skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You cant afford to pay 9pct, 40pct or more. Both are far more than you can expect to make in the stock market, or any market. If you have gotten here to this point, and you just tore up your credit cards, YOU HAVE JUST EARNED A GREATER RETURN ON YOUR MONEY IN THAT PERIOD OF TIME THAN ANYONE ON WALL STREET COULD EVER EARN YEAR IN AND YEAR OUT.

Joel Greenblatt has exceeded 40% over a long span of time. Lynch, Buffet, Pabrai, the Gardener brothers and many other value investors have far surpassed 9% and done so for decades.

Heck, even my performance over the last 5 years tops that modest level.

http://www.stockalicious.com/portfolio-performance/1937
And their stock is close to their 52 week low with a P/E under 20. Interesting.
I never said it in the essay, but we have actually been thinking it at YC. One of the hardest things we have to do in the selection process is filter out people who are smart but uncommitted. (Smartness is much easier to judge than commitment in a 10-minute interview.) And now the economy is going to be doing it for us. So frankly I'd prefer to be operating in a mild recession. Unfortunately this one sounds like it is scheduled to be a few notches above mild.
By doing that you limit your growth rate, and your maximum size.

Charging up front puts people off, whereas if you slowly incrementally introduce revenue later, they will probably be hooked by then.
Apple Gets ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC into iTunes HD; Pushes 1M Shows in 1 Month
You would know much better than me, but I thought the double confirmation process helped prevent emails from the website (e.g. Justin.TV) from getting flagged by spam filters. Have you guys had any problems with this?
Social Web Speeds Ahead Despite Slowing Economy
Verizon Won’t Let Market Woes Stall Fiber or Its Alltel Deal
Is OpenID Too Confusing?
It has benefits from the customer's point of view. Too many people here are looking as it as a hassle. Its not always. sure, as the original poster pointed out, having that requirement on low priority sites, as he calls them, is annoying. But if you're setting up something important, you want to know that everything you set up is correct and your identity is verified. If I was setting up an online trading account it makes me feel better to have a line of communication established.
Is that a feature of USA'ian health politics (which I don;t follow that closely), or does it happen here in the Uk too?
Kaixin001: China’s Apple of Social Networks
Another look at JavaScript inheritance
Exchange email is acceptable but not outstanding. The reason that most companies end up with Exchange is the good calendaring support.

Try your free or less expensive options first and see what your employees think. At our company (back when we were a startup) our first IT hire's first job was to install Exchange -- the executive team was absolutely done with the inferior product that we were using before it.

Another reason you may wish to not use a hosted environment: your company's data can't be monitored or revealed by a subpoena to the hosting company if there's no hosting company. You can be sure that Google complies with subpoenas and court orders unless they're laughably vague and potentially useful for a PR stunt.
Diamonds being scare and high-priced is not a problem for DeBeers, no. But it is for most other people who would like cheaper diamond for jewellery or for industrial/consumer uses. Wouldn't you like a iPhone with a screen of solid clear diamond? It would be hard to scratch.

IMHO, DeBeers and the perception of diamonds as scarce and valuable can only stand against engineering progress for a limited time.
It’s almost as if Apple were in a different business than Dell (DELL), HP (HPQ), Acer and Toshiba.

Helloooooo! DELL, HP, Acer and Toshiba are in the ruthless business of trying to cut their margins thinner and thinner with fewer and fewer opportunities to differentiate their products while they acts as collectors for the Windows Tax.

Apple is indeed in a different business, a business based on differentiation and branding.
Finally Yahoo! starts to realize that their brand is the best thing they have going for them.
The memory issue is Java. Not for event-based C. (Don't believe me, go to the language shootout and see Java vs. whatever and look at the memory use.)

Also what does "a million users" mean? A million open connections? How many requests active simultaneously?

One million simultaneous HTTP requests would sure eat a lot of memory, but who does it that way? It's stupid. The kernel handles socket buffers for you. Each processor core can only read one socket at a time. So as long as you don't take too much longer to respond requests you should be fine.

Plus with things like event based libraries you can just place a read on the socket for at least X size to "wait" till the basic of the request is fulfilled.

I don't know what they are trying to do, it all depends on what the server does. For pure messaging across connections it should be an order of magnitude better in C/libevent. But as I say, I need more info.
This is not as outlandish as it sounds; the easiest way for MS to get high-performance JavaScript would be to jit it onto the existing Silverlight in-browser VM, and use that VM's existing optimisation tricks.
I've actually googled around (in vain) to find such a service (after searching everywhere on last.fm for this feature - I was convinced that they'd have it - but no...)

So, excellent idea, I needed it yesterday!
Ugh that getting real shit makes me barf. Applying blanket statements like "you shouldn't need to take VC money" only demonstrates the tunnel vision of working on one business for so long. Much of their advice is very good, but there's too many absolutes for my liking..

Anyway, all I'm saying is too many people are applying the blanket statement "worry about monetization later" when not all of them should be.

In my opinion, it can be easier for businesses to reach the tipping point of paying customers (i.e. break even) vs. the tipping point of users (???, profitability?, acquisition?). I think MM touched on this.

Myspace hasn't show itself to be a real business yet and either has Youtube. I still can't think of user based acquisitions that have quantifiably proved themselves to be a wise decision, though I think Youtube will.
To be fair, if they are going to be sending spam I dont think they care if you validate your email address. Enter someone elses address and as long as it doesn't get a bounce back, its valid in their eyes.
I wonder how high this could go? I think Microsoft are vulnerable here, since they are widely disliked, even hated.

Apple's market share in the US is higher than in the rest of the world, because the US market is less price sensitive. But what if Apple brought out a cheap version of the Mac Mini, to capture that sector of the market? It ought to cost no more than $200 and like the existing Mac Mini it would have BYODKM ("Bring your own Display Keyboard and Mouse") -- but it would also be able to use the old PS/2 keyboards and mice, which many people have in their attics or on an old PC. This would make it a very attractive low cost option.

Apple could have as an option on all their computers dual-boot with Linux (maybe using a customised Ubuntu distro), and allow people to run Linux programs in a virtual machine under Mac OS. The number of extra customers this would bring directly is not large, maybe 1% of the total market for new PCs; however it's an influential market sector because most Linux users have less-technical friends who rely on them for advice.

One of the drawbacks of running Linux is that it's less likely to be compatible with new hardware than a more mainstream OS. However if the Apple distro and campatibility layer was well-written it would allow and hardware that works with Mac OS to work with Apple's Linux. So many Linux users might go for this option.

If Apple did this, I think they could get 20%+ market share in the US by 2009Q4. How could Microsoft respond? Reducing prices probably wouldn't help them much, and Microsoft are too bloated and slow moving to actually produce a good operating system.
Cryptography safeguards free speech. Off-shore internet gambling companies work hard to get around US government restrictions. Tax shelters have been around for as long as there have been taxes. Hippies grow and sell pot on the black market. The Seasteading Institute is addressing the problem of geographical government monopoly.

Freedom (sometimes) finds a way.
Zenwalk: Slackware's Moment of Zen
More From the Open Source Music Garage
Am I the only who thinks Yahoo is going to be in excellent shape after they trim down and start focusing on what they're good at?
What would be awesome is a game you can accurately correlate to your BAC. I'd buy that on any mobile platform - even if I had to train it with a breathalyzer or BAC strips.
A stress test for several days and fully networked stacks can give you an idea.

And in my experience C/libevent would be hard to beat there by anything as there are less things that can block service. A classic is seeing the garbage collector going bananas for a few seconds in object-oriented languages.
Yes java adds some overhead, but you still have the low level buffers.

A million open connections we're talking about. All active, connected.

Agreed, c/assembly would obviously reduce the memory footprint. But is the extra work worth it? I'd say not for most apps.
yes re: the "t" in the logo, when I was on the site I kept reading it as "Musty"
Of course, the problem with this strategy is that Apple may be cannabalising their existing market to some extent.

I think they could minimise this effect, firstly because the cheaper computers would be a lower spec, and secondly (don't laugh) they could make the cheap ones look not as pretty -- a factor that's probably important for a significant proportion of Mac users. Maybe the ugly cheapo computers could be sold under a different name to preserve the quality of the Apple brand.
I liked the article. When someone writes well, and makes a reasonable point, long form is just fine. Many are on the internet as their primary information consumption medium, and it's not just about byte sized chunks.

That said, I wonder how someone like Macaulay would have fared in our short attention span era?
> Helloooooo! DELL, HP, Acer and Toshiba are in the ruthless business of trying to cut their margins thinner and thinner with fewer and fewer opportunities to differentiate their products while they acts as collectors for the Windows Tax.

Umm, no. They're in the biz of trying to increase their margins. Differentiation is one way that they try to do it.

Customers are in the biz of trying to decrease said companies' prices. One way to cut prices is for said companies to cut their margins.

Currently customers are winning.

Never confuse the outcome of an interaction with the intent of one of the parties.
I think this is an interesting idea. I definitely agree with other comments here. Open it up to let users import data from Last.fm or other apps that are recording their listening trends. Then let them know what albums are being released from artists they frequently listen to.

Pulling in info then making a recommendation system would be great. Maybe work on an iTunes plugin to read star ratings and phone back to the app? Just thinking out loud here, I have no idea if something like that would be possible.
Start to Finish: Publishing a Commercial iPhone Game
> Many people who voted for Rudd would switch sides if this was true.

No "many" wouldn't. They'd argue that it isn't happening, that it isn't that bad, and then they'd ignore it. Most will skip steps 1 and 2.
As a user if I am actually going to give you money, I would think your service was worth giving my email address out for.

On the other hand I have properly signed up for more than 10 times as many free services as I pay for.
IMDB turns 18
Question: How did you select the list of locations to use in the UK version of your site? I would have thought that you would do it based on population size but there are some rather small places in the list - eg Bath & Swindon.

Bug: When clicking the logo to return to the home page from one of the UK regional urls the site returns to the .com instead of .co.uk page and shows the US locations.
I think this is interesting and definitely something to discuss. The whole idea of having a username/password for a service that can be used across several services is kind of abstract. I could see this being confusing to the non-tech public, because at times it's confusing to me.
ToolbarTV
Poll: Is the Death of MacBook FireWire an Outrage?
Maybe they use Java, which has long had such restrictions in its license, or another platform with those TOS.

(I did once use Java for offline processing of data at a nuclear reactor research facility, but human life was obviously not at stake.)
If you have an app with paid & free levels of service, it prevents people from creating multiple, free accounts.
My Mother uses Yahoo for mail and news, I use Geocities for a few small webpages. I think they're a great company with the best PhD-to-riches story ever from the 2 founders Jerry and David. I think their founding story is even better than Google, even if their market cap is a fraction of that.
D'oh, from TFP:
This code (mochiconntest_web.erl) just accepts connections and uses chunked transfer to send an initial welcome message, and one message every 10 seconds to every client.

1000000 / 10 = 100000 writes per second to a client on a connected socket. My guesstimate is it's not that much :)

Based on this graph:
http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent/libevent-benchmark2.jpg

[BTW sorry for replying to my own comment, and sorry I didn't read TFA.]
Sorry for the oversight; we just added "unmanned aircraft" to that list.
The concept is less confusing than multiple sign ons for a lot of people, but the execution of it is not always clear. Things like redirection for logins definitely throw users off track.
Bug.gd relaunches, adds corporate solution sharing via ErrorHelp.com
Hey guys, we'd love feedback on our relaunch. Any thoughts you have are encouraged-- we've worked very hard on this.

(If for some reason this submission isn't appropriate for hn.yc, please let me know what we can do to change that-- our post earlier got flagged somehow. Apologies in advance.)
Overall, I think it is a nice and useful service. I could definitely see myself using it.

My first thought once I grasped its function was "where do they get the data? Can I be sure that my favourite, obscure indie band will show up there?". Perhaps you should add this info somewhere?

Disclaimer: I did not sign up for an account, so there is a possibility that I missed a members' faq somewhere.
Samsung L320 Unlocked
L320 is one of the most fascinating presentations of Samsung, which has been launched in a shimmering Black color to coruscate up your life vividly.
Preparing Merb 1.0 RC2
EVCA: MySQL as a VC success story — Lessons Learned
Thx,
For the UK site we picked locations based on area and population, but definitely can refine it some.
Good arguments. I think there's a bit of a bandwagon of schadenfreude whenever things go badly, and people begin to outdo each other in dire and gloomy predictions of the world's end.

In my very first job, I got used to the idea that somebody, somewhere in the project, feels that the sky is falling and the project's about to end - on practically a weekly basis. Yet the project went on. Human activities have a huge intertia, and the "economy", and the "world order", are merely a collection of human activities with some system applied on to help keep track of what's going on (and, ideally, help it go even better).

Things change, but ever so slowly.
What may get lost is that Apple sold 33% the number of computers that Dell did in the same time frame. As Dell is a big corporate supplier, it is possible that Apple sold as many (or almost as many) personal machines as Dell, and more than any other manufacturer. Another interesting insight is that corporations install the same software they've already purchased and will continue to do so during a recession, while personal users are able to buy and install software as they see fit--especially those first-time users who are trying to find replacements for their favorite windows software. So, buyers choose Macs when they have a choice, but choose Dell and HP machines for their companies to run all of their existing software.
It was killed for spam upvotes.
Nokia Aeon: The IPhone Nano You've Always Wanted
unicity of users
The Worst Places to Spend Vacation
No Hi5’s Today. No. 3 Social Network Lays Off 10 to 15 Percent Of Staff
Neat hack: Boston band's Wiimote guitar effects control
Unfortunately, their cell phone subscriptions were terminated due to lack of payments.
Tim Bray: No Venture Capital
My suggestion is to be sure to advertise and push your project especially hard when your competitors are dropping like flies. If you mearly hang on you will come out the other end with a whole new slate of competitors that will be funded so you need to be in a strong position to take them on.
Web 2.0 Marketing and Social Media Marketing Strategies
I hate it.

Mine switched when I was out to lunch so it was a shock to come back to a totally different screen.

I really dislike the maximize,restore,minimize for the widgets. I have a multi-tabbed browser for a reason.

The left navigation leaves lots of wasted space.

The new Gmail gadget doesn't offer the option to show 0 emails. I only use it for new mail notification. I don't want the top message in my box to be visible to anyone who comes by my desk.

Clicking on a stock in the Finance widget, doesn't bring up the normal Google finance page.

I might have to find a new home page. :-(
In my experience, diversity in temperament is essential for any team to function. If you put two people who are highly excitable together, they will keep running after new ideas and feeding of each others excitement. If you put two optimists together, they will tend to gamble and play too risky. If you put a team of idea men together, you tend to have designs and nobody doing the actual work.

I believe every team should be made up of a bunch of slow and steady chaps, and a few creative people, with the creative people split into excitable and careful.

The guys that one often assumes are slow usually have really good solutions, but when the team is too fast paced, those ideas get drowned out by the people who are loud and confident of their own ability. Soon, the quiet chaps stop talking, because they know nobody will listen to them.

Diversity has nothing to do with ethnicity if you are faced with a programming task. If you were to solve a socio-cultural problem, then diversity in terms of ethnicity would probably be a good division criteria.
1) The rest of the market is also at its 52 week low, no?
2) In a recession, upmarket stuff and luxury items tend to slow down more, so it could affect Apple more than some other PC makers.
How many 'original thinkers' do you need in a company made up of 50.000 people? I'm sure you're more intelligent than I am, but don't you think there are some problems I can solve better than you, based off my past experience? Diverse usually implies diverse in experience, and not in intelligence.
One word: Spam

You can't rely on things like captcha's, not anymore. But requiring an email address is at least a small difficulty. And if you get a whole bunch of signups from a single domain in a short period (And it's not, say, gmail) you know something's up.
Critique a quick/just-for-fun project?
In an attempt to learn to use Mechanical Turk[1], and have an excuse to play around over the weekend, I put together a new site-

PicSauce.com

I've noticed that a lot of images tend to float around the internet unsourced:

I'll get a forward of a forward of an image, and want to find out the original context. For instance, I may see a picture of "Obama not holding his hand over his heart duing the pledge of allegiance", and want to know where that picture came from, and what the real story behind it is..

Alternatively, someone might find picture of a beautiful actress, and want to know what movie it was from, and who they are.

PicSauce.com is a quick site which allows people to post an image or url, and leave comments on it. It works with a content hash of the image, which should help the comments survive it being copied and posted to multiple sites, or forwarded through multiple emails.

Is the site silly? Absolutely. But it is fun to leave comments about images and websites.

Is the name horrible? Probably. It's a 4chanism, which seemed like the site's target audience.

That said, I'd love to see any ideas to make it more useful or interesting.

If nothing else, it's a fun learning exercise- I haven't had to play with IE6 compatibility for a while, and DB tuning is always worth practicing.

[1] The intent of the project was to learn how mTurk works for a requester. Turkers entered 4000 pictures into the sites, with full comments.
jQuery: Fun with Overflows
Apple won't grow any bigger until Steve Jobs leave.
Are you talking about double opt-in? I have a site where if I don't use double opt-in via a confirmation email (with "click this link to activate") then I get a ton of bots filling out my form and cluttering my inbox.
+1 - EXACTLY what I was going to comment.
sorry, I can't get past the frontpage due to the schematic design
We send a verification email when you sign up; we just don't demand you click the link before you start using the website.
I think the point might be to confirm that the email the user is signing up with is a valid email address which belongs to them. It's especially helpful if a user wishes to reset a password. This might help prevent users from creating multiple accounts.

Sure, it's easy to get around, but for most users they simply comply. That been said we don't use email validation on any of our websites.
The line of thinking is that you spend the same amount of money every month buying the same stock/investment. Since you're making multiple purchases, you are reducing the risk of a steep drop off in your stock since the price paid for all your investments will be averaged over a period of time.

I've also heard that there are no significant benefits to this strategy, although I haven't done very much research on it.
I was interested in this quote: "[T]he ratio of government debt to GDP in the U.S. runs to about 62%. For the eurozone, it's 75%; for Japan, 180%." Reddit would have you believe that we're some kind of wacky money-pissing outlier, but we seem to be doing all right.

Wikipedia's list of countries by public debt is interesting: I see no correlation between rank and economic strength. Also curious: there are no countries with negative net debt, so why isn't the circular debt resolved? Maybe the countries are diversifying their portfolios? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_debt
I exactly agree that they're anomalies...but they're by far the most profitable anomalies. Almost all the top websites grew users before revenue! High variance, high payoff. It is certainly safer to start small and grow revenue first; it's also likely not to produce the next Google (or Yahoo, or Facebook, or YouTube, etc.)
Its not like the investors don't know the risks. I'm sure twitter has plans internally to make money and have presented them to investors.
Interesting, why do you say that?
If I'm buying a game, do I really care whether they are in London or Essex? No, I don't - the game is going in the post anyway.

The UK list is a bit grim at the moment, mainly because you are mixing cities and counties into the same list. That comes across as strange, almost as if you are making a category error. Have you though of sticking to counties, or using sythentic regions (The South East, The Northwest, the Midlands etc).
Apple will NEVER ship a third-party Linux. If they do use the Linux kernel (and it's not clear to me what advantages that would have, esp. given the disaster that is Linux audio) the user experience will be indistinguishable from OSX.