simon_

I'm in a very similar situation - I don't have any great advice, but I'd love to discuss "offline" and hear whatever conclusions you come to.

It's a nitpick, and it might be just me, but I find "business student" a slightly misleading way to identify yourself as an undergraduate business major.

EDIT: Also, if I was interviewing you, I would push you pretty hard on some of your "interests". Quantum physics? Awesome demonstration of well-roundedness if true, but... could you walk me through (e.g.) the time-independent Schrodinger equation?

FURTHER EDIT: I think there are a couple punctuation issues in this sentence: "I have held an interest in marketing since high school when I founded my cities first youth filmmaker’s festival." I know these are all minor points, but I'm hoping you'll find them helpful.

It's not impossible, just hard. There's no exchange you can go to, and dealers will generally not work with you if you're a small fry.

In NPR's case, I'd say: (a) it looks like they worked directly with the seller, not with a bank/broker/dealer, and (b) their foundation has $250MM of assets, so they're not exactly a small fry (http://www.npr.org/about/statements/fy2008/fy08nprfoundation... [pdf]).

I have firsthand knowledge of this market. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to buy bonds like this for yourself if you are not an institutional investor.

This is why VC's are becoming amenable to letting founders take money off the table. (See: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/09/founder-liquidity.html)

I don't see any mention of his wife's opinion on this.

Comment 72: "The new facebook is ok"

She doesn't really have to claim that maids love cleaning to make the point that this kind of arrangement is win-win.

The maid's choice to be a maid reveals that the job is preferable to whatever is his/her next best option.

This is silly. It's the shareholders paying the CEOs, not the government.

If the shareholders are happy with management (and they should be, as JPM and GS are the undisputed winners of the crisis), then why shouldn't they pay them competitively?

It's easy to argue that Blankfein and Dimon are adding much more incremental value than they take in compensation. So everybody is incented to pay them enough to keep them...

The pain you feel selling diamonds is much more due to the huge markup charged by retail jewelers than anything De Beers has done.

It might be true that they're doomed as long term investments, but if you buy a diamond for a fair price (e.g. at Blue Nile), I'd expect you to be able to turn around and sell it for >75% of what you paid.

This article pulls my favorite description of Demand Media from that article:

"Imagine a classroom where one kid raised his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else."

I am diabetic (type 1), and I have been meaning to make this for years. Damn you!

I agree that this is a tangent - my point was that it's not a relevant tangent because (without disagreeing on any of your genetics) this woman's odds of becoming a professor after being born in a tiny soon-to-be-extinct tribe on a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal were negligible regardless of her intelligence or genes.

Don't you think it's a little premature to conclude that the quality of her brain (and not, say, geography) accounts for the difference?

More money?

Also, Apple might be strategically happier working with Microsoft than Google right now.

Way to cite primary sources! It enriches these discussions so much when people are willing to do a little digging like this.

doh, fixed.

Acceleration = F/m implies Position = F/2m(t^2) + k1(t) + k2

That's quadratic, but definitely not exponential, and doesn't really look like the curve he drew.

I know the guy's argument doesn't really depend on the shape of the curve, but it's a pet peeve of mine that exponential growth is always presented in an inaccurate way.

EDIT: fixed embarrassing calculus error

Even complete lock-in might not work for them forever.

The entire US financial industry uses Windows desktops and will for the foreseeable future, but adoption of Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007 has been (anecdotally) pretty negligible.

I imagine that their future profits are in trouble if they can't innovate enough for users to even upgrade their products.

It seems clear to me that police actively carrying out their duty have (and should have) immensely more obligations and fewer rights than citizens generally.

For example, while I certainly don't have the right to demand identification from a random person on the street, I better have the right to demand identification from a police officer giving me an order.

Has Goldman Sachs ever missed an interest payment or otherwise failed to met a financial obligation?

The ire in Paulson's quote is directed not against speculators generally, but speculators who don't live up to their agreements when things move against them.

That's not really something Goldman is guilty of. ...As much as people would like them and everyone ever associated with them to be guilty of everything.

c) He hand-waves through very important parts of the calculation (how many women he gets along with, how many find him attractive).

d) He doesn't give himself any credit for being able to selectively meet people close to his age and education level.

Obviously this is just for fun, but the author screws up his reasoning pretty badly. For example:

a) He says .0014% when he means 0.14%.

b) He interprets "X% of Londoners fit my criteria" as "on a given night, I have X% chance of meeting someone fitting my criteria". Apparently on a given night he meets exactly one randomly-sampled Londoner?

The tips about not being overbearing (correcting people, giving them unwanted advice) are well taken, but in many circles - especially the ones you actually want to be in - your natural geekiness will be highly valued.

I swear that, at least in parts of SF and NY (not trying to push geographic stereotypes, these are just the places I have personal experience), geekiness is even cool. If you work too hard hiding it, you will have trouble finding these places.

It's an intrinsically hard problem, but one that can't necessarily be solved at the hardware level.

For a large number of processors on the right tasks, just getting instruction level parallelism (e.g.) is not even tiny bit as good as using an optimized algorithm.

Agree. In a few years, we'll all have N cores on our desktops.

It's 12/31... if it's possible to make US tax-deductible donations, they should probably get that information out RFN.

Sounds like a reasonably good fit for at least one existing YC startup: http://inklingmarkets.com/

Agree.

I'd put both words -- "the terrorists" -- in quotes. There definitely are individual terrorists in the world, but the notion of a unified red team of "the terrorists" has motivated a lot of bad decisions.

It's not supposed to be realistic, he says it's his wildest fantasy.