skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
O(log n) tree search vs. O(1) hash lookup is not the reason for any scalability differences that might exist between RDBMS and key-value stores. RDBMSs with hash indexes are commonplace, and allow O(1) lookups and a b+-tree lookup over a few million rows only does a few I/Os (the fanout in a typical disk-based tree index is on the order of 100, and the nodes in the first level or two of the tree are likely to be cached). Any differences in scalability has more to do with architectural differences (easier to do horizontal partitioning with key-value stores, no need/expectation of ACID transactions, no need to parse + optimize queries at runtime, no need for a complex query executor, etc.)

But I agree that a SQL RDBMS allows much more flexible ad-hoc queries than a key-value store does.
EMT assumes an auction of rational buyers and sellers.
I have this theory that small transaction size actually confers a small advantage. You never have to worry about having enough orders on the other side of the transaction, thus you can do any transaction at the lowest price offered. Whereas big bid orders are basically the average price of the N lowest offer prices. I have no facts or experience on this, just a theory.

In other words there may be profitable techniques that are impossible for the big boys to use, simply because they can't be bothered with tiny investments.

Also, I thought you could eliminate transaction costs using a broker like zecco. Such a broker might invalidate my above theory though, if it were true.
I'm pretty sure the article was just trying to compare HAML to a small part of Seaside. ("Seaside packs a lot of ideas into one framework. One innovation [ed. not The primary innovation]: you don't write HTML.")

I think the real point wasn't even that Seaside's HTML generation is smart/powerful/fun. It's this:

I enjoy programming in Seaside because when I'm programming in Seaside, I'm programming. I'm not wrestling with markup; that's for computers to do. I get the same pleasure out of using HAML.
Compared to MSN / Sametime / Facebook Chat / Yahoo Chat / AOL Chat / etc - I don't think ustream or jtv are very big.
Read "The Intelligent Investor". It was written many years ago and is still relevant today (it's actually scary how history seems to repeat itself). Regarding fees, note that commissions are not the only costs to transactions. Remember the bid/ask spread and that as a small investor you will be taken advantage of.

Long term is the way to go, IMHO. It is nearly impossible to predict short term price movements. Also, forget the efficient market hypotheses; if the SP500 can go up 5% one day and down 5% the next it's obviously bogus. You can count on the average stock owner to be either overly optimistic or overly pessimistic (and not just a little bit). Do you homework first and keep your head.

Find companies with business models you can understand: how are they making revenue, what are their costs, what are their risks? Use discounted cash flows (i.e. NPV) to find a fair market price (P/E is good rough estimate). Be very conservative when doing this, especially with regards to expected EPS and growth. Double digit growth cannot be maintained and generally high growth companies are overvalued. Most libraries have S&P reports that you can study for free (good for EPS data although take it with a grain of salt). Some discount brokers also offer stock reports. Note that analysis recommendations are usually bogus but it doesn't hurt to take note.

Index funds are a good way to diversity but watch out for fees (I like Vanguard, especially their ETFs) and too much portfolio turnover (some are just badly designed). However, it's my opinion that you can do better than the indexes with a little common sense (see above) and if you can stomach the extra risk. Stick to large cap stocks because they are more liquid and less susceptible to insider information. It doesn't hurt to look at insider activity (although note the effects of stock options).

$2000 is not much money, probably not enough to start messing with individual stocks. I would stick it low fee, value ETF and forget about it. $10,000 is probably a more reasonable starting amount, say 25% in high-grade bonds, 25% in a index fund, and 50% in individual stocks of your choosing (say 2 or 3).
A Blank Piece of Paper…
The problem is "small" in your definition is at least in the thousands of shares, probably more in the hundreds of thousands of shares in anything liquid. It's true that mutual funds have a hard time moving in and out of the market quickly, but you're competing against traders who will happily do 1000 share trades all day long.
No YC-funded company should be surprised like he was. We tell them all what they're signing up for depending on whether they take angel money or VC, and at what valuation.

If you sign up for VC, you're signing up to take over the world-- to at least try to get IPO huge (even though IPOs themselves have currently disappeared). This is ok with founders who were planning to anyway. Founders who aren't sure, or are sure they aren't, should only take angel money.

Though nearly all later stage investors want a veto on acquisitions, the point where they'll exercise it varies a lot. It depends mostly on the valuation. As a rule no investor is happy with less than a 5x return, unless the valuation was huge (e.g. in mezzanine round) or the company is in trouble. Over 5x they may still grumble, but most will let you sell the company if you really want to. Or they'll arrange for founders to sell some of their shares privately. Over 10x they'll generally be pretty happy.
- I agree you don't have any advantage. On the other hand the meltdown has already happened, so the prices have been corrected already.

- On the other hand, using the stock-market by investing for the long-term is the biggest crap someone can sell you. There are better ways to invest for the long term, assuming you have more money.

- $2000 may be a lot to you, but it's not a lot of money. So assuming you are a fast learner, want high returns and you have the risk gene, I would recommend learn forex instead. You will learn a lot more in 6 months than what you will learn investing for the stock-market. You will probably lost at least 50% of your capital but you can't learn if you don't burn real money.
'Memory pill' that could help with exam revision could be available soon
The history of the internet video
Would be nice to sync mp3 with Android. I'm amazed no one already took the effort in doing so
About the commissions, Zecco is an online broker which gives the first 10 trades (one way) every month for free.
the recumbent bike thing seems a little douchey. doubly so given the guy's gut. Medical imaging workstations seem much more humane- put everyting on a hydraulic table so you can work comfortably sitting, standing or in a low crouch waiting to strike
Timing is interesting. Assuming things are cyclical, you're coming out of your startup phase of business into a growing / booming economy on the upswing. So the companies that survive the recession period during their infancy have an awesome economy to grow into.
I'm reading so many negative comments. If he's smart and interested in stocks, perhaps he can make money. What if Warren Buffet had posted an ask-HN before starting his career?
Paul, but the YC sample docs give YC a veto over change of control as well. It's not just the VCs who want that power. Now, you may never have - and state that you never will - exercise that right, but if so, then why is it in there?
I would also highly recommend reading a biography of Warren Buffett. I just read "The Snowball", but there's also a shorter one out now as well.
Shut up and run your own datacenter then. How is this frontpage? ZOMG FUCKXORS THE CLOUDZORS
In my defense, I submitted this while testing a Greasemonkey script... didn't think people would actually vote it up.
Might as well just advertise for github. I don't need a badge to tell me I can hack. Use the glider symbol from the game of life. Octocat is stupid its cute but stupid it is meaningless.
I counter with data. World ocean temps were higher in 2005 & 2006 than in 1998. Every year after 2000 has been higher than all of the 90's except 1998.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
So anyway, why not a startup that provides the same service as Amazon's "real name" tag?

You hook into my startup, I charge the user a fee on their credit card, verify their name, confirm the name to you.

You have a user with a valid ID without having to deal with openid or credit card handling, I have a startup with income, the user has a proven ID which they will value because they paid for it.

Sounds good.
Tick tick tick... significant number of Seagate hard drives failing
Not for branding - which all Super Bowl ads are. You want to get as many unique viewers as possible, demos aren't overly important. Branding by buying up a whole bunch of separate channels and time slots is very difficult to get that kind of unique impressions.

The Daily Show's demo is very coveted so they would get a much better rate than a Simpsons rerun earlier in the day.

I will look for the TV study, I am going from a foggy memory.

However, even online breadth and volume is very key for branding campaigns. That is how ads.com really took off - being a single point of purchase for a massive number of uniques sold well with the traditional ad agencies (because they are lazy/uninformed when it comes to the web).
Please don't do things to make titles stand out,
like using uppercase or exclamation points,
or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is.
It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How many years old is this?
I will fully agree that tea is better for you than coffee and I am an avid tea drinker, having several varieties in my pantry but nothing, and I mean _nothing_ beats a nice home-brewed french pressed cup of coffee.

But maybe I'm bias because that's my morning routine. One wonderful cup of that gets me going. The aroma is what wins me over mostly.
Not exactly in the tech product area, but Wil Wheaton has spun his relative fame from Star Trek into a widely read blog, and then a couple of books, and speaking appearances, and other writing for the LA Times, Suicide Girls, various comic books, etc.

Through is blog/twitter he's managed to associate himself with all things "geek" and found an audience who will buy his work.
The meltdown has already happened? How do you know?
Yammer Raises $5 Million For Workgroup Micro-Messaging
Rest of world: um, duh?
(I mean all of this in terms of making an extra few percent - not making 2k into 200 million)

I think you have the advantage of timing. Being a casual investor you can leave $ as cash until an opportunity arises. You don't need to invest in this current landslide until the smoke clears, big firms and anyone who has already lost money is already committed (few will cut their losses).

You also have the luxury of just needing to choose one or two good companies. Drop the $2000 in Microsoft in the early days and you would be a rich man. Take that lesson to today, and maybe you think RIMM is oversold and will be the dominant mobile player for the next 10 years. You put your chips there, and not spread out over 5 mobile stocks.

I realize those two things are very difficult to do (timing and selection), but I do think certain individuals can do it better than the rest of the market.

My biggest point though: Don't waste ANY time in the market until you have enough money so that the difference between 3% returns and 5% is meaningful. 2K + the market == a waste of your time, as others have suggested invest that into yourself.
Your comment is nothing but an ad-hom. Do you have any evidence to support that he might?
Are you serious? What about when you want to target multiple platforms with the same interfaces but don't want to commit to one form of markup/generated code? Imagine being able to easily render to flex, jquery ui, ext js, clean css/xhtml, gross but effective tables etc.

If you abstract it the idea will come.
To all the naysayers: remember that holding cash is holding a depreciating asset. That 2k is not going to be worth 2k in a year's time. So really by not investing you're taking a guaranteed loss of 3%-15% a year (depending on how pessimistic you are about future inflation) instead of some other possible loss that depends on how risky your make your portfolio.

For what it's worth my suggestion is to put your money in gold (GLD or DGP) or oil (USO, DXO or their variants.)

Edit: oh and of course go with an online discount broker instead of a major bank. You'd have to be insane to do otherwise. I'm in Canada so I use Questrade, and they are phenomenal.
Yup, that was The Tipping Point. Quite interesting...
The title wasn't editoralized at all, it's straight from the post. That's fine in my book
My comment was (mis) directed at the general public and their reaction to this.

Yes, its probably silly software and rules behind it. Just like angry tax office bills for $0 etc ;)
Hmmmm. You are probably right. I still wonder if there might be some advantage in only making small investments, such that the strategy is worthless for investors with money, but not worthless to you.
All caps is basically never a good idea.
To An Entrepreneur, Money is Happiness
This is not cheating. Nothing surprising here.

Of course you can do statement-based code, like in any language that supports I/O(Haskell included).

That's a hard fact and it isn't what functional programming is about.
Hmmm. He recommended using canonical URLs without query strings, stemming your URLs to avoid subdomains, using all lower-case in URLs, all of which seems mildly reasonable and is consistent with our plans.

One site I work with gets 67,000 visits from Google search for every 1,000 visits from Live/MSN search, so perhaps I should pay more attention to what he's saying. On the other hand, the Live/MSN search traffic is so small perhaps it's not worth trying to optimize for.
This shows that idea is not really something that VC pays for. It is always the team behind the idea.
What's to stop you from taking YC's money, then selling the company to your wife for $1, assets included, and then shutting down?

YC is very lax in what they allow. There are definitely some deals they've approved that I suspect a normal angel would have blocked in order to hold out for more. But they still need protection from unscrupulous founders.
The YC application allowed for a veto at less than 3x. I haven't looked at the sample docs, but that seemed reasonable.
Men can fight food urges better
I get why some people will object, since Haml is an alternate markup language, and Seaside is a framework. I basically agree. However, the point of this post, and the point of the discussion here, should be about how awesome Haml is.

I wanted to hate it. I don't like significant whitespace at all and so dismissed Haml at first as not something I would ever look at. Enough people told me it was awesome that I had to try it for 10 minutes, and it really grew on me.

Like Sinatra, it's just fun. They pair really well together.
Got a Flip video camera? Here's important stuff about managing your videos
Hold on a second.

When someone says, "venture capital is broken" what they're really saying is that there is a systematic problem with the way venture capital is allocated or how risk is managed. As a financial intermediary, that's basically what a VC does: allocate capital and manage risk.

VCs have sole responsibility for investing and managing the capital that they raise for which they get paid handsomely (often 2% of AuM annually and 20% of profits, if any). Entrepreneurs have no control over and get no remuneration for allocating capital or managing risk.

So what if there are too many "me too" entrepreneurs seeking funding. So what if there are a bunch of wacko founders pitching "hover boards." So what if innovation is dead. If VCs can't allocate capital or manage risk then they should decline to invest and return the money to their limited parters.

Stop blaming entrepreneurs for something that isn't their fault. There's plenty enough to blame them for that is their fault.
Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap
They wouldn't, you guys do a great job of this. (Though actually, anyone who even bothered to read your website would get much of the same benefit.)
Zecco is an online broker which gives the first 10 trades (one way) every month for free.

Zecco (Zero Cost) sounds like a good brokerage option for low-cost ($4.50 for trades that are not free) stock-trading, as long as customer service is not a priority. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecco.com

Another poster also mentioned Zecco in this thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441256
The Dark Lord of Broadband Tries to Fix Comcast's Image
DIY DNA: One Father's Attempt to Hack His Daughter's Genetic Code
Inside the GPS Revolution: Applications That Make the Most of Location
>- I agree you don't have any advantage. On the other hand the meltdown has already happened, so the prices have been corrected already.

A couple of summers ago someone could just have easily said: "on the other hand, house prices have ballooned, so the massive undervaluations in the housing market have been corrected already"

You are arbitrarily calling a bottom without any justification other than an efficient market hypothesis, which, given recent volatility, is hard to put forward.
I have some experience with embedded linux and I would suggest using netburner's dev board to start (netburner.com) They have a good C++ IDE to help you get started.

If you are more familiar with Flash I would suggest getting started playing with a chumby (chumby.com)

I am going to get some phidgets to play with in the next couple months (phidgets.com)

and I have been looking at bug labs but I'm not very java talented. This has also held me back from doing much with the android G! I bought.
It's also very elegant.
True, but identifying the other sucker means that you know why the other guy is a sucker. If you can constrain your betting to betting against suckers, into their weak spot, its hard not to win. The hard part is being patient enough to avoid competing with the unknowns at the table.
I'm a huge fan of openid; I'll look for alternative sites if the main one doesn't support openid (magnolia vs delicious)
web.py is a lot of fun, isn't it? My favorite part is that you can fit the whole app in one file, if you want to (since templates, database models, etc. are all optional). It's the Python web framework that gets closest to the PHP experience of instant results.

Django is probably a better choice for jumping right into CRUD apps and numbing the pain of SQL, though. There's more to deal with up front, but you have a more complete system after the first hour than you do with web.py.
Interesting article; Google comes seemingly out of nowhere takes the web by storm and then pokes around in the usual suspects business.

Yea they are hated but you bet they are not laying off one lawyer.
This could easily be fixed with a couple of lines of Lisp...
Like an earthquake you can't predict them, but you can get safety measures.
Or the hype behind the idea.

With $5 million, the investors/founders believe it can be at least a $10 million dollar company in the next 5-7 years. I personally wouldn't have made that bet but at least they are charging money for their app.
For anyone interested in the Eclipse plugin, it is CUSP:
http://www.bitfauna.com/projects/cusp/
I'm not one to talk on valuable comments (although I do try, most of the time) yours did not add any value. I notice most comments on HN that don't add anything to the conversation (and usually, they come in the form of one-worders like yours) get downvoted.

P.S - I did not down vote you myself, but figured I would help explain to you why you are being down voted.
But if your bet was placed as a CDS with Lehman, you actually may not have made money.
Climate Scientist Consensus - Global Warming Is Real (Other Scientists, Not So Much)
I am not in position to compare the two. But, the housing market was growing globally and so fast that the it was obvious it is artificial.

However, if you said that, yeah that's the answer you actually got.

"arbitrarily calling a bottom without any justification other than an efficient market hypothesis"

the deal is that you should not make predictions on what the outcome you need to be. Rather, correct you predictions and adjust your investments.
"... most people are going to have to slog away somewhat tedious things like making context ads match their page content 0.1% better."

I'm not sure why you think that the 0.1% improvments are assumed to be a tedious slog. They may have required some seriously interesting new ML techniques just to get that extra boost. Recall the Netflix recommendation algorithm improvement contest that had teams working very hard to get those last fractions of a percent.

Small adjustments to a huge system can have huge impact:
http://norvig.com/speech.html
I was going to buy one. Quite glad I chose Samsung instead.
I sincerely hope twitter implement private channels (so that you essentially have the same thing) for their messaging platform.

Would be great to have a private discussion area for workmates or project teammates as additional tabs to the general tweet stream.
> Without insider knowledge

> Try finding a fund that provides good returns

Based on what, exactly?
I was thinking of the Asch experiments well before they were mentioned in the article. Notably, I seem to recall reading elsewhere that later attempts to replicate Asch's work failed, and suggestions that the particularly conformist culture of 1950s America was responsible. Yet this article suggests that what the subjects perceived, in the case where the question had an objective answer, actually changed according to brain imaging, not that they were made unsure and went along with the group.

"Asch talked about the power of the "minority of one." When a unanimous group pressures the individual, that group is weakened as soon as one person breaks off."

Wouldn't it be more accurate -- and perhaps more revealing -- to call this the "minority of two?"
Paul - I agree with you. No VC backed company should be surprised, but in my experience, many are. I believe most entrepreneurs don't really understand share classes and the practical implications of many terms in their investment agreements. Others may understand the terms but are surprised by how they are applied. I applaud your outstanding work in helping to maket this clear to entrepreneurs everywhere. Keep up the great work!
Completely offtopic, but anyone else notice all the alliteration that was going on with names?

Judge James Jones & Daniel Dove

I felt like I was reading some kind of silly comic book, where the RIAA was the villainous organisation (You know, like how evil organisations generally have acronym names)
I'm not holding my breath waiting on twitter to implement _anything_. You can do what you describe with a private room on FriendFeed.
Copied & pasted my text into my trusty text editor, where I found out I'd written 170 characters.

Interesting choice of a "trusty text editor".
How we choose a mate - by Alan Sullivan - Helium
If Google is able to find those pages and drive traffic to them and Live/MSN isn't, it's _not_necessarily_ the site that needs to be optimized, it may be that Live/MSN needs to stop ignoring content or stop considering things like uppercase or query strings to be indicators of second- (or third-) class content. Agreed though, it could just be that Live/MSN just doesn't have the users/traffic, in which case, why are they telling _us_ how to optimize for them?
There's a VC out there that's happy with a 1x return in 5-7 years?! Your estimates are way, way too low. ;)