skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If your stock is accessible to more people, there's higher demand" - this the answer 90% of the time, but I don't believe there has ever been a study (and I've read three or four) that suggests there is any evidence this is true.

To make what I consider to be a not unreasonable comparison, "The standard gold bar held as gold reserves by central banks and traded among bullion dealers is the 400-troy-ounce (12.4 kg or 438.9 ounces) Good Delivery gold bar." [1] - that gold bar currently sells for $41,260 [2] * 12.4 or $511,624/bar. There does not seem to be any difference, per ounce, in price between a one ounce nugget and a 438.9 ounce unit (indeed, there seems to be some transaction costs that imply the larger bar is less expensive per ounce)

For a mature company that is throwing off lots of profit and cash , there are a lot of investors who are analyzing the Discounted Cash Flow of that company, and paying for the stock based on that number. Apple, for better or worse, has entered that realm. Therefore, if they trade significantly below their cash-flow value, those investors will buy up the stock, if they trade significantly above it, those investors will sell the stock (or short it if things get too far out of whack) - It doesn't matter if the stock is selling for $100, $1000, or $10,000/share.

But, the people who run Apple have access to the best advice that money can buy, and they have made this decision - what I'm interested in, ideally from someone who has worked behind the scenes in this kind of really-big-company stock split, is the real reason why this is done. I have a theory it's a mechanism to reward bankers with a lot of business with useless make-work, in return for getting positive ratings moving forward - but I'm open to other theories.

[Edit - another Theory is that Tim Cook and/or his CFO Peter Oppenheimer are just fed up with being asked about a stock split, and given that the stock split is an absolutely meaningless event, that has no negative/positive impact on the company value, but will eliminate the ongoing nagging of people about it, just decided to eliminate that annoyance. My counter argument to that would be is by giving people something meaningless to complain or ask about, you distract them from other things that you would prefer they not spend so much time on - so it's good to leave a few of these around as decoys.]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_bar
[2] http://www.bullionvault.com/
I'm just getting started, but I currently have 3 side-startups (more like side projects) I'm working on. I found that I needed focused, full-time work in the initial stages. Once the website reaches MVP, and has a user base building up, I am able to improve it on the side.

Using the 80/20 rule, 20% of the time you spend building the project will achieve 80% of the use case. The rest of the 80% time is spent on closing the 20% use case gap.
It certainly doesn't help that (supposedly) only some types of asbestos are dangerous.
Dewey. Better bookmarks for Google Chrome
Hopefully your AAPL is in a non-taxable account. Otherwise you are setting yourself up for this [1]:

If all this seems complicated -- it is. A lifetime
of DRIP investing may create a morass of tax
obligations when the time comes to sell the DRIP
shares, with at least four new cost bases of DRIP
shares established each year (when dividends are
reinvested) as well as when any OCPs are made.

The first time I saw my accountant he literally shook my hand when I told him I didn't do DRIP.

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/education/drip/dspp_plans/article/1...
Three Springs
Yes -how insane is that. When I first heard of it, I was almost certain that the person was wrong - but 5 minutes on wikipedia proved they were correct.

But, once again - if the automated purchasing for the stock drives the value up too high, then people will make money selling it - I don't buy into the "inclusion in the indexes drives up long term valuation of a company" - would be interested if anybody has a study that shows otherwise.
Thanks for that. I have about 3 running. 1 for over a year with growing revenue and big customers (relative to small me), another enterprise one which is going extremely well for a 2 month old startup revenue-wise and last one is 6 months in with growing traffic but no revenue model yet. So yesterday after being bit hard by the startup bug I was working on a quick prototype of an idea I've had floating around for two years and decided to stop and ask before going further if this was a smart thing to do at this point. As you've seen it's only been a year running a profitable startup so I'm by no means experienced, and I wondered if at this point there was still room to tinker and toy with ideas.

Automate all the things, have someone handle those you can't. Gotcha, thanks again.
Scientifically alcohol is a drug, culturally it isn't called that. Even go somewhere where people don't drink and they wouldn't use the term "drugs" as an umbrella to include alcohol.

> "Of course a local liquor store is a drug dealer."

Yes, technically correct, but just like jschmitz28 it's incredibly pedantic. The phrase "drug dealer" isn't used to mean "someone who technically sells drugs", it's used to mean "someone who sells illegal recreational drugs". In this case the mom and pop version is what absolutely everyone uses.
But, if that's the case, then people who are not dealing in pop-psychology, but instead in cold-hearted company assessment would stand to make a lot of money, and, in doing so, would quickly drive the value of AAPL to it's correct number.
I agree this is the EB's biggest missing feature. I do it by having a second environment running the same web app. Before deploying I add nodes from this 'reserve' env to the ELB of the main env, and remove all the nodes-to-be-deployed from the main load balancer. Then I deploy the app. When deploy is complete and prod nodes are ready I add them back to the ELB and remove the reserve nodes. The deployment is seamless but this is not a convenient trick - it required a fair bit of custom scripting... Luckily AWS provides great APIs to make all this stuff possible.
Examples of IRC § 501(c)(6) organizations include the Chamber of Commerce, Jaycees, American Bar Association, American Medical Association, and National Association of Manufacturers.

The AMA is a c6 because: lobbying

The organizational definitions in IRC §§ 501(c)(4), (c)(5), and (c)(6) do not contain any explicit limitations on lobbying. The organizations described in these three sections may participate in an unrestricted amount of lobbying so long as the lobbying is related to the organization's exempt purpose. In fact, organizations whose sole activity is lobbying may be recognized under these sections...{etc}

Citation> Tax-Exempt Organizations: Political Activity
Restrictions and Disclosure Requirements, Order Code RL33377
The intent was to incentivise /publishing/ of inventions/mechanisms rather than keeping them a secret. Thus allowing others to build on top of that knowledge.

One way to incentivise this is to grant a /temporary/ monopoly, and require people to publish in exchange. When the temporary monopoly expires everyone else can fully benefit from the invention.
Do you live off of them full time?

Great gem there. I've noticed the same but hadn't had it stuck in my mind that the building stage is the most involving but after that (for most products) there is usually little to do.
Liquidity would possibly be an issues with BRK-A, where 149 shares traded today (though I could make arguments as to why not) - but, AAPL traded 14mm+ shares today. I don't think you would have any problem finding someone to buy your shares at a reasonable spread within seconds. So, I don't buy liquidity as an issue in this situation.
I'm not saying we should continue to use it and I'm not saying that it's perfectly safe. But if you were to ask regular people about asbestos, I would wager that most of them think that if you are exposed to any sort of asbestos, you're going to get lung cancer immediately. Scaring people to the point where people are misinformed from word-of-mouth doesn't make it any safer.

For example, many houses in the Bay Area have asbestos in it, so it's not like having it in your house is going to kill you. You need to deal with it intelligently, but just having asbestos in your home isn't going to kill you. And even then, unless you're breathing it in all the time, you're not automatically going to get lung cancer, just like if you get a CT scan with a radiation exposure equivalent to hundreds of X-rays, you're not automatically going to get cancer. Proper education is important. Sure, lots of people tragically got lung cancer due to heavy exposure, but some exposure won't guarantee anything bad, but it certainly feels like you will based on how people talk about it.
I am torn by what I read about these substances. On the one hand the reports are always similar in that they go through hell but come out a better person in the end. On the other, I find myself constantly asking myself, "can it really be true?" I mean, Joe Rogan touts the benefits of Ayahuasca all the time saying the world just needs to head on down to South America and spend some time tripping. And then we find in his second interview with Amber Lyon that he's never actually done it!*

I would really like to see some truly objective reporting done on substances like Ayahuasca, psilocybin, and MDMA. Even better, I would like to see my government allow serious research into these substances. I suspect they're not necessarily the solution to all our problems but rather can, in fact, provide real and lasting help to many when used properly.

*I'm quite confused about this. Rogan seems to be an otherwise decent guy. Is he just talking out of his ass with regards to Ayahuasca? Is this just his comedy? Is he just assuming his experiences with cannabis and mushrooms are indicative of an Ayahuasca experience?
I don't think the analogy to gold is strong, mainly because any holder of 400 oz t gold bars can freely convert them to smaller units, the old-fashioned way. You can't do that to a BH share certificate, or at least it doesn't work as well. ;)
"Corner" style inner-city dealers definitely still exist.

If you're in SF, walk by the corner of Turk and Leavenworth and you'll have quite a few entrepreneurs of a different sort offering you "Roxies and Ps" or "Chiva".
my .ebextensions script just calls chef-client, which is pretty straightforward to maintain.. Downside is that it takes many minutes for a new node to come up. Sounds like docker might help speed this up.
A 50% cut off transactions? Holy wow Batman.

I like that you can get away with it but has anybody ever complained?

Edit ---

Btw you have some kind of awful bug where after you click about 2-3 subjects on the left sidebar, the links to view info on the notes for sale becomes blank and unclickable. I suppose that doesnt help conversion :P Email me if you need a better explanation to recreate the problem.
A link to said spec / whitepaper (it's quite informative!): http://images.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb1...
Modern-day cleanroom invented by Sandia physicist still used 50 years later
We need better mobile multitasking
Show HN: neat adventure travel website
Are pinned debit card transactions considered ACH transactions?

None of the payment processing providers differentiate between the two.
My grandfather died of mesothelioma from asbestos last year. Other than that he was 89 years old and otherwise in fantastic shape for his age, tending a multi-acre garden and working on landscaping. He was not a carpenter, nor was he a contractor. He ran a boiler at a sugar cane processing plant. The only time he was exposed to asbestos was in the day to day operations of that facility. He was not an employee at the time that it was built.
I love well written stuff. I wish we made more of this today.
Particularly now that ICMP is actually a requirement for IPv6 networks to actually function.
But what kind of patent infringement cases and/or notable patent avoidance in computing do we actually see in practice? Off the top of my head:

- patent trolls, lots and lots of patent trolls, throwing around patents for things like in-app purchases and SSL

- Samsung and Apple throwing random patents at each other and mostly not accomplishing anything

- file systems - FAT LFN, exFAT

- machine instruction sets

- video codecs

- ClearType

Out of those examples, the first two are clearly awful, and the second two are pretty bad because they prevent compatibility/competition. The last two are relatively OK - with video codecs patent uncertainty is very damaging, but as long as we're hypothetically revamping the system we can fix that.

But the last two are also pretty unimportant compared to the software industry as a whole; keeping or abolishing them wouldn't make a huge difference to anyone other than MPEG LA. I'll make a bit of an extrapolation and claim that after factoring out undesirable use of software patents, the same would apply to abolishing them entirely: there would be little effect, because patents never effectively prevented ripoffs in the first place. Yet in the present, plenty of companies focus plenty of effort on R&D. Why they'd do so without patents is the same as why they do so today: most significant functionality takes a lot of time and work to implement, so being first is a large competitive advantage.

I guess we're not restricted to looking at what's currently patentable; if you really wanted to discourage ripoffs, you could expand the patent system along those lines at the same time as weakening the current system. But personally, today's patents are dangerous enough that any thought of expansion really scares me.
I used to work for a pre-IPO startup that had experienced a pretty big run-up in their stock price. As a result, their new hires were getting options to buy 200 shares at $100 per share. (I made up those numbers, but you get the idea.) They did a big stock split partly to change the numbers in stock option offers. Apparently it was much more enticing to offer candidates options for 2000 shares at $10 per share. Even though the options would have the same total value, they believed candidates would respond much better to an offer of "more options."
There some asbestos products where the fibres can easily get into the air like lagging and others where they are bonded in side some product like a cement and it isn't a risk if you leave it alone. The risk for average people is home renovation as asbestos was used in a huge variety of building products and it isn't always obvious. Clearly you can do things to mitigate the risk.
In California there's a large asbestos deposit near the town of Coalinga. Two of the mines were cleaned up under the EPA "superfund". The surrounding area also contains a toxic mercury mine called New Idria. The whole region is remote and favored by hunters, campers, and motorcyclists.

The funny thing about this site is how polarizing it is. The EPA claims victory in cleaning up the mines, but geologists point out that tectonic activity and erosion liberate and transport millions of cubic yards of asbestos. The BLM says the area is closed, but motorcycle clubs still trespass. Some people say that the local asbestos isn't dangerous because it's fluffier/shorter/longer/curlier than others that are dangerous. Rural people say the closure is a coastal, liberal conspiracy. Complete opposite opinions are expressed in apparently respectable peer-reviewed scientific journals.

I don't know what to believe. Maybe the rednecks are right, it's a perfectly good place to tear it up on your dirt bike. Or maybe it's insanely dangerous, and the uncertainty is caused by industry disinformation campaigns. Who knows.
It's been 6 days - how's your egg doing?

:)
Google: if you wanted to take encryption mainstream, you shouldn't have gone miles out of your way to sabatoge compatibility with web email encryption plugins.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/831463
Dearest Brookstone: an ode to a much-loved retailer
Please explain the port mapping in more detail. For example, let's say I want to run N containers on one host OS. Each of the N containers exposes port 80. How do you do the mapping?
Draw up a project plan with staged payments. Ask for an advance, etc.

Yup! Money NOT equity! Just charge market rates for your work. With 4 cofounders they should be able to finance "their idea" - hey they work in a bank ... dhuuh!

If they don't want to play on your terms, then it is better to find out now. One tech guy vs four biz types - just can't end well. No contract will totally protect you and good lawyers don't come cheap. Cheap lawyers end up costing even more in the long term.
This reminds me of the galaxy s1 and s2. Its pretty damn competitive, and its half the price of the others.

I bought the s2 for 400 on release day and it was awesome enough. Nowadays the s5 is 6-700 on release day.

if they deliver what they show - im probably getting one of these oneplus - not a S5 or even an xperia Z2 - thanks but no thanks.
The white asbestos (chrysotile) that the article talks about is listed as a carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the US Dept of Health.
Therefore your excuse for not legally paying for content is: "I'm cheap and break the law because there's only a very small chance I can get in trouble." Not bad...not bad.
| Actually, elecengin said that.

Sorry for that mistake, and thanks for the links.
Most contractors, if they know or are unsure will not touch certain jobs with a 10ft pole for fear of asbestos. In older houses in the Bay Area, likely culprits are old tile, the glue used, or old ducting.

With care, most of this can be removed with little risk. However, as you point out, caution is needed and most DIYers may not think about things. The other extreme is calling in the men in bunny suits that will run multiple thousands for even small issues due to permits, precautions, and disposal.
--Could you (or someone) explain what benefit microsoft would see in this type of pm over the app store that comes with windows 8?

This looks like the type of side project that gets killed once it gains too much momentum and a low level exec gets wind of its possible trajectory.

Because really, if you're looking at the current strategy, it's moving away from this type of dev stuff and more towards easy-to-use-and-fun-GUI stuff. At last year's build I remember them showing a way to put private corporate apps in their store that would only be available with a special key or something. So while I'd love this, it seems doubtful that they'd ever really give something like this too much air.--

EDIT::

I stand corrected, apparently even though they're using google groups and google code for hosting, OneGet was actually demoed at Build2014 and they're working with Chocolatey to get it working. I'm blown away at the amo0unt of commitment and effort already expended, it might be a new Microsoft after all!
> Even go somewhere where people don't drink and they wouldn't use the term "drugs" as an umbrella to include alcohol.

Ah, interesting, I didn't know that. How many muslim cultures and languages are you familiar with?
Wow, arseholes. It's hard to recommend any course of action really, because I can't think of any coworkers I've ever had who'd refuse a reasonable request like that. I guess I'd offer to buy them some flavoured nicotine gum and ask them to try that for a while?
I disagree but will switch to a "near zero marginal cost" company.
Hmm... so visual studio professional setup is that easy?

Don't you need a license key per windows instance or something?

I'm not dissing VS, I have 2012 and 2010 on my windows partition, just wondering if it's really that easy.
Not yet. They're profitable but not enough to support me.

Once I have the third project up and running, I plan to focus on freelancing or a full-time job, and grow these on the side.
A Check of the Open-Source Project WinSCP Developed in Embarcadero C++ Builder
Python's List Comprehension vs .net's LINQ
Watch if bored. Need views.
its for my advertising class. we just need views. PLEASE WATCH.
Well in a Interview I was told it was clear I had ability but he couldn't take a risk on someone who hadn't finished.. :/
I am really curious about this point of view. Many of my friends and colleagues share it. Do you really see no issue with downloading something for free if it isn't provided to you in a way you can pay for and consume that you prefer? Are you okay that you are not paying for something that really does take a large amount of money to create?
Has game development got a target singularity? What would it be? Simulated Worlds like Matrix?
That's all true, I just don't think it's as huge a factor as a lot of people think it is. If one OS market share is so small that the result is very, very few good apps being written for it, and many big-name apps are not available for it (like Twitter or Facebook or Candy Crush or whatever), that's a big problem. But up until that point, it doesn't really matter.

For example, IMO Windows Phone has a much smaller app store than iOS or Android, but it's big enough that the size of the app store is probably not going to be the #1 factor (or even in the top 5) when someone is deciding what kind of phone to get.

Consumers might say "I don't want Windows Phone because Windows Phone isn't appealing to me", but it's probably past the point where very many people would say, "I really like Windows Phone but won't get one because there aren't enough apps." Point being, Windows Phone is a very distant third behind Android and iOS in terms of market share. It's in the low single digits in market share, but that's still enough to get over the adequate-app-store hump (IMO at least).

So, I'm not denying that market share is essential to drawing developers, I just don't know if the market share extremes are ever going to get big enough to have an impact on iOS vs. Android.

My main objection is when people (and I'm not accusing you of this) slip into there-can-only-be-one-ishness, where there is an implicit notion that the market being discussed is a natural monopoly, and that the ultimate outcome is inevitably a market share horse race that leaves only one company standing. The argument is always that whoever has the most market share gets more apps, and whoever gets more apps gets more market share, resulting in a natural tendency towards a last man standing situation.

This was such a huge theme in the '90s in the computer industry- so many people just assumed that market share alone would cause Windows to completely take over to a much greater degree than it has. Mac OS would just vanish, and Linux would turn out to be just a fad amongst CS undergrads. Of course, Microsoft still has a monopoly, in the sense that it has 90%+ market share pretty much any way you look at it, but that's a lot different than 100.0% market share that people were predicting it would have. That leaves plenty of room for OS X and Linux and others to find their niche, and those niches are frequently more profitable and/or interesting than the mass market that Microsoft has covered so thoroughly. I wouldn't be surprised if the mobile world shook out in a similar way, long-term.
I think netstrings provide a good and dirt simple format for robust logging. It's just a simple length prefix (which is ASCII, so the length is itself variable length).

http://cr.yp.to/proto/netstrings.txt

e.g. 3:foo,

So if one record gets borked, you can search for the next few length prefixes that "line up".

This doesn't require any transaction library or anything. It's just a little bit of redundancy in the data.

It's a good format for delimiting JSON too. I was surprised to find recently that JSON-RPC makes you parse all the JSON to find the closing }.
Chrome Extension Stealing Bitcoins