dharmon

25 ms·

211.
by dharmon 10y ago
When do you think this starts to matter? I mean, I assume you didn't start "training" newborns by leaving them alone all night, right?
212.
by dharmon 10y ago
It's basically a coffee table book, so I doubt there is an electronic version. A big chunk of the material (I hesitate to say 'all') is transcripts from various talks that you can legally find on the web (like "The Psych
213.
by dharmon 10y ago
Reading the original text can be challenging, by I really enjoyed Magnificent Principia by Colin Pask. Basically it's a guided tour of what could be argued is the most important scientific text of all time. I really enjoy books like
214.
by dharmon 10y ago
Despite the tone of the article, Kroc did not just swoop in and capitalize off of the Brothers' genius. If anything, they were an albatross around the company's neck, as their contract specified that Kroc basically wasn't all
215.
by dharmon 10y ago
If you liked Razor's Edge I would highly recommend Maugham's magnus opus, Of Human Bondage. That book blew me away.
216.
by dharmon 10y ago
He's saying that in this low interest rate environment investors are not demanding 10%, but would rather be happy with something like 7 or 8% as their hurdle rate. In finance speak, MSFT's cost of capital is dependent on the risk-
217.
by dharmon 10y ago
This is a great list, and it should be higher up in this thread. Most of it applies to longer-term investing as well (the area I work in). 1) I always tell this to people. So much of investing / trading comes down to your emotional rea
218.
by dharmon 10y ago
The book The Box talks about longshoremen unions fighting the age of shipping containers and the unemployment it caused by eliminating the need for manually packing ships. The solution that worked best were unions that accepted this path
219.
by dharmon 10y ago
I wasn't thinking HomeAway, I was thinking every hotel chain out there. You said within 2:1, so Pinterest and Snapchat definitely qualify if you are counting their competitor as Facebook. Unless you meant 1:2, which doesn't make s
220.
by dharmon 10y ago
I thought your grandparent post was being facetious, but are you being serious with this one? Here's off the top of my head: Airbnb, Xiaomi, Flipkart, Pinterest, Snapchat (if you count instagram as a competitor), Zenefits, Didi until l
221.
by dharmon 10y ago
There have been no IPOs. The largest acquisition was Cruise, then Heroku, then OMGPop, then Parse. The fall-off of acq prices is pretty steep, but given that they put up hardly any money ($17k early on, now $120k) the returns are insane. Wh
222.
by dharmon 10y ago
Box is public, but they don't break down "small team" / individual revenue vs enterprise. They are, however, pushing hard not just for enterprise customers, but for service contracts and "Box Consulting" servic
223.
by dharmon 10y ago
This was the "standard" text we used for new grad students to understand CG. It's not perfect but covers the ideas and algorithms pretty well: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Equake-papers/painless-conjugate-gra.
224.
by dharmon 10y ago
No doubt there's going to be some low-hanging fruit (speaking relative to the experience of the participants) that is going to get scooped up quickly, so why would they open the program at something higher? Just high enough to entice t
225.
by dharmon 10y ago
I guess it comes down to goals. If the goal is to capture the young crowd whose attention Snapchat stole, then I still think integrating into Instagram won't work. A separate app is still a long-shot, but a long-shot is better than cer
226.
by dharmon 10y ago
Since this is clearly a direct shot at Snapchat, I can't help but wonder if they would have been better off just making a new app rather than integrating into Instagram. I think the kiddos like Snapchat partially because it's not
227.
by dharmon 10y ago
In my PhD thesis I claimed a function was convex that was not. The embarrassing part was that in the next section I proved that an almost identical function was non-convex. Phew, I feel better getting that off my chest. Good thing nobody re
228.
by dharmon 10y ago
You'd be appalled at how much overhead universities take out of research grants (from NSF, DARPA, NIH, etc.) to maintain these administrations (along with legitimate uses, like paying utility bills). 40-50% is not uncommon.
229.
by dharmon 10y ago
Agreed. If anything, and if I'm reading it correctly, he's actually trying to explain why libertarians would be opposed to this: > "For people that have a sort of libertarian bent they get a little confused because they
230.
by dharmon 10y ago
Exactly. In my facetious examples, the European vacation actually would be for customer acquisition. There would be a meeting or two with potential customers, but they would still fly first class and stay in top hotels, plus have a few ex
231.
by dharmon 10y ago
Most definitely is fraud, and of course I wouldn't actually recommend doing it!! But that's what parent was talking about, buying toys and parties and such and why investors don't notice. Cause they call it by a different nam
232.
by dharmon 10y ago
Investors will look at financial statements (in whatever sad form they exist at most startups), but they don't look at itemized expenses. They also expect lots of money to be spent. For example, let's say I wanted to take an exp
233.
by dharmon 10y ago
In the first few paragraphs, my thought was "hotels have lots of rooms with very different light characteristics, and when you reserve a room, you are not reserving any specific room." I can vet and dump this idea in 5 minutes and
234.
by dharmon 10y ago
To add to this, I really like the landing page. No oversized sliding images or fancy animations. Just one graphic and well-organized text. Refreshing.
235.
by dharmon 10y ago
Levine's daily Money Talk is always a quick recap of current events, with frequent refs to prior columns. It's not supposed to be a coherent article with a theme. Think of it like the entire WSJ biz/tech/money/inves
236.
by dharmon 10y ago
"Nothing to add..."
237.
by dharmon 10y ago
This: > “I’m an optimist: I believe that there is an endless supply of huge problems affecting humanity.” combined with this: > “I think we could meet it, but it would be more like 15 to 20 years.” That was too far away, which was why
238.
by dharmon 10y ago
Strongly agree with the motivation bit. On top of it I'd say don't just start working on something, but start on something small. A ridiculous number of inventions, science, and companies started out as solving some small problem
239.
by dharmon 10y ago
P&G owns Gillette, not Unilever. I guess they think they can give P&G a run for their money, and $1B is a pretty cheap price tag to take a stab at it. They've got quite an uphill battle ahead of them, though.
240.
by dharmon 10y ago
Taking this to the geographic extreme, some of the most competitively solid businesses are things where you just can't move the product very far. I'm thinking quarries* and trash. *The exception being highly sought after material

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