skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> don't invest in stocks, invest in yourself

QFT. Unless you are trying to do market-timing (day trading) with penny stocks, your investments aren't going to be liquid enough and they aren't going to return enough to significantly increase that $2000 in a reasonable amount of time.

Day trading in penny stocks is significantly risky. I did it in college once with $3k. I was up to $9k after a month or so, then managed to lose it all in the next couple months. Your luck is probably just as good playing slot machines, and it's probably actually better playing blackjack. Most penny stocks are penny stocks for a reason (they're crappy companies).

You'd do better to spend the $2000 and, more importantly all that wasted time, working on your idea and seeking out investors (if you really need more money).

I'm willing to bet that for a reasonable amount of time, nine times out of ten, it will be easier to get someone to invest $10k in you than it will be to turn $2k into $10k on the market.
You missed the main idea of the post. The idea is that for the majority of these "in the cloud" applications, the user is not the customer. An advertiser is the customer. (Unless you pay a subscription fee of course.)

Think gmail, youtube, etc. By all means, use the services. Just don't put all of your eggs in one basket if you do.
I don't remember the last time I read a top-ten book, and my list of recently-read books is probably wildly different from yours, as are both from a random third person here. The Internet opens up news and alternative news dramatically -- it's not a three-channel world and hasn't been for a long time, which brings me to TV -- a lot of people here don't watch it at all. I don't watch much. "Same subjects" might be true from a big enough view -- there are only so many categories of thought to go around, but within politics, science, world events, local events, philosophy, games, sports, etc., there's a lot of territory to make up a huge variety of subjects that people talk about.

Oh, and even though I disagree with your post and recognize that it's irrelevant to the article, I voted it up because it's relevant to the topic at hand and shouldn't have been voted down to 0.
Canadian cities like Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto would be insane! So many different groups of people marry and their kids marry too creating an amazing mix of people.
The "remove port numbers" suggestion is misleading. It should be "don't run your web server on a port other than the default HTTP port", especially with the suggestion to use redirects to canonicalize URLs. Most sites that run their web server on a different port have a good reason for doing so (although I think a subdomain would make more sense all around).
That site visually overloads me.

Lesson learned: simple is nice
Why not something like a Beagle Board?
Beagleboard.org
I never heard anyone not shipping to Quebec. I have heard of American vendors not shipping to Canada from the USA.
Maybe you could build a correct model with explanations? That could easily be single most valuable article on HN for the whole year.
Note to Leibnitz and Newton… Archimedes beat you both.
Additionally, while LCDs are same-color horizontally, it changes faintly vertically. But since your eyes are also horizontal, there is no difference noted. When you turn the monitor vertically, though, there is a bit of color/differential/refraction to the different eyes. This drives me nuts.
CrunchPad: TechCrunch's Internet Tablet, Will You Buy It?
I wonder how they'd feel about dividend checks.

That's what's so frustrating and why companies like Microsoft [1] and Apple [2] are sitting on huge cash piles. Eventually, there's nothing to reinvest the money in to unless you start a) gobbling up companies or b) expand in to unrelated markets. Once it gets to this point, and there's enough rainy day money in the bank, dividends are the way to go. Though looking at the S&P, some companies naively believe they're still growth companies.

From a startup founder's perspective, you could be pressured to compete in markets outside of what you do best.
Do you want a 20% chance at $20 million or a 1% chance at $500 million? When do you start becoming risk averse?

[1] Microsoft figured this out and started issuing dividends.

[2] Something like the iPod does not happen to most companies.
Well, that's true, but the same is true of televisions. Most people who steal a TV weren't going to otherwise buy one. Nonetheless if someone stole 100 TVs, you'd sue them to recoup the sale price of 100 TVs, not the one they might actually purchase.

Granted the RIAA suits are ridiculous anyway, but either pirating is stealing or it isn't. If it's stealing, it doesn't matter what the markup was or how much they would have paid. If it's not stealing, then let's dismiss the whole case and move on.
Now to start codi, em, I mean, designing. Yes, that's what I mean. Designing.

Rings so true.
My iPhone is not a Mac Pro
Good level 1 support staff are trained to follow scripts to reduce the cost of customer service. Their job is not to think or get creative.

Ideally their script should have an exception or a way to bump to a supervisor who has the ability to make decisions themselves.
A number of companies have shut down web drive projects in the recent past such as AOL's Xdrive.

I guess I'd be surprised with Google's move to "focus" their efforts if they released something like this.
It's not the same as stealing (even if it is still a crime) because those 100 TVs couldn't be sold to someone else.

See also, this picture:

http://danhau.posterous.com/not-not-stealing
Lots of good advice in this thread.

In addition, understand risk management. You don't have enough cash to diversify across stocks (and time, buying in stages) to really be effective. An index fund is probably your best bet.

That said, if you want to take a lot of risk, look into options trading. Deep in the money calls are a relatively low risk way to succeed. But the learning curve for options is steep.
The title was also automatically pulled over by the GM script - I was just too lazy to rewrite it.

I deleted the post myself because I felt it wasn't "HN quality", all caps or not. If you disagree, feel free to resubmit: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717
You can't dismiss it though since it's still a crime. It's not like they're all frivolous suits; the damage calculations are just off.

Granted, IMHO suing your customers is retarded, but at least the cases have some logic behind them.
A New Era of Regulation
Flagged as this is an old and very much out of date article.

Here is a video of flight 4 that was successful. (awesome to watch too)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To-XOPgaGsQ

Also, an update to the article which people might not have seen was that SpaceX was recently (less than a month ago) awarded the contract from NASA for resupply missions to the International Space Station.

http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20081223
Launch any application in windows with a keyborad shortcut
Why enterprises wouldn’t embrace private clouds ?
But all those factors come into only after you have some measure of success. So release after 80% still seems like sound advice.
I don't find RyanAir charming. I was turned away from my flight for trying to collect a boarding pass 35 minutes before departure at Hahn Airport. Their policy is show up 40 minutes before or no boarding pass. Security wasn't an issue, seats were available etc.

Or... my favorite... I remember when they stranded me in Bratislava due to fog at Hahn with no way to get home. That was really charming too. I got lucky and booked a flight on another carrier to another city a few hours from my car. sigh

Of course they were so cheap I put up with it. But I don't have any love for them at all.
If this catches on in the enterprise they could make a killing. The sales cycle is killer, but the margins are usually ridiculous.
There are tutorials http://www.utorrent.com/rsstutorial.php

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgsf923m_2d6k97n

They work for Mininova's feeds.
I bought quite a few Seagate drives back when they were the first to move up to a five-year warranty; I believe it was around the 7200.7 series. Those were great drives - fast and reliable (knock on wood, I don't think a one has died on me yet).

Shame to hear about the .11s. It seems odd how cyclical the hard drive industry is... company gets popular, has a massive defect, consumers run to alternatives, until they have a massive defect and everyone flocks back.
I used CMUCL a bit, and SBCL almost never. Does SBCL really deliver on what it set out to do? Is it better, faster, more portable? As far as I know, the Windows port never matured.
Which of the two do people recommend using?
They have newish planes that are already horribly shabby (torn seats, worn carpets). They don't clean the plane between flights. There is very little legroom. They provide zero food/beverages on even 5+ hour flights without a large cost. They overbook. They charge for every piece of luggage. No video screens or audio system in the plane. Very little carry-on space.

I have heard great things about RyanAir, they just tack on the charges after you take off for every service.
In one of the video lectures the author of Clojure seemed to claim that Clojure is as fast as Java. IME though that's not quite the case.
Somehow, this nearly made me feel warm and fuzzy about Comcast.

The part about the focus group turning on the guy who was downloading anime movies was rather startling. Has the anti-piracy PR regime won so completely that neighbors accuse each other of 'stealing bandwidth'?

My problem with cap-and-overage schemes is that it places the burden of regulation on the user, who may not have the tools/knowledge to avoid paying outrageous overage fees. I'd honestly prefer lower speed caps to total usage caps. Advertising 20mbps internet that you can only use to capacity for 28 hours per month (250gb cap) is rather misleading IMHO.

If, on the other hand, my cable modem had a usage meter on the front of it like my electric meter does, I'd be more accepting of usage caps.
Ask HN: How do I find out if I'm infringing copyrights?
I'm setting up a webapp that will play and organize clips of old musical recordings for playback and analysis, and maybe some newer ones.

How do I find out if this is legal before investing time and money into this?
"Dr Andy Calder, a scientist at the MRC Human Cognition Unit at Cambridge University, said that given the relatively small number of people involved, it was hard to be certain whether the difference between men and women was genuine."

That's a severe problem with the reported study.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
With $5 million, the investors/founders believe it can be at least a $10 million dollar company in the next 5-7 years.

The $5 million investment did not buy the entire company, so the valuation might be north of $10 million right now. Did you perhaps mean $10 billion?
Lawyer?

Also, if the music clips are newer than "ancient" you're probably infringing.
He totally misses the point of seaside. It isn't about slick html generation. It's about keeping the client state entirely in the server through continuations. Seaside would be nearly as powerful if you still had to generate all of the html by concatenating strings.

Having said that, I think Seaside is headed the way of the dodo as javascript clients become easier and more powerful.
Suppose you do think you have an advantage - like, you have a PhD in math, you have some clever trading algorithm, and it trades well on paper under what you think are realistic assumptions. Your advantage is, I don't know, that you don't trade on emotion so you do less stupid stuff (I've never traded and have no plans to). Then what?
He probably just slipped a digit and meant $100 million. I figure that if you take VC money you believe you can build a company worth $100 million.
Twitter-Yahoo Mashup Yields Better Breaking News Search
With $2,000, the best investment you can make is purchasing quality, non-perishable dry goods in bulk as you spot them on sale.

That's not sarcasm. You'll be eating and wearing out your stuff one way or another and buying a year's worth of rice, grass seed, socks, underwear, cat litter, detergent, toothpaste, etc. when you spot it on sale could shave 20%+ off your living expenses.

So, a greater than 20% return. No risk, no taxes, and no commission paid. You really can't do better than that to put an extra $500 in your pocket two years from now.
Seems like the "Caffeinated Crash Courses" is something I've been looking for for a while. Does anyone know if there are videos of these courses, or of similar fashion (Entire topic in <2 hrs) somewhere on the web?
"One innovation: you don't write HTML. You tell Seaside what HTML you want, and it does all the dirty work."

I'm sorry. I really think it is legitimate to dismiss Haml out of hand. The ideal framework writes everything for me but the html. If there is one think about the web that works, it is html. HTML is the first markup language used widely by non-programmers. You can come up with whatever argument you want for its undesirability but its like trying to fight the need for a qwerty keyboard in a PDA.

Not only is Html a great, proven, standard language for representing rich text on a page, it is a language that even your customers can understand (not to mention your web designer..). I'm sure someone once came out with a great, non-ascii word processor...
Correlation does not imply causation. Eg, brain scans could result from genetic differences or environmental (cultural) differences. All this study shows is that people who report cravings have different brain activity than people who do not.
Google Knol six months later
Edit of the comment gave me a blank page at that time.
why all the pessimistic comments? invest that $2000 in a 401 or roth low-risk fund and you will likely get good returns in 50 years.
Corporate Blogs: It's The PageRank, Stupid
article worth it for the japan groups link:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/04/twitter-launches-groups...
Credit card scam exposes mind-blowing ignorance about security.
How to design a good API and why it matters, Joshua Bloch [pdf]
Things To Do Online To Help Obama Restore America
BTW: just noticed HN automatically adds a [scribd] link for a pdf. Convenience and cross-promotion in one. :-) (edit added pdf warning)
Fade out on George W Bush
Article is great, but dated: it is from May 2007.
The Dream - alive in CS academia?
fascinating, more from a social than technical perspective.
Right, so there should be no restitution at all, only punitive damages. Court-determined fractional restitution is scary. Our legal system has better uses of time and money than trying to figure out how many of those 17,000 people would have purchased the album, especially since the answer is zero if you count other avenues of piracy.
You have a fiduciary duty to your minority investors. They can sue your ass if you try this.

Look, I understand - if I was going to do it all over again, I'd go through the YC process. But I still do not understand what the purpose of that term is if they're never going to exercise it.
The most important book I ever read.
step 1) please forget anything you read from Jim Cramer

step 2) read The Black Swan by Taleb

step 3) make an account at caps.fool.com

step 4) get your score above 80

step 5) never invest more than 2% of your capital in any investment

step 6) figure out how to profit from your capital given rule #5

step 7) if you've figured out rule #6 you're set for life
I think the design issues for APIs, DSLs and languages are very similar.

For adoption, the learning curve is very important, and the beginning of this curve is sensible defaults (like Python and Rails), so you can make the common tasks happen fast, while having the power to also do the complex low-level fine-tuning that is less common (and not the first thing you do). There's a learning curve (per user), but also a building curve (per project).

However, common is an attribute of usage, and not intrinsic to the API. You need a lot of users before you know what is common. And, over time, as the world changes, the common tasks change (eg. there are many different internet protocols, but http turned out to be most common).
The original premise of this was "why is PHP so popular?" (not "let's talk about the merits of the PHP language"), which is an interesting question precisely because many of us (yourself included, apparently) don't think PHP is a particularly interesting language.

Despite being a technically uninteresting language, it still became incredibly popular. Why?

That's why it's on Hacker News.
This is a puff piece.

I will wait until Cisco ships something into the market.
> "Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking." A.Einstein

I disagree.
When I don't get enough scifi my thoughts are mundane. When I read scifi I have tons of thoughts every day on different scenarios given the scifi setups I've read, or totally different stories I want to write myself.
with the economy the way it is, i think a lot of these companies are gonna have to start focusing on their own business models. google is competing very hard both on the marketing and product innovation front and is snatching away market share from the others and will continue to do so because of this. google offers significantly cheaper prices on their products compared to microsoft (the quality of google offerings is up for discussion). they are well positioned to compete with the telcos as well, with products such as grandcentral and android. they are even spurring up competition in the entertainment biz with youtube. yes, it is true that the big companies are not willing to partner with them, but the underdogs are lining up to work with google.

with the moderate size force of lawyers (compared to the competitors) that google has acquired over the years, and the amount of legal information they have learned from all these legal dealings, i have no doubt in my mind that google is fully prepared to take on the big dogs.

keep in mind that google is a very efficient company and has a lot of cash. as many venture capitalists know, cash is very important in making your ideas work.
With the exception of not cleaning the plane, that sounds exactly like RyanAir.

When I said RyanAir is 'charming', I meant for leisurely travel around Europe. There is no way I'd put up with them if I had to absolutely be somewhere at a pre-planned time and feel like doing business when I landed.
At least one of the links for a paper links to a GoogleTM search for it.
even after reading this, i can only speak to haml. it does beautify your markup, but like anything... it can still become a pain to read when files become verbose.
But --- do they have Ninjas to keep the pirates off-board?
I'm going to have to disagree with this article, since it's not like Pascal's wager -- the choices to redirect our effort to combating climate change will have a negative effect on if there is no climate change. The amount of attention that alternative energy, etc consume vs real on the ground problems of starvation, poverty, and disease that are affecting the world is staggering. These are real problems and dwarf climate change; even if we can significantly reduce co2 emissions population growth and the rising standard of living will most likely dwarf the gains made. So perhaps we should instead focus our attention on reducing population growth - caused by poverty - caused by corrupt political systems.
Just from personal experience as an entrepreneur this comment is spot on. Actively looking for funding for most smaller startups is a waste of time - success-oriented entrepreneurs are always better off just starting the business and pushing it to profitability on their own. At that point there is not usually a scarcity of ways to get additional capital, because people will clamber over each other get a piece of a profitable growing company.

But at that point there is little sense in taking funding unless: (1) the business model expects exponential growth in costs, or (2) the founder wants to diversify risk or stop eating ramen by trading some equity for immediate cash. So self-selection is working against the interests of venture capitalists. It is bringing them into contact with people who spend significant amounts of cash to focus on getting funding instead of actually rolling out a business.

There are plenty of opportunities out there. If I can see them and the VC industry can't that is their problem and it is their job to solve. One simple case in point: how many times has a VC actively solicited pitches from people on Hacker News? I can't think of a single case. Yet the comment section on Umir's site is filled with VCs whining about the lack of decent business plans? Wow.
It will be a great education for you into how markets work. I know it opened my eyes widely when I started playing around the same age. It will completely change you.

Couple of quick things. Don't listen to a word Cramer has to say. It is all in volume, earnings per share, FUTURE earnings per share, and ratio. Also, markets can be irrational. And no matter how smart you are there is enough FUD to cloud your decision.

Expect to lose a good portion of that to start but it will be one of the best classes you ever paid for.

With such low money and bad margins the odds are stacked against you but it is worth it for the awareness that you will gain with market insights.

See this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jwEwlZnSFY

In the end if you want a good chunk to be completely low fee and almost guaranteed just invest in index funds, now is a perfect time. Wait 5 years and they will be up quite a bit with usually a less than 1% fee.
Layoffs at O'Reilly
They get replaced by new currency. See Rentenmark on Wikipedia.
You know, I think, if I ever became a millionaire, I might pay myself into a tech support job and do it the "right way," telling people what they actually need to know to help them, and ignoring my superiors (because I was paying their superiors.) That would be quite fun.

Actually, rethinking that, is there a company right now doing phone support the "right way?" Might be lucrative.
Fiduciary duties are murky, and what exactly would Y Combinator sue for? They'd spend 20x more in legal fees than they invested, and after they won, what would they get? None of their $15-20k back (would be gone in legal fees from the startup they sued, if it weren't already wasted) and control of a company that was comprised of 2 or 3 founders who are now gone for obvious reasons. In the end they'd end up spending a couple hundred grand on a mediocre domain name. Doesn't it seem far better to just have that provision?

I have no doubt they'll exercise that provision if they have to. Having that provision ensures they won't. It's like mutually assured destruction, in that having a large nuclear arsenal prevents both sides from ever using it.
Yeah, but why would Spirit's flight have been cancelled? It wasn't weather. I think they cancel due to underbooking. I guess they figure they'll pay for your ticket on a nicer airline, which should be worth something.
You might want to try using the free Stock Market Game UpDown for a few weeks/months to practice investing:

http://www.updown.com/?_refer=36311

They give you $1 million in play money to invest, but you actually make real money based on your performance (no minimum transfer amount -- I've made a whooping $0.82 so far, but I can withdraw it if I want).
Tracking Of Safety Equipment Made Easy With Handheld RFID Readers
CASE Inc, an Alabama based software development company, has developed an RFID tracking solution for safety equipment incorporating handheld RFID readers from Tracient Technologies and Motion F5 tablet PC's. The solution is designed for construction and manufacturing companies who are required by law to conduct regular inspections on safety equipment such as eyewashes, safety showers and fire extinguishes. An essential part of these inspections is the accurate