Hacker News: johnglasgow

New comment by johnglasgow in "Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess"

johnglasgow — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 01:51:10 +0000

After being so upset with his cheating class, why does the professor offer a large time period to re-take the test? It seems like he is baiting the students to cheat again. Can't he set it during a normal class period where everyone takes it at once?

New comment by johnglasgow in "100 Naked Citizens: 100 Leaked Body Scans"

johnglasgow — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 05:25:20 +0000

You act like TSA agents came up with the idea to grope and body scan everyone in the airport. This is a huge pain the in ass for them, and they know that it poses a health risk for themselves. However, this is their job, and they are carrying out orders from their superiors. So there's no reason to make snide remarks to the agents.

New comment by johnglasgow in "When The Speed Of Light Is Too Slow: Trading at the Edge"

johnglasgow — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:01:02 +0000

"There is no point having the optimal colo between TSE and NYSE because they have no overlapping hours nor do they have anything that trades on both and is fungible."

There is tremendous overlap amongst various stock exchanges, OTC's, dark pools (12% of US trading), and of course there's Forex which is 24/7.

New comment by johnglasgow in "When The Speed Of Light Is Too Slow: Trading at the Edge"

johnglasgow — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 10:49:18 +0000

Quantitative trading companies are spending more and more money to trade faster, because the barrier to entry continues to plummet. For example, they used to install software programs on computers, now they actually hard-wire programs directly to motherboards to shorten the execution time. As the article mentioned, trading firms are investing heavily into expensive fiber optic lines instead of traditional internet. For these reasons and many more, the fraction of a penny that each trade earns them also continues to grow smaller as the arbitrage that they trade on grows smaller because every firm is investing into the same expensive strategies.

New comment by johnglasgow in "When The Speed Of Light Is Too Slow: Trading at the Edge"

johnglasgow — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:20:06 +0000

Automated trading is almost to an equilibrium, where the costs will begin outweighing the profits.

New comment by johnglasgow in "Marijuana Legalization Fails in California"

johnglasgow — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 10:05:06 +0000

Not only do the supporters not vote, but they have very little political power nor do they provide monetary support.

New comment by johnglasgow in "Herding Firesheep in a NYC Starbucks: Do Users Care?"

johnglasgow — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 07:17:41 +0000

The users are not at fault here. Even a SSH or VPN will leave them vulnerable to attacks. Companies (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) have to increase their own security, because they are the only ones that can fix this problem.

New comment by johnglasgow in "What a Rotten World It Can Be: Report Says Three-Fourths of World Is Corrupt"

johnglasgow — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 09:53:37 +0000

It's all relative.

New comment by johnglasgow in "Compared to you, most people seem dumb"

johnglasgow — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 02:31:26 +0000

Let's say I go to the mechanic with a light on in the dashboard, and he'll immediately notice the gas cap isn't tightly secured so it set off a car sensor. He probably went back to his mechanic friends, told them the story, and everyone laughed.

The computer and everything about it is our profession/hobby/passion and that is the main reason we know so much more than everyone else about it.

New comment by johnglasgow in "Wall Street Journal Investigation Into MySpace Was Quietly Killed"

johnglasgow — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 05:26:38 +0000

Arrington loves writing link-bait articles. The WSJ just published an article on My Space leaking user date to advertisers:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230373850457556...

New comment by johnglasgow in "[dead]"

johnglasgow — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 23:56:24 +0000

An IPO for Facebook would mean losing all of their top engineers who are hanging around until they can cash out. Everyone will leave for the next hot startup and to work on their own projects. Zuck is smart for dragging the process out.

New comment by johnglasgow in "UberCab Ordered to Cease And Desist"

johnglasgow — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 21:00:40 +0000

Three points:

1. Sounds like UberCab should look into licensing out their platform to existing cab companies. It would mean lower margins, but they can quickly scale throughout the US and beyond much faster.

2. UberCab's blog post is arrogant. Did they really think they can avoid paying expensive licensing fees because they are using black cars instead of yellow cabs? Taxi licenses are very expensive and a lucrative revenue source for every major city. A taxi seat can cost as much as 1 million to purchase in NYC, and I know other cities such as SF and LV are not much cheaper due to the fixed number of licenses. I can only imagine the outrage of other cab drivers losing work to cheaper services (i.e. UberCab) because they are not paying licensing fees.

3. UberCab can easily recover albeit at lower margins. They need aggressive biz dev to quickly secure licenses. I hope they can continue to disrupt city transportation.

New comment by johnglasgow in "What We Look for in Founders"

johnglasgow — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 19:00:58 +0000

What are your thoughts the two founders being identical twin brothers?

New comment by johnglasgow in "Reddit Founder: “I Wish I Still Owned Reddit Now”"

johnglasgow — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 05:50:42 +0000

This is way off topic, but I believe we met at the Founders and Cocktails event last month that was held at the lounge across the street from Santana Row. We chatted for a while about the Reddit vs. Digg battle going on at the time.

New comment by johnglasgow in "60 percent of Apple’s sales are from products that did not exist three years ago"

johnglasgow — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 10:06:56 +0000

Apple is one of the best companies at cannibalizing it's own products, which is mandatory to stay ahead of the competition. Example: Apple crushed iPod sales by releasing the iPhone.

New comment by johnglasgow in "AOL Attempting to Buy Yahoo "

johnglasgow — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 08:01:55 +0000

It's called an LBO.

New comment by johnglasgow in "The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Online Communities"

johnglasgow — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 21:47:38 +0000

This article is very relevant to our company as we redesign our social product to better achieve the network effect and reduce this exact issue. Thanks for the great insights.

New comment by johnglasgow in "Ask HN: Your favorite web application design/UI?"

johnglasgow — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 21:54:57 +0000

http://alpha.patterntap.com/collections/Tabs

I always start at PatternTap.com when I'm stumped on a design solution.

New comment by johnglasgow in "Google’s Pound of Flesh"

johnglasgow — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 22:14:00 +0000

If payday loans are really as secure as you make them sound, the interest rates wouldn't be so high on the loans. It's pure economics.

New comment by johnglasgow in "Green Dot: The $2 Billion IPO You’ve Never Heard Of"

johnglasgow — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 09:19:32 +0000

I wrote this in the TC comments, and will echo it here:

"This article was not very well written IMHO. The big exit was for the Tech Coast Angels investors who had over 100x. Criticizing Zappos for their 1B+ exit vs Green Dot's 2B exit is an awful argument. Not only are they both in the low billion dollar range, but Sequoia forced Zappos to sell. This was widely publicized in Tony's blog post about it.

I've heard Steve speak give a keynote, and he had a standing ovation. Truly an inspiring entrepreneur. He deserves every cent he earns from the IPO."