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msherry

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Contact me at msherry@gmail.com

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It wasn't originally -- it was created in Palo Alto, by people not affiliated with Russia. It's gone through changes since then, though, and I don't know the current ownership status.

Source: I worked there a long time ago.

I remember doing this a few companies ago. Except we didn't have a modem, we just found a phone we could send commands to. It had some user interface that would pop up after every sent message, so we rigged up a terrible little hack to press the acknowledge button every few seconds to dismiss it. It worked surprisingly well :)

Photo of this amazing disruptive device: https://i.imgur.com/6MNb19R.jpg

It's true that the SEC makes this data available free of charge, but it's typically not useful without a lot of extra processing. XBRL(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL) is a standard of sorts, but there seems to be no enforcement of how it's used across different companies' filings (or even across multiple filings from the same company), and many critical pieces of information are filed under e.g. company-specific extensions. It's definitely a pain working with the data in any meaningful way.

FWIW, www.downside.com had a hard time reading the latest filings for AAPL, the only one I tried. Visiting http://www.downside.com/cgi/testfinancialsextract.cgi?url=ht... threw an error "ERROR: SGML Parse error: EXCEPTION reading from net: The filing is bigger than the maximum allowed size of 5000000 bytes. at EDGAR/netutil.pm line 75."

Maybe. If you're just loading constants onto the stack, it seems like it would be pretty forgiving of optimizations and such, and even work across architectures (assuming the same endian-ness, at least).

I'd definitely look for init code for some calculation (as it appears the author has done here), rather than actual computation code, since, as you point out, optimizations could have a huge impact on the instructions emitted for those.

They can only go so low. Here's a pdf of Visa's interchange rates: http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange-... . (Mastercard is similar, and Amex is even more expensive.)

It's 10 dense pages of tables, but it essentially sets a lower bound on the pricing you can get from one of the companies discussed in the article. Everyone would love to see the card networks lower (and simplify) their fees, but that's not what's being railed against in the article.

I applied to work at a Radio Shack when I was 16. I didn't get a job there. The guy interviewing me spent most of the time making sure I knew the difference between being paid hourly, and being paid on commission, and making sure I really knew what a spiff was. In retrospect it was kind of weird. It was kind of weird at the time, too.

Reading these, I don't feel like I missed out on too much.

That was really interesting, thanks. In particular,

"The Enforcement Process. Congressional investigations often begin informally, with the interested committee or subcommittee first seeking information on a voluntary basis (i.e., by sending a letter request or asking for an informal interview), rather than by issuing compulsory subpoenas. Although there is no legal obligation that a party comply with such a request, it is typically in the responding party’s best interest to do so"

A bit off-topic, but why not make it a referral link? I clicked it (when it was still broken, unfortunately), and imagine others will, too. You have a popular blog with not-insignificant hn traffic, I believe -- I don't think many here would begrudge you that.

You do realize that the second sentence was "I thought, and still think, that this would be bad for the quality of Nintendo’s games, and bad for their bottom line", right? Or are you trolling?

My 2c is that R has a wealth of libraries and utilities (for statistics, machine learning, finance, etc.) that are not as easily available for other languages. Things like scikit-learn for Python close some of the gap, but looking at packages on http://cran.r-project.org/, it seems that Python might have some catching up to do.

I make no representation as to the quality of the libs available for R, as I don't have a whole lot of experience with it yet.

This is why I hedged with the word 'significant.' I completely agree that people were making and selling apps for mobile devices before the iPhone came along. Can we both agree that the ecosystem exploded in size and visibility to the general population only after the iPhone was released, though?

"a little over half of which are in that bright sliver of Midtown, while the other half are strewn across the country supporting Times Square operations from designing the content on the signs to keeping the power plants that power them on line."

Time Machine to a local Synology Diskstation w/RAID, plus Backblaze. Will also chime in that I have nothing but love for Backblaze -- every time I've needed them (small files only, never a full restore yet), they've worked flawlessly.