choffstein's comments

wesm, I can't thank you enough for this library.

I own and operate a quantitative finance business. Pandas (+ numpy) has been a godsend. Not only do I not have to pay for matlab licenses, but even the less experience programmers on my team have been insanely productive.

Thank you.

It's not just having the dry powder -- it's knowing which companies are worth spending it on. You're either "defending your position" or "doubling down on a loss." Great way to lose money fast unless you can find some real signal in the noise of going from Seed to Series A.

And this is another brilliant part of Dave's model. He can rapidly apply lessons from the last 50-100 startups he funded to the next 50. He can rapidly collect metrics that will allow him to determine which companies are worth following on with.

His "sample size" is much bigger and therefore allows him to mine out statistically significant data about where to follow on.

I met Dave when I was interviewed as part of his "Shadow Dave McClure" contest last summer (http://www.internmatch.com/dave-mcclure-job-shadow). Getting to sit down and talk to him for 15 minutes and see how 500Startups operates was ...enlightening.

Dave definitely sees the world a little differently. I sincerely hope this business model works out well for him. On the one hand, it is a "diversify and capture the broad market" approach, but he has also done well in creating a brand for himself and 500Startups, making it an "exclusive" club to join (remember, you can't apply!), which means he ideally only gets incredibly qualified leads from his "mentors."

If markets are fairly efficient, in the long run he shouldn't make any extra money over just investing in a broad market index. But if they aren't efficient (and there is no reason to believe in the Angel space they are), creating a huge diversified portfolio of incredibly well qualified leads that he can incubate and nurture is a great portfolio strategy.

My worry is only the exit strategy and how he can prevent himself from getting diluted in the Series A; being only a minority share-holder, there is nothing that stops him from finding great companies, seeding them, and ultimately not being able to turn as great a profit as he would like because he can't liquidate and gets diluted.

Zen? This is madness!

In my mind, Matlab's (Octave's) array based programming makes sense. This? This does nothing that I expected it to do!

replicate seems to pretty randomly takes a function. Is that an R thing? I think what confuses me most is that there is nothing about this syntax that tells me that "cumprod (rnorm (1000, 1, 0.03))" hasn't already been evaluated! I could not, for the life of me, figure out why replicate didn't just create 100 exact copies. For example, why does replicate(...) evaluate, but the internals don't? This is driving me crazy!

This is probably the best overview out there: http://brehaut.net/blog/2011/ring_introduction, though it doesn't mention the new kid on the block, Noir (http://www.webnoir.org/)

Repost: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464213

I could not agree more. It's an irresponsible statement and should only be qualified by those entrepreneurs talking about how much money they started with.

Though, having been to 500Startups and seeing the amount of 20-somethings there, I can't imagine they had much to lose in the first place.

I don't see why this lie of having to put everything on the line is consistently perpetuated within the start-up ecosystem. Yes, start-ups are hard -- but I am getting tired of what seems like a consistently perpetuated lie so that start-ups can feed their own ego -- or worse, justify their failure.

I am sort of dumb-founded that this is on the front-page of HackerNews. I know this isn't a constructive comment in any way, but this link is to a basic post that is going over the different between a list, a set, and a map?

Really?

This is the second or third time I've seen a service like this created (getexceptional.com and airbrake.io are two that come to mind quickly).

I can only hope this trend continues and in an open-architecture style. The ability to basically develop a skeleton monitoring UI that I can plug my own software into is fantastic.

My only thought is: why is this local to the machine I put it on? I'd rather have a central repository that I send me data to, like getexceptional. I don't mind having to set-up the process for each server I spin up, but I would prefer it if the information all aggregated to one source that I could browse through.

What I sort of imagine is registering for an Amon account and getting a unique key and identifier. Whenever I install Amon on a machine or want to call it from my code, I use that unique key and give the hardware a unique name and register my software service (pulling the hardware name from some config file automatically). Then, when I log into my central Amon account, I can browse through my exceptions and hardware details by machine name or software service.

Give me the ability to have multiple logging levels and I am in heaven.

Take it one step further: let fall-back be to either a local db or file-system and have a cron-job go through to try to fulfill the upload tasks.

That is definitely something I would pay $25-$50 a month for.

I'll tread softly here, because obviously this is a sensitive issue to you, as it is family.

To me, working "smarter" has always been about recognizing where the "leverage" is in your business and taking advantage of it.

At the end of the day, there are some businesses that simply don't have an obvious or easy "leverage" point. Lawyers and dentists and doctors can only bill so many hours in the day. They are fundamentally limited in their earning potential by the clock. The "leverage" point becomes a practice, where they build a book of business and take off the top from the billing hours of employees.

A taxi driver has very little "leverage" to speak of.

Software, on the other hand, has an incredible amount of leverage: distribution is cheap; the marginal cost of customer acquisition and maintenance tends to be much, much lower than other businesses; initial capital costs are much lower than other businesses. That's why you get rags-to-riches stories in software more than other places: home-runs are cheaper to swing for.

In the taxi-driver business, it is hard to define "smarter." Points of leverage probably include discovering the optimal locations and times for maximize fares-per-hour. Ultimately, you're bound by the number of hours in the day, and that is a tough business to leverage. When there is no leverage, it is tough to work smarter; often, you have to resort to working harder.

Think about Coca-Cola. What is the core asset? Certainly they have developed a brand, but they protect their formula as trade-secret. Coke could theoretically be run as a pretty small organization, maybe just an IP holding company, and leverage bottling and distribution companies to take advantage of their already existing infrastructure. To me, that is working "smarter." That is what a lot of software companies do. Look at all the "bottlers" and "distributors" that are coming out of the wood-work for software. For a start-up, I can pretty much out-source (from open-source, nonetheless) the majority of my components, IT infrastructure, and IT maintenance. That is leverage. That is working "smarter."

I am constantly impressed with Heroku's ability to identify market needs, create partnerships, and deliver product. I would love to see an article or book about their company and its evolution.

I've known Pat Maddox for a very long time now -- I'm glad to see his stuff up on Hacker News. I think he is incredibly bright.

I think a lot of people tend to scoff at products that only make $2500/mo -- every startup is aiming for that billion dollar valuation. But given that he only had to put in 2-3 hrs a week in maintenance, he was really making something like $850-1250 / hr -- which is a rate most people would kill for.

As he mentions, with that sort of business leverage, he could have worked on other projects and just floated off the cash from his original business. Sure, it wasn't going to make him "rich" -- but it was at least a somewhat stable asset (unlike the car he bought).

I think a lot of people overlook these smaller, niche opportunities -- and I think there is a lot of money to be made there.

Very interesting. Seems rather niche, though after the recent sale of Phenona (which I believe was on Hacker News a couple weeks ago), I can see why everybody would be rushing to become the cloud-deployment solution for any language vertical.

Would love an invite if you have any more

Great looking site and product!!

As someone who is in the financial industry (creating investment models), it seems to me like the real product here you are selling is the Vuru grade. There are already plenty of other screeners out there -- I don't really need another (though I like your UI).

With that said, I would like more info about the Vuru grade and how it has performed. 10 yr, 5 yr, and 3 yr info isn't relevant anymore in the industry -- not without more information than you have provided. How many holdings per year? What's the turnover like? What's the peak to trough draw-down? How have the quantiles performed (e.g. how do those 90+ perform compared to those 10+)? If you showed me that since 2000, there is a linear relationship between the Vuru rank and annual returns, then it would be a product I could get into. On the other hand, if you show me that I have to buy the 900 stocks that are rated 90+, it's just another unrealistic academic portfolio.

My recommendation? Take the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and DJIA since 2000. Show portfolios on each made of 90+, <10, etc -- rebalanced annually and monthly. Show the number of holdings per rebalance period. What I want to see is that if I rebalance my portfolio of the stocks rated 90+ in the S&P 500 every quarter, how am I going to perform versus just the S&P.

I guess all I am trying to say is, please, please, please give me a REALISTIC portfolio and its performance (even if it is backtested) over the last 10 years and give me summary stats every rebalance period. I want to isolate the power of the Vuru grade and take out all the other noise around it.

Best of luck! I look forward to seeing how this evolves!

Not personally interested because I don't get migraines, but I like the "don't keep a diary, we'll just ping you occasionally" method. Very unique, and very interesting. I hate keeping logs, but I respond to texts all the time. If I got a ping a couple times a day with questions that tailored themselves to my habits over time, I could definitely see myself responding. It takes a HUGE hurdle out of the equation.

Knowing people who have had to do this because they get migraines, your process seems like a great idea!

Best of luck. I really like the model.

Rails Playground has been good to me.

Looks green to me

Also, front page? Wow. Must be a slow day on Hacker News, huh? I'm honored, but I don't really think the article has the "substance" to justify a front page ranking.

You're absolutely right -- but it was the decision I had to make.

I really wanted to play with Lush, but it seems to have broken with Mac OS 10.6 -- which is why I ended up going with Clojure.