nikete

"using a small, elegant language called perl" - The Economist.

The mean YC startup about a year ago [1] $22.4 million, let us assume 3 founds on average and 3 years of work, and that they hold 1/3 of the value, and you get an average return well north of 500k a year per founder.

[1]http://ycombinator.com/nums.html

The global currency post market turnover is ~1.4 trillion according to the BIS, note this includes many currency pairs that dont involve USD; a trillon a day is an upper bound on the daily USD market.

China effectively traded around 0.2 trillion USD for yuan and kept the USD last quarter, the impact is not that big.

More generally looking at the volume transacted does not tell you much about the depth of the market; you need to look at the order book for that. Looking at the bitcoin market there are several lots of over 25k sitting within 20 cents on each side of the bid-ask, this means it is extremely likely one could carry out a directional 100k trade with relatively small market impact if spread out over a few days.

It is worth to point out that one is a stock (debt) and one is a flow (GDP), and the right way of comparing them would be by taking the net present value of the flow, or comparing the cost of servicing the debt per year to GDP (so debt servicing cost climb to x percent of gdp).

Velupillai's book is awesome. An exercise of his that I love is looking at how much of general equilibrium theory one can prove using only constructive math.

A nice blog on a similar vein seems to have been started recentely on http://aiecon.tumblr.com/ by a grad student of Sandholm.

Argh. Got a premium subscription just so I could use this, installed it on an ipod touch, and it crashes as soon as I open it (no user input, just opening the app makes it crash).

So thats your objective function.

94k hits, seems to be about what any 3 random words will bring up, for example: http://www.google.com/search?q=kangaroo+fries+blue

"It's enough of a phenomenon that there are bloggers who've blogged about laptop etiquette."

This is a joke, right?

I am not sure the slashdot author understand the paper he read, he says:"the best often rise to the top, the very worst rarely do," yet the paper says: "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible." http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.p...

Namely, the paper does not say that the best often rise to the top, simply that they are unlikely to do badly.

You tell reporters stuff about yourself off the record?

Because that, not off the record generally which Dan spends a whole paragraph defending, is the relevant bit.

The book (Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference) to which this is the epilogue is excellent, I cant recommend it strongly enough.

You can just implement a client that does that. No need to wish, there's an api, it's use is encouraged, go hack! http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/web/...

Are you for real with the "unlimited" part of the pro accounts? I.e. I will definitely get one if I am allowed to interact with my account programatically (ie I am free to write a script to add urls to monitor I?) this is functionally I have to use in a lot of the little tools i develop.