scott00

What you're asking, in typical futures terminology(1), is how the futures market can function if futures positions and spot/physical positions are not cross-margined. This is actually typical in commodities futures. The same issues apply to crude oil and corn futures (physical settlement) and live hog futures (financial settlement). So how does the market function? If you're in the business of cash and carry arbitrage, either you have a lot of money, or you borrow it. At scale these types of strategies require a lot of capital to purchase the spot side, so a relationship with a lender is important even without the margin. The lender knows about both sides of the trade, so you can generally get good terms. And your margin balance pays interest, so the extra borrowing to cover the margin doesn't cost you that much.

It is a real cost of doing business though, which is why margins are generally so low/allowed leverage is so high in futures world compared to securities. Should be interesting to see how they margin the bitcoin futures, because bitcoins are an order of magnitude more volatile than most other products.

(1) The money you post to a futures clearing firm to guarantee against default is called either margin or a performance bond. Same concept as collateral, but the word collateral is usually only used in the context of guaranteeing payment of a debt.

Switching from expensing a reserved instance cost to capitalizing and then depreciating it is actually a bad thing. It increases your short term paper profits and decreases your long term paper profits, but doesn't change your pre-tax cash flow. Since you pay taxes on paper profits, it increases short term taxes and decreases long-term taxes, reducing after-tax cash flow in the short term and increasing it in the long term. Since money has time value this reduces the value of your business.

In general, if you have the option for tax purposes, it's better to expense something than capitalize and then depreciate it.

If that were true, it would mean that a roofer would need to raise prices a great deal in order to reduce demand a small amount. In such circumstances, it would probably be very profitable for a roofer to increase prices. The opposite (roofing has very elastic demand) is probably more likely. Under elastic demand, a small increase in prices would lead to a large decrease in demand. Under those circumstances, a roofer may prefer the certainty of 100% utilization at a slightly below market rate to having to struggle for contracts at the market rate.

US copyright law lets you sue for either actual damages plus the infringer's profits OR statutory damages.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504

I actually caught a semi-real one once. My new employer was MITMing all ssh traffic.

Does anyone find the results of how users would travel absent Uber/Lyft strange to the point of disbelief? Only 1% of users would replace Uber/Lyft by a taxi?

The biggest current mechanism is the case where driving beats commuter rail + walking, but commuter rail + ride hail beats driving. The other would be where a shared ride (ie, Uber pool rather than Uber X) is replacing a solo car trip.

Source please. Must learn more.

The logs in question would be AWS's S3 access logs. Having Accenture's credentials wouldn't let you delete those.

For U2F, there are two issues. First, communication doesn't use a smart card protocol, it uses a custom protocol over USB/HID. So to implement U2F using the TPM you would need to write a virtual USB device driver, which is a pain. Github wrote one for Mac, but there's nothing for Linux or Windows to my knowledge. Second, U2F calls for a physical presence check. With most existing hardware, there's no way for the TPM to verify physical presence, so it has to be done in the client software, which reduces the point somewhat. Newer hardware may address the second point, as I've seen some new laptops with TPMs hooked up to the fingerprint reader.

For other smartcard-y things: a lot of stuff gets called a "smart card", but any given application is going to involve a particular applet on a smartcard, and a particular client side implementation to use it. The Windows virtual smart card implements a PIV applet, I believe, whereas most of the Yubico stuff works using either non-standard applets or a PGP smartcard applet. So the client side would not be compatible with the Windows virtual smartcard.

It appears to me that what they've accomplished is to devise an algorithm that can, in polynomial time, find a solution to the ATSP with cost no worse than a constant multiple of the optimal solution.

Can any domain experts confirm or deny my interpretation?

Why does the Jones act discourage trade between PR and the Caribbean? My understanding is it mandates use of US ships for shipping between US ports. It should therefore have no effect on shipping between PR and the various non-US Caribbean nations.

Basically because the velocity of money is variable and depends on societal factors (lending practices, payment technologies, even psychology). What the central bank is really looking to do is keep the amount of money that's in flight supporting transactions at any given moment roughly stable. When velocity drops the money supply needs to increase faster than inflation to keep the amount of cash in flight the same. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1V

Not exactly sure what you're driving at. If there's enough evidence that these guys knew despite their protestations to the contrary, it doesn't matter what they say. It's not like they need to confess to get convicted. And if there's not enough evidence, the SEC can't make companies fire its executives or revoke golden parachutes.

Created an account. It asks for and confirms email and phone number. Interestingly it does not ask for name or SSN. So it doesn't really represent an identity as a person but rather as a recipient of communications.

Security-wise, starts with using the phone for 2fa, allows setting up TOTP. Generates backup codes and tests for retention. Big problem though: there's no option to disable the phone as a 2fa option. A lesser sin is no U2F support.

Hah, that's actually excellent news for those hoping for criminal consequences. It might be hard to put anybody in jail for their security negligence, but to me it looks like those three have served themselves up on a platter for an insider trading conviction.

That's a good question, but I don't have the data to answer it.

I don't understand the question.

95% confidence intervals for those curious about the statistical significance given the small Olin sample size:

Olin: 1.80% - 4.06%

MIT: 0.71% - 0.81%

Stanford: 0.48% - 0.54%

You may want to clarify whether your issues are with the tech stack or the domain or both; they raise different issues. I think of the tech stack as the programming language you use as well as the major libraries/frameworks/services involved, while the domain is the area of business the software serves. So if you went from being a VB6 developer for a bank to a python developer for a health care company you switched both tech stack (VB6->python) and domain (banking->health care). Some info on how long it's been since the switch might also be helpful for gauging reasonable expectations.

Some specific thoughts:

2. Going the management route might work if you have domain knowledge but lack experience with the tech stack. If it's the other way around this will be a much harder sell in my opinion. Either way, don't be looking for a promotion unless you've been there at least a year, or there's a pressing business need that putting you in the job would neatly solve. They hired you to do a job, they're probably not going to react well to you immediately trying to get a different one.

3. I wouldn't sweat this one. Real time collaboration is going to be the hardest given a knowledge gap, but the real work of design and coding can be done very effectively while conducting research to fill in knowledge gaps when you need to. Your company and colleagues probably care more that you produce high quality code fast than whether or not you shine in meetings.

4. I think it's reasonable to expect you'll be pretty behind on tech skills for the first 3-6 months. If that's the case, I wouldn't sweat it, you'll probably catch up. If it's been a year and you're still behind you might be in trouble, it's time to find a new approach to learning what you need to learn. Domain knowledge on the other hand is a much slower slog. It may take 5 years to get to expert, and I don't think there are any real shortcuts.

The leaders of most public companies are indeed influenced by analysts and investors. The reason is because the leaders of most publicly traded companies can be fired by the board, and the board's perception of leader performance is influenced by analyst opinions and the opinions of large and/or influential shareholders. In Google's case, Larry and Sergey hire and fire the board, not the other way around. There is a meaningful difference between the corporate governance dynamics at Google and most other public companies.

Why do you think Wall Street strong armed them into dropping the motto? Isn't it more likely that the people in charge simply changed their minds about the best way to run the company? And, given the lack of formal control, what mechanism did Wall Street use?

Larry and Sergey own super-voting shares and can outvote all other shareholders combined.

There really isn't such a thing as "the value people generate" beyond one-person businesses. As a simplified example, a business that sells software has two components: building software and selling software. The value of building software that isn't sold is zero. The value of selling software that isn't ever built is zero. But the business of doing both has value; the sum is greater than the pieces. So how do you allocate the surplus of cooperation? I don't think there's a fundamental theory that can explain one correct way of doing this. In real life, you allocate it by negotiation. It's not right, or wrong, it just is.

Breaching the corporate veil is definitely possible. An article from 1991 mentions ~2000 cases where it was attempted, 40% of which were successful[1]. However, this is much more common with smaller and more closely held corporate entities. None of the piercings attempted against public companies were successful. If I were in Benchmark's shoes I would not be particularly worried about that.

I think personal liability for their director is a somewhat more likely concern in the same vein. Smith v Van Gorkam[2] is a relevant case for that. Intentional misconduct is definitely something that can trigger this. I'm not sure that getting their obliviousness on the record is a particularly helpful defense against this though.

Overall, I doubt this theory is a major motivation on Benchmark's part. Benchmark obviously has billions at stake here and has also obviously concluded Kalanick is toxic to those billions. Seems reason enough to me for scorched earth legal tactics.

[1] http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Van_Gorkom

If you like this story you may also be interested in the book "Paper Tiger" by Tom Coyne. Same idea of total dedication to making the PGA, but starting as a guy who played competitively in his youth, but had gotten rusty. He was shooting in the 80s, and decided to dedicate a year to it. Entertaining read I thought.

I think the implication is that after the technical staff came up with the proof of concept, the operation to actually deploy it probably got reviewed by a somewhat senior official charged with making policy. He's expressing more surprise that the policy maker deemed the operation in the best interests of the United States than that the technical staff came up with the idea.

I realize this is a long way off from production. I guess what I was saying is I think the notion that we may have a 24 Tbps tape drive in 10 years more interesting than the notion that we may have a 330 TB tape drive in 10 years. And I'm wondering if my logic for the bandwidth is faulty, or if that might actually be doable with this technology (eventually).

There are actually some somewhat analogous situations in the US listed equity options markets. Options are typically adjusted for corporate actions other than regular dividends. However, special dividends are only adjusted for if they are more than 12.5 cents per share. And for voluntary corporate actions the options are adjusted according to whatever would happen to a non-electing shareholder. So if there's an exchange or tender offer, or a merger with electable form of payment, you have to exercise your options ahead of the ex date in order to benefit.

Putting a few of their numbers together seems to imply a read bandwidth of 24 Tbps (330 terabytes = 330*8 terabits/tape, tape length = 1098 meters => 2.4 terabits/meter, tape speed = 10 m/s => 24 Tb/s). Which to me is way more interesting than the total storage size. Of course I have no idea what you could actually feed that into, it far exceeds CPU memory bandwidth, let alone SCSI or PCIE. Do these things not actually run at full speed for more than a fraction of a second?