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Is there a NYC AI startup job list anywhere? | jeffrese: Join NextNY, sign up for the email list, start going to events and start networking. http://nextny.org/ |
Is there a NYC AI startup job list anywhere? | whalliburton: i've got a NYC startup that I can show-and-tell. whalliburton {at} gmail.com |
Is there a NYC AI startup job list anywhere? | wumi: so you decided against continuing grad school?why not put an email in your profile... |
Is there a NYC AI startup job list anywhere? | bkmrkr: Interested in another job as a program trader? |
What are some good iPhone app developer blogs or forums | tstegart: For the business side or the coding side? |
What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup? | ca98am79: I have learned that it isn't success that really brings happiness - it is the process of getting to success. And that same process sometimes leads to "failure." |
Books on meta-learning | gtani: http://search.oreilly.com/?q=mind+hacks&submit.x=0&s...i remember these 2 mind hacks from Oreilly being good, but i htink mine got borrowed forever. |
Books on meta-learning | icey: It's not a book, but understanding the methodology behind supermemo is a good place to start. |
Books on meta-learning | silentbicycle: There's probably considerable overlap with books on creativity and making your thinking more flexible. Roger von Oech's _A Whack on the Side of the Head_ and _ Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!_ may be helpful.Also, look at some of the books about home schooling, targeted to both parents and the teenagers themselves. I remember Grace Lewellyn's _ The Teenage Liberation Handbook_ having sections along the line of, "How do I go about really learning history/math/foreign languages/etc."Many things with meta-learning advice will have it as a secondary topic, albeit an important one. Try your public library -- this is an excellent question for a librarian. |
Books on meta-learning | mooneater: Related, see "How to Solve it": http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/polya.html |
Books on meta-learning | garymeeg: Kathy Sierra's blog is fantastic:http://headrush.typepad.com/Here are printout versions of her posts:http://enklo.com/passionate//Gary |
Books on meta-learning | Alex3917: I've heard that Thinking And Deciding is good, but I haven't read it personally. |
Books on meta-learning | aspirant: I've never heard of meta-learning, but about a year ago I stumbled onto a branch of philosophy called epistemology or the Theory of Knowledge. My studies there have been absolutely exhilarating and disturbing.Next time you see someone at the coffee machine, ask them them what is meant by knowledge, reason, belief, truth, evidence, opinion, conviction, and hypocrisy.The incoherent jumble you'll get back is indicative of the broken and sloppy process of the attempt to process data into knowledge (learning). |
Finding a Mentor | kynikos: Build relationships with mentors by networking like crazy and showing more senior people in your industry that you have passion for what you're doing, a drive to ask questions, and are placing value on their opinion. Ask a lot of questions and form a mentor relationship with those who are most happy to answer them. Mentorships are informal and are more like a professional friendship than the sort of thing you'd be a part of if you volunteered for Boys and Girls Clubs of America.Reaching out to family friends and acquaintances whom you admire is a good way to start. |
Books on meta-learning | Jaytee: I didn't fully understand meta-learning until I started reading neuroscience books. Find some introductory text book on neuroscience (Amazon). Then read a book that explains extensively on various forms of neural plasticity. Developmental neuroscience also provides crucial insights Once you understand the fundamental mechanism of how the brain learns, all the methodology behind meta-learning can be derived. (e.g. practice science)
Because the brain is a complicated machine and only recently has evolve more complex types of learning, so I personally think it's more important to understand its limitations, (e.g. when you are not learning, or why you can learn physical skills faster than mental skills etc.) |
Books on meta-learning | nazgulnarsil: overcomingbias.comi've spent hours clicking everything the blog posts link to.
these are your bibles:
http://www.logicalfallacies.info/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biasesstudy those throughly and you will be better equipped than the vast majority of humanity.
Disclaimer: exposing the fallacies in social sciences may not win you over with your professor. |
Books on meta-learning | DavidSJ: Gödel Escher Bach |
Books on meta-learning | ryanmahoski: The Art of Memory by Frances Yates. Classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the printed page. |
Finding a Mentor | manvsmachine: Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm currently in the same situation as you? These are just a couple of strategies that I'm trying (YMMV).Option 1: If you're in college, look through the professors' web pages and look for ones who do research in areas that you are interested in. If you find one that you think would potentially make a good mentor, think of a SMART question to ask. It doesn't have to be anything incredibly difficult or profound; this is to show that 1)you are at least reasonably intelligent and 2)you are interested enough in his field of expertise to involve yourself in it outside of coursework. This is just the beginning of a process; all you're really trying to do at first is get them to think that you're not worthless. Having a little pet project that is relevant could help as it gives you a reason to visit and ask questions every now and then; if you are making significant progress, they will notice and you will hopefully progressively become less of a waste of their time until they warm up to the idea.Option 2: Join a professional organization (IEEE, ACM, etc). Some metro areas have organizations specific to the local tech industry. I cannot vouch for this personally; I just recently became an ACM member but won't be able to evaluate its influence until the coming school year.Option 3: If you live in at least a semi-urban area, check for tech meetups or events in your area or even try traveling to a couple. This might not yield a close mentor quickly, but the more people you know, the more there are that can potentially help you. |
What are some good iPhone app developer blogs or forums | tstegart: How to get in to the program? You go to Apple's website and sign up. Its a two step process, first you sign up, and then sign up again for the developer program. When they accept you, you pay $99 and can submit applications to the app store. No word on how long those are taking to get approved. And they have added a few hundred apps since launching. There are RSS feeds of new applications, updated applications, and the top applications. See http://www.pinchmedia.com/your-view-into-the-app-store/I'm not sure of where to go for the developer side, but apple's forums would be a good start. I run a blog about the business side (in sig.), and there are many other resources out there as well. |
Finding a Mentor | ScottWhigham: Aside from the other good advice, one thing I've found is that if you are doing interesting things, interesting people hear about you and are interested in talking with you. So, while you're networking at the tech meeting/etc mentioned, be interesting. |
Anybody outsource their startup? | david927: I've done just that and it's worked spectacularly for me. If you have a good job, don't drop it for your startup -- outsource the components instead. |
Anybody outsource their startup? | gm: Of course, outsource if it makes sense. Don't drop the ball though, manage it. 80/20 rule still applies, take full advantage of it. |
Anybody outsource their startup? | ericb: I'm doing it now. It's a little like arbitrage. I hired someone on Rent a Coder to keep my project moving while I finish a consulting contract.The key is finding someone who's good. I have some tricks for that on Rent a Coder:1 - Spend some time building a private invite list of coders who have something similar in their work history. Pick only people with a 9-10 rating, and 10+ projects. Make sure at least couple of those projects are decent-size. Give preference to similar time zones unless you work either early morning or night hours (like I do).2 - Invite your coder-list to a private auction, and don't worry about the price of the bids much. Instead give it to the guy who asks the most questions.3 - Have well defined specs (as you have), and create unit tests or test stub names that are required to pass for the project to be considered "complete" and put this in the requirements.4 - Outsource discrete chunks.If you've got a great coder, #3 is less important, but some people have low attention to detail and try to turn the project over ASAP. So they'll lob something over the wall that doesn't work fully, and you lose time investigating and complaining about each item--they make you drag it out of them. I make automating the required tests part of the project, and then I spend less time verifying their work. Call it test-driven outsourcing.I've found that outsourcing a project takes anywhere from 10-30% of the time doing it myself would have, but it's still a win. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | Anon84: Here are Warren Buffett's recommendations. I hear he knows a thing or two about investing... ;)http://www.businesspundit.com/10-investing-books-recommended... |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | tstegart: For savings, I use FNBO. They have an online presence (FNBO Direct), where everything is done online. https://www.fnbodirect.com
The nice part is, they adjust your interest rate as it goes up and down. So when it goes up, you don't need to look around for another bank, they automatically raise it for you. Not all banks are so kind.For books, try Bogle on Mutual Funds. In the end its a let down excitement wise, because his main advice is basically "put it in an index fund and let it sit for 40 years." He makes a good case that you'll do better than most people this way. Of course, most people don't do this because they want the excitement of trading, watching stocks, etc. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | zacharye: As an aside, my etrade savings account yields just north of 5% interest. Might be worth looking into in the interim and even more so if you plan to trade yourself. Is etrade a safe bank? Well, I've had money there for quite a while and in this day and age what bank is safe? |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | jon_dahl: The first and best book on investing that you should read: A Random Walk Down Wall Street (http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/039306...). This book has great investing advice; is funny, interesting, and well-written; and clearly explains what's going on behind different investment approaches. In other words, it doesn't just answer the "what" question, it answers "why" and "how".As for specific advice, investing isn't that difficult. The best approach is to be lazy: decide on an asset allocation (e.g. 50% US stocks, 30% international stocks, 20% bonds), buy index funds, and rebalance to these percentages every now and then. Vanguard (https://personal.vanguard.com/us/home) is probably the most respected provider of index funds; give them a shot.Check out David Swensen's lazy portfolio if you want something more advanced: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6203264.For investing discussion, try http://www.bogleheads.org/. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | dionidium: A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton MalkielIt starts with a brief history of market bubbles, moves to an explanation of the the most popular theories of stock forecasting (and why you probably can't use them to beat the market), explains and argues (quite convincingly) for the efficient market hypothesis, and concludes with lots of practical personal investment advice. |
Anybody outsource their startup? | incredicorp: I have alway's done that- the 'not prone to misdirection' type's of tasks I always outsource.It worked so well I have started recommending my partner-in-outsourcing to other startups with incredible results...not only is it more convenient- it just makes good business sense.let me know if I can help anyone..([email protected]) |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | byrneseyeview: The best book on investing that I've ever read is this one:http://www.amazon.com/Buffett-American-Capitalist-Roger-Lowe...It's a biography, but there are lots of anecdotes about specific analyses. Nobody can invest like Buffett, but just about everyone can benefit from reading about how he did it. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | noodle: the internet does the job just fine, imo. there are some good investing blogs that will give you good information for the beginner investor.if you want my 5 second pitch for what you should do, here it is:open up an online savings account with HSBC direct or ING direct, so you're getting 3%+.save up money so that you have padding for 3 to 6 months worth of living expenses, in case of emergencies. i'd suggest 6 so that you have 3 months of living and the other half is for monetary emergencies (big car problems, etc).put your long term investment money (401k/roth) into index funds with low costs. keys are diversification (50% domestic, 30% international, 20% bonds is what i do) and long-term. despite short term drops, over the long haul, the market will grow. set it and forget it.after that, if you still have some cash left over, you can pick up some more riskier stuff. just make sure that you fulfill your "safe" investments first. ensure your long-term riches and safety first, then go for short-term stuff. |
what language should I learn next? | davidw: How about Italian? In terms of computer stuff... C is always a good one. Erlang is something kind of "new" and different, but at the same time quite practical for certain kinds of applications. Java's not a bad language to know, but it's not that exciting. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | ltbarcly: Random walk down Wall Street, then the Graham books (look for things that are written by the people who taught Warren Buffet). |
what language should I learn next? | brlewis: BRL |
what language should I learn next? | Anon84: Hindi! Everything will eventually be outsourced to india, anyway.Seriously though... Python is probably the best option, followed closely by Java. |
What do founders of failed startups do next? | noodle: this is too situation-based to answer, really. they do what they want or need to do. maybe that's start another, or maybe its work at a more normal job. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | syalam: bogleheads guide to investing |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | maurycy: Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager
Stock Market Wizards: Interviews with America's Top Stock Traders by Jack D. Schwager |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | simplyauser: I have read many of the recommend books. Here are my two pence.Books on Wealth 1. "Rich Dad Poor Dad"
and find out exactly why someone becomes rich.
(if you like this one, at some point you may also
want to quickly scan through "Cashflow Quadrant
Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom".)
2. Also "chapter 6 - How to make wealth"
from "Hackers and Painters's chapter 6 - "
3. "The Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin"
Investing books in this order 1. Peter Lynch's One Up on wall street
2. The Intelligent Investor (Ben Graham)
3. Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits
4. Security Analysis (Ben Graham)
5. The Warren Buffet Way is a famous business read not exceptional but read it if you have some time left
6. A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Read it for a good laugh)
Do NOT read 1. AA- The Motley Fool Money Guide
2. How Gerge Soros Knows What He Knows
3. Investing Online For Dummies
4. Malkiel Burton - A Random Walk Down Wall Street
5. Cracking the millionaire code
6. Joel Greenblatt - You Can Be A Stock Market Genius |
What do founders of failed startups do next? | ph0rque: After I resigned from my startup early last summer, I spent about two weeks moping in the evenings/on weekends (I had a dayjob by then), then came up with another idea that I started to work on. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | vaksel: Don't forget to pick up a book on how to read financial statements, once you figure that out you'll actually be investing, instead of playing the lottery based on hype. |
Anybody outsource their startup? | vaksel: I think the #1 rule for outsourcing is making sure that you can sue the pants off the person if they screw you. This means you need to stick to programmers in U.S.And yes you will pay more, but you'll be surprised how much less it is compared to what you expected. And yes rentacoder is a good site, because you can set where to get bids from.Other sites you can list in the description that you will only work with U.S. based people, and you'll still get 50 people from India offering you their services. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | ideas101: you must read "The Dollar Crisis" before you invest in anything - trust me this will help for the rest of your life !!! |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | ojbyrne: I really enjoyed Henry Blodgett's "The Wall Street Self-defense Manual: A Consumer's Guide to Intelligent Investing" (http://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Self-defense-Manual-Intell...).It's basically a diatribe against active investing. Buy index funds and hold them. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | jobeirne: Jonathan Hoenig's Greed is Good is pretty excellent. http://www.capitalistpig.com/merchandise.html |
what language should I learn next? | silentbicycle: OCaml. If you've been working with languages dynamically typed at runtime, using something statically typed at compile time will be very informative. Unlike most other statically typed languages, OCaml's type inference turns the type system from a thing that needs to be constantly appeased to a free reality check when you need it.OCaml will also teach you functional programming tricks usable in Ruby, or several other languages. At the same time, it doesn't force you to learn almost everything all over again before you can do anything at all the way Haskell does. In my experience, OCaml is designed to be a practical, modern, statically-typed, multi-paradigm language, while Haskell is designed to be a conceptually pure language for experimenting with language ideas in new territories. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on what you intend to use it for.About the OCaml type system:
http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/04/14/useful-things-ab..."Why Rubyists Should Learn OCaml" (a presentation): http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/07/07/rubymn-presentat... |
what language should I learn next? | pmjordan: I'm enjoying Clojure - in terms of web frameworks there's Webjure and Enclojure, for example. The latter seems more Rails-ish whereas the former is more Javaesque, but it's still pretty early days. I prefer Clojure to Common Lisp as it doesn't have a lot of the cruft you'll find in CL, it has some cool concurrency features, and you get easy access to any Java library you might want to use. Plus, the source code to the language itself and its supporting libraries is very readable and hackable, which is something I haven't found in other languages.I can't really recommend web programming with C, although it's a wonderful language to learn; I'm sure you'll have many revelatory moments as you get to grips with it and discover things about the higher level languages that you normally use.Common Lisp is definitely usable for web development, and Hunchentoot is a pretty decent web server and programming environment, although it's certainly not the only one. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | tjr: I really like Ben Stein & Phil DeMuth's "Yes You Can Get a Financial Life":http://www.amazon.com/Yes-You-Can-Financial-Life/dp/14019112...Very conservative approach to long-term investing, but also helps prepare you for other common life expenses, such as housing and children. A great broad, bottom-line, why-this-really-matters-in-life approach to investing. I wish I had read this book at or before graduating from college. |
What do founders of failed startups do next? | jimgagnon: I was one of the founders of Abacus Concepts, a pre-internet Macintosh startup. For thirteen years we were in start-up mode as all of our competitors were much larger than us. After I sold, I was truly burnt out and took some time to see the world and start a family. The money was holding out good until the crash of dot-com and a property purchase I made -- then I had to start looking for a job again.For me, it was difficult because the advent of the internet changed everything, and my resume was filled with dinosaur skills. I knew it would be mistake to jump into the internet with my skills as they were, so I was able to find a job doing java. Nothing exciting, but I'm getting my hands dirty with Linux and net stuff.Working for people sucks. The regular money is nice, but it's a pittance and the tasks are boring. I spend my spare evenings diving into python and django to build my own site. I'm getting kinda old for the crazy hours, with kids and all, but if you want real financial security you either have to put in forty years with the government and get a nice pension, or do your own thing.I thought about a career change, but I love programming too much. Your on the edge of a revolution they will be talking about for a thousand years, and the money's good. Besides, what other careers can you have where you can drop out for nine years and then jump back in again? |
what language should I learn next? | gaius: I am in the process of learning OCaml and Haskell. If I can use them in production, great. If not, I'll still learn things I can apply to my Python work. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | gcv: For the shortest introduction to sensible, index-based investing, read The Coffeehouse Investor (Bill Schultheis). It shouldn't take more than an hour or two to go through, and it contains all the basics. Then, if you're interested in a more in-depth analysis of the same thing, read A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Burton Malkiel), as suggested by several others in this thread. |
What do founders of failed startups do next? | pg: In the case of YC startups, a lot of them get picked up by other YC startups. This was one of many unanticipated advantages of funding startups on a large scale. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | eposts: Here is a good list:
http://www.bogleheads.org/readbooks.htmGeneral Investing# The Four Pillars of Investing - by William ("Bill") Bernstein.# Wise Investing Made Simple or The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need - by Larry Swedroe# The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing - by Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, and Michael LeBoeuf# All About Asset Allocation - by Rick Ferri# The Informed Investor - by Frank Armstrong# The Little Book of Common Sense Investing - by John "Jack" Bogle# The Coffeehouse Investor - by Bill Schultheis.Investor Behavior# Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them - by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich# Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich - by Jason Zweig# Rational Investing in Irrational Times: How to Avoid the Costly Mistakes Even Smart People Make Today - by Larry SwedroeFinancial History# Against the Gods and Capital Ideas - by Peter L. Bernstein# Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation - by Edward Chancellor# A Random Walk Down Wall Street - by Burton MalkielLike others here have mentioned, http://www.bogleheads.org/ is a great forum for Vanguard investors. |
Anybody outsource their startup? | jeffrese: oDesk works well for this and they have great PM tools baked in. Stay away from firms, only hire freelancers, be quick to fire and quick to giving raises to good developers. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | breck: Invest all of it in my startup. :)Now for real advice:First, consider getting an online savings account from ING Direct(3%), or putting your money into PayPal(2.5%)...Better than less than 1%.Second, jon_dahl's advice is spot on. The 2 tricks are to diversify and to dollar cost average(invest your money each month instead of dumping it into the market all at once)....Index funds are the way to go. Vanguard's are great...You might also want to read "Fooled by Randomness" which will make you feel confident that this is the right investment approach, and anything else is pretty much gambling. |
what language should I learn next? | dominik: I'd recommend Python, so that you can play with Djgano. |
what language should I learn next? | ricree: Perhaps you are asking the wrong question here. Instead of learning a new programming language for web apps, maybe you ought to try programming a type of application that is new for you. I think that taking a go at something like a client-server, embedded, mobile, or desktop application would help broaden your perspective and abilities more than simply learning a new language would. |
How do you read RSS feeds? | amarcus: i don't use feeds. I like visiting actual sites. In firefox, i have a bookmarks folder called "daily read" and i open its contents in tabs. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | samt: Investments by Bodie, Kane and Marcus (BKM) is one classic that still has value in this climate. |
what language should I learn next? | richcollins: If you want to stay on the OO path, I would suggest Smalltalk (Squeak), or the simple but powerful Io programming language (http://iolanguage.com/).C is also an important language to learn if you don't know it already. You could use it to implement a simple database for a very specific task (http://cr.yp.to/cdb.html) |
what language should I learn next? | breck: French. |
How do you read RSS feeds? | dominik: I ask because I currently have about 100 feeds in Google Reader; most of them update fairly infrequently. I try to only subscribe to feeds that have full text, since I dislike excerpts because I have to open a new tab. That said, I try to read all my feeds, but often fall behind (260 unread at the moment). I find catching up takes too long and I just have to press 'Mark All as Read.'Perhaps I need to adjust my approach to feeds to maximize my information/time; I tend to cycle between subscribing to many feeds and then unsubscribing from many. My biggest trouble is with feeds that are high volume (1 post/day or more) yet have interesting content. These can be enormous timesinks if I'm not careful. |
what language should I learn next? | manny: No Perl fans here?Shame. :(I, then, humbly suggest Perl. You might like it, and with your Ruby background it shouldn't be hard to pick up. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | drios: Fooled by Randomness is a great book to keep things in perspective. |
How do you read RSS feeds? | ajkirwin: Generally? I don't. Until I can get such information via feeds, presented nicely and in an aggregatable way, I will just visit individual sites. |
what language should I learn next? | kenver: I'm not sure you really need to "learn" another language, if you can program in one you can probably get by in another quite easily given a bit of practice and some documentation.I think it would probably be worth learning new algorithms or trying to tackle problems which are totally out of your area of expertise if you really want to learn something new.If you really want to learn a new language you could look at VHDL, and start designing some hardware! I did this myself as part of my research degree and its quite interesting to program code that gets implemented on hardware. |
How do you read RSS feeds? | gaika: There are ~300 feeds where I skim all the posts and ~20 that are a must read in a separate bucket on google reader. Feeds are so critical to what I do that I have to keep up with them even after a vacation. Which means ~1000 messages in the "inbox" from time to time. There are ~100 other feeds that I wish I had time to read, but unfortunately their volume is too high for me to keep up.Really want to change that, so there's no fixed "inbox", but the posts that are critical should bubble up to top, and the rest should only be findable with specific topic searches. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | cypress-hill: try investing with imaginary money. the only way to learn about the market is to be in it, even with imaginary investments. what was written about the market in the past is based on the market of the past. its not all bad or outdated, but a some of it is. for example, buy-and-hold only makes sense in a secular bull. in a secular bear, you need to learn a new strategy.learn by doing. simulate real investing. you will learn a lot. |
How do you read RSS feeds? | vasudeva: I use irssi (CLI Linux IRC client) for a ton of things -- it's basically my dashboard -- and have eventually hit upon the strategy of running an rbot (a Ruby infobot-alike by linuxbrit) and using its RSS plugin to monitor about 60 feeds in a private channel. It sits in a separate irssi window along with IRC, email, AIM, and stocks, and is nice because I can use irssi's controls (or rbot's) to do things like highlighting or ad-hoc scripting.These I see all day, skim almost all (especially in the morning) and hit quite a few. Keeping it confined to my little dashboard area makes it accessible, while keeping it ignorable/attendable the same way I manage email et al.I also use mobile Google Reader on my BlackBerry when bored. |
How do you read RSS feeds? | brandonkm: Currently I use rojo, although I heard they are undergoing a transformation (new name, etc.). I think theres a lot of room for improvement in the RSS reader space, but they currently offer the best type of reader from what i've seen out there. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | nostrademons: #1 for me would be The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham. Also read all of Warren Buffett's Letters from the Chairman - they're all up on the Berkshire Hathaway website. Peter Lynch's books are good too.I see a lot of people here recommending A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which is a good book, but you're going to finish it and say "This investing stuff is too complicated for me. I think I'll just put my money in index funds." Which is perfectly sensible investment advice, but if that's all you want, I can tell you "Go invest in index funds" right now and save you a couple hours of reading. ;-)Jeremy Siegel's Stocks for the Long Run is like Random Walk - it's decent, but the conclusion is basically "go invest in a stock index fund and don't worry about it". I'm not even sure that's great advice right now - he bases a lot of his argument on historical performance, but when an asset class has done well over the recent past, that usually means it'll do poorly in the near future. Read neither or both - Random Walk gives you good perspective for understanding Stocks for the Long Run.Finally, if you do get into investing, make sure you start small. I've made some wonderful investment decisions and some truly terrible ones. The wonderful ones more than compensated, but they looked very similar at the time, and if I'd put all my money into the terrible one there wouldn't be any capital available for the wonderful one.Actually, I'd recommend doing some dry-runs: pretend that you're putting money in a stock, and then track how well you'd have done over time if it were real. Read all the 10-Ks for the stock (they're up in the EDGAR database at the SEC's website), research all the fundamentals, and listen to the analyst conference calls (Yahoo Finance webcasts them live whenever earnings come out). That'll give you a sense of what questions to ask and what events affect the stock price.I did some of those dry runs and lost hypothetical money on a lot of them, which makes me very glad that they're just dry runs. ;-) |
what language should I learn next? | volida: "who has a month to spare to learn another language?" |
what language should I learn next? | ccwu: How about Chinese? Probably more useful.But seriously, python is well regarded and with G App Engine as a possible hosting platform using it, you can also learn more about design for hosted infrastructure apps. |
How do you read RSS feeds? | ptm: I track around 30 feeds (news / high frequency) on Firefox Live Bookmarks on a daily basis.I also track around 800 feeds (opinion / lower frequency) on Netvibes on a weekly / biweekly basis. |
what language should I learn next? | wilkes: Languages every programmer should at least have some understanding of:Lisp - because it's lisp, duh
Smalltalk - to actually understand OO
Prolog - it requires a completely different thought process, for better or worse
Haskell - for understanding useful type systems and functional programming
C - because it as low-level as you should ever needJust my 2 cents |
How do you read RSS feeds? | cypress-hill: left to right |
what language should I learn next? | cypress-hill: haskell without a doubthaskell is on the edge of almost every interesting trend in programming tools.parallelism? check
STM? check
closures? haskell is closures
functional programming? better than any other lang
continuation style? check
type inference? check
good library support? check (kinda)
repl? check
etc etc |
what language should I learn next? | wastedbrains: I played around with Scala and thought it was really interesting. |
what language should I learn next? | jksmith: IO (iolanguage.com) is very cool. The Qi layer over CL (lambdassociates.org) is also worth looking at. q/kdb+ (kx.com) is very interesting, but needs a more complete toolset for a commercial product.What if your language was nothing but macros? Factor (factorcode.org) is a fascinating example of this, and I think due in part to the project developers and the language paradigm itself, I've never seen any open project language take huge leaps in capability in such a short amount of time as as Factor has. Incredible stuff, but difficult to get into unless you can devote a large amount of contiguous time to it.When it comes to Lisp, I don't know why it's dismissed just because there's always something wrong with one of the open projects. Just buy Allegro CL - there's something to be said for products which hold up against commercial rigor.One addition: everybody should probably be learning Erlang. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | utefan001: Like many of you, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the best investing approach is. My advice is to not spend any money on investing books. I am not saying not to read them, just don't spend ANY money on them.I think the future of investing is here, and it is covestor.com. This site helps anyone stand on the shoulders of giants. Covestor shows who really knows how to trade in a verified way. Some users on Covestor are professionals, others are simply individual traders.For me, I don't have the time to spare to try and beat the S&P. Thru Covestor I have found a CFA/CFP that knows how to beat the S&P waaaay better than I do. His name is Sean Hannon. In case you are wondering, Sean didn't pay me to write this.www.epicadvisorsllc.comhttp://www.covestor.com/rankings/popularity
(see #2 on list / user "epicadv") |
How do you read RSS feeds? | johns: I use Bloglines because their mobile versions (simple mobile version and iPhone version) are superior to Google Readers. I have 114 feeds divided up into folders by interest area. Some folders like "Development", "Design" and "Competitors" are higher priority reads. I have a few top-level feeds that aren't in folders that are the highest priority. |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | keven: Highly recommend Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.also http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_04_29_a_blowingup.htm |
Best books/source to learn about investing? | josephl: Check out this site to learn a few tips on technical analysis: http://www.stockcaster.net/education |
What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot? | brk: Here's my thought on the matter... The "Killer feature" here is the lack of killer features. There are no buddy lists, stupid picture icons, special groups, or karma-whoring incentives. It's just a simple place to exchange news that is generally relevant to a hacker community.The lack of needless bells and whistles to constantly hold peoples attention will generally make this site un-fun for the unwashed masses of Digg and Reddit refugees.BTW, welcome to hacker news... |
What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot? | Readmore: The only hope is our elitist comment trolls. Also the fact that HN has far fewer users makes it much easier to deal with the problem. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com+news.yc... |
How do you read RSS feeds? | anirbas: I use Opera's feed reader at present, but mainly because I read some cookie-protected feeds and an in-browser one seems like the best solution. I keep a pretty tight leash on the feeds I subscribe to (twelve or so at the moment), and delete any I ignore for several days. |
What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot? | noodle: the quick and dirty answer is the userbase. it doesn't, at least right now, turn into digg/reddit/slashdot because the people who want to see a digg/reddit/slashdot are already at digg/reddit/slashdot.the community here likes how things are and has a vested interest in keeping HN like it is. so thats what they do, try and push out the bad where they can and promote the good. |
What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot? | davidw: PG has said he won't let it, and will do what it takes to keep it high quality. |
How do you read RSS feeds? | pjackson: I use Apple Mail. It shows individual feeds as if they were a mailbox, all grouped under and RSS container. Unfortunately, this keeps me addicted to HN throughout the day rather than just once or twice a day. |
what language should I learn next? | vikram: It's probably not worth learning another language for a web development project. You'll spend most of the time learning the syntax and the framework. Nothing which will expand your mind.Try a functional language like Haskell, Erlang or ML.
But you really need a problem to work on. A database-backed web app can easily be written in Ruby, but maybe there is a feature which requires background processing, write that in the newly learnt language.BTW, how is your javascript? |
what language should I learn next? | schtog: Concurrency and parallelism is hot these days and functional languages are superior there.
Learning a different type of language will widen your horizons and once you know one functional and one OO-language then it is quite easy to learn other languages after that.My suggestions are Clojure and Erlang. Both are made for cincurrency, have web frameworks(maybe not as good ones at rails though) and are functional. Both also run on a VM.Learning CLojure will also expose you to JAVA and the JVM. |
How do you read RSS feeds? | wallflower: By not having a RSS reader, I can lie to myself and say that I'm not that addicted to technology news/blogs. By not having sites bookmarked, it makes me put a little effort into visiting sites like MacRumors, techmeme, etc. |
How do you read RSS feeds? | bprater: I'm embarrassed to say that not once, but several times, I've collect loads of feeds and then rarely made good on reading them all.The stuff I was interested in would change over time, so I was left with feeds I wasn't so interested in anymore. I tried different feedreaders. And I would always feel overwhelmed when I saw 4,283 unread messages.So I'm back trying it again with a "must read" folder in Google Reader and only putting feeds in that I definitely want to read.But when I do subscribe and am committed to reading, I try to make an effort to at least open every post and start reading it. |
What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot? | gaika: PG http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 :"1. The kind of stories that are most popular on reddit and digg (pictures and politics) are banned here.2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves.3. The custom of the site is to be civil in comments.4. Votes on comments affect karma.5. Trolls are fairly rapidly banned. The only reason Giles hasn't already been banned is that I thought perhaps he was joking." |
How do you read RSS feeds? | swombat: Strange, this thread is full of luddites who don't use RSS!Anyway, I use Google Reader. I tend to read everything I subscribe to. If I don't read it, I unsubscribe to it after I've ignored it long enough. I have maybe 30-40 subscriptions, all to sites that post infrequently, so I rarely have more than a handful of articles unread.I get a lot of interesting articles via Hacker News too, and also via Google-Reader recommendations (one of GReader's killer features imho). |
How do you read RSS feeds? | comatose_kid: Top to bottom, left to right.Seriously, I'm subscribed to about 40 feeds, but I usually don't even start my feed browser because it's a time sink.The S/N ratio with most blogs isn't very high, but I subscribe just to get that occasional important nugget of information/insight.But I am coming to the realization that RSS is a bit of a distraction - if I start my RSS reader, I feel obliged to read everything just to get rid of the 'unread' icon. It doesn't really help me build great stuff. |
How do you read RSS feeds? | arthurk: I'm using Google Reader for mostly personal blogs but visit sites like HN directly since they tend to clutter my whole feed reader. I had subscribed to the HN feed for a long time but since the feed displays every blog post that hits the frontpage there were a lot of uninteresting entries.I would re-subscribe to the HN feed if there were some option for a feed which only displays entries with X upvotes and/or X comments (and X could be specified in the options).The general problem with subscribing to the feed is that I don't see which entries are popular and which not because stories tend to hit the frontpage rather fast on HN compared to other big sites.For now, I just visit HN and click on a few stories on the frontpage (mostly these with many comments or upvotes). |
How do you read RSS feeds? | makecheck: At home, I use my web browser (OmniWeb) to put menus of feed items into my toolbar. This is good because I tend to be in my browser when viewing other news sites.Yet at work, I use my E-mail (Thunderbird), perhaps because the RSS feeds tend to be blogs, newsgroups or other similar E-mail-like items.In other words, my reader depends on the style of the content: is it E-mail-like, or web-like. |
How much traffic from a techcrunch story? | tstegart: No, but I can tell you how much traffic a Hacker News post will get you. |