SHOwnsYou

I think you're underestimating the ability to raise money from F&F.

First, I'm sure you have friends with lots of cash, but the beauty is that you don't need 10k from one person -- You could get 1k from 10 people.

I freelance/consult in a pretty niche field. Keep in mind that I may not be the target market for this idea, but my engagements are typically 3-6 months long. If everyone I worked with in the last 12 months gave their feedback, I might have 5 reviews.

I think the 37signals thing works really well because they have volume customers at lower prices, while the freelancers I know have few customers at super high prices.

But there are also several kinds of freelancers. I don't know if you're trying to target me or the companies that do 3 logo comps per day at $1000/project.

I can't tell you what to do. Honestly, it sounds like your mind is already made up.

But if I were in your shoes, I would want to do both. So I would schedule next semester classes to be in the evenings OR I would strike up a deal with the new employer to change my hours around slightly.

Why can't you do both? Or do you only want to do one?

I worked full time in college from the time I was 20 until I was 23. Work was 8-5, classes from 5ish to 8ish, hung out with friends afterwards.

I went with 15" MBP. I really wouldn't trade it for anything. In the store, the 13" looked too small and an additional 2" was trivial in price (~200?).

A lot of people swear by the MBA - I'm not convinced. Do they weigh less than my MBP? Yes. But can I swing the extra ~3LBS of weight? Yes. MBP has expandable ram, more screen real estate, and a disk drive -- I need Windows for a few applications I run and occasionally for testing - I don't even know if it would be possible to install it without the disk drive.

If liquidity exists without HFT then it's not correct for HFTers to justify their existence by claiming they are liquidity providers.

I realize the semantics of this can be argued ("existing liquidity doesn't preclude or prevent the existence HFT" for example), but not only do I think that is a wash argument but it also misses the point entirely on the utility of HFT.

That doesn't really show how they measure liquidity, but even if it did, I'm not particularly interested in how the framers of the article you linked measure liquidity.

I freely admit that if you want to measure liquidity as the amount of buyers in the marketplace, then HFT definitely increases liquidity. However, to suggest that HFT is the only source of liquidity, as I've said twice before, is farcical.

Also, it is totally accurate that HFTers reduce spread in the marketplace. They also increase the spread when they are driving the price of a stock up. Also, HFTers aren't unique to affecting the spread in the market. Every large scale buyer can change the spread.

Not only that, but my original point regarding the provision of liquidity and HFTers claiming they provide the essential job of supplying it (ie: without HFT, there would be no buyers) and I used the short period of time of the average stock position holding to suggest that the liquidity exists regardless of the existence of HFT.

What is improving liquidity? It greatly depends on how you look at it. Do more purchases provide more liquidity? Absolutely. If I previously had 10 buyers and now I have 100, I am absolutely more able to liquify.

However, to suggest that the entire 100 are needed to liquify when 10 will do (less than 30 seconds later I might add) is farcical.

Flash crashes and short term volatility.

Also "oft-cited liquidity that they provide" >>

This argument is farcical to the nth degree. When the average time for HFTs to hold onto a new position is less than 30 seconds, I'd say they're merely claiming credit for liquidity that was already there.

Electronics don't get cheaper every year because the dollar strengthens. They get cheaper every year because the production process becomes more efficient.

Some things can't really get cheaper every year (without some exogenous shock) -- anything with really high fixed costs of production OR a requirement of some level of quality by purchasers.

For example, it takes a ton of land to grow corn. As the population grows, the demand for and value of land will rise. That means that for the farmer to keep growing corn on his land, instead of selling it or using it in a new profitable venture, the corn needs to be producing a higher level of income for him than it had previously when land was cheaper.

Similarly - grass fed beef is not going to get cheaper. In addition to land requirements, there is the quality requirement also. If someone demands higher quality food, higher standards need to be followed, higher quality inputs need to be used, and a third party needs to ensure that those requirements are being followed.

I was afraid it might be a little less interesting to this crowd due to it being a desktop app as opposed to a web app.

I view that as a feature rather than a drawback -- Many of my classrooms at school don't have wifi (and my school is rated on several "most wifi accessible" lists). Quickly navigating to a site to take notes isn't always possible.

That is a very astute comparison between this and a wiki.

It is similar in that you can create pages, organize them, and link between them.

It is more accessible to the average user than a wiki is - setup, administration, confusing options, etc.

This has fewer options - To do list, calendar, notebook.

1:The notebook is organized by one category (typically semester or subject)

2:Then you have a second defining category (typically class)

3:Finally, the entry for that individual lecture.

So it has fewer, more succinct options.

It is also more dynamic than a wiki. No university curriculum is limited classes where all notes will be in easily typed language. Imagine trying to take notes for a calculus class with just word.

I looked at my notes and realized that the reason I used a notebook to record my notes is because I needed to be able to draw graphs, write math formulas and chemistry equations - stuff that doesn't translate well to text editors.

So I build something that was as similar to notebook paper as it could be and still allowed me to save and organize my notes.

On the better grades front - I am convinced it was due to ease of studying that this afforded me. Usually before a text, quiz, or essay I was frantically flipping through hundreds of pages trying to find relavent notes. With this, I was able to simply search "LaGrange" and was greeted with a wider understanding -- Notes came up from both calculus and economics. I was able to understand the whole much easier since I was so much more organized.

Site: http://gpaspike.com

Download link: http://gpaspike.com/download

It sounds awesome - small, customizable datepicker, but nothing shows up for me in chrome for Mac.

Not only is it free riding because the UK isn't spending a proportional amount of their GDP, but it could also be considered free riding because the quantity of research by the UK isn't the same; size notwithstanding.

But you're next line is absolutely baseless. What makes you think the UK spends their research dollars more efficiently? I'd love to hear even a single reason.

While you're thinking, here are some breakdowns of spending: US: 70.1% of spending is by private industry, 13.6 academic, 12.2 government.

UK: 65.7 private industry, 21.4 academic, 9.7 government.

I'd say they look much closer than you would have people believe.

I'm not sure you're considering all sides to the universal healthcare issues. The United States contributes the most money of any country by far toward medical research (close to 10x of what the UK contributes). The benefit derived from that is that countries like the UK get all the benefits of that expenditure without having to make that expenditure. So what you get is a lopsided benefit in non-US countries. This creates free riding.

So what happens is that as other countries free ride the United State's research, the US would have to not only foot hte bill for research and development (of which it is the biggest contribute in the world), but they would also have the bill for the fruits of that research - ie: the actual healthcare services and machines require to deliver those services. The United States doesn't get to pay a single bill and get great universal health care, it effectively pays twice for care while other countries pay once.

If I'm understanding this right, if a user stays on a single page for longer than 30 seconds, their session is invalidated? That sounds pretty harsh.

I typically concatenate the users IP and UserAgent. If the new request doesn't match, the session is invalidated and they need to log in again -- But I also don't have a mobile offering for many of the sites I build, so the changing IPs problem is mitigated substantially.

I've had my phone for over a year and I never knew what it meant to sync the phone until I read the article and discussion today.

I've rarely even turned on my computer at home since I got the phone; consequently, 99% of my browsing is done on a mobile device.

My gut instinct looking at this is that it is really hard to believe you held a senior position as a student; it seems even weirder that you held a senior position at a university - an institution which doesn't have anywhere near the turnover of the private sector.

Also, a senior engineer after only 2 years in your current position and just out of college?

I'm sure it's true and good for you, but I know a lot of people will notice it and wonder.

I won't find any more solutions. I will let the program find them, which, given enough time should find every single possible solution.

Any line drawing variant is just the concept I've already outlined expanded.

So I guess my question is: Is the challenge in this finding other ways to generate solutions, even though a method that will generate all possible solutions has already been found?

>> not infinite is infinitely far away from infinite

Nit picky in my opinion, but the reason I didn't assign it a number and rather opted for the more generic "nearly infinite" is because there are a ton of possibilities.

Here is my idea for you and will eventually come up with most solutions (might miss some outliers, this is my <5 minutes of thought on the topic):

Write a program that shows a square and it's center point.

A single line increment out from the center point going at a random starting angle between 181 and 360 (in other words, they generally tend toward going left). The line moves the smallest amount possible each iteration (1 pixel for example).

After the line has moved one pixel, a new angle is picked for the line move, from 0-360, and it increments 1 more pixel. If the randomly generated line crosses the center line of the square (if you folded the square in half from left to right) force the line to randomly pick a new angle before incrementing.

Do not allow the line to cross over itself.

Now you have your first line. Take this line, replicate it, rotating it 90 degrees, then 180, then 270.

This is your first square. Set the program to keep generating new squares, add rules as you see fit.

Now you have more solutions to this puzzle than you can count.

Edit: This is pretty badly explained, but it is based on the idea of a single line leaving the midpoint, moving randomly until it reaches an edge. You then replicate that single line 3 more times, each rotating by 90 additional degrees.

This is #1 on my "Ask" page.

I am not very interested in puzzles, math, or much else that this question relates to, but I am incredibly curious-- why is this question being asked?

I don't understand the significance of this problem.

So there are nearly infinitely many ways to accomplish this. What does that mean though?

What are the implications of there being infinitely many ways to do this? Why is it interesting?

No two books have helped me more than:

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion

This looks cluttered.

I'd suggest layout similar to fmylife.com. You don't need to require an account for people to use. Allow commenting, only those logged in can comment ? (Just thinking as I type).

I'm wondering if this would be more interesting if users generally had a more playful tone. "Trying to finish studying, but 30rock is too addicting!"

This comes close to a more specific twitter though, but similar sites exist (thathigh.com, fmylife.com, probably more).

Take all of this with a grain of salt. I am just typing whatever comes to mind.

It has to do with men who have the ability to over-indulge or be lazy (and get fat) but have the strength to avoid such activities.

Physical strength is not a factor in this. It is strength of the mind.

Many don't employ bulk purchasing in the traditional sense.

RueLaLa for example is actually run by GSI Commerce, the largest end to end ecommerce provider. They have existing distribution contracts with hundreds of companies.

When a product reaches its end of life period, GSI Commerce either buys it from the retailer and adds it to RueLaLa or the product goes into "overflow" where it is moved to RueLaLa but GSICommerce now takes a more significant percentage of the income.

The reason it is so profitable is because no additional infrastructure nor purchases are needed. GSICommerce keeps the old inventory in the same warehouse, reclassifies it as RueLaLa material, and removes it from the client website.

This is completely false. The value of a verbal contract cannot exceed $500.

The sales person may try to pressure you into going through with the deal by telling you the contract is binding, but no court in the world would make you pay ~30k for a car just based on you saying you wanted it.

I understand that the court offered to allow an explanation for the "NO LIMIT" response, but that is not where I was going with the lack of explicitness with the "NO LIMIT" response.

What is troubling about it is that contracts can be altered (by an IM conversation no less) from extremely explicit verbiage to less explicit verbiage.

But be careful to note that I am not so much concerned about the particular case in question, but rather the precedent it sets.

More regarding this case - I am shocked a single person has the ability to completely nullify a previous contract stipulation and provide a new one without so much as a signature.

I do find it slightly troubling that a single utterance of "NO LIMIT" is enough to alter a contract.

"NO LIMIT" is not very explicit in what it refers to.

A contract signed and in place was able to be refined without additional signatures nullifying the previous contract -- This is a scary precedent. May there be mercy on anyone that IMs me something that could be perceived as altering a contract we have.

> homeschool vs public school I can't speak with any authority on the relative value of home school vs public school for children of wealthy families. But I will point out that simply because a school district is well funded does not mean the school district will necessarily be better than better than a slightly less funded district.

>scaling I did speak incompletely. I meant to to explain that school best works at scale (I meant to say "not only does that not scale down"). You have already explained this for me. Each family requires a parent to do the home schooling, where as public schools can provide a teacher for multiple children of multiple families.

>pay for it regardless Fortunately those that own, they realize an associated cost of owning is taxation. The argument could also be made that in return for paying for the public school system, those residents are able to live in a place that has a compulsory education system.

I'd be willing to bet that no one would flock to (let alone stay there for a significant portion of time) an area that did not require taxes that went to a local school system.