squigs25

Wow! This is really cool.

In statistics and machine learning this would be considered an unbalanced data set: predicitng who will start a company when the vast majority of people will not is a very difficult task. It's similar to predicting who will be a terrorist (another really difficult problem).

I think the threshold they are using is way off however. Even if someone has only a 5% chance of becoming a founder (or less), that's pretty significant. I understand that would probably increase the population by many orders of magnitude, but only capturing 17% of 350 means ~60 startups will be found as a result of this program. Given that the large majority of those are likely to fail, the numbers could be better.

Some really interesting predictors might be what meetup groups does the individual belong to, what is their current job title, what is skills and connections do they have on linkedin and facebook, how many founders are they "connected" to, and who are they following on twitter.

It's also worth mentioning that this is probably biased, because the data set of individuals includes data points for founders only after they became founders. You would ideally want the data from before they became a founder. Perhaps over time this model would get better, as non-founder individuals become founders.

This is a really good point. In the context of the headline however, it's listed in a string of characteristics which would normally be considered obstacles which the founder overcame, and I do not see gender as an obstacle.

This is a really impressive story. I wish we got more background about the 2010 era, before she hired engineers in San Francisco? Was this site completely freelancer developed initially? How many users did she get before shipping out to cali?

BTW, this site is really taking off with young, social-media crazed teenagers, so keep an eye on it! Already at 8MM users, it's similar to pinterest with a business model that really makes sense.

Why is it relevant that she's female?

"because it's the right thing to do"

The right thing to do is fund the best concepts that exist. I don't care if they're all women founded or all men founded.

The reason there aren't more women founders is the real problem at hand. It might be that women are more risk averse. It might be that there's a stigma against girls who program. It might be that there's a large enough population of women who are more focused on finding Mr. Right than founding the right company.

I'm making up some numbers here, but if 1 in 5 companies are founded by women, then it wouldn't make sense to seek a 50/50 founding member gender breakdown in a YC class. That said, my guess is that more than 20% of companies you choose would be founded by women, because the women that did make it to the company founding stage are that much more likely to have the skill sets and the drive to be successful.

Haha, yeah I guess they found that architecture might be a bit too valuable to open source

Regarding munis, Lumesis is trying to hack this space... Not sure what their penetration is, although I think there's potential here.

good points, and great article! Maybe you know better than I do, were Neal Goldman and co-founders originally Bloomberg guys?

This IS the reason capital IQ started. They've done reasonably well.

There are a couple reasons why it's really difficult to disrupt this industry:

1) An mvp won't cut it. If I'm a trader with 300MM in my pocket, then I need access to information. All information.

2)Reliability. Traders need a highly reliable connection. No room for error. A great counter example is Reuters. I worked on a support desk where I had both Reuters and Bloomberg (at a cost of something insane, probably close to 100k/yr). I imagine that when a major pricing error occurred on any exchange, I would find out within 30 seconds to a minute. Despite all its resources, Reuters proved time and again to have pricing issues. Connecting to hundreds of exchanges with thousands of securities is difficult. When you start to go outside of the US, there's some really bizarre logic. Bloomberg was incredibly reliable on the other hand, and their support team responds to issues within minutes.

2) Network effects. Bloomberg messenger is the way to communicate in finance. Also, Bloomberg leverages its network to constantly monitor prices, so pricing problems are discovered REALLY quickly. It's kind of like open-sourcing security pricing monitoring.

3) Reputation. Even if you create a perfect replica of Bloomberg, would I stake my clients money on your track record? Even with a good track record, why would I not trust Bloomberg when it's the de facto standard?

4) IP? not sure about this one, but I imagine there are a lot of features baked into Bloomberg with legal protection.

5) The cost is insignificant for most of wall street.

Funny story: on a whim I interviewed with capital IQ while I was in college. They asked me to design an interface that would allow people to access financial information quickly. Having never used or seen Bloomberg, I immediately started describing a system of keyboard shortcuts, to which my interviewer responded that I was basically just describing Bloomberg terminal. Didn't get the job.

If only they had made this more ergonomically possible

It's been about 15 minutes now: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40pinterest&src=typd

really cool? yes. Impractical? probably?

Scanning earth using satellites is really cool. Maybe they're outsourcing this to a central company, and paying a hundred bucks per store per month. fine. But to be honest, there are some more effective low tech ways to catch these numbers, for example by looking at the number of transactions, or installing sensors on every entrance to count the number of people entering.

Seems like they're shooting a pigeon with a cannon.

I think there's way too much emphasis on volume here. Sure, if price swings wildly, there will be a large volume associated with it, but if there's a large spike in volume it doesn't necessarily mean a big change in price.

So ultimately volume is a measure of interest, but for every bought share there was a sold share, so it's not a measure of performance. I would bet that higher volumes might mean lower bid/ask spreads, meaning you're paying a smaller penalty to get in/out of a position, but for most retail traders that spread isn't going to make or break you anyway.

Kx's Q is used widely in finance. Pretty funky, but I used it a bit in my last job.

I agree with this.

Look, if you don't enjoy programming/data/technology then you're probably in the wrong field.

But I think it's ok to have to force yourself to work on the stuff you don't enjoy as much. You just need to have adequate enjoyment from what you do, and the self discipline to do what you enjoy doing. At the end of the day, you're lucky to enjoy what you're doing half of the time, and to be making many times more than the rest of the world's population could make.

I think human brains are probably wired for speed over accuracy too. This might have a lot of potential in machine learning and eventually AI, where information processing speed is often more important than accuracy.

condensate on the ice will add to the glass, making it impossible to answer this question without knowing the humidity and temperature.

It's always shocking to me how many people just assume that a login/password system should store everything in plain text. This was a pretty good explanation of the right way to hash.

One problem though with this guide, some experts think it makes sense to add some extra computation to make it a little bit more difficult to compute the hash, for example creating a hash loop which rehashes 10,000 times or something similar.

In the past, I've found the following php tutorial really well written, and comprehensive:

http://forums.devshed.com/php-faqs-and-stickies-167/how-to-p...

This is only one misleading graph, which, to be honest, I find misleading.

A short route doesn't necessarily mean good bandwidth

Never used it, have thought about spending an hour or two to play with it but ultimately:

There is no good reason that I have encountered yet where I need to use it. Generally I think people try to use the tools they have at their disposal to solve a problem. I have python, and I can do most things in python. It's not always efficient, and as an example, when I first started using python, I blindly used urllib without thinking about it. The requests library has been getting momentum recently, and I found that I prefer it and that it simplifies some of what I do, but at the end of the day why would I have searched for an alternative if what I had was working?

As developers we have to value our time. In an ideal world we would learn everything there was to know about every programming language, and pick the appropriate language for each project. In reality we stop to think that a language is capable of achieving a task, and if it is, we don't look any further.

Ironically, the reason so many people use c/java/python/ruby is because so many people use c/java/python/ruby.

Really interesting - this exploit could apply to any social app that tells you the distance between you and another user

Is it unfair to also ask why the poles of the earth don't appear on the sides of a map?

Nice! What stack are you using?

I have FiOS and use google tv (underrated, but great) and I have been having issues with Netflix recently.

I think the best way to test this would be to open a VPN connection, and connect to AWS or watch Netflix via VPN

I wouldn't read into this even if it wasn't an outsourced support person.

But the proof is in the pudding, the speed tests speak for themselves, no?

IN the perfect world of competition, true.

Unfortunately most people have very few ISP options.

Totally true, but let's be honest even if the chat representative understood English perfectly and denied up and down that Verizon was throttling, he probably doesn't have the expertise to know one way or the other what is actually happening.

I think the evidence speaks for itself however.

Exactly - the beauty of bash is that it's accessible