jadc

Very cool. Congratulations!

I am also into residential real estate and was wondering why you chose to go the cash route especially when rates have been so low. For instance, in the properties that I am currently in business for, for 20% down I able to fetch a 30% ROI after mortgate + all fees incl. property management, taxes, insurance, etc... For the same properties, if I would go all cash, my return would be closer to 11 to 12%. Of course with the mortgage approach, it tends to be a bit slow (i.e. a mortgage at a time) and longer to scale to the same levels of in terms of absolute monthly returns since my monthly cash flow is lower in absolute terms.

Interested in your thoughts.

Based on a quick read of [1], it seems that using saline water is more expensive because of the preparation that is needed, so for now, it is easier to start with fresh water and add additives.

Also seems the consideration is about saline aquifers and not ocean water. I suspect the cost of transporting ocean water is the issue leading to this consideration.

[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/breakthrou...

That's a very useful report but where does it support the claim of "the current move towards fracking as climate suicide"?

More constructive criticism would be to offer some information on the expected efficiency of these panels as opposed to just dismissing them.

It is called a subsidy because the feed-in-tariff you get is generally more than the market rate for the electricity produced. Also in many countries, you lock in a certain tariff for many years (20-25 years) so the amount you get paid vs market rate diverges even more over time.

Just off the top of my heads, some benefits of VMs vs processes: - you get the encapsulation/isolation out of the box - abstraction from the hardware; may not seem like a big deal if you're thinking in terms of a single machine but very useful for migration (whether live migration or cold migration) between different machines - ability to snapshot the state - arguably a smaller attack surface since you deal with fewer drivers inside the virtual machine versus a general purpose OS (VM escape exploits do exist though - no denying that).

I am wondering about the kernel piece. Does Chrome on Windows have any code that is loaded in the kernel? I'd be quite surprised if they did. Any Chrome expert know?

Yeah agree that SlideRocket could be super useful.

There was a lot of excitement internally at the company towards using it but after the first few tries, many have given up in frustration and reverted back to PowerPoint.

I don't have any insight into the SlideRocket team to understand this lack of traction. My theory is that this was more of a whim acquisition on the part of the previous CEO and isn't going anywhere because it falls quite outside the core focus of the company.

Long time VMware employee here.

While this is of course a sad event, it is not a reflection on the strength/weakness of VMware. Actually for a lot of my time here, we've had "carte blanche" in terms of hiring. The challenge was finding enough qualified people. I do think with the recent slew of acquisitions, the company may have grown too much too fast and is needing to reorganize hence this announcement.

From what I heard, the company is still planning to grow its headcount in 2013 from where it is today. It is also engaged in a massive expansion project which will triple the size of the campus in Palo Alto. It would not be undertaking such a massive and costly effort if a permanent downsize is being envisaged.

I am sure you are not advocating a defeatist line of reasoning. Of course, any proposal could be subject to abuse and fraud. It is a matter though of moving things in the right direction or not.

As to the questions you raise about how to define the requirements (what is foreign-born national, what is advanced degree, what is STEM), a possible start is the current "advanced degree exemption" for H1-B which currently grants an additional 20,000 H1-B visas.

I am aware that those get filled up pretty quickly too but it illustrates my point that you can define some sort of requirements to answer the questions you raise. In this case, the requirements are: - degree must be from accredited US university/institution - master's degree or higher - foreign national (which is different than foreign-born national) is anyone who is not a US citizen or permanent resident

+ 1 for the C1M comet application

The article provides a lot more in-depth information on the subject and more experimental data (across multiple machines - not only localhost).

Author mentions this point briefly without saying "AES-NI" though.

<quote> On the contrary, AES can be very fast in software implementations, and even more if your CPU provides specific instructions for AES. </quote>

According to the article, there are devices that could be attached to existing toilet seats that cost 100$ or less. If they do work well (article claims that they have good reviews), then cost is not an issue.

It is true that this not a non-profit organization. It is a B corporation. According to Wikipedia: "A benefit corporation is a class of corporation required by law to create general benefit for society as well as for shareholders. Benefit corporations must create a material positive impact on society, and consider how their decisions affect their employees, community, and the environment. Moreover, they must publicly report on their social and environmental performances using established third-party standards."

How common are these B corps? Any other notable examples?

For Java code, I am a big fan of Sonar Source [1]. It is open source, is able to leverage checkers such as FindBugs, and has integration with code coverage tools such as Cobertura. I have found the clean dashboard to be a great boon, and have never felt intimated by the reported warnings like I've been with Coverity et al.

[1] http://www.sonarsource.org

Even though the article mentioned restaurants specifically, I believe the point about Yelp being fundamentally flawed extends much beyond food.

I have heard similar reports from doctors saying that Yelp is filtering out their 5 star reviews unless they advertise with them.

Here's pg's explanation (from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098756) It's not so much that it's ahead of its time relative to hardware as it is something you do in the early versions of a program. Using closures to store state on the server is a rapid prototyping technique, like using lists as data structures. It's elegant but inefficient. In the initial version of HN I used closures for practically all links. As traffic has increased over the years, I've gradually replaced them with hard-coded urls. Lately traffic has grown rapidly (it usually does in the fall) and I've been working on other things (mostly banning crawlers that don't respect robots.txt), so the rate of expired links has become more conspicuous. I'll add a few more hard-coded urls and that will get it down again.

Thank you for the 83(b) mention. The article completely glosses over that.

It has become common in the english language to write "she" instead of "he" when the gender is undefined. This is presumably also to break the male stereotype mold.

Seconded. It would be great if the author could expand on this point.

This definitely seems like an interesting idea. It has been proposed before in the context of peer to peer networks, but I am not sure if it was taken beyond academic research.