simon_

A lot of comments here missing the point... The Daily Mail is a tabloid that is exploiting people's (evident even here on HN) love of hearing about cancer cures/causes regardless of evidence.

Then the commute is almost as big a problem as the job itself. If you moved close to your job, you'd save 4hrs/day to work on whatever you wanted.

That's definitely true (I live in NYC...) but misses the point of the observation. The point is that the same material stuff will make you happier in a context where other people have less.

Rovi, formerly Macrovision.

Just search for companies that have had Steve Blank as a board member.

Take the bag just to keep your options open.

You can always die later if you still want to.

Variable cost = d(cost)/d(customers), not d(cost)/d(time)

I don't think it's likely, but I deeply hope that Google (or somebody else) can kill the US addiction to subsidized handsets. The market will be so much more efficient and flexible when we pay for phones as phones and pay for service as service.

I'd expect your host/ISP to cave and shut you down if presented with the threat of legal action. If you want to stay up and are really going to face that kind of challenge, it seems like you would need to host the site in a jurisdiction where they wouldn't even be able to make a credible threat. (Russia, maybe?)

Come on... you're not going to tell us what it is?

On the other hand, Match.com, OKCupid, etc. have created a kind of formal dating renaissance.

I am so tired of hearing about "confounding financial products that no one can hope to understand".

An intelligent person willing to spend a few hours would have no trouble gaining a basic understanding of CDOs, credit default swaps, and the like.

There's no excuse for that kind of thing in mainstream journalism (where you often see it), and I'm kind of surprised that you hear it from Jason.

I don't know about legal restrictions, but I frequently see the claim that people empirically don't move within the EU as much as they move within the US. I'd guess that variability of language/culture probably plays a role...

frankly, the probability of fraud by the researchers or reporters strikes me as many orders of magnitude higher than the probability that he can fast indefinitely without dying.

My prior for this claim being true is ~0. (IE - the evidence that he can go years without food or water should have to be extremely compelling to come close to convincing you.)

The big difference is that flow of capital, goods, and (most importantly) labor between states is virtually unrestricted. In Europe, this isn't the case, which is a big reason Europe isn't an "optimal currency zone" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_currency_area).

I'm guessing this is mostly a mortgage?

Not claiming any expertise, but a data point for you: I was born in '84 and I have zero identification with Gen X.

We had AIM in high school, Facebook in (some of) college, and MTV had already mostly stopped playing music videos when we became aware of it.

I think a related problem is that he is interacting with "PR majors".

Probably requires quite a bit more financial/legal hacking than technical. That said - I agree that it seems like a real opportunity.

The entire "payments industry" boggles the techie mind - Visa, MasterCard, and Western Union (to name a publicly-recognizable few) enjoy very high ROI having a nearly trivial (for a serious organization) technical problem to solve.

Obviously some people will choose one way and some people the other. And Facebook will continue to serve those that are willing to trade privacy for convenience/connectedness.

I seriously doubt it would have been "just as censored". That wasn't their message, but Trey and Matt have had no trouble parodying the US military in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_America:_World_Police.

It's a tiny bit more than 10 years old now, but one of my favorite algorithms, period, is John Platt's Sequential Minimal Optimization. (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=299094.299105)

It was a huge advancement to the state of the art in training SVMs.

Proceeds from investors (debt or equity) are not profits, and the company receiving the investment will not pay taxes on the amount.

The investor will have to pay taxes on any capital gains / dividends / interest she receives.

I loved this back in 1994. Definitely worth a read, although I think the whole S&M thing comes through a little strongly.

I was working in the same markets at the same time - Magnetar's trade was widely known and considered pretty shady. We thought they were exposing themselves to big liability/reputation risk, but it seems like it worked out fine for them.

In general, the only things that will generate income for you are work and assets.

So... ask yourself what assets you have (a popular website or a library of photos, e.g.) that aren't currently being monetized.

These guys are obviously charlatans. He claims to reliably make >$100K/yr trading his $100K account. If he could really generate 100% return on capital, he would be the richest person in the world. (Or... at least he would have more than $100K to manage.)

The author isn't totally uncritical, but it's annoying that he gave these guys so much space in the Times to advertise.

And the stuff about it being "bad for investors" is pretty rich. Sure, there are might be some funny incentives created by a Founder Visa program, but none that wouldn't be transparent, known, and probably avoidable.

Certainly they're not futile to pursue in limited domains.

There's a paper I'm trying to find for you about analyzing affect in news articles for the purpose of trading stocks - I think they got things working fairly well.

My googling turned up "neilc" as a user of dashes at least one of the obvious digrams from that post.