ryporter

I agree. Others here are making arguments as to why they think this is akin to gambling, but there is a specific legal definition of gambling (at least here in the U.S.) --

"A person engages in gambling if he stakes or risks something of value upon the outcome of a contest of chance or a future contingent event not under his control or influence, upon an agreement or understanding that he or someone else will receive something of value in the event of a certain outcome." [1]

This is not a contest of chance, and there is no future contingent event. Other participants future actions within this event do not count as a "future contingent event."

[1] http://definitions.uslegal.com/g/gambling/

While I certainly think that Penny Auctions are less than useless, I really don't see how they can be classified as gambling. I think that the salient point here is that there is no element of chance. Sure, you don't know how your opponents will behave, but you also don't know how your opponent in a chess game will behave. The nondeterministic behavior is not endogenous to the game itself.

I do not believe that both Koller's and Andrew Ng's transitions out of Coursera reflect badly on Coursera or on MOOCs in general. Instead, what you're seeing is two incredibly brilliant professors (I was a grad student in the same lab as both, and I TA'd for Koller) returning to their area of expertise. The world will probably be a better place for it.

Prior successful exits is obviously a key factor.

I trade this market professionally, and it is quite easy to massively elevate your stock price if you control most of the floating shares. These sorts of price run-ups happen very regularly, but, to their credit, the SEC normally stops them before they get this far. They are typically able to halt trading by the time it's worth a billion dollars, two tops. :/

I think that California will eventually be forced to change as more and more people migrate to states to like Washington. The data only goes through 2010, but the Tax Foundation has a nice table for net migrations from state to state. [1] Also, anecdotally, try call up a moving company and inquiring about a move from the Bay Area to Seattle. The typical response I received was, "Oh, no problem. We have a steady stream of trucks moving people up there."

[1] http://interactive.taxfoundation.org/migration/

I moved from Palo Alto to Seattle in 2014. One factor was cost of living (including taxes), but another was that Seattle had a large number of very nice, relative new high rise apartments. I had my pick of great apartments, while in Palo Alto such apartments simply don't exist.

The housing problem in Palo Alto is not simply one of affordability. It's also a problem of desirability among those with the means to pay.

The article omits the key component of transmitting information between venues. For lines between continents, the improvements are orders of magnitude greater than the ones discussed in this article.

I think it's a great idea to study algorithms and math for CS, and that OCW is a very good resource. Also consider taking a Coursera course on algorithms. One taught by Tim Roughgarden started Aug 8. [1] I haven't taken the class, but I've met Tim and seen him talk. He's both extremely intelligent and a dynamic speaker.

I wouldn't prepare specifically for the interview yet. I know that others are very skeptical of the algorithms interview, but I conducted it myself many times, and I'd like to defend it. When done right, the goal is to see how you think about algorithms. I didn't care about whether you jumped to the solution as much as I wanted to hear you think out loud.

My goal was to decide whether I could see myself developing a new algorithm with you as a peer. For many interviewees who lacked a former CS background, the answer was clearly, "No." You need to have a basic and intuitive understanding of Big-O notation, and you need to be able to develop an algorithm yourself. These courses will teach you exactly that (though you absolutely must do the problem sets as well).

Now, it is true that the interview process has its own quirks. So, get experience. Apply to a bunch of jobs, and try to setup interviews with other companies before you even have a phone screen with a company you really want to work for. As with developing algorithms, nothing beats experience. However, I really believe that this step should be secondary to learning the fundamentals. They truly are the basis for the rest.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithm-design-analysis

Monster's P/E ratio yesterday was around 65. Given that the company is far from a high-growth startup, that suggests that this deal isn't cheap. (That's not to say this is a bad deal -- the synergies between online and offline recruitment make sense.)

For $3B, they could have hired are pretty energized and engaged team. Seriously, whenever I see these big acquisitions by companies of a product they have been trying to develop internally, I always think about the person in charge of that team. I imagine that they are thinking that they could have done a lot more if they had been given a couple extra billion dollars to hire an amazing team.

Private companies often want to control who and how many of their shareholders are. It is likely not because they fear being shorted. The market for short selling private companies is currently a very distant threat.

Let's say you place a short bet on Uber through one these "creative" methods that uses a smaller exchange, then you have to worry not just about Uber's price rising, but also that you will not be able to unwind the trade should it become profitable. Doing so could prove to be impossible either for legal reasons (e.g., if Uber or some other company launches lawsuits as their price drops), or if the exchange simply goes belly up. In short, you better be very, very sure that Uber's price will drop substantially in order to make sure a risky bet.

Fundamentally, the underlying inspiration is the growth of these companies. The fact that interest rates are so low, and that investors are chasing yield elsewhere, helps to enable it. However, these deals would still happen even if debt were more expensive. On the other hand, if the company weren't showing promising growth, then the deals would not happen.

My point was that it would be if Airbnb's fundraising were truly a pyramid scheme, which it obviously is not.

Investors are not blindly giving these companies cash (insert tired Theranos joke here). They see far more information we do, and they do more due diligence than most investors do in publicly traded companies, including (and especially) during the first dot-com bubble. That ended rather catastrophically, and Silicon Valley was never in danger of being "destroyed for good."

Thank you. I, too, am tired of comments along the lines of "I don't understand, so it must be a scam or a ponzi scheme."

That implies that their stock price will plummet after they IPO. You'll be able to make a fortune shorting their stock.

They will if it's clear from your resume that you took 6+ years to graduate. It's a reasonable concern for an employer, since the cause is often different from yours (namely, lack of effort).

So, as other have suggested, don't make it obvious. It's ridiculous to see the year of high school graduation on a resume anyway. Also, you don't have to list internships from your first two years.

If it does come up, or if they ask about it, do not lie. The appearance of hiding anything is a red flag. Just tell them that you were dealing with personal issues, and that they are resolved now. So, it won't affect your ability to perform the job.

Much of the difference is in land/home values, but, yes, it would mean that people in states like Hawaii would save more by shopping online. (This of course assumes that the online store doesn't pass along the increased transportation cost in the form of higher shipping.)

I'd be more interested in the real value of $100 of income in each state, which would account for differences in state income tax. On such a map, WA would look significantly better, and states such as CA and NY would look even worse.

The author's evidence is incredibly circumstantial, and does not merit the certainty that he projects. Can we please have some actual, hard evidence?

I just moved from downtown Seattle over to Bellevue, and the sea of cranes certainly got on my nerves, but the design of the buildings did not. Many of the new building exteriors have a lot of glass, and I find it rather attractive.

I'm far more concerned that we are overbuilding and could end up going the way of Miami circa 2007 than I am about what we are building.

The NY Fed is in New York.

Not to mention repeated game effects (of setting a precedent in this case), which make the setting even more difficult to analyze.

Normal banking systems can have the same problem when they, too, have lax security. Witness the $100 million heist from the Bangladesh account at the NY Fed.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hackers-steal--100-million-fro...

Agreed. The bait-and-switch wasn't at all necessary. It's not like no one would show up if she held a press conference to announce a new product.

Everything mentioned in this article is a relatively small factor compared to the largest -- Didi Kuaidi is a Chinese company, and Uber is not. Didi may indeed have the superior approach, but we won't know until the two companies both try to enter a new market outside of their respective countries at around the same time.

Not when a Chinese company is buying a company from a foreign company. The Chinese government stronger favors Chinese companies, all the more so when they are partially owned and/or well connected to the state. There is no way that this deal could have taken place with roles reversed. (Note: I'm not judging the policy -- just stating it.)

Google is perfectly able to invest a few dozen million in the Android development chain, if they so desire. If they don't, and if you're right that it would be a good investment, then that's simply a bad decision made by Google proper.

Alphabet is trying to learn from the mistakes of their predecessor tech giants, who continued to focus almost exclusively on their current money spinners, only to wind up completely missing the boat on the Next Big Thing (tm).

Did Larry Ellison just transfer billions of dollars from himself to himself in a taxable transaction? I'm surprised the deal was all cash.