jam

"These electronic trading boats"

Wait... is this a joke?

  A few weeks later I hit uninteresting roadblock

Did you use speech-to-text to write this post, or is that just an odd mental slip?

The design for syntax highlighting is pretty clever, and makes that feature much more responsive than most in-browser editors. The current line is always black text on a light blue background... and then when you move the cursor to a new line, the highlighting is processed.

I've implemented that kind of thing in the past, and making it perform well is always a ton of work. This approach is much more elegant and gets you 90% of the value. I like it!

matlab

...unless you consider financial markets to be sufficiently complex that individual success is unlikely to be correlated to good decisions. It's more difficult to say the same of successful entrepreneurs.

Let me tell you, being a math major doesn't automatically mean you get P=?NP.

Do I need to remind you that not everyone interested in shrinking government expenditures is a Republican?

In twenty years, does privacy still exist? What about in a hundred?

I'm definitely not a fan of exposing data that people wish to keep private. It seems conceivable, though, that privacy is an idea that won't survive time and technology.

Have you considered a remote development server?

The purposes of financial instruments (like debt and equity) are to replace these sorts of inefficient transactions.

"VC money" post-investment is now your company's money. Assuming you own a percentage of your company, it is your money.

they do everyday in democratic schools > http://www.sudval.org/index.html

At least a quarter of the programmers that I work with have a degree in something non-computer related.

Really? My takeaway was the difficulty of trying to uphold otherwise-worthless paper as legal tender.

Worthwhile part:

>Call it Madoff’s Law. Where there are consistent returns, it doesn’t mean that the risk is reduced, it means you can’t see the risk.

Worthless part:

>I would create additional forms of licenses (...) that any financial institution can apply for (...) and receive for a new financial instrument.

I'd rather own Tesla.

I believe he was questioning this line:

>It's the flood of low-skilled workers that essentially drop the bottom out of the labor market that present a problem.

Bigger companies can also "use it" easier than small companies. It would make patent sqatting more expensive, but probably not prohibitively so.

I can't speak for him, but my guess is that his ideal libertarian state would be non-democratic, opt-in only, or both.

Don't ask me how he plans to achieve it...

>> "[T]he extension of the franchise to women ... [has] rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

Seems like so many people have been pissed about this line. It seems obvious that he didn't mean "women should not have the right to vote" though... just that it makes libertarian ideals harder to achieve, because women tend to favor more government.

Hence his main argument: The US majority will probably never be libertarian, so libertarians must try to go beyond politics if they ever want to achieve their goals.

Spending per GDP is the best actual metric I can come up with for visualizing the "size" or "power" of government in society. There's no 1:1 relationship with regulation, but the two are surely correlated.

In Rand's writing, government spending is equally detrimental to society - but you are correct that spending itself was not in question.

"I don't necessarily see 'undersea welder' as a future proof job. Our whole prediction of the future, currently, is the end of oil, which means the end of offshore oil platforms, which probably means 90% of these jobs will be gone. This doesn't really make it future proof."

Ah, but you forget about the growth in demand due to seasteads.

Google Ventures seems like a good proxy for this behavior.

I'd sure hope not - it would make the program far too easy to screw over.

My fanboyish love for Tesla Motors aside, I found this quote the most interesting part of that link:

"I can say that the second model will be a sporty four door family car at roughly half the $89k price point of the Tesla Roadster and the third model will be even more affordable."

The Roadster, last I checked, retails for $109,000 and qualifies you for a $7,500 tax credit. We'll see if they can hit their target of $57,000 for the Model S.

Thanks a lot for the link.

It looks like going for PCI compliance is what's necessary for credit card information storage - any idea whether there are similar regulations around bank routing / account information?

There sure is a lot of cheap land out there, but nary an allodial title to be found.

...by buying your company. ^_^