hncommenter13

9 ms·

1.
by hncommenter13 2y ago
The Learning Company acquisition by Mattel was one of the worst deals ever. There was strong evidence at the time that the financials for The Learning Company were overstated. And yet Kevin O'Leary's various opinions on business a
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by hncommenter13 3y ago
One correction. It's not $8B per year, it's $8.4B in the last quarter --which is over $32B annualized, especially considering the last quarter's revenue grew over 20% from the same time last year. GCP's profit margins a
3.
by hncommenter13 3y ago
There's a great book by CS professor Steven Skiena about the automated betting system he built (using early 90s-era technology!) to place bets on jai alai. The Book: https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~skiena/jaialai&#
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by hncommenter13 3y ago
I'm not sure lack of compensation is the problem, in California anyway: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=Police&... https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/ca
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by hncommenter13 3y ago
I'm not defending all of Getty's business practices, obviously. But my understanding of what Getty is selling is both convenience and a degree of legal protection for media buyers. If you buy an image from them, they will, in writ
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by hncommenter13 4y ago
Here's a another story (2011) of a medical source of radioactivity showing up where it wasn't supposed to be: https://www.wired.com/2011/10/ff-radioactivecargo/
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by hncommenter13 4y ago
I worked for an ecommerce startup in 1998/1999 that was founded in 1997. The app was built in Perl with (by 1999) a MySQL backend. But there were definitely applications for building larger websites, including ColdFusion[1] from Allair
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by hncommenter13 5y ago
Obviously not the same level of detail, but there's a dataset from the Federal Highway Administration that has basic data (at least what's available publicly) on many bridges and their condition. https://www.fhwa.dot.go
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by hncommenter13 5y ago
Interesting piece. But speaking as someone who was formerly a very junior VC through the dot-com era, there most certainly can be a negative spiral. The public and private markets aren't as distinct as they might appear to be. A VC buy
10.
by hncommenter13 5y ago
I'm not sure what stage of company we're talking about here. I'd argue that for ALL companies, in any industry, working capital--measured on the balance sheet--is a critical data point. That is, you may be booking revenue but
11.
by hncommenter13 5y ago
The Financial Times has occasionally written articles pondering some of the odder financial decisions at Keyence (eg, hoarding cash, world-beating margins vs. competitors, low relative R&D as a % of sales, etc). Doesn't seem to hav
12.
by hncommenter13 5y ago
Not a lawyer, but I'm not sure that's correct. Per the CFTC's Enforcement website, they can bring civil enforcement actions in court--without the other party present aka ex-parte--seeking to freeze and enjoin the operations o
13.
by hncommenter13 5y ago
That is how the law works after it was amended in 2012.[1] From the time of adoption in 1994 until 2012, even relatively minor crimes could result in a life sentence.[2] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/
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by hncommenter13 5y ago
Some additional background on the reciprocal rights they enjoy with St. Andrews in Scotland: https://www.espn.com.au/golf/story/_/id/13173734/st-andrews-...
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by hncommenter13 5y ago
I believe your reading is incorrect. The police are not allowed to order journalists to leave the area or to "round them up." The police were given a legal order by a judge not to do this. They did it anyway, issuing an unlawful o
16.
by hncommenter13 5y ago
This is obviously very impressive, and far better than I could ever do myself. But I must say it bears more than a passing resemblence to the version below, first uploaded to YouTube in 2009. Including the specific appearance of the robot a
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by hncommenter13 5y ago
Hi, I'm not sure I follow this idea that passive investors don't lend their shares. Is that meant to describe the hypothetical world of no active traders, as discussed above, or is it meant to describe the present situation in the
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by hncommenter13 6y ago
It's trivial to prove that naked short selling doesn't exist the way the author thinks it does. a) Take my word for it. I am a former VC now working as a professional short seller (for the past eight years; my first really great s
19.
by hncommenter13 6y ago
Just FYI, people often forget that shorting shares creates synthetic shares that, conceptually, should to be added to the float. Imagine a company with 1 share outstanding. I borrow a share from Person A, and I sell it to Person B. Person A
20.
by hncommenter13 6y ago
I'm not sure this is quite right. I would have thought that most restaurants very much WANT to sell sodas, as the margins are enormous--much, much higher than the margins on cooked food. This page [0], for instance, says the cost of go
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by hncommenter13 6y ago
Bronx Science was founded in 1938. It has graduated eight nobel prize winners, seven in physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronx_High_School_of_Science And, per Wikipedia, many of the faculty came from Stuyvesant,
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by hncommenter13 6y ago
I'm not expert in this stuff. Is there a reason all of these domains are specified here? [edit, formatting] Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only: default-src blob: 'self'; script-src 'unsafe-eval' 'unsafe-inline
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by hncommenter13 7y ago
One of the founders of ITA Software, which became Google's flight search, discussed some interesting issues in airline fare search [0]. I don't have enough of a CS background to fully understand all of this, but the message is pre
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by hncommenter13 7y ago
I think the HN baseball fan crowd is the perfect audience for this paper, entitled "A Mathematical Analysis of Catcher/Pitcher Encryption Schemes." https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2018/project&#x
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by hncommenter13 7y ago
Again, in the interests of historical accuracy, Crossrider did more than that. They actively provided monetization for traffic from installed apps. I have in my email a post from longtime senior employee Yonatan Pesses to a LinkedIn group (
26.
by hncommenter13 7y ago
This may be ancient history, but I believe this understates Crossrider's active role in the adware/malware that was being widely installed. Per this research from Google and other academics [1][2], Crossrider was one of the larges
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by hncommenter13 8y ago
FWIW, This American Life ran a great piece by Michael Lewis on John McCain's relationship with David Ifshin. Ifshin was a prominent Vietnam war protestor (and Democrat) who later developed a relationship with McCain. https:/&#x2F
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by hncommenter13 9y ago
Wow, interesting. These [1] are some seriously long aerials. In San Francisco, fwiw, the SFFD's largest aerial ladder is 100 ft fully extended. This is the mechanical one on the truck. SFFD trucks also carry a 50-ft wooden ladder, but
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by hncommenter13 9y ago
FYI, be careful what you do with it. Some of this sort of data--like federal contribution data from the FEC--cannot be legally used for commercial purposes[0]. They do actually enforce it, at least occasionally. [0] https://trans
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by hncommenter13 9y ago
Someone is selling similar data to investors via Quandl. The source is confidential, however, so it's unclear if this is Unroll.me as well. https://www.quandl.com/alternative-data/email-receipt-data

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