veyron

I literally conceived of this idea a month ago. My day job is in finance, so this break is the first contiguous block of time I could find to put it together. As far as audience is concerned, its true that the audience is smaller but that's good insofar as emergent problems can be addressed before people come back on Tuesday :)

"Investors were looking at this company as they did many other things they invested in."

tl;dr: Investors were looking for the IPO pop and then dumping it. Problem is, if everyone follows that idea, there's no upside left.

It was obvious from when FB first started trading on SecondMarket that the "IPO pop" would happen before the IPO. The IPO pop stems from a supply/demand mismatch (lots of people want to get in but are unable to). And because the accredited investors got in before the IPO, the only people left were "retail" investors (and we know how that story ended). Many analysts and investors don't understand that key point, which is why a lot of people were caught with their pants down.

The original prospectus quoted the 2.1B share count that google uses. I'm sure the difference will be corrected after a few filings ...

I'm actually launching something in the same space on Labor Day (http://codewren.ch). This is not a particularly good omen ...

great minds != great stock

Bell Labs had great minds, but that didn't mean that the legal entity managed their innovations well ...

The reason why this cross is important is because it dropped more than 50%. Regulation T, which governs margin requirements in most accounts, says that you are allowed to borrow up to your cash balance to buy shares. So if you had 1900 dollars in your account (for simplicity of math), you could borrow 1900 more dollars to buy FB shares (3800 dollars = 100 shares). Now that FB dropped below 19 (and it looks like it'll close below 19), basically those investors lost ALL of their money (the value of the shares is now 1825, so your equity in the position is 1825[current value] - 1900[borrowed money] = -75) and we should expect another wave of selling pressure as those investors are forcibly closed out of their positions.

The importance is that institutions may decide not to participate in future IPOs (or may do so with weak uptake).

38 dollars per share was the price that the institutions who participated in the IPO paid. Facebook received slightly less than that.

Investors who paid 42 per share at the IPO received shares from the underwriters.

This seems pretty dangerous. If you misspelled git you may also have misspelled the command you wanted to run, and especially if you set 1- or 2- character aliases in git you may run something you never intended to run.

"my high average karma means I'm probably less of a risk. Probably."

If anything all this means is that you conform to the culture of HN, precisely what (it would seem) Lobsters is trying to break from.

For those not watching the stock marker: Nokia (NOK) up nearly 9% on this ...

If you are really trying to solve procrastination, you have to address the distractions.

Now, here is what I would like to see: the OFF switch. Hitting a button that would block all electronic distractions (turning off television etc) and block distracting sites (like youtube/reddit/HN) and disable distracting apps (like iPhone games) for half an hour.

This most likely will involve special outlets or plugs that can be turned on/off via wifi.

Problem is that if all you do is expose the top project, and that takes time (for example, waiting for a long compile), you lose the ability to switch to another task.

I have a few friends working as examiners for the USPTO. The review is more thorough than you make it sound. The problem is that the procedures drive examiners to err on the side of approving the patent. If the patent is rejected, a lawyer can appeal and the SPEs get involved. In the appeal, it takes much more evidence from the examiner to demonstrate that the patent is invalid.

It's not really a functionality issue. MySQL just works.

The PHP API is incredibly direct and there's little development overhead.

Postgres on the other hand always felt kludgy for small projects. Just getting it up and running and creating databases took longer than with mysql. And phpMyAdmin is a tool most people are familiar with, for which I can't even think of the postgres analogue.

Pardon my butchering of the phrase but postgres is a hammer and mysql is a scalpel, and most projects call for a scalpel.

that 50% line is important -- many investors who bought at the IPO price on margin will have 0 equity left in that position (borrowing half using RegT margin)

There were wall street and silicon valley people talking about Facebook as if it's worth 200B or 1T dollars, in which case buying in at 100B may make sense. This was a problem on both sides: SV hyped, WS hyped and a bunch of people were blown out of the water.

Dumb article. The underlying assumption here is that a management shift is a panacea but that's far from the case. People forgot to ask how Facebook could effectively monetize, and I think MZ has a much better shot at figuring it out compared to external management.

Facebook is in a quandary because it would be difficult to monetize (to the extent that it reclaims the 100B market cap) and still retain its user base. And if these business people existed, don't you think Facebook would have already hired them?

That's not true. So in the case of `ps`, there is a known limit to the number of processes, and it is fairly small, so the performance hit is limited.

As another example in this context, if the original data source is gzip'd, it's faster to gunzip and then pipe rather than integrating the gzip logic into the app itself.

That is a terrible idea: sometimes the app can take advantage of a constraint to minimize work done.

In your example, if we just wanted to filter for a particular user, dps would have to print out ALL of the information and then you could pick at it. This doesn't seem bad for ps (because there's a hard limit) but in many other examples the output could be much larger than what is needed. That's why having filtering and output flags in many cases is more efficient in generating everything.

As a side note: To demonstrate a dramatic example, I tried timing two things:

    - dumping NASDAQ feed data for an entire day, pretty-printing, and then using fgrep
    - having the dumper do the search explicitly (new flags added to program)

Both outputs were sent to /dev/null. The first ran in 35 minutes, the second in less than 1 minute

I've had certain personal data wiped from a hard drive many years ago, so I am a bit paranoid:

USB Thumb Drive for active files, 2 copies on External Hard Drives for long term storage (which I migrate once a year to new drives), and two physical copies of critical documents (legal, tax) kept in two locations (usually my parents house and a safe deposit box).

    creating a hedge fund, or any kind of fund, was something i should be thinking about in my 40s or 50s when I wanted a more traditional role in finance with a lower risk/reward profile.

Many of the more prolific hedge funds were started by people much earlier in life. David Einhorn, for example, started his fund at 28.

If you are going to ask that, you should leave contact information either in the post or in your user profile. Otherwise how would people contact you?

What they are really whining about is not being able to find talent at a cheap price. That is a problem not just for startups but for everyone.

Oh I meant fees to the recipient, There's a law in the US that requires CC merchants to charge the same price as they would with cash payment (for most goods; some, like gas, have special exemptions), so when you pay X dollars by credit card the merchant receives less than X dollars.

C will still be king.

" Domestic bank transfers are pretty much free for all private people and almost everyone pays all their invoices electronically via their online bank."

In the US, domestic bank transfers cost money (for example, Bank of America charges 3 dollars for ACH and 25 for sending wires; most banks charge 15 for receiving a wire), which explains to a great extent why cheques are still used.

"What's more, credit and debit cards are accepted almost universally" -- credit card fees are onerous

"I think you can get a cashier’s cheque if you really need to" -- did that on Friday. 8 bucks.

Wire transfer and CHIPs both go through the NY Fed system. The banks send requests and money is drawn from or credited to the individual bank's account at the fed.

Here are the specs: http://www.frbservices.org/campaigns/remittance/files/fedwir...

He didn't generate a fraudulent check, so he didn't do anything illegal. It's akin to receiving a forged bill and then using it at the next place.

Checks are still useful because most online transfer mechanisms cost money. For example, my bank recently started charging for ACH transfers, and wires are always expensive.