Hacker News Reader

michelson01on Ask YC: How do you invest your money for long term growth?

vanguard index fund or fidelity spartan fund (which actually is a money loser for fidelity, but they keep the fees at .1% as a loss-leader to bring in the chumps for the managed mutual funds)

no-load, low-fee index funds, basically.

michelson01on Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

whoo... tough crowd :)

michelson01on Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

i don't know... the algorithm killed jeeves

michelson01on Scribd is now the largest Rails site on the Internet (using Alexa rankings)

Scribd is growing quickly and actively hiring all kinds of developers (ruby on rails, flash/actionscript, C++, etc) so please contact us, hackers@scribd.com, if you're interested. Check out our jobs page here: http://www.scribd.com/static/jobs

Here's a link to our traffic graph on alexa:

http://snipurl.com/24rqq

michelson01on Scribd is now the largest Rails site on the Internet (using Alexa rankings)

yeah, this is using alexa rankings, so it's far from perfect and misses a lot of other data, so take it for what it's worth.

michelson01on Don't use Pound for load balancing

i prefer a proxy balancer that is smart enough to know when the back-end servers (mongrels in this case) are busy or not, and smart enough that it doesn't send requests to back-end servers that are down (i'm looking at you, apache mod_proxy_balancer)

michelson01on Don't use Pound for load balancing

until fair proxy balancer is production ready (http://www.brainspl.at/articles/2007/11/09/a-fair-proxy-bala...), i really like nginx in front of haproxy in front of the mongrels

nginx => haproxy => mongrels

michelson01on Robert Scoble interviews Trip Adler of Scribd

i still wouldn't trust him with my cats or with mowing my lawn

michelson01on Hot or Not acquired for 20 million

they were already making millions a year for many years. it's not like they were broke before this.

michelson01on Bubble Bubble Everywhere

also, with the value of the dollar plunging below even the canadian dollar, the US stock market prices in terms of euros, for example, haven't been climbing that much, iirc (might even be declining?). someone can probably point to a graph of US stock prices in euros, but it's interesting, as i recall.

michelson01on Simple Geometry Puzzles You Can't Solve

answer is 42. I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

michelson01on jRails - jQuery on Rails

i thought one of the big advantages of jQuery was the smaller size of the javascript file(s).

but this demo uses 106k of javascript (and it's not compressed for some reason)

photo from web developer extension: http://myskitch.com/michelson/document_size_-_http__ennerchi...

michelson01on New Firefox3 Theme for MacOS X (wow)

isn't that a picture of safari?

michelson01on Ask YC: Equity/Salary Question

keep in mind that if the company is successful and is one of the lucky few to get a series A VC round you will likely get diluted to 0.5% - 0.6%.

michelson01on Do you live under the fear that a YC company is about to demo what you working on?

'YC company' is the new google

michelson01on Scrybe Closes Series A

in other news, so did Twytter and yLike

michelson01on Chinese iPhone Copy (Fake Knock-off)

fake knock-off? so it's not a knock-off?

michelson01on Where is the SF news.yc meet?

there's a facebook group for it too

michelson01on Where is the SF news.yc meet?

y-scraper

michelson01on Scribd gets $3.5M in Series A round led by Redpoint

Hey, the three of us at scribd are looking for more people to join our team. Chances are good if you're reading this that you're the kind of person we're looking for. If you join Scribd now, you'll have the real startup experience: you'll design the product (not only implement it) and work in a tiny group that accomplishes big things.

Send us an email to hackers@scribd.com and we can talk more about it. Or check out our jobs page just for news.yc readers here: http://www.scribd.com/static/newsyc

Thanks,

Tikhon

michelson01on Auctomatic changing its name?

don't worry, I'm sure they'll take out a vowel or something, like optimalsal or optimalsle

michelson01on [dead]

i had to refresh twice to get it to work.

michelson01on [dead]

you might have to hit 'reload' a couple times. Facebook f8 is having some issues as they roll out the apps.

michelson01on Seth Godin's new book calls Paul Graham the "best in the world" [PDF]

yeah he doesn't actually mention Paul in this pdf, it turns out

michelson01on Seth Godin's new book calls Paul Graham the "best in the world" [PDF]

scribd link to flashpaper version: http://www.scribd.com/doc/50745/seth-godin-mentions-paul-graham-in-his-book

michelson01on How to scale your rails app, by Scribd (a YC startup)

this talk was given at the silicon valley rails meetup a couple days ago.

michelson01on Command Lines: the next UI breakthrough?

we switched this particular document to HTML just now. check out our new pdf - html converter -- I think it's the best pdf to html conversion available online right now.

michelson01on news.yc leaders' average points per submission

this might have been easier using hpricot, rubyful soup, scrapi, scrupyt, or something like that.

michelson01on The most amazing theoretical result in computer science (you will find it hard to believe!)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/25200/nature06

scribd link, via slurping (www.scribd.com/slurp?url=...)