chrismaeda

Breathless headlines like this are usually a sign that everything is fine. If the journos start saying you should mortgage your house and buy {tulips, dotcom stocks, bitcoin}, then that would be a sign that the market is peaking.

MT-

Here we are 25 years later and now UNIX is the "good" OS.

The horror.

-Chris

I've had a Dell Precision M7520 for about a year. It can have up to 64GB ram and runs Ubuntu 16 LTS. I think it came with a Windows 10 license but I threw it away. The only downside is that the standard power brick draws too much current to work on airplane power outlets. It also makes you stronger because it's so heavy (~7 lbs).

Search for 'payment for order flow' if you want to know how robinhood gets paid and why you might want to pay trading fees instead of getting it for 'free'.

You're confusing domicile with state of incorporation. E.g. A Delaware corp resident in Nevada pays no state income either. As others have said, if you plan to raise outside capital and have an exit, then you should be a Delaware C Corp. If you are planning a lifestyle business, then an LLC in your state of residence is fine.

As an angel investor, I don't want to deal with that kind of hassle. If the company is losing money, it may want to carry forward the tax losses to offset future profits. If the company is making money, are you also going to distribute cash to your investors to offset the tax liability you just threw onto them? Will you get my K-1 to me well in advance of the April 15 filing deadline so I can plan my taxes, or will you piss me off by getting me a K-1 on Apr 14 and surprising me with a last minute tax liability? If any of your investors are non-US persons, now they have to file US income tax returns. These are the practical reasons why investors hate pass through entities.

It's a good workout for their immune systems. I let my kid eat all the dirt he wants.

This is what you have to do to become an ancestor.

I read a few PG Wodehouse books every year. Uncle Fred, Lord Emsworth, and Bertie Wooster are my spirit animals.

How often do really good writers come along? It's interesting to hear what contemporaries thought of Gatsby because, 90 years later, we know that it is an Important Book. On the other hand, how many people will read Stephen King or Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey in the year 2100, even though these were commercial blockbusters in our time?

Another version of the cliff's notes is to buy ETFs instead of index funds. ETFs are more liquid since they trade the same as stocks. As you learn more and accumulate more money, you can also start buying individual stocks.

The top Index ETFs that I would recommend (index in parens):

  SPY (US S&P 500)
  DIA (US DJIA)
  BRK-B (Berkshire Hathaway*)
  EFA (MSCI EAFE, aka developed countries in Europe and Asia)
  EEM (MSCI Emerging Markets, aka China, Korea, Brazil, India, etc)

I would recommend at least 2/3 US indexes and the rest international. Don't worry too much about international exposure since all US multinationals operate globally; e.g. buying Coca Cola (KO) is actually a bet on economic growth in China.

* While BRK-B is not an index ETF, it's actually the first stock I would recommend for new investors to buy. BRK-B is Warren Buffet's company and has broad exposure to the US market.

When I put on my pointy corporate IT hat, and I go to the Oracle web site to download Java, I see that Java runs on Linux, MacOS, Solaris, and Windows. Then when I go to download WebSphere, I see that it runs on a similar set plus AIX. Java support for Linux comes from the vendor while Java support for FreeBSD comes from the "community." Corporations will generally not depend on infrastructure that does not have reliable vendors who will sell them support contracts. Linux has this ecosystem in place. FreeBSD does not.

Java runs on Linux. There are tons of bespoke and third party Java apps running in companies. Running Java on any other x86 UNIX is a hassle.

The backstory here is probably that Walmart was able to negotiate fee discounts with MasterCard and American Express, but Visa refused to budge. So now Walmart is punishing them for our benefit.

In Canada, debit transactions are run through the Interac network, which is a non-profit set up by the Canadian banks. Interac also has an email money transfer service which is widely used.

Canadian banking is different from everywhere because the market is protected from foreign competition. It makes Canadian bank stocks good to own, but makes banking expensive and annoying for Canadians.

My guess is >99% of this data refers to corporations that are legitimate businesses that are fully compliant with the law. US persons have been required for years to disclose offshore bank accounts (through FBAR reports) and other offshore financial holdings (through IRS Form 8938 on tax returns, cf FATCA). I'm sure there is a team at the IRS that is busy comparing this data set to the IRS database, and woe to anyone that has not disclosed their offshore financial interests.

But it shouldn't be a surprise that people use offshore corporate structures to manage offshore businesses. The main reason this is necessary in the US is that the US taxes corporate profits worldwide, while other countries do not (they have territorial tax systems and do not tax profits earned in other countries). So US corporations have to set up these complex structures to achieve tax rates that are comparable to other developed countries.

Fun article, and one which shows the dark side of gamification. If you provide points, levels, and leaderboards, people will sacrifice their lives to leveling up for stupid little perks like jumping the line, slightly larger seats, and liquor and snacks that you probably shouldn't have anyway.

I was one of these people years ago. I was doing a lot of international business class flights on behalf of a public software company, and had 1k and global services status. Then I burned out and quit, and spent the next several years barely making premier silver. It's no big deal once you get over your sense of entitlement. And United has put all the perks up for sale anyway, so you can now buy whatever perk that you can't live without.

A couple of months ago, I finally made million miler status, which is a kind of "emeritus" status: you (and a designated companion) get star alliance gold status for life. This is actually kind of awesome since now I don't have to worry about getting miles every year to make premier. I still accumulate points so that I can get free tickets, but being retired from the elite status rat race is very relaxing.

My evidence is 5000 years of human history. What is yours?

This is a lot more fun than debating which browser-based MVC framework is better. ;-)

Europe would become part of Greater Russia and Australia would become part of Greater China.

List of mutual defense treaties. This may be a good working definition of "part of the empire." They don't enjoy the same rights as US citizens but their security is guaranteed by the US military. http://www.state.gov/s/l/treaty/collectivedefense/

I'm not sure that treaties with the US is a prerequisite for prosperity. On the other hand, I can't think of any rich country that is not good friends with the US?

An alternate view, which is well supported by history, is that while empires are created by war, they are very good at bringing peace and prosperity for long periods of time.

The Roman Empire delivered peace and prosperity to most of the Mediterranean basin for hundreds of years. The British Empire had a similar track record for a much larger area.

So now I'm rooting for the American Empire and the Pax Americana. I would most certainly rather be living in the West (or Westernized parts of Asia), under the aegis of the US military, instead of some third world shithole that does not enjoy security treaties with the Americans.

You are disturbed by peace and prosperity?

I took 6.170 (software engineering aka small group projects) and 6.035 (build a compiler), both in CLU, at MIT in the 80s. I was a Lisp guy so I didn't want to like CLU, but I remember thinking the exception handling was a win - you declared the exceptions thrown so that the compiler could check that you were handling all the thrown exceptions. Lisp had nothing like this since everything was dynamic and with C it was given that real men did not check return values for errors. I was glad to see them resurface as checked exceptions in Java.

I've read a similar claim in The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. According to Pollan, most fertilizer is manufactured with petroleum-based energy, so our agriculture is driven by fossil fuel consumption; ie natural gas -> fertilizers -> corn. This is not necessarily a vegan agenda; Pollan says we should move to solar-based agriculture by feeding animals grass instead of corn, which should incidentally make the animals tastier and more nutritious.

We're in the midst of adopting Liquibase to support our schema on 3 different db's (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL). Interested in hearing about any experiences or gotchas with this tool.

I'm not drunk on wine at an OS research conference but I have to ask anyway: Aren't microkernels obsoleted by hypervisors?

In DonaldKnuth's paper "StructuredProgrammingWithGoToStatements", he wrote: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrematureOptimization)

If using Quicken is like living in a loft condo in the middle of a city with a gym and a swimming pool in the building, it sounds like using ledger is like living in a house made of twigs and mud with no electricity or running water in the middle of a field. It's a cool and interesting house in its own way, but you would never want to take a date home to spend the night.

Here's my path (~30 years worth).

high school:

  basic
  6502 assembly
  a little FORTRAN
  a little pascal, but didn't understand it

mit:

  scheme (sicp omfg)
  symbolics lisp
  common lisp
  clu
  pdp-10 assembly
  connection machine
  a little C
  a little more FORTRAN

grad school / 90's:

  a lot of C (system programming / unix kernel hacking)
  Obj-C / NeXTStep (reappears later as OSX / iOS platform)
  MIPS assembly (branch delay slots ftw)
  x86 assembly (segment registers wtf)
  ALPHA assembly
  a little C++, but hated every minute of it
  Visual Basic

dotcom years to present:

  Java
  C#
  SQL (Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL, DB2, MySQL, etc)
  Python (scheme without parens!)
  ETL platforms (visual programming environments for data manipulation)
  PHP
  Obj-C / iOS (oh hi, you're back)
  Groovy / Grails
  a little Ruby / Rails

I'm a little weird because I did a lot of Lisp early, and then became an OS hacker. Once you can find single-line errors in assembly code, everything else is easy.

I learned a lot doing C and assembly; especially the importance of working clean, checking results, and being careful with pointers. Lisp teaches you how good the world can be; C and assembly teach you how to cope with how bad it really gets. However, I'm not sure I would recommend a new person to spend as much time on this since the world has moved to languages with garbage-collected heap storage.

I never cared for the functional languages (ML, etc), mostly because I found the functional programming zealots to be such insufferable bores.

If I were starting today, I would start with Java or Ruby, since they are modern OO languages with good deployment options. Once you know these, it's easier to "downgrade" to simpler languages like Python, PHP, and JS.

But the real takeaway is that you should learn them all.