dangoldin

You can consider buying a put option as a form of a short. The problem there is you need to deal with the likelihood of your option expiring worthless. But your downside becomes limited.

Yea - they didn't quite think it through but I can't imagine the work to let people fix their history to be too big of a problem. Especially if they limit it to web interface only.

Some still exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours

Augmented Reality (AR) vs Virtual Reality (VR).

Even if passive income is easy, it's not for everyone. I've been doing consulting work the past couple of months and can have 1-2 days of straight work pay for my entire week. Unfortunately, the free time isn't as fun as you'd think since almost everyone I know is working full time jobs. Maybe I'm more social than most but having free time without being able to enjoy it with others isn't something to strive for.

Even living in the EU you suffer from the patent patent systems around the world since it will influence the way companies develop/charge for products - especially if it's in a major market such as the US.

The cost of dealing with patents is just incorporated into the cost of the final product so we all suffer.

I've been doing the Project Euler problems and always love seeing the APL-like solutions. Amazingly expressive stuff that would be fun to get into some day.

Good points and they'd definitely need to be handled. I just think there's a big opportunity in making the inbox richer and the existing static email is limiting it. I don't really have good answers to how to deal with the security issues but I have no doubts we'd be able to solve them if we wanted to.

Yea - I was definitely impressed by it and I just got started. It felt as if I was able to get rid of all the boilerplate and just focus on getting the next page that needed to be crawled and the information to extract.

Have you taken a look at Scrapy (http://scrapy.org/)? My evolution has been from Perl to Python and I recently did a project with Scrapy that left me pretty happy.

I've learned that lesson as well. As much as web frameworks try to make the database interchangeable past a certain point it becomes amazingly difficult to switch.

If it could deal with daytime vs nighttime that would be amazing.

"Drive Simulator"

I took a quick look at tech companies that went public in the 80s up to today (1) and it's not as simple as Scott makes it out to be. The annualized returns are comparable now to what they were in the "glory days" due to companies like Tesla and Netflix but the massive long term returns are going to be harder/impossible to achieve.

Sure we may not have the chance for another Microsoft going public but there's still opportunity, it just takes a bit more effort and moving money around more frequently.

1. The post itself is not 100% relevant but the table of returns is worth taking a look at: http://dangoldin.com/2013/05/24/investing-in-tech-stocks/

I asked about this when I heard about the shutdown but no one responded. I guess now we know the answer.

I think non-interventionism gets harder and harder to achieve as the world gets more connected. Even if the government becomes non-interventionist you still have private companies and individuals intervening. I think it's hard to separate the two.

It's true when he wrote it but has also been true before 9/11. Most times the US intervenes in foreign affairs on behalf of economic reasons (Guatemala, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, etc)

In the case of Nicaragua in 1984, it went up the UN courts with the US being found to encourage human rights violations but it didn't amount to much since the US sits on the security council.

This is such a complicated topic that I really don't know whats the moral answer is. On one hand I don't believe we should be completely isolationist when there's so much going on in the world but on the other hand it's very easy to screw things up and impossible to predict the consequences. The best I hope for is having morally justified reasons for intervention rather than economically justified ones.

Lots of interesting stuff at the following links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_U.S._regime_change_actio...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States

Great post. If you liked this I also suggest taking a look at Peter Thiel's CS183 lectures at Stanford. Blake Masters did a great job taking notes: http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup

In particular, take a look at the Class 15 one - http://blakemasters.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels-cs183-...

Pretty cool - thanks for sharing.

I've always wondered why this information can't be kept in your browser and be shared through that. That way the data is kept locally without even needing to rely on any 3rd party service.

How about Fahrenheit 451 or We? Almost every dystopian novel shares something with the world.

And your comment reminded of something similar with Coke. At some point they decided that they weren't competing with other soda manufacturers but for "share of stomach" and started going in that direction by going on an acquisition spree.

The author, Daniel Greenfeld, is also coauthor of Two Scoops of Django (https://django.2scoops.org/) that has a lot of other awesome tips.

I obviously don't know much but it seems stupid to not tell your team who they're going after. They would use that information to plan the breach and I'd suspect a good squad leader would demand to know before going in.

Very well presented and designed too. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sharing this. The way these are defined reminds me of the way I'd be defining methods in SML - a base case and then a recursive one to deal with the tail.

Yea - I wasn't going for optimal but just wanted to have some fun and decided to take a stab at using Prolog.

Thanks for the explanation. It's such a neat idea that inputs and outputs can be interchangeable. Opens up approaches that are very different than the standard ones. The append predicate is definitely a better example so thanks for sharing.

Glad you enjoyed. It was pretty frustrating getting started when you know how easy some of the things are to do in other languages but once I got into it it felt great. You definitely start thinking about them at a different level although parts of it felt pretty functional/mathematical to me.

The other thing I realize now is how much easier it is to get started now with StackOverflow and Google being available. I remember having to go through tutorials and demos that came with the software or read books to learn new languages. Now there are so many resources out there.

OP here - someone left a comment on the blog who's clearly more knowledgeable than I am. I'm copying it here:

    The quotes are necessary if an atom starts with something
    other than a lower-case character. Any unquoted token
    that starts with an upper-case letter is a variable.

    As for atomic_list_concat, it's an optimized library
    function that requires the separator. It's certainly 
    possible to write an equivalent that is completely 
    flexible.

My domain is down as well - words.io.

Good thing it's just some crappy side project.

Very cool. And since it's all a 3D model it's a lot easier for them to generate the panoramic files than taking actual photos.