To be honest, I don't think (and I'm going off the author's name) that english is his first language. Personally, I posted this to HN as it succinctly gave me a quick overview of MR.
I try not to judge an article/blog post on the quality of the grammar when the ideas they are trying to convey are solid and useful.
There are some exceptionally fantastic minds out there that are able to succinctly explain, sometimes difficult, subjects.
I appreciate them for at least trying, and if they explained it in a language that is not their first language, all the more respect to them.
While I can agree that pointing out the spelling and/or grammar mistakes could be constructive, calling the article "un-shareable" because of them seems terribly over-the-top.
Unless you're already familiar with the material, spelling and grammar lends credibility to the content of the article. Similar to a code smell, it makes you ask "are you sure you know what you're doing?"
While I agree that numerous spelling and grammar mistakes can indicate a lack of maturity in writing skills, I also know that some of the most brilliant people I've ever worked with were absolutely terrible at spelling. One guy in particular was an amazing programmer. He produced libraries of code that were fast, efficient, and easy to read and understand. They were also very well documented. I know, because I went through the documentation and fixed the dozens and dozens of spelling errors. If I didn't know otherwise, I'd have thought he made a game out of how poorly he spelled words.
I can appreciate numerous spelling/grammar errors making you analyze an article with a bit more scrutiny. However, I can't think of a single example of an article with those kind of errors where I couldn't figure out from the content whether I thought the author really knew what they were talking about.
At any rate, I think there is a big difference between an article needing a little bit more scrutiny, and the article being "unsharable".
Just my personal opinion, no disrespect intended. I have personally authored posts that needed a bit more time on the proofreading table and I did worry that people would question my authority on the subject due to grammatical errors in the article.
Just to be clear, I don't want to give the impression that I don't think spelling/grammar matter (even for blog posts). I just think it is easy to get so pedantic about it that you place far too much weight on them.
I have my own set of pet peeves, and am probably guilty of allowing the violation of one of them to taint my view of an article too quickly and too often.
And of course, there are always those articles that are so bad grammatically that it looks like a first-grader wrote them (but I don't think that's the kind of article we were discussing).
This is VERY misleading given that it doesn't include visitors to the search engine (which Google dominates) and even bigger it does not include visitors from mobile devices.
At this point, I agree with you. Right now it's a score based on a combination of publicly accessible metrics. With that said, I think they are still very early stage and their vision to provide robust growth metrics to the investor community is much needed.
Now, if they can pull it off or not is yet to be seen.
If you could provide information useful enough to provide a competitive advantage in investing, why provide it at all? Just invest in the companies yourself and put the millions in your own pocket.
To me, what it looks like (not saying it's true) is that it's a ycombinator shill company the backers of ycombinator are using to pump up other companies. After all, a lot of these companies are successful/bought out because of self fulfilling prophecies: they're successful because people think that they're successful.
A competitive advantage is not a sure thing, its just an edge. Their tech could make a 90%/10% fail/win risk a 85%/15%, which would be a huge boon, but extremely dangerous for someone to place their life's savings on.
Speaking of, just because I may know a good investment, doesn't mean I have the resources to actually capitalize on it. I may know a likely way to make 10 Million/year, but if the buy in is 5 million, I'd be out of luck. Might as well sell that information to someone with 10 Million and make a cool 50k/100k for myself in the process.
During the goldrush, selling pickaxes and pans to miners was often a better way to get rich than to actually take the risk of mining yourself. You can see a modern day parallel in the custom bitcoin rigs. The companies selling them could just fire the machines up themselves. In the long run however, its better to sell the machine that could make 10k/yr for a guaranteed 2k in your pocket.
Say there is a game at a casino, that has a 1/100 chance of winning, and if you win, you get a payout of 100.01(original bet). You have $100. How would you play without it being extremely dangerous?
By the Kelly criterion, you should bet edge/odds of your bankroll. Your edge here is 0.01 * 0.0001 = 0.000001. Your odds are 0.01. Therefore you should bet 0.0001 of your net worth. So if you had a million dollars, that $100 bet would be a sensible investment. If you've only got, say, $100k then you should only bet for entertainment value.
The investment rule that underlies Kelly is to maximize the log of your net worth. Why? Bets multiply your net worth by a random factor, take logs and you're adding a random factor. In the long run a sum of independent random factors tends to converge to the expected value, so maximizing the expected log of your net worth will result in a strategy that with 100% odds will, in the long run, beat any other.
Sorry, I was being rhetorical, I guess it wasn't obvious. My point to the parent was that no need to bet your entire life savings on one company, you can split it among hundreds and take advantage of your edge.
Great question and it does make you think. I did notice the story quickly made the front page with very little up votes or maybe I just don't understand the ranking algorithm that HN uses.
Not if you know where the gold is buried and no one else does (which is what their purpose is). In your analogy, the shovels would be something like Meteor, or one of those "learn to rails in 24 hours!" startups.
Or Mattermark just has slightly better shovels than the competition, and they know that focusing on keeping a slight lead in shovel making by selling a ton of shovels is more profitable in the long run than going for a single quick pile of gold asap.
Edit: Especially so if the gold doesn't want to be 'discovered' by just anybody. Founders have VC preferences.
I've been following Unpakt (https://www.unpakt.com/) for the last couple of months. It's an interesting concept, kind of like the Kayak of the moving industry. Still dealing with the old school moving companies though.
I'm looking forward to exploring the integration with Jupyter.