saretired

The difference is 1.09%, not 9%. Also, what was the time delta between those quotes?

I have no way of predicting Snap’s future, but I am certain that tomorrow, the founders and VCs will take hundreds of millions off the table through share sales, the investment bankers will earn fat fees, ditto the deal lawyers, some people will buy in hoping for a quick buck on a first-day big pop, and founders and VCs all around will be looking for increased pre-IPO valuations. That’s what this show is, and the rest is just speculation.

Of course you have the right not to tip, it's optional after all, but many people do choose to give tips, and then the question is whether part of the tip is being skimmed off by Instacart.

Restaurants have paid large fines under the Fair Labor Standards Act for tip skimming; I have no idea if FLSA applies here, but if a consumer chooses to tip, s/he has a reasonable expectation that the money will be going to the person providing the service and not to the person's employer.

That was the motto on the Washington family coat of arms before he was born. It's a quote from Ovid.

Taiwanese companies such as Foxconn with extensive operations on the mainland may be particularly vulnerable if the Trump government insists on making the one China policy a bargaining chip in trade negotiations. We’ll see how it all plays out, but the worst case would obviously impact Apple and a few other US tech companies.

I'm looking at the excepts in his post, which are broken.

The “optimized” functions have a bug when the number of remaining bytes is less than the block size.

'Laid off' is ambiguous: it can mean either a temporary suspension (i.e., a factory lays off some workers until conditions improve) or a permanent job loss. I haven't seen any suggestion that these job loses at Theranos are temporary, so I have no problem with the use of the word 'fired' in this context.

Perhaps as a proof of concept they can do a native implementation of GNU grep in Haskell and publish some timing stats.

Apple's OS of that era was still single-threaded and an antique next to Windows. NeXT gave them a modern OS. Performance was falling further and further behind Intel-based systems. NeXTSTEP ran on Intel, Sparc and PowerPC. And most of all, NeXT gave them Steve Jobs.

The article specifically mentions commercial bank lenders, which are regulated. While I'm sure there are non-bank lenders in this space, a commercial bank can't delay repayment without a charge to the loan-loss reserve, and taking stock in lieu of payment, unless the stock is good as cash, is also a loan impairment. Unregulated commercial lenders have more freedom, but they are also constrained by GAAP.

I'm confused. The CEO of Persado is quoted as saying "interest rates are low," while the article says that Metamarkets is paying 14% on a loan cut in Oct--for comparison, the Merrill Triple-C-Rated index ("extremely speculative" junk bonds) is under 12%. So while it's true that UST base rates are low, that doesn't seem to be a factor in this funding. Sounds like a story about a few banks goosing earnings with risky loans and company insiders/VCs getting more upside "if things work out" and far less of those pesky loses if they don't, very much like the speculative real estate development loans in the 80s that made for a big but very short party.

I agree that reading code is extremely important for improving as a programmer, but the code has to be read analytically. That’s hard work, because it means understanding the problems and subproblems that the code is solving. For example, you may have seen the longest identical subsequence algorithm used by diff, but analyzing the implementation in V7 Unix is a different learning experience. Or if you’ve studied interpreters, you could look at the awk sources maintained by Kernighan to see how a fairly complex interpreter fits together.

There's plenty of 20th century organ music, a lot of it is religious (my father was an organist). It's hard to record pipe organs, particularly the low bass, and without excellent playback equipment the presence is lost. You might be interested in Messiaen's organ works or in the music of his predecessors Franck and Dupré.

dmr wrote the V7 malloc and calloc (which calls malloc) [0,1]. Mike Lesk used calloc in lex ;-) [2]

[0] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...

[1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...

[2] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...

It appears that only calloc was in Lesk's Portable C Library [0] while malloc was the name Thompson gave the kernel's memory allocator in V6 [1]. When Ritchie rewrote Lesk's library for V7, he may have simply retained calloc for backward compatibility with existing user space code. [0] http://roguelife.org/~fujita/COOKIES/HISTORY/V6/iolib.html [1] https://github.com/hephaex/unix-v6/blob/master/ken/malloc.c

It obviously depends on background and goals. People who come to programming with only HS math would probably benefit most from studying (not just reading) an introductory discrete math text such as Biggs or Rosen. For calculus, linear algebra and so on one could look at MIT Opencourseware. For most people, actually learning the material requires a significant time investment, and one of the hardest things to fake is a knowledge of math.

The obvious symmetrical question is whether there has been a pro-American dictator who actually improved the lives of the citizens. But 'improving the lives' is extremely vague. Measured by what? Literacy, GNP, health care, growth of a middle class, civil liberties, respect for contracts, life expectancy, public safety, etc.?

Sedgewick did animations of quicksort and other algorithms back in the 80's. He coincidentally did his PhD on quicksort under Knuth. Jon Bentley gave a Google Talk about quicksort and inputs that drive it to O(n^2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvgYAQzg1z8 His implementation of a production quicksort with McIroy is widely used. It's in BSD, glibc (non-recursive version--some here are saying that glibc qsort is a mergesort, but at least in the code I've read that's not true. Perhaps there's some confusion over the memory allocated by glibc qsort for the pointer stack it creates to avoid recursion). The paper by Bentley and McIlroy called ``Engineering a quicksort'' fills in many details that Bentley omits in his Google Talk.

Not to minimize that person's loss, but 60% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, and I don't assume that the people I observed only went once to the casino. Minimum wage earners tend to have nothing left over by the end of the month. My point was only that it's not the dollar magnitude of the loss that matters, it's the ability of the gambler to sustain the loss whatever the dollar amount.

The one time I was in a casino I accompanied a coworker who gambled to one of the low dollar casinos in Colorado. What I noticed were poor people who came with $100 and wanted--or needed--to leave with $200, and of course the business model says that very few of them did. I bought a $10 bucket of quarters out of boredom and after 10 or so minutes I had $11.25, which is an incredible annualized return but not what gamblers are looking for. I noticed people going from one machine to another--"this one is cold", "maybe this is the right one", etc. It was very sad, and I learned that low dollar gambling can be insidious when the players are poor and look to the casino for money they need. The big dollar losses may make better headlines, but the self-delusion and suffering are the same.

Interesting reaction to the quote from Robert Gordon of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America. PCI is an umbrella lobby for insurers; their website says they represent writers of 42% of automobile policies in the U.S. Since insurers are in the business of understanding and quantifying the risks they insure against, I'm willing to assume that he and PCI are knowledgeable about this issue.

USGS page on the quake: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#...

Well, if you read the article, it mentions the tax breaks that Tesla buyers get, and that the "future of these tax credits may come into question based on Trump's opposition to the government picking winners and losers."

How is constantly seeking government hand-outs capitalism? How is taking those hand-outs not allowing the government to pick winners and losers?

Trump received a 40-year, $120 million full tax abatement from NYC for the Grand Hyatt (Newsweek 6/17/90) . He sought a residential tax abatement for Trump Tower, an abatement designed for low- and middle-income housing (NYT, 8/6/1983), and an abatement for another luxury tower, Trump Palace, and for Trump International Hotel (NYT 7/17/94). He sought a $356 million low-interest loan from the federal government for the West Side Yards, received a $34 million tax abatement in Florida, and had the assessed value of a Las Vegas property lowered from $180 million to $8.6 million (LA Times, 5/11/2011).

All the Chinese have to do is let their UST holdings run off as they mature over time, use the proceeds to buy whatever they want outside the US, and insist that new US contracts be priced in RMB. If China stops rolling its short term UST, interest rates will soar.

There have only been 2 drops greater than 700 points. The third largest fall was 684 points.

As of September, China held $1.22 trillion of US Treasury bonds. Something to keep in mind before launching a trade war.

I've been around since Lotus 1.0, and worked in financial and engineering firms. I've seen cases where spreadsheets have been the right answer for knowledgeable and relativity sophisticated users, either to build a quick model or as a front-end, and cases where the result is an unauditable mess. Lots of oops when say accounting people don't understand say the math of partial-period NPVs, or are so innumerate that an obviously wrong result looks fine to them. Without the review process that should go along with production code, sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't. It all comes down to who is using the tool, I guess.