I needed a couple of AOL Instant Messenger buddy icons for a project, and then that turned into a project and before you know it I was trying to scrape every single buddy icon off the internet.I have slightly over 500,000 of them live, browseable, and downloadable with a single click on my new totally non-commercial project site buddyiconarchive.comI think that I am perhaps 20% of the way to my...
A unicorn I worked at for two years is going IPO soon. The RSUs are double trigger vest.I want to hedge the risk that the stock gets cut in half in-between the IPO and the lockup expiration.Here are the two strategies I have found so far:1. If you have X shares/RSUs, short X additional shares at open of IPO. Cover after lockup expires.Pro: lock in a sale at the IPO price Con: requires...
It is not a monolithic organization. There are actually 850 regional MLSs in the US. In some sense this is a P2P walled-garden marketplace. However, there is downward pressure from the national realtors association to standardize on things like listing formatting, so it is not entirely self-organizing.
I think owning the marketplace is valuable. Similar to various open source initiatives, once the free marketplace gets to a certain size, someone like Red Hat will come in, fork it, and set themselves up as gatekeepers. The resting dynamic of the system is a feudal kingdom.
My 2c
I am developing a B2B eCommerce site that will accommodate a wide range of asset types.I am working on the browse/search aspect of the site and trying to develop UX that will allow both usage modalities to happen on the same page.I am not a professional UX designer and I am hoping to draw inspiration from other web sites. I am going for a sleek, modern, and mobile friendly feel (though for the...
I have questions, Science has answers. Science!
I've tried using their tool to report them one at a time, it's quite tedious.I've tried emailing them at [email protected]. Redirected to support page.I only care because FB is the first hit when you google my name and FB suggests connecting with these impostors on their logged out landing page.Besides writing a bot in Selenium to scrap FB and report each profile, I'm not sure what to do. Any...
I was excited to try it but I'm afraid of what crapware I'll get if I do.
The amount in the pinata should probably double every X days. In this situation, if two people know the secret, it is advantageous for one of them to act immediately.
This seems like a feature for no one, as the people who really care about leap seconds are probably doing their own timekeeping already since computer clocks aren't exactly accurate to being with.
For instance, if I put two groups of mathematicians in two different rooms and lock them up for three years, but one group has access to the internet and the other doesn't, how much more progress will they make on the same open problem?
What if I give both groups internet access but only one group gets to use modern search engines?
What about finer gradations of the same idea? Is a research team confined to using only Google to search smarter or dumber than a team that must only use Bing.
I'm wondering about how much IQ actually matters compared to tools. After reading Sapiens (which I highly suggest), I don't think the principle machinery for solving problems exists in our heads and hasn't probably since the middle ages, if not before.
Dropbox has a team of people whose only job it is to write AI software against the data being saved there. They have software agents rummaging through everything you upload (which is maybe not surprising, but also not a service I want to pay for).
I think if someone could combine the sharing aspects of DropBox with some of the more secure cloud backup products (like CrashPlan) they would have a winning business model.
The secret sauce would be figuring out how to do this without becoming a pure infrastructure provider, where the margins are a race to the bottom.