skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since Redis keeps the dataset in RAM, it offers performance in the same class as memcached -- though memcached is significantly faster. There's probably a way to run it without the persistence (or just decrease the snapshot frequency), though you could just set it up to clear the tables when the application restarts and not worry about it. If you're looking for a more "modern" replacement, it's a good choice.
Great article. A good example of this flaw at work is energy policy. Too much activity centered on activity to make people feel like something is happening. Not enough on tax policy that would incent people to innovate on their own. Politicians want to be standing next to the money as it is being handed out.
Your time horizon is too short. If you had left your money where it was instead of taking it out at the first sign of danger then it's likely you would have made it all back by now. There's a lot of volatility in the stock market (that's why the returns are higher than savings, money markets, etc), but the spikes and dips average out if you're thinking in terms of decades and not months.

That's not to say that your startup isn't a better investment, though.
It's a really funny, whimsical thing to do, but how will this help you to increase your privacy? Next time you enter the US your finger prints won't match the data on your passport, right?
Redis is persistent, replicated storage, isn't it? No matter what buzzwords they use on their site, Memcached is a volatile cache, it should never be used to store otherwise irretrievable information. I know, people use it for stuff like session storage, but that's really not a good use case for it.

I don't want to attack Redis, so there is no need to defend it. Maybe memcached-like behavior is one of its many features, but I personally like Memcached exactly because of its simplicity.
On December 6, Andy Rubin wrote on the Google Blog: "Today, more than 200,000 Android devices are activated daily worldwide." [1]

Three days later, Andy Rubin tweeted "There are over 300,000 Android phones activated each day." [2].

Given the little time in between, the latter statement raised some eyebrows. But again, the smartphone market is growing like crazy, so it's not at all unthinkable that right now 300k Android handsets are sold daily.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/introducing-nexus-s-w...

[2] http://twitter.com/arubin/status/12727540783251456
I dunno I get what you're saying. But these stakes seem small. Consider YC gives you only ~20k for a 6-7% stake. (This is, of course, pre the 150k startup fund offer)

Both programs really offer access to tools to creating a successful business. 5k and 1% seems a very small price to pay for access to something that seems like a very successful incubator program.

Let me put it this way, if 5k + 1% were the cost of joining YC I'd do that in a heartbeat.
It's democracy, stupid
I think their idea of a "startup" is different than mine. I'm not aware of cleantech or pharma companies being started by a couple of people in a bedroom or across the internet, and though new companies have to be started somehow, it strikes me as hyperbole to compare Astia and YC.
Hire talented copywriters/designers/UX people etc for small tasks
I'm in college, I have a Roth IRA that I set up using the money from my internship last summer. I use Sharebuilder, you can get trades for $4 a share. When I get a job I'm gonna max my 401k and Roth IRA each year, no question.

My investment philosophy comes more or less from this interview: http://www.kirkreport.info/2009/03/qa-with-less-antman.html

I only own 3 ETF's - 50% VT, 20% RWO and 30% PCRDX. I'm investing for the super long run and think of stock downturns as a great time to buy more shares.
The Facebook Story : A New Twist
Facebook Story with a twist!!!
I'm not a great designer myself, so I always go with a simple rule of thumb - keep it simple and don't try to do things I'm not good at.

You don't have to be a a capital-D designer to make good work. I'd recommend picking up "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams.

Sometimes all you need to do is not make any glaring mistakes in order to create a design that works.
By mobile device they just mean mobile phone. Why they don't just say that I'm not sure. However...

If you assume iPod Touches are still 40% of iPhone sales (a number I see used often) then they're about level on sales in 2010, though Android's growth is still much higher.

There was something like 15 million iPads sold last year, though Apple themselves seem keen to separate them from the smaller devices, unlike Android which has blurrier boundaries. Some analysts have started adding those iPad sales to the PC stats they compile, maybe tablets will become big enough to have their own category next year.
You're an outlier that is comfortable with the internet and open to connecting with a company at a personal level.

Most people seek a professional, stable, and safe image in a company they're going to share their personal details with. Misplaced commentary about the founder's personal life is one of those 'split' decisions where it'll make 5-10% of women love her, and the other 90%++ will get scared off.

Like OKCupid, I'm sure she'll have a passionate userbase if she continues to be personable and connect with people, but the awkwardness and lack of women will drive many away.
Thanks tombaker. Appreciate the help!
Thank you for clearing that up. Because I never used Redis before I wasn't sure, but my impression was also that it is intended for persistent storage and that there is a difference between a cache and a storage engine.
Google 2000 vs. Google 2011
Definining the Value of Community (Review of LeanCoffee Meetup in Toronto)
Warren Buffet's rules of investing:
1) Never lose money.
2) See rule #1.

I use municipal bonds to immunize my expenses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunization_%28finance%29). Municipal bonds (affectionately called "munis") are not subject to federal income tax because of a Supreme Court decision in the 1890s. Most states also exempt the interest on their own municipal bonds from their own income tax (of course, if you're in a state with no income tax like TX, then that's not really a problem). Furthermore, some states (like California) are constitutionally obligated to pay the interest on bonds before they allocate money to the the state's general funds.

My immunization strategy is simple: for every $10,000 I put into munis, I get anywhere between $40-50/month (average return on capital is in the 5-6% range these days) in passive income. Keep in mind that since this is not taxed, this translates to a pre-tax rate of return that's closer to 6.94%-8.33%, assuming a federal tax bracket of 28%; in reality it's a lot more because of FICA and state income taxes.

For long term growth and in tax-advantaged accounts, I use zero-coupon munis. Yes, being in a tax-advantaged account diminishes the allure of munis, but some of those bonds are now paying in the 7.5%-8.5% range.
Wikileaking : Neologism in making
impishidea.com

ImpishIdea was founded by a young HNer who was dissatisfied with previous literature discussion sites for young writers.
That is an interesting option but that makes it too much work for the end user. But appreciate your help!
Ideas So Dumb, Only an Economist Could Believe Them
Also, Steve Jobs (until recent health issues) was very active in every aspect of Apple, whereas Bill Gates has been in the process of disengaging himself from Microsoft.
I thought it would only sync to a single folder on my Dropbox, but no, I can edit any text file AND it has syntax highlighting.

Very neat and useful, thanks.
Study Claims Bing more accurate than Google Search
Hitwise reports that Bing users clicked on a search result 81.54% of the time for queries made in January, compared to 65.58% of the time for Google users, reflecting the finding that Bing, according to Hitwise, was considerably more likely to yield a result relevant to users' queries.

This is certain to add to the discussion of relevancy in search engine results and accusations of copying or user search stream data.

We probably need more in-depth study to really understand how the results and conclusions were achieved.
Habits for failure
Its a cloud server. You can vary its size an re-provision at will. Also, all resources are unbundled so you can tweak the RAM for example leaving other resources unchanged. You can see a video of a cloud server being deployed at http://www.youtube.com/user/CloudSigmaCH . It takes a couple of minutes.
Yeah mostly I was expanding for the benefit of readers. I like your plan.
If you invested one dollar in Microsoft in 2001 and cashed out that holding today, your compound annual return over the five-year period

Am I missing something... how is 2001-now a five-year period?
Every experience I've had with a recruiter has left a bad taste in my mouth.

The first didn't know the difference between Java and JavaScript, and when they wanted me to fill out an online skill quiz, she fumbled and gave me the wrong one (I only figured it out part-way through due to the first obviously language specific question, where I immediately realized I answered some previous questions wrong) and then wouldn't push for the salary I requested. Doesn't know anything and won't help me? Relationship over.

The second was an informative middleman between me and an obviously on-the-fence employer, but called me a ridiculous amount of times to relay every tid-bit of conversation he had with them and prodded me for friend referrals every time we spoke, which got old fast. Odds are good that if I didn't give up any names the first 3 times you asked, I'm not going to give any names the 9th and 10th and 20th time either without any knowledge of the recruiter's successes, I'm not wasting my friend's time with him. It resulted in nothing, wasted a ton of my time and was very annoying.

The third was totally useless and was trying to tell me about similar-salary lateral movement opportunities that
required moving or a stupidly long commute, negating any possible benefit. Waste of my time.

The fourth was a cold-calling corporate HR recruiter from the company I was currently employed with,
offering me my previous postion I had just moved up from. My boss and I had a good laugh, and I was tempted to apply/move forward with her to see what would happen.

There might be a handful a good recruiters out there, but the odds are so low, I don't see a compelling reason to waste my time on the off-chance they're useful, friends and networking are infinitely better. They also seem to be very adverse to sending email that contains anything meaningful, always preferring the phone.
Hi Everyone,

I'm the author of this article, and I'd like to get your feedback on this article because I worked really hard on it. I also think everyone can get something out of this article even if you don't belong to this specific meetup. Definitely geared towards startups who belong to meetup groups.
Traditional VPS providers slice up large dedicated servers to share them between customers. Typically VPS providers use a container technology such as Virtuozzo to isolate multiple users on a single server from one another whilst running a single shared instance of the operating system. By contrast, our KVM technology enables every user to run their own isolated copy of an operating system of their choice, providing a greater choice of operating systems, higher performance, deeper configurability, and stronger isolation and security guarantees.
"..in the past 12 months, Gates has sold off a whopping 90 million shares—reducing his holdings of Microsoft common stock by 13%."

Since when is 13% a whopping number? Cut that out of a pie chart and you barely have a Pacman.
Awesome app, would be even more awesome decoupled into a true webapp.
This is great advice. You can read a ton about passive investing over at Bogleheads, how to maximize the returns on your index funds, the proper bond allocations, etc.

It's actually quite amazing to me that a lot of geeks who would spend literally hundreds of hours researching esoteric technical knowledge on the Internet, won't spend at least a few hours researching how to setup their retirement accounts. With life expectancies on the increase, we can reasonably expect to live 1/3rd or more of our life in retirement. Wouldn't you want to make sure you had enough money to do this?

Also, for someone with an entrepreneurial streak, wouldn't it be nice to "retire early" in your 50s and have the luxury of a steady income while starting a new business? This is ideal - imagine being a founder and not having to worry about paying for food or housing.
I paid off bad debt (no income from loan's purpose), stashed some in precious metals (hedge against fiat currency), and am now learning to acquire real estate income properties (rentals) for another revenue source for my excess cash.

My personal opinion is that most stocks are over-valued, and my confidence is low in most of our current central banks. But hey, that's just based on my value system, your mileage may vary.
He's working on eradicating polio (via immunization campaigns in the hot spots of the world). There are some big expenses for that.

He's playing a real world game of Pandemic with the resources of basically a man and it sounds like he's getting somewhere.
I was actually going to add a second paragraph about the throttling but figured my point was uninteresting so I deleted it.

I think the throttling is expected. Consumer wireless data plans are intended to handle stuff one is likely to do on a phone. If you start pumping gigs of torrents or something over the network, I'd expect the carrier to throttle you.

My problem with the way Verizon handled this is their lack of transparency. They've said their top 5% data users will be throttled. They should really publish an expected amount of data transfer that would put a user in that segment, and indicate how they'll throttle you. I also don't like that they said loudly "our plans are unlimited!" and then in a footnote that had to be pointed out by someone else, "oh yeah but we'll throttle you if you use 'too much'".
I suppose it may be possible to host the video on youtube and just embed it, rather than hosting myself. The huge drop in bandwidth and storage costs may very well be worth the loss of control.

What do you see as the major downsides to that loss of control? I think the biggest problem from my perspective is that youtube videos are limited to 15 minutes, unless you're a special partner, iirc. While a bit of a crimp, I don't think it's a showstopper.
Try http://everytimezone.com
Regardless of the amount, I have a philosophical problem with an incubator that compares itself to an angel fund / investor and then charges a cash fee for participation. You can do one or the other, but not both.

The difference between YC and them is that first of all YC gives you money in exchange for an equity stake. Secondly, YC has proven itself many times over now to the point where I am sure people would pay significantly more than 5k if they charged it. Had YC charged 5K in Summer of 2005 you'd have seen them pooh-poohed, and rightly so.

Also, I think encouraging women to be entrepreneurs is noble, but the person being interviewed is not helping by saying that YC is wrong for women because "society doesn't support women moving for 3 months" yet. Argue for society's limitations and sure enough, they are yours [1].

“Number one, most incubators require you to be on site, at least part of the time, for several months,” she points out. “Vivek Wadhwa has done research to show that the average entrepreneur is 35 and has 1.2 children. I don’t know many adults with children that will relocate to an incubator with the Y Combinator model. Society doesn’t support that yet, so that women can up and move for three months.”

1. With apologies to R.B.
I am kind of shocked by the uniformity of answers here, so I will add a dissenting voice.

In the current economic climate, it is pretty much a waste "investing" in anything until you have, say, an 8-figure sum in cash laying around doing nothing. I don't have that, so I am not bothering with "investing". I put "investing" in quotes because I feel the word tends to be perversely used; people really mean speculation, that is, gambling with negligible effects in terms of real-world wealth creation, but the gambling happens on such a huge scale that it distorts market prices hugely. Real investing is when you put money directly into something in order to enable the creation of something that wouldn't have been possible without your capital (as the YC folks do).

Stocks are terrible. If you look at market histories, corrected for inflation (actual inflation, not government-reported inflation, which is always understated, as the government benefits by understating it -- so normalize against something like an alternative inflation index or else straight-up commodities) then the S&P, DJIA, etc have actually not grown in 15 years. 15 years!! I know all of the "just buy an index fund" seems like good advice -- and it did used to be -- but in modern conditions that is no longer true. On top of this fact, pile on the risk of another market crash due to the USA's still-precarious economic situation, and stocks are clearly just not worth being in. (People are starting to realize this; there have been net outflows from equities most of the time for the past 40 weeks, and insider-selling-to-buying ratios are consistently huge.)

You can put money in bonds, but then it is locked up and you have a lot of inflation risk, so then you'd be aiming at short-term bonds, which are going to yield less.

Really what has happened is that US economic policy has become very hostile toward people who are responsible and save money, as an incidental effect of the desire to stimulate consumption (which mainly means taking on more debt and keeping rates tremendously low because if they ever become not-low now, debt burden is going to crush the economy.)

The upshot is that you are better off taking the mental energy you would have expended on "investing" and subsequently worrying about your money, and instead funneling it into your creative endeavors. You will make more money that way, especially when you take a long-term view. (Think about Einstein and the story about him having a closet of identical suits; except what I am talking about here is way less extreme and way more obvious.)

I have a rant about how peoples' "investing" according to the modern American model is actively making the world a much worse place than it ought to be, but this post is already long enough.
I think you're right. From the article, as one of the reasons YC is unsuitable for women:

> "Vivek Wadhwa has done research to show that the average entrepreneur is 35 and has 1.2 children. I don’t know many adults with children that will relocate to an incubator with the Y Combinator model. Society doesn’t support that yet, so that women can up and move for three months."

I get the feeling that the average YC founder is a little younger than this. Oddly, so does the article:

> [YC is] pretty much a den of 22-year-old guys who dropped out of Stanford with dreams of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg

Given that the article apparently contradicts itself internally, it's difficult to discover what exactly is anti-women about the YC model.
Accessibility, for one.
1996: Let's be honest: right now, most Java applets are a joke when compared to their native counterparts.

That's still true, and it's a better analogy. HTML5 in 2010 and Java applets in 1996 both promised portability at the cost of a nonstandard UI.

For HTML5 to become prominent, it needs to offer something to users that iPhone apps don't. Users don't care about portability or ease of multiplatform development.
And for the JS heads - a prime number sieve in JavaScript:

http://wiki.pageforest.com/#js-patterns/prime-sieve
LivingSocial’s Tim O’Shaughnessy Rocks Deloitte Event
That 200,000 figure had been quoted before though, by Eric Schmidt back in August (which is when Steve Jobs said "We think some of our friends are counting upgrades in their numbers." & "We think we are ahead of everyone.") so if any eyebrows were raised by Rubin using it again 4 months later then they were (or should have been) raised in surpise at Android sales plateauing, particularly after announcing 100K per day in May and 160K per day in June. It's not unthinkable that they're up to 400K per day by now.

It could well have been a simple typo or something intended to be updated to the latest figures that got missed.
Sure, I was just curious if paid traffic could have been profitable for you. With $8 in profit per shirt and a conversion rate of 0.5%, it looks like anything over $0.04 per click would have resulted in a loss.

Your site was gorgeous, and the idea was strong. Amazing how hard it is to push people to action.
Selena Deckelmann will teach PostgreSQL on CodeLesson
Prison Economics: How Fish and Coffee Become Cash
How does this work when Dropbox only allow mobile uses of their API?
A Gaming Bluetooth Controller for your Phone
Hey, you're welcome. If you're coming from a background similar to mine (which it seems from the info on your blog), you're part of your own sub-culture that is reflective of your target market so I'm sure you're getting great feedback from other sources.
The discount to your mortgage is often quite small since you shouldn't count the entire mortgage interest write-off as a discount, only the amount above the standard deduction. Also, this discount will shrink over time as your interest payments shrink and the standard deduction rises.
Once again your willingness to share is very much appreciated!
> Your time horizon is too short

That's not really the point, I think the point is that I shouldn't have been investing in something that could evaporate on paper in 3 months.

Either way, yes, the point is I'm a terrible equities/retirement investor and a better small business person. Everyone here has excellent reading comprehension, as I would expect on HN.

> That's not to say that your startup isn't a better investment, though.

I didn't sell at the first sign of danger (first of all - selling at the first sign of danger would have been a GOOD idea, but my father, the successful older investor, told me to hold on as it crashed.). I sold after the market had come back by around 60-70% from the lows. That was good enough for me, especially since another 'double dip' was a very real possibility in the beginning of 2010.

If I had sold at the bottom I would have lost nearly everything. But I finally liquidated after my startup was consistently making money and I actually wanted the cash to put back into the business / spend.

Keep in mind I was never broke - I just had a large proportion disappear for a while. That drove me to do 'smarter' things with it after some of it came back.

Having said all that, "You should have held on to it" is standard 20/20 hindsight that makes a market crash sound so predictable. I think I had pretty good forward-sight given the situation.
I think your idea of a startup is very narrow. Tesla Motors was a startup. Talk to most VC's and you'll find they invest a ton of money into these types of companies.

BTW most cleantech or pharma companies start as two engineering or science PHD students in lab somewhere, and these days those labs can be on different sides of the world.
I go into more detail on this in my post below, but I think that this is actually not true any more, because the basic nature of the economy has changed. If you adjust for honest estimates of inflation, stocks have been down consistently for 15 years. That starts to look a lot like a "new normal". Then you start adding in survivorship bias, selection bias, etc; the picture is not pretty.

Maybe it's not the new normal, and maybe stock markets will start rising again as they have historically, but when you see a lull this long, it at least suggests the strong possibility of a pattern break.