Viewing profile — hncommenter13

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 …

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…

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.c…

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…

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.…

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/

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 buildi…

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 t…

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 …

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 p…

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 rela…

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--…

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:…

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-...

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 …

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 YouTu…

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'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 …

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 borro…

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…

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…

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-sr…

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 fu…

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.…

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 l…