skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who's been building financial models for a living up until recently, I have to say that this model isn't very useful as it doesn't answer the most important questions.

The OP focuses entirely on the time period where the revenue line finally catches up with the cost line, i.e. profitability has been reached. But guess what? See all the time periods before that, where the business is running at a loss? Where is the money coming from to fund those losses? That's the up-front investment required - VC, loans or digging into your own pocket.

So that's the first important yet unanswered question: what is the up-front investment before the business can sustain itself?

The second is to calculate the ROI for the above investment, but with a twist: calculate the average ROI at every time period, taking into account all periods before the period being calculated for, but ignoring all future periods. This will provide you with a very important result: you will see that the average ROI remains negative long after your business becomes profitable. You will also see in which time period your ROI reaches an acceptable level - a very important factor when risk is considered.

Yes, it's just a model driven by assumptions. But with the above metrics, you can play with the assumptions (worst, best case etc.) and get meaningful results for decision making.

Disclaimer:
The above explanation has been simplified quite a bit. Liberties have been taken with definitions. All your base are belong to us.
I use chi.mp, its easy to remember (logan.mp). It works with most sites, I get errors when i try and use it here (HN) though.. which is weird.
Apple was incorporated with a $250,000 investment. In today's dollars that's more like $800k.
LeaveSteveJobsAlone.com and the Auto-Health-Story Generator
This is great advice.

I've been through this a few times as well - I built some Zigbee based devices a couple of years back.

You don't always need to fabricate your own boards - particularly for first runs. Sometimes you can get away with the dev board, sometimes you can get away with OEM boards (e.g. if you develop for PIC microcontroller, there are loads and loads of different prebuilt modules you can lift and drop).

The case of regulatory certifications is an interesting one - they do have consideration for a "module radio", which means you can got through a much cheaper, quicker certification process (it's still a pain). It's been about 3-4 years since I looked into it, so there might be other options now.

When you're selecting a dev board make sure it's accessible to you. If at all possible, go for something with a good cross-compiler and an emulator.

The fact that you want Linux - Well depends on the power you need, but you could use anything from a standard Intel through to a Blackfin. I hear the Motorola/Freescale toolchain is good too - although I've never used it personally. Anyone on here have much experience with embedded Linux?
The Plot to Kill Google
is it really? have you built anything in seaside?
It depends how native you want to be. AIR or wx works fine, but to really get native look and feel you must write a separate front end for each platform using the native toolkit.
Simon Firth: "It's so simple that even I have a Posterous site."
Good support staff ignore the rules. Somebody dumber figures out that rules are being circumvented, and before you know it it's exactly as the parent poster described: lock out the "Next" button until all rules are followed!

[edit] Might as well relate an anecdote:

When I got my MacBook Pro about 2 years ago I had it built with some custom options (glossy screen and bigger HDD, FYI), which made it a "custom order" in Apple's system. It took a little longer to ship, but anyways.

So over Xmas the MBP bit the dust, and I had to get a replacement from Apple. They offered up a new unibody MacBook Pro, and since the stock model matched the specs on my custom-built one, I was to get a stock, new, MBP.

This was going to take about a week, they told me. I had an Apple Store some 20 minutes away from my home, and I asked if I could just bring in my broken laptop and walk home with a new one. Less hassle for everyone. Nope. According to my support rep, this is allowed if my machine was a standard config to begin with, but their system would not allow a replacement order to be placed if the system was custom!

Rules sometimes suck.
How do they solve the bandwidth issue for HD?
I read your comment, and was a bit taken aback.. "isn't that what :javascript is for?"

Reading through the comments, though, :javascript was developed specifically in response to that post - it wraps everything indented in script tags, and does the right thing with special characters/etc.
Google Web Drive in the works?
Papers Written by Googlers
Nothing big. I've played around with it.
For most "too many characters" errors it's a Javascript error, which means I can at the very least backspace until it fits, without doing a submit each time.
Start up now...not
Say Goodbye to Done
We lead boring lives while hanging around people who lead interesting lives
Well I've got bad news for you. I'm not that rich and I'm not that successful. But I have been around successful people. You see I'm a journalist. If you go to a stadium and you see the crowd doing the wave, there are some people who just sit there watching. Those people are journalists. We lead boring lives while hanging around people who lead interesting lives.

And I've observed a few things about the few really great people I've had a chance to meet and cover. First, they tend to have really big heads. As someone once said, what they have doesn't look like a head. It looks like a container for a head. They also can't sit still. They need to be around people. You and I require sleep. They require people

People who talk to the dead want to feel connection to this procession through the ages. They need to feel in their bones where they have come from, and what ultimately they will leave behind
Ah -- I didn't know about that. I was just putting my script tags in strings. Thanks!

The More You Know
Getting There From Here
I dunno. If it scales, I'd consider myself lucky to find something with a similar return.
No problem. I don't think I caught it until I went through the Haml docs a second or third time - lots of handy little tidbits floating around in there I missed the first time.
You actually getting 2 URLs - one is "anonymized" with some garbage at the end and another uses your Y! username instead. My Yahoo account is Gmail style: firstname.lastname and many websites usually try to deduce the username I would most likely choose if I wasn't using OpenId.

As a result I can always choose whether I would like to stay unidentified or not. I really like Yahoo as an OpenId provider with two URLs and a sign-in seal. It's pretty versatile and secure.
And you still don't know jack.
Australian police avoid arrests due to bad new computer system
ditto to you, too.
Perhaps, but Haml isn't an abstraction layer. You're still using exactly the same HTML tags and attributes, just expressing them in a different way.

A better way of thinking about it would be simply an alternative syntax for HTML, eliminating most of the tag soup that's inherent in HTML + ERB.
They need to make sure they have a very low-power mode. When the tablet is placed in the stand, it should both charge as well as serve as a digital photo frame automatically.
didn't i see a see a screen grab of news.yc redirected to localhost on your box? off the wagon? ;)
I could easily edit posts to redirect to a whole new blog. The blog isn't old enough to be that big of a hassle.

This is really about the openness of platforms. If you operate on even a moderately open platform (e.g. allowing 3rd party javascript), then the risk of platform collapse is a minimal risk to your data.

That is the biggest risk with Facebook. They aren't inclined to be open with my data, so i don't bother using it. Blogging platforms don't work unless they are open.

You're definitely right about the subdomain though.
Microsoft still searching for merger with Yahoo
the post isn't about getting upset, its about something, the actual company has no real control over, causing a huge PR problem.
In addition, Sass (Haml's CSS counterpart) is almost worth the price of admission by itself - the way it handles nested CSS rules and families is very smart, and that's not including constants and calculation functionality.

http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/docs/rdoc/classes/Sass.html
The only failure here is in the author's inability to understand how genetic programming works, why a fitness landscape that is effectively flat with only a few spikes is completely unsuitable for this particular technique, and why anyone considering using GP in python needs to work with ASTs and avoid trying to eval() random strings.
Amtrak Discover America - Amtrak USA Rail Pass
Getting Onista out of Ghost Town image.
Since our alpha release of Onista:http://www.onista.com, we experienced little tough road getting good products listed.

Onista was starting to appear a Ghost Town (As most of marketplaces do after launch with lack of products) and we are REALLY glad announce the availability of wide range of products now.

http://onista.wordpress.com/2009/01/20/announcing-availability-of-wide-range-of-products/

Would greatly appreciate feedback on what we can do to attract more sellers to list the products and buyers to buy those.

In fact we are really looking for help on creating and executing marketing plan. We are open to all options including adding new member to the team who would like to get on the marketing initiative.

Thanks in advance,
The best way to use OpenID is if you have your own domain or website. By putting some tags in your website you can then login with the address of your website. Makes it really easy to remember.

The feature is called delegation for those interested.

I use my tumblr address which works really well for me.
I am the author of this blog post - good points on this from a financial perspective. I can tell you were building financial models for a living, because you think ROI is the most important question for entrepreneurs ;-)

For startups, the most important things are good products and good markets. Successful angels and VCs know that, and will invest based on product and growth, NOT financial metrics. Thus, in very few VC pitches will you ever see stats on ROI or payback rate, that's more something you'd seen in the accounting or I-banking world. (I know this from personal experience, having spent the last year at a silicon valley based VC and seeing dozens of pitches)

So if entrepreneurs are primarily focused in the world of products, features, etc., then the key thing is to figure out the metrics that measure how these products tie to external market value. So things like conversion rates in funnels or cost per acquisition become super important, because the features are the steering wheel to your revenue engine. As a result, the spreadsheet model is mostly focused on things that are granular enough to relate to product and functionality, rather than things like valuation multiples or ROI or other overly-broad financial metrics.
There are a lot of things like that, which wouldn't get voted up. Obviously, the real pull is its edginess.

People like myself and parent aren't keen on that kind of pull b/c it attracts the "hackers" who think breaking systems is hacking. They tend to be narcissistic and more a drain than a contribution.
I certainly hope not :|
"The Nine Nations of North America" and "Albion's Seed" have detailed data on the distinct cultural regions of the US, but no genetic information.
Continuation magic of this kind is interesting and useful but only when you don't want to use anything outside the Smalltalk VM (for example some database), when you start to communicate with something external to VM you have only moved problem to different place and probably made it harder to solve. There is reason why call/cc is sometimes called "functional goto".

But apart from continuations seaside also provides system to abstract out HTML generation, that not only changes syntax of HTML but also has support for building page from tree of prepared components (like you would construct desktop application). And this HAML thing only seems to change syntax of HTML and not add any similar capability, so comparing it to Seaside probably is misguided.
I'm the original author for the blog - the numbers are fake, and were chosen to make the graph interesting :-) Your mileage will vary!

Note also that you pay upfront for acquisition but your revenue base builds up over time - the more momentum you get, the better off you are.

It is however true that a lot of businesses that rely on paid acquisition end up with low margins - just look into the leadgen industry as a good example of this. This is particularly true in the Google Adwords world where auctions systematically drive up prices.

That said, if you can pay $80k and get $120k out, and that scales up to LOTS of revenue, then making $1.2B in revenue per year on $800M in cost may not be that bad. Certainly better than a lot of businesses.
Lets note that 95% of small businesses make less than 250k.

If a business spends $800 and makes $1200 that is great. The risk is small. If the same business spends 8k to make 12k that is great. The risk is bigger but relatively small. If the new hired gun, self-proclaimed-marketing-guru, decides to jack up ad spending to 80k to make 120k, someone is betting too high now.

Asking if this model is scalable is bringing emotion into this scenario which will guarantee you failure sooner or later.

At one point you will reach the amount at which spending more on ads will not increase your revenue. I guess that is when justifying "branding" comes.
pg has commented on this in the past when asked, "Why does YC almost entirely fund web 2.0 startups when there are so many other areas of technology to explore?" And his answer was, basically, "That's what we see." Though he followed up with, "And that's what we know how to judge." Specifically in the context of, why they don't fund enterprise startups, when there's so much money to be made there.
in paid user acquisition, unfortunately, the common case is that you run out of ads to buy. So then you have to start buying crappier ads that perform worse, just to get to the next level of revenue.

One of the biggest examples of this is eHarmony, which is rumored to have $100M+ revenue, but terrible margins because they have to plow so much of that money back into advertising.
Ask HN: playin' the stocks game
I'm a 21yr. old, soon to be college graduate, possibly on his way to grad school, and I want to have a hand at the stock market. I'm planning to start with a measly two grand or so in hopes of gaining some capital.

I just finished reading 'Real Money,' by Jim Cramer, where he outlines some of the basics of stock investing - Multiples, P/E ratio, dividends, yields, etc. I'm not sure if I've attained sufficient knowledge to jump into stocks, or whether I should do a bit more reading on the field.

Being a complete beginner, what resources would you recommend to help lay the basic foundation? And after I've obtained enough information, what are the initial steps do you suggest I take? What tools do you use? Suggestions of brokers? How's the market treated you? What kind of 'investor' are you - a trader or more long term?

I think it'd be interesting to hear the hacker's guide to investing, although often times the market is wildly irrational - a trait most of you hackers lack from what I've read here.

So, everything from suggested investment methods to tools you use to keep track of what's happening.

Thanks all.
Isn't breadth and volume bad for CPM? With the Super Bowl, you're effectively advertising to everyone in America, so your demographics are almost exactly average, whereas with The Daily Show it's largely college educated 18-35 year olds, the most coveted demo.

I'd imagine the Super Bowl has to have way lower eCPM.
Hello Wrold vs Hello World, in Java
30 Rock
It's pretty hard to get over reason #6.
Kind of a pain to do on a regular basis, but would definitely work.
Patent Trolls Are a Symptom of Deeper Problems
Avoid individual stocks. Without insider knowledge, an individual is basically gambling when they invest in individual companies. Try finding a fund that provides good returns, and let a professional who has hundreds of millions of dollars in leverage and much better insider knowledge make the specific decisions.

The other key is to look abroad, especially in emerging markets right now. That, and Chinese infrastructure (i.e., airports).
That 150 number made me remember this nice, little compact, too nice story about Gore-Tex which was probably in 'The Tipping Point' (I don't remember):

"What is most unique about this company is that each company plant is no larger than 150. When constructing a plant, they put 150 spaces in the parking lot, and when people start parking on the grass, they know it's time for another plant. Each plant works as a group. There are no bosses. No titles. Salaries are determined collectively. No organization charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Wilbert Gore - the late founder of the company, found through trial and error that 150 employees per plant was most ideal. "We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty," he told an interviewer some years ago"

http://www.commonsenseadvice.com/human_cortex_dunbar.html
This is advice that people rarely take, and I'd probably ignore... but I'd recommend investing with a fake portfolio to start (there are "fantasy" investment sites that make this easy).

Making money is important - but I'd also recommend that you invest in things you believe in.
Because some people deeply lust after the page turn effect. No accounting for taste...
I would absolutely recommend reading "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel. Its a great introduction to the theory of efficient markets.
The video doesn't say anything more than the text. It's basically the first 3 paragraphs of the article (which is like 200 words?)

What's interesting about this study is that apparently they are finding that conforming people are actually genuinely perceiving the conformed opinion, rather than just pretending (which would be a simple case of cognitive dissonance).
The hard part here is clearly not getting data into whatever audio player is available (ie. car radio), it's getting ubiquitous wireless in each of these devices, so that one does not need to carry around and plug in a device like the GPhone. Does anyone know if AT&T or any other wireless providers have any plans to go into this market? Obviously, tying a device to a particular network sucks because it locks you into that network, but I would be much more likely to pay for a monthly data plan if I could get a car radio that used the same connection to stream music!

I imagine the problem here might be licensing, but I'm not really knowledgeable enough to know.
so, this guy who founded an ad network is telling you to spend 35k on ads when you first start your business.

who voted this up? do you people even know what Y Combinator does?
"Past returns are not an indicator of future performance." It would be very easy to be caught in an upswing in some market you're investing in--be it US technology in 2000 / 2006, or Czech railroads in 2009, or whatever--and be stunned when they dive when you start playing for real money. Investing in things one believes in is dangerous advice. Believing is important in many things in hacker culture; investing in public companies can't be one of them. You need more solid evidence, not just faith.
The second benchmark isn't particularly fair. We're supposed to be testing == speed, not object creation. It should be something like:

test_str1, test_str2 = "test", "test"
str = Benchmark.measure do
10_000_000.times do
test_str1 == test_str2
end
end.total

testsym1, testsym2 = :test, :test
sym = Benchmark.measure do
10_000_000.times do
testsym1 == testsym2
end
end.total

Of course you might not need to create two strings, and definitely not two symbols. Somebody want to run this? (I'm on a communal computer with no Ruby.)
FYI: The new official github for sinatra is at http://github.com/sinatra/sinatra
It's posted, but doesn't seem to be discussed at all in that forum.

Some more discussion is available on it here:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-01-18-n35.html
For me, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger's investment advice resonates the most. You could start here:

http://ycombinator.com/munger.html

Also, before buying mutual funds, read this:

http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/best-investment-advice-youll...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248469

Some good stuff here.
The market isn't irrational - people are. Learn about psychology, sociology ad behavioral economics and you'll have an edge.

Here's a nobel prize lecture on behavioral economics to get you started: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/

And another really important tip: Make sure you can afford to lose all the money you put in.
Expect to lose your $2000. I'm not trying to dissuade you -- investing is a skill, and if it only costs $2000 to learn it, you've done great. If you're not afraid to lose your capital, you'll be much better positioned to take calculated risks.

Be aware of commissions. If you have only $2000, you will have to engage in fewer, more profitable trades -- otherwise commissions will completely erode your profits. Let's say it costs $10 to make a round-trip buy/sell trade. That's already 0.5% of your capital right there. If you do 10 trades a year, you're starting off with an annual return of -5%.

Traditional stock picking really isn't my thing. It's nearly impossible to have an informational advantage. The professionals can barely beat their benchmark on a regular basis. It just doesn't make sense to play the stock picking game unless you have a credible reason to believe that you have an edge over the competition.

A great place to hang out is www.nuclearphynance.com. It's the best message board for quant finance. Lurk there for a while and learn about the computational and quantitative side of finance. Traditional stock picking isn't really related to hacking, but there are sides of finance that are.
Keep in mind that market value is defined as the price the market puts on something when an exchange takes place, not the dollar value printed on the price tag. When I first tried to sell my house, no one would buy it because we set the asking price too high, the asking price was not the market value. Interestingly enough, doesn't the scarcity of the good factor into the market value (or at least the perception of scarcity)? Can something with an infinite supply even have a market value?
This is totally unfair. Things like this just happen. Information gets mixed up, rules don't get changed fast enough, beauracracies don't work fast enough.

This same scenario has happened countless times in the past.

This incident was a tragedy for everyone involved. For the pilots and crew, the passengers and all of their friends and family -- many of whom were other spirit employees.

Cut them some slack.

Running a big company like that and reacting to a plane crash, which -- come on now, it doesn't happen often and look, they got everyone out. Everyone from Spirit /on/ the plane did exactly what they were trained to do perfectly and it saved lives.

And now, someone at the front line does what they were trained to do perfectly and you raise a fuss.
I'm not interested in that argument either. I am specifically asking what this judge would take into account besides the retail value of the fruit. The grocer obviously doesn't sell all his inventory. Would the damage calculation take that into account? What if the thief chose pieces of fruit which other customers were not likely to buy?