Good news on most fronts.

Paul Graham said that my indexing didnt slow down the server, which was a big relief. The slowness I experienced was a result of him throttling my IP address, which means he set a limit on how much data I could download. The limits are in place to discourage people from crawling the site, which if done en masse, could have a significant impact on Hacker News.

The post received mostly positive feedback other than the occasional “lol you idiot”. I expected a lot more of these. It reflects really well on the Hacker News community that there were so few of them. On any other popular news aggregator, there probably would have been a lot more trollish commentary. So, thank you HN.

I hesitated at first about writing anything. Maybe it’d be better just to ignore it and move on. I decided to consult the authority on these things: my lovely wife. I explained to her what happened. She laughed, did this wave motion with her hands and said “Smooooth”. She thought it was hilarious and told me to post it. “But its Hacker News!” I told her. She rolled her eyes. Women.

Anyway, I started analyzing the data from the 73% of submissions that I was able to log before I got throttled (sounds terrible every time I write it). As expected, there is a lot of interesting information to be gleaned, which I’ll share shortly.

Thanks for reading –

Per Marc Andreessen’s recommendation, I’ve been perusing the Wall Street Journal the last few weeks. To say there’s a lot I don’t understand would be an understatement. There are a lot of fundamental things I don’t understand about the world, the stock market, finance, and business. For example, what exactly does the Dow Jones Industrial Average measure? How is it calculated? How does a company get added to that average? What causes stock prices to change? I don’t even understand the concept of buying and trading shares of a company anyway.

Realizing that I need to back up a few steps, I picked up The Guide to Financial Statements which I’m slowly making my way through. Last night I picked up Investing for Dummies. Finally a book written for me!

In retrospect, I’m not sure I’d do it differently. By working backwards and starting at the deep end I have a better idea of what to focus on now that I’m learning the basics. It’s a pleasure getting those “Aha! Now that makes sense” moments. Given that I read a quarter of Investing for Dummies a few years ago and don’t remember any of it, I think this method will help me connect the dots in a more practical, memorable way.

Been playing with a few layout changes this evening. Cleaned up the sidebar a lot, added some good blogs, and changed the post font from Georgia back to Arial.

I’m proud to say that my knowledge of JavaScript is no longer merely theoretical: behold. I know, I know, I’ll be on my way to a wildly successful web app in no time ;)

Actually… the current plan is to build a complete web site so that I can learn Zend Framework and Prototype. Not going to go into a lot of details right now, but the web site will be a new take on an old idea plus it has the potential to actually make money (!).