adsense'
The problem with using a professional is that you have less information available for choosing professionals than you do for choosing stocks. If you pick one and he gets good returns, was it because of luck or skill? If he gets poor returns for the first 5 years, is it because he's investing in good values that are overlooked by the rest of the market (a long-term winning strategy) or because he's investing in the hot stock of the month that gets dumped soon after (a long-term losing strategy)? It's really hard to "verify" performance when that performance depends upon so many factors outside of the professional's control.

With individual stocks, companies are at least required to give a detailed report to the market every quarter. It's a lot of work to keep up on all the information that may be relevant to a company's performance (some would probably say it's impossible), but at least the information is out there. That's not the case when you're looking for information about a financial professional's performance.

If you really don't have time to spend on this yourself, I'd recommend passive investments. Index funds, treasuries, munis. When you buy an index fund, you're basically hiring the services of all financial professionals, everywhere, to do your research for you. And paying a significantly lower fee than if you'd actually hired one.
"What am I missing?"

Nothing. The emphasis on DSLs is distracting.

Worse, it may lead people to think that certain coding techniques are only used when creating a "DSL".
'Made For Adsense', sites that add no value other than to get google traffic in order to sell the clicks back to google.

Google is heavily cracking down on these nowadays, so it's less of a problem than it used to be, but the sheer number of RSS feed regurgitators made searching for something very hard for a while (end of 2008).

MFA is a predatory strategy, it just takes without giving back.

Remember all those wikipedia clones with 6 adense ads per page? That's MFA, but there are lots of other examples.
I think the abstract game described by the article implies that one wouldn't directly see the change in the gender ratios, what one would see would a person who had become "desperate" and and began "underbidding". Once one person starts "underbidding", the effect can cascade as other feel pressure to match the "bids".

However, the big question is whether a dating site would be arena where that kind of dynamic would actually play out.

It's worth noting that in the present housing market, there's a also a mis-match between people looking to buy houses and available new houses. However, the banks and Real Estate dealers have managed hold back the flood-gates of desperate offers through various means - so market structure can put a damp on these ratio effects. I've evolutionary psychology theory that talks about the social pressure on women to not "sell themselves short" and this is another effort to control market structure to prevent the effects described in the article - but since Internet dating sites are a purely individual matter, they may be where ratio effects come into play.
This is my point.

These surrounding nations have exported their instability to the Congo. The Ugandans claim they are looking for LRA, the Rwandans are looking for Hutus, neither are native to Congo.

So, not finding any rebels around, they decide instead to chop the arms off any Congolese children they might run across, after massacring all of the adults. AWESOME.

You can put grand names like LRA, or Ugandan Army, or Rwandan army or whatever you like on these guys. That doesn't make them anything more than petty criminals with an ego running around playing cowboys and indians. Only they are too chicken$#it to engage each other in battle, so they prove their mettle by massacring civilians. Each new massacre meant to 'one up' the last massacre by the other side.

Ridding the Congo of Rwandans and Ugandans etc etc is long over due. It is time that the world stops coddling these monsters. A boot in the @ss of every Ugandan and Rwandan found in the Congo, now that's change that all of Africa would believe in.
Trust me, taking one project and not giving up until you MAKE IT WORK will be much more profitable in the long run.

This sounds like it could be recipe for burnout and a waste of your life. Some businesses won't work no matter how hard you try. It seems like the best strategy would be one that is good at finding a reasonably scalable business model. If you don't find one after a few iterations, it might be a good idea to try something new.
Just wanted to point out the fact that most of the advice here will be biased (not negatively). Most if not everyone here has one financial goal in mind asset growth.

You on the other hand, shouldn't have that as your only goal. You have a huge sum of money and you should be thinking about capital conservation. What happens if hyper-inflation kicks in? What happens if the American economy spirals into depression?

People with high networth have to plan for these things. That is where a financial advisor is actually useful. They might not be able to make you alot of money (because if they could they would be already rich by doing it with their own money) but they can help you preserve the wealth you already have.

I would recommend that is a line of questioning that you should definitely go over with anyone that is going to advise you on your new found wealth. It would be best that they bring it up with you without you having to mention it.
I have to say that this is only an American phenomena.

Guys like him wont go anywhere in Europe. With his antics he will look like yet another american idiot.

I remember in college in the US, getting drunk and doing stupid things was like a badge of honor. Saying "man I was so trashed last night", was like "oh I am so cool, I can drink alcohol".

While back home, If you get trashed, means: 1. You are not man enough to handle alcohol, 2. You have no self control. 3. You look like an idiot, and girls wont touch you.

Maybe that's why I don't date american girls. Messed up values.
This is probably the first Paul Carr article that I've ever been able to fully read. Excellent analysis of the current situation.
I'd still not give you odds on making more than $1 per 'project' per day though.

Factoring in all the costs you'd be very happy to be a bit above break even after a year with tons of 'content' ripped by mfa sites that don't do all the work and that don't invest the money. They'll be making your profit. And at $1 / day per project you're not going to spend any time suing the infringers either.
"Facebook just hears more gossip than any one person did in the past."

More is different.

http://www.well.com/~bbear/kellyart.html#RTFToC13
Nevada state could lay off all general fund workers and still have deficit
Europe Risks Another Global Depression
It's totally doable IMO. A friend of mine who knows nothing more than how to setup a wordpress(answer: get her bf to do it) wrote 20 posts and forgot about the blog. She gets ~$50 check from google every month. She was laughing about it.

The life time value of her blog post is pretty cool!

I don't know if it scales(I'm presuming it does from posts like the OP). But hey I like the initial numbers.
That's absolutely true, which is why the 'throw it at a wall and see what sticks' method is really good to find out what works and what doesn't.

Making 400 sites that all work is undoable. But making say 10 sites that work and that all contribute a bit is definitely a workable scheme (see above), but it still won't make the kind of money that it potentially could because monetization is really hard.

Solve the monetization issues and the thing looks a whole lot better right away.

But reliable ad networks (both in not serving malware and in paying out on time (or at all)) are few and far between.

Sticking to one thing and doing it well has made me lots, trying the '400 different projects' (ok, a bit less, but still) worked to some extent but definitely not on the level that Max makes it seem should be trivial to achieve.

And that's with me being free to dedicate 100% of my time to this stuff.
I think I believe him, actually. Or rather, I believe that he didn't seriously mean to trade a post for an Air. It looks to me like he just didn't have the experience to realize that you have to be careful when you're joking about an ethical violation. I'd like to believe the conversation went something like: "We have this new product coming out. Could you write it up?" `Hm. I don't know, I have a bunch of posts I'm currently work on, not sure if I can take on another for a few days.` "Is there anything we can do to change your mind?" `How about a <pie in the sky request>?`

For a 17-year-old (even a fairly-well-connected one) an Air is a pie in the sky request. If he had asked for a nugget of platinum or an Oscar, it would have been obvious that he was joking. As it was, he (probably) asked for something that to him WAS obviously joking, but to most of us is an easily-attainable object; that inequity easily leads to the current situation.

I'm not saying that's how it happened (also: I have no inside information or anything) but this is why I'm not prepared to burn the kid at the stake for it. A lack of experience led to a critical mistake; one that I don't think he'll make again. It sucks for him that his mistake is so public, but that's that's the way it goes.
Depends what your definition of splogging is. I don't think its a black and white thing with lots of gray.

I don't think creating 500 blogs and getting UNIQUE content written for it is splogging.

I do think spamming other people's blogs in comments with your blog url is splogging.
America's Fiscal Crisis: Getting Keynes Only Half Right
Everybody should use the Permanent Portfolio. It's a testament to human and market irrationality that most people aren't doing this. Fortunately, most people never will, so the stability and returns of this approach should extrapolate forward.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/26525858/Fail-Safe-Investing
Schonfeld sure gave it the old college try at sticking it to Last.fm.
Daniel stressed the fact that he never actually received the MacBook Air and he seems to be under the impression that opinions will sway in his favor once people realize this. I don't think he realizes that just because he never received the payout doesn't excuse him from asking for it in the first place (whether he was joking or not). Despite all of that, I don't think this kid is going to be too impacted by all of this in the long run. Life goes on. Someone will accuse Mahalo of more SEO trickery and all of this will be a thing of the past.

I think the bigger story here is that he gets to have late night IM sessions with Woz. I'm jealous!
What happens if China's 'bubble' pops?
Dentists to replace drills with plasma jets
Cool!

But to prove it works you need to scale it, and that's where the hard part sits I think.

I fell for it in just that way.

This all started with http://www.clustercompute.com/

A small site about a project that I built years ago.

I rebuilt it using drupal, and the template had a nice spot for a google ad in it so I thought oh well, whatever, let's do that.

To my surprise it made some money! Hey I thought, that's easy, let's do that some more. And that's when I ran in to the statistics of the thing, when the numbers get larger the payout seems to drop considerably.

$50 per month is great as 'found' income, and as long as your site is small you'll be able to stay under the radar of the cloners, but as soon as you start getting significant traffic (as in show up on alexas 100,000 or so) then you're going to be cloned left right and center.

You'll be competing with your own content on 20 other sites.

Even on HN we get plenty of 'blogspam' submissions that are basically nothing but the original article quoted with a one line addition (if that).
I should have simply explained that my example will close the file handle and flush the changes out at the end of the block passed to the anonymous file handle, instead of making a statement about your wants.
The problem with that thinking is that there are costs involved in laying someone off and hiring anew two years later. And you have paid those costs to get no productivity out of them.

Uh, suppose that when you originally fired the person, you simply didn't have the money to pay their salary? At that point, there is no thinking involved, just a decision that's forced on you. And like a lot of desperation cost-cutting, it might indeed cost you more money in the long run. But saving that long-run money won't help if you can't pay rent and buy food next month.

I read an article some years ago that indicated that one company which paid top salaries for its industry saved money by doing so because they spent so much less on the hiring process and on training, and also because of general quality of work and customer satisfaction, because their employees tended to stick around.

That is if a company is in a niche producing items which haven't simply become commodities.
Odd; I've had the exact opposite experience. Most of the professors I've met were pretty cool people. And most of them put in an honest effort in the classroom.

Maybe you're just going to a real asshole-magnet of a school? Or maybe the place where I go is especially nice?
Remember, execution > idea