btcoal

In my limited experience: no. I'm sorry but $40k pre-tax is not a liveable salary in SF or any medium-->big city.

"CyberSource's patented invention is simple: when validating online credit card purchases, use IP address information (such as IP addresses) as a check against fraud. Thus, the patented method might raise a red flag if someone attempts to make a large internet purchase through an IP address that had previously been used for a fraudulent transaction."

IANAL and this is not legal advice, but the guys (probably) that tried to patent this should go f* themselves.

I took 6.01, in python. Just missed out on SICP, but I'm going through all the exercises now.

Ah, OK, shift the whole scale I referred to over...Google,Dropbox Diamond and Microsoft platinum.

Wasn't aware of how much support Microsoft provided in general though. Thanks!

Just from glancing at the first page, there does not seem to be a diveristy of sources there.

Why is Microsoft "only" a Gold sponsor? They have more cash on hand and are worth more than Google and Dropbox combined.

It may be a trivial thing to note, but it still seems odd to me.

Being from the upper midwest, I always considered "the South" anything south of the Mason-Dixon Line plus W.Va and Kentucky. Wow this is off-topic.

Little gems of insight like Simpson's paradox are why I studied statistics.

Guh. Right you are: named ranges (http://www.contextures.com/xlnames01.html).

I learned about this feature years and years ago and never used it. Maybe it wouldn't actually be all that helpful afterall. If only I could downvote myself.

"But, I'll just mention two things that are critical in Multiplan.

The first is the use of naming. You are not put into a mode where you have to use "A10," "B9," "C14," and things like that, which you have to do with VisiCalc. If you want to say that taxes are 6% of sales then you say "taxes are .06 times sales." If you want the sum of all the profits you say "SUM (Profit)" and so we deal with data on a name basis which is the way people are used to dealing with it."

Am I the only one that would love to see this impleneted in spreadsheet software today?

"Hoffman pointed to one of his recent investments, Airbnb, a short-term vacation rental website, as an example. The website pairs people looking for vacation rentals with people willing to rent out their homes. As Hoffman pointed out, both parties would want assurance that the other is trustworthy. Airbnb’s answer is an evaluation system based in part on the responsiveness of a host — the faster a host responds, the more reliable he or she is likely to be.

“And that’s a very good predictor of whether this will be a good experience,” Hoffman said. “This creates an improvement in the world.” "

...Spoke maybe a day or two too soon.

You're so right. I had the same reaction to this and the New Yorker article covering the same.

I got interested in hedge funds in high school after reading a lot of articles like this. But after learning a lot about economics and finance I learned to pick up the sensationalism in these articles.

I think just about every article about a hedge fund has a line like, "consistently beats the market...which most economists say isn't possible." That's not even true. The free market hypothesis has not been given much stock outside of the University of Chicago (Eugene Fama) since the 90's. Most economists who even study such things focus on under what scenario can an investor outperform the market and what types of securities tend to be undervalued.

I'm even amazed that the article doesn't begin by mentioning Ray Dalio's childhood as a chess prodigy/math olympiad/other thing that only really really smart people can do.

These articles typically have a set format: 1. Intro into the mysterious culture of the hedge fund 2. Background on the precocious child prodigy turned market whiz 3. Description of firm's hiring practices of PhD's etc 4. Questioning value of Hedge Fund's to society 5. In conclusion, this hedge fund makes a lot of money...

I almost want to run some NLP scripts over a corpus of profiles of hedge fund managers and automatically generate a dozen of these, print them, and see if I can get a job at Bloomberg.

No. As the article states, he has a particular form of Parkinsons unique to his ethnic group that is extremely heritable.

A good place to start: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

Wooah! Citation please??

Yep.

The one exception to this, which may really not even be an exception, is if you are your target customer. If you really need the product you're building that is a good starting point. I think for turning a website/app into a business the most important first customer is you.

Well then you may have done yourself a disservice because:

a. the quality of presentation of content is independent of the quality of the information of content; and

b. text that is harder to read may be easier to remember: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11573666

Facebook has improved my life as well.

I went to high school in one city, college in one 1,000 miles away. Have since worked in cities all over the world. I don't know how I would manage to keep even a tenuous grasp on all the connections I have with people in these different places without Facebook. Admittedly, these are not and never will be deep social bonds I am maintaing, but that is hardly the point. There is value in maintaining a large web of shallow social connections. Facebook helps me do this.

Moreover, whether or not Facebook has improved the life of me or anyone I care about is irrelevant to an objective evaluation of the site's value. I could make the same case for anti-malaria drugs.

As a stats person, I've seen lots of job postings for "data scientists" that are along the lines of "We need someone to turn our massive amount of data into profit!" I hesitate to name names, but if you search for data scientist jobs you will see what I'm talking about. My reaction is always, "Great, but what business question are you trying to answer?"

We're getting so close to that tricorder I can taste it. Keep it up guys!

Google can do this because they have too much cash on their balance sheet and the market demands a return on that cash. They need novel areas to invest for them to grow. But there is an alternative. I would prefer to see Google return cash to shareholders via a stock buyback and focus on their core: organizing the world's information.

This is not because I hold GOOG stock, just because I believe in that mission, think they still have a long way to go, and don't yet have the resources to tackle that problem myself.

I think as a smaller company revenue-wise and, ideally, as a private one they could have more long-term focus.

While I too would like to see Mr Bloomberg give some of his (hard-earned) billions away to a good cause, it's too hard to establish a great university over night. He's going the route of inviting top existing research universities to establish a satellite campus of sorts. This is a much smarter approach for attracting talented students and researchers.

I suspect this is more about the temporary employment boost that having a major university in a city can bring than the long-term employment benefits that an economy based on scientific and technological prowess can bring.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. But the picture today implies that the technology sector doesn't tend to create a lot of jobs, even when it creates extremely useful inovations or novel avenues of entertainment.

The sub-point he was making that aptitude or talent does not imply creative output. So he gave an example of a group that had extremely high ability in an area but did not produce in that area. With the bigger point being that differences in achievement in certain areas between women and men may come down to interest more than ability.

The logical counter-response to this would be "well there were so many social barriers (de-facto and de-jure) preventing women from producing creative output"

He then gives an example of a similarly or more repressed group with extreme ability in an area (Black jazz musicians) that managed to be extremely prolific in that area.

It is actually pretty convincing. Or at least thought-provoking.

That is, if you do in fact think.

That was unfortunate. But another side of the issue in Chicago was that the city blew through the cash in record time. Even if the meters had been sold off at an above market price, the disfunction in the local government would have resulted in the squandering of the proceeds.

From your well made point I infer that we should make a dispassionate evaluation of the value of public assets during good times so that they won't be sold for a song during bad times.

Things usually go, "No we will not sell off pieces of our nation" (during good economic times) so nobody actually evaluates the options for doing so --> "We need cash now!" And we become subject to market forces when leveraging public assets.

"Deep procrastination usually strikes students later in their college career, when the difficulty of their courses ratchets up. At this stage, their work load gets harder and harder, and at some point some powerful part of their brain says “no more!”"

My mileage definitely varied. I found that after my second (Sophomore in the US) year in college I rarely procrastinated. It was getting through the required classes the first two years, where the why at the end of a long chain of questions was "because you have to to graduate from MIT." That's not as motivating as it sounds.

Eventually I was taking only classes I wanted to be in. And if I didnt want to do an assignment and wasnt going to destroy my GPA I just didnt do it.

Fast-forward to the real world and it returns. Deadlines from bosses help to avoid procrastination but if the work isn't too challenging and expectations are low enough you can still do some deep procrastinating.

But then again, maybe the reasoning my work isn't challenging enough is because I didn't get the most amazing job in the world because I didn't just push through those assignments in college that I really didn't want to do. Hmmm...that's some meta-circular evaluation right there[1].

[1] No it isnt.

Hmm, well I didn't think this needed clarifying but the internet is notoriously bad at transmitting humor (or maybe I am). But I was being facetious with respect to the examples I gave.

By capturing private wealth, what will most likely happen are taxes on existing wealth (national property taxes, increases in the estate tax, etc.). National debt is uncollateralized and will always be this way, so sovereign debt holders will never have claim to the physical assets of a nation. It is country themselves that can change laws to appropriate private wealth. Constitutions and laws vary in the extent to which this is allowed. There is the notion of an unconstitutional level of taxation in the US.

As for the rest of your ideological rant.

Anyway.

"God had given him a tail to keep the flies off... he would sooner have had no tail and no flies"

The problem as I see it, and the article briefly hinted at this is illiquidity. Western Europe is extremely rich (in terms of capital stock) but has a relatively low income (in terms of capital flow) and extremely low income growth. Without structural reforms (improving infrastructure, decreasing frictions in the labor market, reducing entitlements to incentive work, etc) you cannot increase income or income growth levels.

But, by increasing public claims on private wealth and opening the country up to foreign direct investment (read: selling the Sistine Chapel to China to rent) you can tap the capital stock. This should be increasingly seen as a way out for wealthy yet cash-poor Euro countries.

Without structural improvements in the US it will also be the only way forward 30 or 40 years for now. Be prepared for a "Sponsored by India" sticker on the Washington Monument.

I am limiting this prediction to mass-consumed applications of technology.

If we extrapolate (obligatory: http://xkcd.com/605/) present trends it seems that the platform of the future will be the web.

This will require fast internet connections on computing devices (whatever those will look like in 10 years) as pervasive as water and electricity in the rich world. And we are getting there.

So the language of the future will be based on this platform. The obvious choice then would be javascript. But javascript has a lot of problems so most likely someone will invent a language of the form javascript++ within a few years.