skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@giarc: Shorting consists of borrowing as asset from someone to sell at the current market price and hoping it goes down in value, so you can buy it back for less that you sold it and then return the asset to its owner. In this scenario, you take the difference in price, less the premium you paid the owner for the right to borrow. To give an example, say stock A is trading at $100, but you think it is going to fall. Say you find someone who is willing to let you borrow a share of stock A for a week for the premium of $1. You agree, and then immediately sell this share back to the market for $100. You now have $99. If the stock falls, as you hope it does, say to $90, you spend $90 to repurchase the share and return it. You now earned $9 on a short.

Consider the opposite scenario: you short, but the price goes up. Again, borrowing a share of stock A for $1, trading at $100. You sell that share to the market and wait for the price to fall, so you can buy and return. But, suddenly the market learns that company A is insanely profitable in a previously unknown way, and the price of the stock skyrockets. At the end of the borrowing term, you are obligated to return a share of stock A to the person you borrowed from. How much will you have to pay to get it back? This is theoretically unlimited, depending on how high the market goes. If the market goes to $200, you have lost $101 on the short. If the market goes to $200,100 (and does not fall below this before the end of the borrowing term), you have lost $200,001 on the short.

Now imagine you have borrowed a LOT of shares on high leverage (value of what you borrow exceeds what you actually have on hand to pay it back) and you can see how shorting and being wrong can wipe you out.

Good point from svachalek[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6690938] below: if the borrowed stock rises high enough, eventually the lender is going to margin call you..

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/shortmarginrequir...
It doesn't have to have the earning potential of Google to be successful. It's valuation is 1/10th of Google's.
> Even with the disaster that was the Facebook IPO, if you held for a little over a year you'd be up nicely.

It could be argued that the Facebook IPO pricing was absolutely brilliant, in that Facebook and its selling shareholders received (what in retrospect was) top dollar under the then-extant market conditions, instead of in effect giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to the fortunate few who were able to purchase IPO shares.
Finally, Facebook comes to Boston
Job posting for a PHP pirate
The P/E doesn't mean it's overvalued, it means it's priced assuming substantial growth in earnings. That doesn't make either the forward-looking market price or the backwards-looking profit numbers wrong.

If that growth is unlikely to happen, then it's overvalued. If Twitter becomes quadruple-Facebook and is earning $2.5 billion/year in a few years, it's very undervalued.
So Vista is dead, right?
and starts paying that out to investors

That part doesn't actually happen anymore these days rendering most of these new tech stocks very complex insider wealth generating schemes.
I think Amazon is another outlier, as we've already discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6591112

Notable pull quote: "It's important to note that if any other company spent until their EPS was negative, investors would /flip/. Amazon is playing with razor thin margins while trying to scale up a platform to end all platforms that we might someday use for everything without thinking about it."

So again, like Apple and Facebook, everyone knows the CEO is playing the long game and doesn't give a crap what the stock price is.
This is relevant to my interests. Where can I learn more?
For people who care, I support New incentives - an organization that's actively trying to help constrain AIDS in Africa and that has managed to do it in a very cost effective and transparent way.
Ctrl-Alt T, F11

Launch terminal, go fullscreen, much faster.

You are right about muscle memory. I hated Ubuntu until I forced myself to learn the shortcuts, now I love it.
You have made the mistake of assuming mutual exclusion when I for one did not. I am a software engineer and I do this professionally. I am fully aware of the kinds of technical issues, and procedurally issues, which can fully or at least even partially account for its woes. That was not my point. My point was pretty clear and I was very very careful with my exact wording, if you'd care to take a second look at my original comment you've attacked, and probably downvoted, erroneously.
That's new in C++11 though, isn't it? I'm pretty sure (i.e. I haven't checked the spec) that as far as C++03 the complexity was allowed to be linear. Honestly my sense of aesthetics agrees -- linked lists aren't supposed to have constant-time operations, there are better choices if that is a requirement. And if you want an augmented data structure you should cook your own: a list with extra tracking (i.e. ever node needs to have a pointer to the global thingy!) and insertion hooks isn't a "list" any more.
Let's calculate.

Twitter revenue was $391M for last 4 quarters [1].
Twitter market cap is currently $24670M, or about 63 times the revenue. If Twitter's revenue grows 100% each year (that is, twice each year), it will take 5 years for them to catch their current market cap with revenue: 1 + 2 + 4 + ... + 32 = 63.

But what investors are interested in is not revenue, it's profit. Let's imagine that Twitter discovers a magnificent monetization strategy that gives it 25% margin, like the one Apple enjoys. It would then pay out its market cap in 2 more years (4x growth).

This assumes that Twitter will always enjoy unfettered 2x revenue growth and the same high margin each year, while its valuation stands still, as does the dollar inflation. All these assumptions look a bit unrealistic to me, alas.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-revenues-2013-10
Show HN: Compare success/decline rates by different payment gateways
Until recently, neither has AAPL. Doesn't mean the cash disappeared.

GOOG has 56.52B in cash and short-term investments (as of end of september). It's on GOOG's books but could easily be paid out (either directly or in the form of a share buyback)
Its not "the Patriot Act". Its "the USA PATRIOT Act". And USA PATRIOT is not just a ridiculous emotional appeal embedded into a name, its also an acronym for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism".
I don't agree with your point that arguing what-if scenarios is a losing argument. These days there are enough actual or potential attacks on groups that someone holds dear such that a what-if argument can be constructed that will resonate with anyone. Sure, there may be some people that would want, say, the Occupy Wall Street activists monitored, and those same people would deplore the Tea Party "activists" being monitored by something like the Obama administration.

I would argue that imagining what-if scenarios and disseminating that fear are the only way to prevent us from crossing the threshold where there's no turning back. Waiting for direct evidence of a police state is a losing battle. Just take a look at what a decade of the All-Seeing-NSA-deniers have brought us? Relying on the next Snowden to bring us hard evidence about intelligence activities is a losing proposition.
> This will break cross-browser compatibility.

That kinda ruined all the excitement for me :(
Good of the OP to include all of the alternative techniques that might be better for cross-browser or other specific situations.

Seems like transforms are better than the original main suggestion though... why not stick with those?
Shouldn't we expect that success for one means loss for the other? Their services have significant overlap, and the social/mobile advertising market is finite.
especially if you're a girl :)
Not directly relevant. Not required to add "ifs" and "buts" to each story.
"breach of fiduciary duty" is a very real thing. (29 USC § 1109 specifically) In this case it has nothing to do with the link you posted. He means the contract that Twitter signed with the banks probably has language that says they will attempt to get the best possible price for the shares. The resulting pop shows that they did not do that.
you can do (real) vertical-centering with display: inline-block too

See https://twitter.com/giuseppegurgone/status/38820349236545126...
Thanks for this response. I think I may have to do a crash course on each one for a few days to make a more informed decision. I've always used Backbone to quickly prototype, but I like the idea of having a more complete toolkit once prototyping is done.
> Anybody who buys TWTR is making an informed decision

If only.
> From my own experience, many don't give because they don't want to.

Good point; despite many being flush with money some can be notoriously stingy. Of course, it's the stuff of proverbs that the most well-off give less freely than those with less.
Ideally, yes. But they do undervalue so that there's more incentive for IPO investors to buy in. Value it too high, IPO investors won't bite, and the firm won't raise as much capital as they want.

The real story is that Twitter raised 1.8 billion in cash, the market is just a side-show.
cool but the name have bad connotation. go shit poo ?
If you buy a stock at 10 and it goes to zero (the bottom limit), all you lose is your $10. If you short a stock (thinking it's price will go down), there is no upper limit on how far it can go up. If it continues to go up, you're going to lose the amount of money at which you eventually "buy to cover". For example, if you hold your short until the price is $100, you lose $90.
Here's the documentation for pillow. There are quite a few new features and supported formats.

http://pillow.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

It's amusing to me that he ignores pillow for the whole piece and then links to the tutorial I ported to the pillow docs from the PIL handbook just a few weeks ago.
> The biggest problem I have with IE is disjointed updates. They don't care enough to fix the one thing they need to fix. And don't tell me they're doing automatic updates now, they need to go back and fix all versions. Including on Windows XP.

Their claim is that it's impossible to provide modern IE for older versions of Windows, because IE is so deeply tied into the OS it requires features and libraries that are intimately tied to newer versions and don't/can't exist on (say) XP.

(Not saying I endorse that as a reasonable position, just explaining why they do things the way they do.)
Because the actual content of the article is interesting, it's as applicable to Pillow as it is to PIL.
This is great and looks like it has great potential to expand into added services. Do you plan on having international "less than container" air shipping rates?
Not just Mac OS X, it is in the FreeBSD base system by default, it is the replacement for the libstdc++. See FreeBSD 10 where the switch was made :-).
You might think we're better controlling these assets on your own machine, but I have endless stories of friends and family loosing files, deleting stuff, failed backups, etc.

There are many people who don't care about the asset being on a machine vs their phone. They just want the asset wherever they are. This is why there's so many successful cloud-based services like DropBox and Evernote.

Why is source code any different? (Not asking about corporate privacy/trade-secrets here, just the concept of a code file as text being shared to all your devices and thought of as an asset you always have access to).

I'm of the opinion that the sooner I can throw away the device I'm using today, and pickup my work with the next device, the better we are. Using my desktop computer here at work. Tablet on the train, etc... and then I want a new Tablet? Boom, just log into my IDE and I can continue coding ASAP. Just like logging in to email.

This wave is coming. Right now big enterprises have virtualized their dev environments into secure environemnts that you can only access via RDP. The next phase for them is offering only secured source-coded private-cloud based editing solution.
"Windows XP still works "good enough" for most computing tasks."

Well... when those computing tasks increasingly involve using web services, then no, Windows XP doesn't still work "good enough".
I would argue that, nowadays, many young people expect the government to take care of necessary social work, making charity less relevant. Here's my theory, which admittedly has no data to back it up:

Older people, who skew Republican, believe in small government, and believe in private charity. (They're also more religious, and remember that a lot of charity is really donating to your church.)

Whereas younger people (especially techies), who skew Democrat, tend to believe more in active government, and believe that democratic participation will ultimately lead to effective social use of their tax dollars.

And it's not an unreasonable position, necessarily. If you support higher taxes and more political activism, there are many good arguments as to how government policy is a vastly better conduit for doing social good, than private charity.
I would rather pay more in taxes.
As a web developer, I have to say that this looks amazing! You guys did a great job building this and it looks really polished. Congratulations on launching.

On the other hand, I have to agree with many of the other commenters who say they would prefer to have their files on their file system.

Maybe you could consider integrating with the file system api for platforms that support it? Then you could have the best of both worlds.
Google had a solid, well-working monetization mechanism: AdWords, released in 2000, 4 years before the IPO. It was easy to see how it performs financially and why it might skyrocket.

Can someone enlighten me how Twitter might earn some steady money?
GRPN and TWTR are not the same. I can assure you, that things worked out just fine for GOOG employees. GRPN was very clearly broken. TWTR is not. Whether it is worth this or not I don't know, but I wouldn't expect it to behave like GRPN.
Having met most of the LessEverything guys, I'd definitely say they know what they are doing.
You might be surprised. Supporting extra stuff can have serious IT costs. When the head of IT says it's going require x dollars, y FTEs, or z weeks in schedule slippage to bring on that support, the CEO turns to the VP and says, "Jim, is this really worth it?"

But things can shift slowly. I worked at a big media company when the iPhone was launched. The next day, the CIO emailed the entire company of 20k and said that iPhones would not absolutely not be supported, and to please stop asking no matter what VP/SVP/EVP you were. It was years before iOS was permitted on the network.
Yes I talked to some lawyers and that's what they told me. Thank you!!!
Ideas worth implementing – Startup Weekend, Mumbai
Unsexy is the new sexy. Go Silicon Beach!
I still don't get Twitter!
Are you suggesting markets are not efficient? In that case, when can we expect you to become extremely wealthy from your inefficiency-proving strategy? (Claiming the EMH is false is equivalent to claiming that such a strategy exists.)

What if I were able to prove that markets are inefficient because efficiently pricing securities is an NP-complete problem? Well, sure, maybe a strategy exists, but if it requires solving an intractable problem then I'm not about to get rich off of my proof ;)
New platform for funny vines
From 16 years old developer.
PIL has never worked with pip, but you can still install it using the instructions on their web site.

pillow works fine with pip.
Mmm, you're right w.r.t Goa and extricating out Bangladesh off Pakistan's. But there is much more prior to these controlled aggressions - for example "suspension of civil liberties" for those who lived under Portugese administration (see wikipedia). Let's also not forget that Goa was a colony of Portugal but originally it was a part of our land. Similarly sandwiching between Pakistan on left and Pakistan II on right wasn't a great experience either.

To get pedantic on this subject, even the Mughals aren't originally from India. Mughal campaigns in Central Asia was also about plundering and ruling India, it's not the other way round. In fact original Indians are not even Aryans (I am an Aryan) of European descendence for that matter. So my estimate of 3000 years stands corrected, it goes way further back than that.

Sentinals, for example in my prior comment, are aboriginal of the Indian peninsula. The other term used to represent aboriginal Hindus is the Dravidians. This land has chosen entropy over order, I can assure you.
Of course, if the banks held FB stock for sometime, they'd realize a profit based on todays price.
For a computer-buyer? It's 6 years old, not 12. If you bought a computer in January 2007, it ran Windows XP. That computer could've been a 2 Ghz dual-core 64-bit machine that should still run fine today, but the operating-system bundled with it is end-of-life.

We all know computer sales are in a slump because quite frankly a computer from 2007 is fine at most of today's computing tasks. So are you really shocked that users of such machines are bothered by the fact that their OS is now unsupported with no free-upgrade path?
Uhm.... Diabetes can be a life-long disease. Way to discount people for being irresponsible. Clearly people who eat too many sweets don't deserve health care in your eyes.
Inaka / Scaling Erlang
Regarding tax dollars: please take a moment and google for "QE3 stimulus package". If not tax dollars, it's inflation dollars, which is an indirect tax anyway.
How I created passive income in a week, by over-delivering value
If you're referring to historical ages, then this pretty much applies to all other continents including Asia, Europe, America etc. Wasn't it pretty common for kingdoms to wage wars against each other?

The original poster said "3000 years", so I don't know why you'd get upset that someone started talking about history.

It doesn't take much to Google to get your facts right. It's actually Pakistan that often violates cease-fire.

We've always been at war with Eastasia
Other one from the summaries:

I don't see how

$((${X} + ${Y}))

... is more recommendable than ...

$(( X + Y ))

for example.

But well, guide styles are a good thing, and this one can help to many people "not used" to deal with shell scripts to follow some basics.

Edit: and help to people used to it, on working in a team.
Why is it that arrays start at 0?
Most Walkable Cities in United States, Canada, Australia.
How does Wall St always seem to end up with the blame on these threads? They priced the Facebook IPO too high and they get the blame, they priced the Twitter IPO too low and they get the blame. The company just went public and raised $2B+ at a higher valuation initial valuation then anyone expected. IPOs are tricky things to get right. Give it a few months for the hype to settle down before you start screaming about "joe public".
That's what we were thinking! Out of all the markets we looked at, this seemed to be the most underserved in terms of software. There is a lot of partial software solutions out there, but they are all extremely antiquated and end up being a huge burden on the users.
Garantia Data Now Offering More Free Space, New Plans at a Lower Price
>"And, again from my perspective, I wish someone had made clear to me sooner how the world really works, today (and likely always). "Paying your dues". Earning respect. There are environments in which this works. But there are many in which it does not."

Very true. This is why I think "get the fuck out" is often great advice. Keep moving, onward and upward. Sit still too long and you run the risk of getting run down and becoming what you hate without even realizing it.

It seems to me there are plenty of books which claim to teach you how to be a great leader, but not so many about how to manage up, lead from the rear and survive among hostile peers.

Personally, one of the better resources I've read for this was The 48 Laws of Power [1]. The book sometimes gets a bad rap from people who look at it as a manual for your own action. While it could certainly be applied that way, it's at least as useful for understanding the mechanism of others actions and how to protect yourself against or benefit from them.

1: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0140280197/
Where is the article? I clicked this and saw headline + picture.
Only a small percentage of TWTR shares were up for sale in the IPO--there are 544.70M total shares and just 70M were part of the IPO (a little less than 13%). Unless I missed something the shares sold in the IPO were issued, so for example if you were a VC with a million shares of TWTR you would still have a million shares of TWTR (now valued at $45M). The money from the sale will go to Twitter, not an investor. Twitter did "leave money on the table", but their #1 goal was not to pull a Facebook and have the IPO be DOA.
Could you please tell me what the difference between you and smailex.com?
How to Use Your Computer All Day Without Hurting Your Eyes
It isn't free. Someone else is paying your parent's bill, either through their own premiums (which some say have tripled, though they have no prior conditions) or through taxes. Don't judge the price till the bill takes full effect; you may not be smiling.
Or you can buy puts and the most you're out is the amount you paid for the option.

If you're looking to play around with some money - basically playing a gambling game with companies - then options are a fun little game and you can manage your downside perfectly.
That screenshot looks an awful lot like Inky (http://inky.com/).
I want someone to try these and report back. I've covered mine with a drywall + insulation + drywall sandwich.
This kind of thing is exactly what I need for my students. It's so much easier using web-based products where I don't have issues with the network at work or students installing software at home.
I currently use Mozilla Thimble quite a lot, and the more IDEs of this type we get, the better they'll all become.
The underwriter's goal is to facilitate a successful IPO. There are obviously different interests at play. The company and its investors would like to say as high a price as possible. The new public investors the shares are being sold to would like to see as big a profit potential as possible. The bank's job consists of choosing a sensible price point for all parties involved and advertising the offering so as to generate interest in the shares. Once the actual IPO happens, the public is able to see whether or not the bank did a good job. This in turn is important for the bank's reputation and ability to acquire future deals.

The FB IPO was widely considered a failure because the initial share price was unsustainable. The underwriters had to buy massive amounts of shares on the IPO day to stabilise the price above the initial level. This, however, couldn't avoid the crash over the next months which lead to early public investors being underwater. Morgan Stanley's (as well as Nasdaq's) reputation took a big hit thanks to this and it will haunt them for quite a while. It's also the reason why the TWTR IPO is lead by Goldman Sachs and the shares trade on the NYSE.
Um, I don't consider "Obamacare" emotional, I consider it neutral. I just think it's a catchy nickname for legislation. It is neither negative or positive.
Serious question: Why does the Hacker News crowd seem to be so cynical about big tech IPOs? Considering for most startups this is the dream, why aren't there more congratulatory high fives? Is it just a case of jealousy?

This IPO is going really well. The stock is being well received in the marketplace. I know twitter employees who just got rich are reading this, but can't comment due to SEC rules, so congrats Twitter peeps!
What got you stuck on CasperJS?

I've been thinking about creating a web front-end to CasperJS.