ctkrohn's comments

That's already very common practice, and unfortunately it's not very effective. Bear Stearns was 30% employee owned [1], and Lehman was 25% employee owned [2]. All that stock became worthless when the firms blew up.

[1] http://www.nceo.org/main/column.php/id/282 [2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122117966831526067.html

They answer a few of these questions on their FAQ: https://banksimple.com/faq/

* They are not a bank. They are essentially a web frontend for wholesale banks. Thus they are regulated differently.

* You do have the benefit of FDIC insurance, but it's unclear what ability you have to access your funds directly from the wholesale bank, or whether you are limited to BankSimple.

Here's the Python equivalent, for what it's worth: http://www.trinhhaianh.com/stream.py/

I've been playing around with this in my current project, yet I'm not convinced this is always such a great model. It requires a lot of mental work to remember what types you are operating on at each state in the pipeline. That being said, I'm a big fan of LINQ, and I'd like to see this model applied more frequently to DB queries.

Vanity Fair is a bizarre magazine. One day they'll publish a penetrating article by Michael Lewis on the Irish financial crisis. The next day they'll have a great article about a team of English mountaineers, two of whom died on Mont Blanc. Then they'll turn around and do a huge cover story on Justin Bieber. If they publish something I care about, I'll find it extremely interesting and well written, but the other half I find completely inane.

I'm really not sure how this is different from Last.fm. I use Last.fm for all the purposes mentioned in the article: keeping track of what I listen to, finding new artists, following friends, etc. Am I missing something?

Actually, Chicago is the font on the original iPods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_(typeface)

I work with Brian at the Cambridge Coworking Center. His work ethic is absolutely absurd, and he deserves every bit of this success. It's an awesome and inspiring story.

Ah, good point on why we should look at employment vs. unemployment. Makes sense.

I was tempted to argue that the decline in construction doesn't support the "obsolete jobs" hypothesis, because the jobs were created by an overheated housing market and shouldn't have been there in the first place. But regardless of whether the jobs were justified in the first place, they're not coming back. A technological shift isn't the only thing that can make a job obsolete; a one-time speculative bubble can do the same thing.

This article is unpersuasive. Each of the supposedly anti-IPO changes had a very good reason behind it. These should be seriously considered before reverting to the old way of doing things:

#1: This is really a consequence of the other factors he cites.

#2: Decimalization made stock trading massively cheaper. When prices were quoted in eighths, the price at which you could sell was 12.5 cents lower than the price at which you could buy. This difference went straight into the pockets of brokers, not investors. It was basically free money.

#3: Internet brokerages. What, you'd rather get on the phone and call someone to make a trade? I love the convenience of E*TRADE and similar platforms.

#4: The growth of prop trading, in and of itself, didn't push out IPOs. It merely filled the void in profits left when IPOs stopped making as much money for the banks.

#5: Keep in mind how research used to be done: banks would effectively promise to write good research on stocks they brought to market. I think it's absurd and insulting to new companies to suggest that no one would buy their stocks unless accompanied by heavily biased "research."

#6: Guess what, shareholders are the owners of the companies. They should have a say in how companies are run. There's a balance between their interests and management's interests, but the author merely asserts that things went to far without providing evidence.

#7: While there's plenty of wealth outside the US, international investors are still able to invest in the US. I don't see why this is a negative for IPOs.

#8: Larger funds: I'll admit that I'm unsure about this criticism. I don't know enough about this area of the market.

#9: Keep in mind that Sarbox was passed to prevent Enron and Worldcom. Its requirements may be onerous, but they're designed to help prevent specific types of fraud that were extremely damaging to the economy. While Sarbox may have reduced IPOs, it also may have reduced the risk of fraud. It's difficult to say.

Which jobs were made obsolete? If unemployment were technologically driven, you would expect IT to have less unemployment relative to other industries. But that's not the case. Paul Krugman had a pretty good post on the topic:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/whos-unemployed/

Ah yes, forgot about the Alpha port of NT. It's a little-known fact that Windows NT ran on non-Intel architectures: besides the Alpha version, there were MIPS and PowerPC ports.

Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm in the article, previously tried to create a market in box office futures:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/business/media/08futures.h...

Cantor is a brokerage firm at heart -- I dealt with them frequently when I worked on Wall Street. Their entire reason for existence is to match buyers and sellers, and take a cut of the transaction. More markets to do so means more money for Cantor.

I grew up using a Intel 486-powered DEC workstation. DEC's legendary machines were behind them by that point, but I still have plenty of nostalgia for that computer. 16MB of RAM was a lot of memory in 1993.

Another vote for Square One. They've been extremely helpful and offer great service. They'll be happy to put the money in CDs or in an interest-bearing savings account, and will also be able to advise you on what's common for startups at your stage.

"So Page—so integral to what makes Google Google that its central PageRank algorithm is named for him—is pushing his way into the CEO job, leaving Schmidt as chairman."

Really? I was always under the impression that PageRank got its name because, you know, it ranked pages. Is there more of a story behind the naming?

The Amiga had an m68k-series CPU, so Linux will run on it too, just as it will on old Macintoshes.

For more info, http://www.linux-m68k.org/

Doesn't seem like he's calling Facebook a fraud. But Enron had a famously superstar-driven culture. In particular, they had a fairly strict employee ranking system. Every year, each employee would be assigned a quintile based on performance. The top 20% of performers would always get raises, and the bottom 20% would always get fired. Sounds like a great system in theory, but from what I hear from people who were there, it led to a poisonous and cutthroat culture. Not sure if the same will happen to Facebook, but there certainly are some dangers.

It's encouraging to see that Kasparov framed his famous tournament as "programmer vs. machine" rather than "man vs. machine." In hindsight, it's easy to chalk Deep Blue's victory up to computational inevitability, but there was some seriously cool engineering going on behind the scenes. Deep Blue was a purpose-built chess machine: a 30-node RS/6000 supercomputer controlling 480 custom chess chips. It was the culmination of nearly a decade of research at IBM.

Don't forget Matplotlib. Great-looking visualizations built on top of the Numpy stack.

No! Do it! Fork my trivial program and put up your results.

The square is a pretty interesting place to start, though, since we already know there's a relationship between quadratic polynomials over the naturals and the distribution of primes. These polynomials describe lines that (eventually) become straight.

This is definitely amateur math hour for me. I was a math major a few years ago, but I did not study any number theory.