sethg

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121.
Bloodcoin: the ultimate liquid asset(ropine.com)
2 points by sethg 15y ago|0 comments
122.
by sethg 15y ago
You can usually get a 10% annual return by investing in regular stocks. The kind of investors who put their money in VC firms are looking for higher returns. Let’s say I invest a million bucks in my local VC fund, and its investments earn
123.
by sethg 15y ago
At the last startup I worked for, the VCs sold the company for a loss, so I am just as well pleased that I took five years’ worth of salary instead of a commensurate portion of their loss. Then again, my salary was somewhat below market rat
124.
by sethg 15y ago
Remember that a lot of people who don’t code as a profession end up doing it as part of their work (just as a lot of people who do not have “writer” in their job titles, and who didn’t major in English, end up doing a lot of writing for
125.
by sethg 15y ago
I agree with your factual statements, but my immediate reaction to “coding is the new Latin” is “does this person mean that coding is a skill which is fairly useless for its own sake, but signals to other people that you have mastered a com
126.
by sethg 15y ago
I thought recursion was taught in music class, through the song about the old lady who swallowed a fly.
127.
by sethg 15y ago
Note that long before governments had fiat currency in the “we will print as many dollar bills as we want to” sense, devaluation of specie-based currency was not uncommon. According to Wikipedia, the Roman denarius had about 4.9g of silver
128.
by sethg 15y ago
In the US, during the early 19th century, state-chartered banks (and other countries, such as insurance companies and railroads) would issue their own notes. These were not, technically speaking, money, but they were used as such, because
129.
by sethg 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_versus_environment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_versus_player
130.
by sethg 15y ago
Dumb, dumb, dumb people can learn to follow all sorts of rituals, if they’re sufficiently motivated. That fact does not, in and of itself, justify the rituals.
131.
by sethg 15y ago
The OP was not familiar with the Wikipedia convention that editors talk to one another by editing one another’s talk pages. Instead, he followed the instructions on the automated email that Wikipedia sent him , which said “To contact the e
132.
by sethg 15y ago
On the one hand, yes, yes, yes. On the other hand.... 95% of the effort that goes into Wikipedia may be nothing more than primate status games among insiders, but those games motivate an extremely large number of people, and because so m
133.
by sethg 15y ago
The Soviets had pledged not to be the first side to use nukes. The US did not reciprocate, because the Warsaw Pact could have overwhelmed NATO forces in Europe with their conventional forces (or so everyone thought), so the US wanted to re
134.
by sethg 15y ago
The way you phrase it, it sounds like B&N is suing MS for ideological reasons, but they are profit-maximizing capitalists just like everyone else in this game. The difference, IMHO, is that B&N has very little history as a consumer
135.
by sethg 15y ago
Include a clause in the options agreement stating that if an employee is laid off, or fired without good cause, they become fully vested. Of course, “good cause” is an inherently slippery term, but if a CEO announces in the frigging Wall S
136.
by sethg 15y ago
When the startup I worked for was acquired, I got a retention bonus dangled in front of me as an incentive to stick around; one of the terms of the contract is that if I am laid off or if the company has a change of control, then the entire
137.
by sethg 15y ago
As I understand it, CDOs on subprime mortgages would have been a reasonable investment vehicle if the odds of mortgage defaults and the correlation among default rates in different regions had stayed at historically low levels. The proble
138.
by sethg 15y ago
In finance, you can construct a highly leveraged investment vehicle that earns fantastic returns for nine years in a row and then blows up in your face in the tenth year. It’s a lot harder to do this in other industries: next year’s iPhone
139.
by sethg 15y ago
In 1907, there was a financial panic leading to widespread bank runs. To quell the panic, J. P. Morgan brokered arrangements among other wealthy financiers to redirect capital to the banks that they considered weak but salvageable. After
140.
by sethg 15y ago
If investors could make accurate predictions of what securities would be worth 15 years out, then we wouldn’t be seeing financial blowouts every 15 years.
141.
by sethg 15y ago
A financial panic is not an avenging angel that slays the wicked and leaves the righteous untouched. Without the possibility of a bailout, if, say, Citbank went under, this would not only screw Citibank’s depositors—most of whom were hardly
142.
by sethg 15y ago
Israel is one of the ideal places to test out this system, because the country is so small: 100 miles will take you from Ashkelon, the southernmost major city on the Israeli coast, to Haifa, the northernmost. And very few Israelis expect t
143.
by sethg 15y ago
The US area code 707 covers northwestern California, so it is possible that the +7 should be a +1.
144.
by sethg 15y ago
The company address is in California, but the phone number given is “+77071120122”. Do they actually have a landline in Kazakhstan, or is that a typo?
145.
by sethg 15y ago
Do the students move on to using an IDE? I realize that Eclipse or Visual Studio comes with a lot of overhead and you can easily spend a whole semester getting bogged down in all the options, but I would think that an editor with syntax hi
146.
by sethg 15y ago
Worse than “OOP is the one true way” is “OOP is the one true way and Java’s style of OOP is the one true OOP”. I’ve heard of a CS curriculum that starts by teaching Scheme and ends with a segment on “OK, now you know how to program in Schem
147.
by sethg 15y ago
I’ve been programming professionally for over ten years, and when I have to look at Java code that other professionals have written, I am constantly irritated by how the actual point of the code is buried in… mquader’s “OO ceremony” label e
148.
by sethg 15y ago
My nine-year-old son learned Scratch last year. Oh, if only I had that when I was nine....
149.
by sethg 15y ago
Their math selection goes through calculus, differential equations, first-semester statistics, and linear algebra. I don’t see anything beyond that.
150.
by sethg 15y ago
If a woman at a conference for some female-dominated profession (say, nursing or elementary-school teaching) made a joke from the podium about how incompetent men were at that profession, it would be just as inappropriate.

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