Viewing profile — byrneseyeview

But that's exactly what they're sorry for. It's not like Dell's going to say "We're sorry we hired a jerk." That implies that they meant to hire a jerk. "We're sorry you're offende…

One good reason to have this kind of bonus: you're more likely to end up hiring people who existing employees have already worked with. Having a common culture is hugely valuable, …

I searched for the readable headlines ("the pilgrim fathers" "a thrilling icident" "the pacific") and found this: http://spiderbites.nytimes.com/free_1864/articles_1864_12_00... So…

I reasoned that there is no greater strategy at play by the Zynga geniuses in the war room of their ridiculous company headquarters. Whenever I find myself thinking this way, the k…

40x refers to the return to the investors. If investors own e.g. 30% (I am making this number up and have no knowledge of the situation), their return is ~12x.

I don't understand why you'd trust a corporation more than Congress when it comes to how the tax code should work. If we all pay what we think we should owe, rather than what the r…

But if the money is never distributed, how does it benefit the shareholders? My thought experiment from earlier in the thread: what is the net present value of a billion dollars in…

This indirectly brings up the point that it's hard to make the case for directly taxing corporations at all, aside from the fact that it's convenient. Ultimately, all corporations …

The value of your stock is the net present value of the future dividends you should expect. If you put a billion dollars in cash on a rocket and launch it into space, the value of …

If I live off of my savings, and generate no taxable income, am I also immoral for driving on roads? What if I work part-time, but pay less in taxes than the average person? Once y…

The maneuver you describe is equivalent to incorporating in Delaware (or Nevada, I suppose). You can compound your wealth in the low-tax environment, but you will pay taxes when yo…

Right, but they may not be the most effective means to do so. If I mow your lawn, then break into your house to steal $20, I might justify that on the grounds that your mowed lawn …

I find it fascinating that being offended entitles people to extra credibility and lower standards of proof. It would be interesting to imagine a world being offended made you less…

Last time I got hired by a big organization (definitely not C-level), my interaction with HR was as follows: they called me up to say they were sending an offer letter, and asked i…

It's hard to come up with a counterexample when you're looking at outliers. A successful startup is already statistically improbable, so I don't think you can easily say that if Pa…

Aside from being "provincial," is he wrong? Diversity creates communications latency. For example, on HN I can refer to "latency" in this context--it would take way more syllables …

May 2012 $15.00 puts are $2.10/share, so at the current market price the insiders are still ahead. They may put a premium on diversification, but they also sold stock before the IP…

You're right. The "edit" button has expired.

Why should they have sold for $6 billion? They're worth $9.6 billion today. Groupon is not a bet on the coupons business--that doesn't justify the current valuation. Groupon is a b…

By what metric exactly is Yahoo News still the top news site? ComScore. Yahoo gets an enormous amount of traffic: Alexa also considers Yahoo as a whole the #4 site (behind Google, …