jplewicke

Someone actually tried to follow this advice starting in September 2007: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5934 . Needless to say, it did not work out well for them and they almost went bankrupt due to spiraling margin debt.

The difference between a mortgage and margin debt is that mortgages aren't constantly marked to market, and you can continue to own the house even if you're temporarily underwater on the mortgage. Whereas with margin, you can be forced to sell if the value of the assets you've bought underperforms.

It's actually completely normal for a small group of stocks to account for most of the index gains -- see https://www.aqr.com/cliffs-perspective/still-not-crazy-after... .

I think that there's a common thread that underlies the development of intelligence in both humans and Portia spiders. We both evolved in an environment where we were at a sensory and physical disadvantage to our prey. We both relied more on understanding the behavior of our prey in order to hunt. In the case of early humans, we adopted a style of hunting known as persistence hunting.

Persistence hunting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting )is a general hunting strategy in which a hunter chases their prey over a very long distance(15-30 miles). Eventually the prey becomes weak and succumbs to exhaustion. On its own, that's not very special -- both dogs and hyenas adopt a very similar hunting strategy. The key difference is that humans lack the extremely sensitive sensory abilities that are used by other persistence hunters.

In the absence of such senses, early hominids had to predict where prey would go and accurately pursue them over very long distances based on very small amounts of visual evidence. In short, early hominids hunted by simulating the minds of their prey. If you look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o (a documentary on persistence hunting), you can watch some Kudu tribesmen literally simulating where an antelope will go.

It certainly seems to me like lucking into an evolutionary niche where you get caloric benefits that are directly linked to how well you can simulate the fairly-complicated minds of your prey is pretty much a recipe for extreme selective pressure in favor of general intelligence. The story is a little different in the case of Portia, given that they are apparently at a visual advantage to their prey. However, I think the examples mentioned in the article make a strong case that Portia's comparative hunting advantage is in planning the best attack method based on the behavior of a given type of prey.

One of the better proposals to fix whatever market structure issues we have is to move to "frequent batch auctions", in which a micro-auction would occur every 30 seconds or minute, which would amount to a similar thing. I'm not aware of any research that discusses whether such a system would be workable in the presence of the existing continuous trading market.

That chart understates the cumulative return of McDonalds by 20%, since it is just a graph of price appreciation and does not include the effect of reinvesting dividends. The proper cumulative return for McDonalds over that time period is actually 64.7%, assuming reinvestment of dividends.

I found this book helpful: The HIPAA Roadmap for Business Associates ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1484067010/ref=oh_aui_searc... ). It goes through some of the basics of HIPAA, what kinds of policies you need to have and why, and includes some example policy templates similar to the ones being graciously provided in this article.

Saying that we're due for another pandemic is quite simply the gambler's fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy . The odds of a pandemic may well be higher than recent experience would indicate, but pandemics still occur randomly.

They don't -- they are re-emitted in random directions that are statistically related to the original direction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scattering .

The article doesn't get much better, but there may be a kernel of truth to the rug store angle. There's a profile of the rug store owner/prolific angel investor at http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2012/03/21/silico... .

On the other hand, there's a very good reason why HFT liquidity has evaporated in previous crashes (such as the 2010 Flash Crash) -- the exchanges broke trades in an unpredictable fashion, so that any attempt at market-making would have opened the market maker to considerable risk.

Let's say you step in during a major market crash and buy AAPL when it's trading at $200/share. Let say it then rises some more to $300/share and you sell, only to see the price recover to $500/share. What happens if the exchange breaks your original buy at $200? Then you end up being short on the way from $300 up to $500, even though you were right about the direction of trading and contributed liquidity during market distress.

They've theoretically instituted a fix for this ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash#Trading_curb ) which will make it clear in advance what trades will be broken, so we'll have to see how HFT and market making responds in the next crash. Bid-ask spreads tend to widen significantly during market distress, which should actually increase the profitability of being a market maker during a crash.

Luckily, it looks like Mr. Money Mustache is already in touch with Ken from Popehat: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/03/11/mmm-receives-legal... .

I don't have a dog in this fight, but Ripple Labs did set things up so they would start off with all the network currency, and still own the majority of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_(payment_protocol)#XRP .

Ripple is actually a generalized network flow problem, in which the flow through an edge can be multiplied by an exchange rate when converting between currencies. As a result, regular network flow algorithms don't apply. There's also another issue with using a minimum cost criterion, since the costs are in different currencies and it's not clear how to put them on the same footing.

It's still necessary to consider the total number of shares. Let's say you've been issued 500,000 options with a $0.10 strike price, and the company is currently valued at $4 million. The approximate pretax value of exercising your options immediately would be:

~ $2,000,000 if they've only issued 500,000 shares ~ $100,000 if they've issued 13,000,000 shares ~ $2,000 if they've issued 40,000,000 shares.

And your returns would be negative for any greater number of shares.

The real problem is that you don't know the price per share from the current valuation.

On the face of it, this is quite clearly illegal discrimination on the basis of the prospective employee's country of origin: http://www.justice.gov/crt/legalinfo/natorigin.htm

If you're from Brazil and have work authorization to work in the US, any employment lawyer would be very excited to hear from you. The company responsible is quite likely liable for substantial fines, not to mention the principle of the matter.

One minor nit -- money market funds are no longer explicitly federally backed. There was a temporary guarantee program, but it expired in September 2009: http://www.ici.org/pressroom/opinions/letters/12_pss_am_bank... .

That works well for getting just your money back. If you're upset about the whole thing and want to shut it down or get their business practices changed, a class action lawsuit is the way to go.

Paypal is just an intermediary between merchants and whatever payment methods customers use to pay Paypal, such as debit/credit cards and bank transfers. And guess what? The modern financial system has no irreversible payment methods. Bank transfers, credit cards, and ACH are all reversible, wherever you go around the world.

If you haven't heard of it before, the May Scale of Monetary Hardness is a great way of thinking about this: http://stakeventures.com/articles/2012/03/07/the-may-scale-o... . If you're a payment intermediary, and you're delivering irreversible assets like gold coins or briefcases full of cash in exchange for very reversible payment methods like credit cards for personal checks, you will get horribly, horribly burnt by fraud, because you can deliver the gold coin and find out weeks later that your credit card was charged back. http://whatilearnedtoday.jameslarisch.com/?action=view&url=b... is a great example of this with Bitcoin and Paypal respectively.

It's not even about educating the user about irreversible transactions -- it's just that there's no way for Paypal to offer them unless customers fund their Paypal purchases by dropping off briefcases of cash and gold bullion at their local Paypal branch.

A lot of employment lawyers will take cases on in exchange for a portion of the damages if you have a valid case. Almost every employment lawyer will listen to you enough to figure out if you might have a case.

They're not metal detectors -- they're RFID scanners that sound an alarm if someone tries to steal something. A lot of products have an RFID chip attached that must be deactivated at the checkout. It's for reducing shoplifting, not for public safety.

Part of it is that as the total value of the company rises as the company matures and it removes various sources of risk. The dollar value of 1% of the company could easily rise from $1 (idea on a napkin) to $2000 (early prototype in seed stage) to $250,000 (business model proven and many customers secured). As that happens, a smaller and smaller percentage of the company is required to make up a given disparity in cash compensation.

I would like to see his response to this article by Phillip Greenspun that argues that the real reason why American airlines have a better track record than Korean ones is that American pilots have roughly 30 times more hours in the air by the time they become a pilot at a major airline: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety .

It sounds like Malcolm Gladwell's publisher never bothered to fact check the piece with an actual airline pilot before publishing.

Using the rope isn't even needed for most trees. When you learn how to fell a tree with an axe or saw, you'll learn that you can alter where you make your first cut to account for the tree's center of mass, lean, asymmetric branches, and other obstacles.

For example, if the tree is leaning strongly in one direction and you want it to fall somewhere else 10 degrees away, you basically make your first cut a full 20 degrees away so that it'll split the difference.

If you want a really unsafe way to fell a tree, you can attach a grip hoist 15-20 feet up the trunk and anchor the other end to the bottom of another tree near where you want it to fall. Once you start tightening up the grip hoist, you put enormous torque on the trunk and pull it over. Or the trunk snaps in two. Or your grip hoist breaks.

Disclaimer: if you're learning how to fell a tree from a cigarette card or comments on the Internet, you'd better know a good surgeon.

The point is to give the defendant a proportionately strong incentive to show up at the trial. The judge has authority to set bail at a level that makes it likely they'll actually stand trial, which has to take into account the defendant's personal resources, the size of the potential punishment, and the level of danger they pose. If Bill Gates was being tried for first degree murder, I'm sure his bail would be set well north of $1 billion.

In a nutshell, the problem is that you can't really release the company you're investing in from potential liability from you not being accredited. If you decide after you invest that they ripped you off, you may be able to sue both the company and some of individuals involved, or they may be criminally liable for the manner in which they sold securities.

However, there are some situations in state and federal law where being a "sophisticated investor" with knowledge of the markets and the industry allows you to invest.

P.S. I am not a lawyer and this is only my understanding of the situation.

The "club" would have to have at least $5 million in assets, according to current SEC guidance: http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm .

There are some great Photoshopped photos showing how much more fun the Las Vegas strip would be with narrower, pedestrian-friendly streets:

http://narrowstreetsla.blogspot.com/2011/07/las-vegas-strip-... http://narrowstreetsla.blogspot.com/2011/07/las-vegas-strip-...

One great way around this is to alternate rounds of sortition with rounds of election:

- You pick 1000 random people to serve as the House of Representatives. - They elect 100 people from among themselves to serve as the Senate. - You randomly divide them into 10 person committees.

If you have enough rounds, there are some great effects:

- The election means that only competent or representative people make it through to the next round. - The sortition makes it so that no one individual or small group is likely to make it all the way to the top.

There was a recent Sell HN thread where people were posting projects they wanted to sell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5803374 . Hopefully this will be a recurring monthly event, so you might be able to put it up then,

Rob Walling writes about this in Start Small, Stay Small ( http://www.startupbook.net/ ), and I think he mentions a range of 5x - 36x monthly revenue. It's dependent a lot on how automated and easy to maintain the site is, and how high the quality of traffic and revenue is.