fsk

Actually, it was a bad example.

Suppose you spend $1M to produce something worth $100k. You lost $900k.

But suppose you borrowed at 0% while inflation was (to use round numbers) 10%. After about 50 years of borrowing at 0%, your $100k is now worth more than $1M. (I'm too lazy to use logs to figure out the exact breakeven point right now.) You made a profit.

With 0% interest rates, your investment that destroyed $900k of value was (eventually) profitable. If you can avoid mark-to-market accounting, you can just borrow, wait for inflation, and eventually sell for a profit.

When interest rates are less than inflation, a capital-destroying investment can seem profitable.

Finance is complex because:

1. If a transaction is complex, it's easy to sucker people into buying. Why would anyone buy a structured product?

2. If a transaction is complex, both sides can claim an immediate profit based on their idea of how it should be valued.

3. A lot of complexity in finance is driven by the fact that big banks can borrow at 0% while true inflation is higher. Via various derivatives, this government interest rate subsidy is packaged and sold. For example, I can't borrow at 0% to buy stock, but if I buy a call option, the bank can borrow at 0% to finance their hedge.

4. Because different people have different interest rates (banks borrow at 0%, large corporations borrow at 5%), banks can price a derivative at 3%, and both sides can LEGITIMATELY claim an immediate profit on the trade. (Bank borrows at 0% and lends at 3% to finance the derivative hedge. The corporation is borrowing at 3% instead of the 5% they normally would pay.)

My employer originally had a Wordpress-based blogging product.

They spent more than $2M writing their own blogging system, and it still was missing many features that come with Wordpress.

They ditched it and switched back to Wordpress.

It depends on whether you are a recent college grad or not.

A recent college grad will probably believe the hype.

An experienced candidate is more likely to see it as just another job and another step in a career. (hence the preference for recent grads over experienced candidates)

Answer: There is some neat stuff happening at Google, but the typical employee is doing the boring maintenance that any large business requires. As a bonus insult, they're ridiculously overqualified for grunt work and they didn't think that was what they signed up for.

For a typical software engineer at Google, it's like being a janitor at NASA. Some neat stuff is happening there, but you aren't a part of it.

Also, if you have a couple of years at Google or Facebook, future employers/investors will automatically assume you're qualified, even if you aren't. That opens lots of opportunities. It's also a big contrast from what a typical software engineer sees, where they're asked FizzBuzz on every job interview.

My attitude is that, if they're going to close a question as offtopic, then put it in your robots.txt for Google to exclude that page.

Why is StackOverflow polluting Google with content its moderators deem "not appropriate for the website"?

Do you realize how many times I've had a question, googled it, and the #1 result was "StackOverflow - offtopic, closed"?

What makes this a HARD puzzle is that the pieces don't completely fill the area. That dramatically increases the solution search space.

Run your own mailserver - postfix + roundcube.

It'll take you some time to set it up, but it will be educational!

Your main problem would be getting enough paid subscribers to cover the cost.

Also, you should do it as a website rather than a print newspaper.

There already are several "conspiracy theory" websites.

They are transferable skills BUT it's very hard to find a job that isn't a keyword match for your previous job.

I have a lot of C/C++ experience, but that experience has a market value of $0 when applying to other jobs. There are transferable skills, but employers don't want transferable skills, they want someone who's already an expert in their stack.

I.e., most of my current work is LAMP, but I'm not getting any serious interviews for non-PHP jobs. Learning new stuff on your own doesn't help much, because most HR/Headhunters say "Only paid experience in a tech stack counts."

Regarding mobile development, my current interest is Unity. With Unity, you can use the same code on Windows/Android/iPhone.

I thought Facebook is killing it because they have a large lock-in network effect for their users. You have to be on Facebook if all your friends are on Facebook.

1. Math - You probably should know real analysis, abstract algebra, linear algebra, and some logic.

2. Whatever else interests you

That's what I figured - a lot of people who say "Java is as fast as C" aren't doing proper compiler optimizations on their C. I suspected that was true, but I didn't spend the time on a proper test.

-O2 or -O3 does some neat stuff like unrolling loops and inlining functions

--fast_math is another one I use

If you don't put in ANY optimization flags, it puts in full debugging info, which slows things down a lot.

I don't know anything about Java optimization.

What compiler settings were you using? In my experience, C is faster than Java if you turn on full optimization settings.

Due to accounting/tax rules, "qualified incentive" options are required to be priced at "fair value".

It's better for you to just ask for more equity.

However, realize that equity is usually worthless. If they already raised a lot of money, you're probably only going to get a tiny slice. If the equity is a factor in your decision to accept the job or not, you probably shouldn't.

Remember that the recent investors probably got a liquidation preference, which means they need to eventually sell for a LOT MORE than the price of their last round, or common shareholders may get nothing.

Law of Headlines says "no".

My experience also says no. The two issues I'm facing are:

1. Due to technology churn, after a couple years of experience, your experience loses its market value faster than you can get new experience.

2. At 40, I'm starting to feel age discrimination. When you go on an interview and everyone else is <25, you see that you "aren't a good cultural fit". Younger programmers have started talking down to me like my experience is irrelevant. Then they ask me to debug their code for them.

As a programmer, you can make good money from 25-35. After that, it's starting to look like it's over.

If you do

open database connection

do one insert

close database connection

That adds up fast.

At work, I've been very disappointed in the performance of their Amazon RDS. They had unexplained master/slave replication issues.

You also can put a memcached in front of the database.

Ask for an exec-level title if you pick #1. In an early stage startup, it's easy to get. It makes it harder for them to hire someone over you later.

Your index wouldn't be clustered, is it? For a regular index, insert is O(log n). For a clustered index, insert is O(n).

You can also bulk insert records, rather than 1 at a time.

We have 2k operations per second on our aws rds.

+1 for sell, before they depreciate

Use the money to rent an ordinary VPS (aws, linode, etc.)

There's no reason to own your own servers unless you have unicorn-level success, and Netflix still uses aws.

Get a friend or relative to buy the puts for you.

For 2D images, fractals can be used for image compression. I don't know if any of the popular image compression algorithms use this method.

Another flaw: The Y-axis should be log scale.

In any stock market chart for 5+ years, the Y axis should be log-scale. The stock market tends to go up exponentially over time. If you don't use a log scale, then old prices look flat while recent changes are distorted.

(^DJI interactive chart max time interval)

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI+Interactive#{%22rang...

Notice how, on the linear scale, the 1987 crash looks like nothing, but on the log scale, it's obviously one of the biggest dips.

The OP makes the same error. Private equity valuations go up exponentially over time for the same reason that the stock market goes up exponentially over time. Since his time horizon is more than 5 years, the Y-axis should be log scale. He's artificially exaggerating more recent gains by using a linear scale.

Also, with a log scale, he wouldn't need to use a different chart for seed/A/B/C/D.

I lost interest in chess when I realized that, in order to be really good, you had to spend a lot of time studying and memorizing openings. That seemed like a boring waste of time.

Company towns ended in the early 20th century, for a good reason.

Imagine losing your job and housing at the same time.

It also doesn't get favorable tax treatment. The value of the housing winds up as taxable income for the employee anyway.

1. Find some time every week or every day to work on it.

2. Open an editor and start doing it.

3. Break it up into small chunks so you can feel like you're making progress.

Also, pick something better than a job board. (Unless you're really sure that's what you want to do.) There already are too many people trying to make a better job website.

One thing that helped me, surprisingly, was having a couple of side projects. That made it easier for me to switch around when I got bored with one.

When government creates a power imbalance, and then government tries to correct that power imbalance, it usually winds up making things even worse.

Many of those power imbalances were created (directly or indirectly) by the government.

There should always be an option to declare bankruptcy and start over (unless you were guilty of a crime, which is a debt you shouldn't be able to dodge).

For example, if someone decided to enter a slavery contract, they could always later declare bankruptcy and default and start over. However, an employment contract of 1-10 years probably would be treated differently.

I had a severe negative reaction to lithium, along with risperdal and abilify. I've liked Seroquel, which surprised me after all the others I tried were awful. Someone else might say the reverse (Seroquel was awful but those other drugs were better).

The important lesson is that, if a treatment isn't working for you, then you should try something else. My first psychiatrist was extremely hostile to the idea of me switching drugs, so I concluded that all psychiatrists were useless. In retrospect he was wrong, because switching to Seroquel was a good idea for me, and I wouldn't have tried it if I didn't fire him.