Disqus - Latest Comments for marascio

Re: Showing a Bash Spinner for Long Running Tasks

Louis Marascio — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 15:08:58 -0000

Haus, it is in the public domain. You may use it for whatever purpose you wish, commercial or otherwise.

Re: How to fetch NYSE prices with simple bash script

Louis Marascio — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 19:32:44 -0000

Why not just use Yahoo Finance like everyone else? Why go through the trouble to scrape data from someone who doesn't want you to scrape it? Yahoo Finance is easy to use, the API is clean, its fast, and you're not violating any terms of use.

Re: Showing a Bash Spinner for Long Running Tasks

Louis Marascio — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:51:45 -0000

Nice! Thanks for sharing.

Re: Showing a Bash Spinner for Long Running Tasks

Louis Marascio — Sun, 15 May 2011 08:54:46 -0000

Thanks for sharing. I love pipe viewer but it isn't always the best way to show progress to your users. Computationally expensive tasks, for example, w/o any pipe IO come to mind. It is a great tool, however, any is worthy of it's own post.

Re: Email Overload (Apology)

Louis Marascio — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 09:24:54 -0000

Amazingly, you've achieved a 100% response rate to your blog's comments so far (as of 8:24 central time). Perhaps it's simply a matter of unconscious priorities?

Re: The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers

Louis Marascio — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:57:55 -0000

I don't think its a question of whether you or anyone else on the platform team cares--of course you do! The real question is whether FB management will correctly prioritize and staff the team required to properly support developers. That's where I have my doubts.

Re: Porting A Number To Google Voice

Louis Marascio — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 11:40:58 -0000

The system just isn't designed for this. The reason you can own a domain name is because DNS allows for resolution to an IP address, something you, as an individual, typically do not own. Traditional telephony just is not built for this. SIP, ENUM, and other related VoIP standards do allow for this--they simply do not have critical mass in their deployments. The SIP guys (of which I was one, currently reformed) believed that dialing by sip address (basically email address) would be a killer feature that would lead to mass adoption, and indeed it could have been had it not been for those pesky digits on the billions of phones deployed in the world. Dialing by name/email was simply too cumbersome and did not fix the basic model of use every human being was accustomed to when using their phone.

Until there are fundamental changes in the system, from the basic architecture to how the end devices work, you won't ever really get to the end game you want, IMO.

Re: Stack Does Gaming

Louis Marascio — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:43:39 -0000

Of course you and Jeff got to leverage you're rather large followings to bootstrap that process. It will be interesting to see what happens with the gaming site. Good luck!

Re: Gold, Euro, and S&P 500 Bailout Aftermath

Louis Marascio — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:41:09 -0000

Good video Michael, you should do more of these. Very informative.

Re: Email Bankruptcy

Louis Marascio — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:14:10 -0000

Wouldn't it be better than nuking 800 emails? I mean, those didn't get responded to either :). IMO, a human filter is much better here. They are infinitely more adaptable, can be responsive without being intrusive, and can help the people emailing you understand your priorities. This is infinitely better than having an email languish for weeks or months before being summarily nuked.

Why not use a human filter that lets all "important" email flow through to you directly from the 30 most important contacts you mentioned above. Then let the human filter prioritize the rest of the emails based on what's important to you: new deal flow, young entrepreneurs seeking counsel, whatever it may be. There is no shame in this, and it leaves you in a situation where you're actually responding to all of your email vs drowning in it.

You've declared email bankruptcy. It's time to institute the court mandated restructuring plan. :)

Re: Have you ever wondered what value we create here?

Louis Marascio — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:24:41 -0000

Efficient markets -> lower transaction costs -> greater access to the markets by everyone. Why is that un-noble? Isn't Art.sy doing the same thing? By creating a place to buy & sell art online you're making the market more efficient and are, in turn, opening it up to more buyers and sellers.

To any students reading this, go do what makes you happy. Work in a field you find stimulating. Everything else will sort itself out.

Re: Measuring Measures - blog - Hadoop User Group Talk on Flightcaster

Louis Marascio — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:56:45 -0000

Looking forward to watching the video. Just an FYI, the link to your slides is broken. Looks like there is some trash at the end of the URL that needs to be removed to end up at the right place.

Re: Capitalism just like Adam Smith pictured it

Louis Marascio — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 18:58:47 -0000

To be clear, I think OTC derivatives need to be regulated. I don't think speculation needs to be. I understand, now, the intent but I think how and when you bring 'speculation' into the story here paints a picture that you think of speculation as the root cause of the problem.

Re: Capitalism just like Adam Smith pictured it

Louis Marascio — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 16:54:57 -0000

Speculation is not a recent phenomenon. Speculators have always been in the market because they perform a valid and vital role in creating and maintaining market efficiency. Traders were speculating the futures pits from the beginning of the markets. Providing immediacy is a valid service (one of many) performed by official and un-official market makers--read, speculators. Why is this, all of a sudden, deemed evil? I just don't get it. Regulation of OTC derivatives markets is a good thing, and I'm all for it. But I just don't understand why there is such hate for the 'evil speculator'.

Re: Measuring Measures - blog - Fast Clojure Vectors and Multidimensional Arrays

Louis Marascio — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 14:07:39 -0000

Looking forward to the series. Two small typos:
s/at the hear/at the heart/
s/coverage on hte clojure/coverage on the clojure/

Re: Startups Get Hit By Shrapnel In The Banking Bill

Louis Marascio — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 11:21:53 -0000

Laws are great. Limits based on arbitrary thresholds of net worth and other criteria are unfortunate. Why not have an Accredited Home Buyer law stating that you can't purchase a house unless you've had $150k in annual salary for 10 years and a credit score of 700? We don't have such a law because it creates artificial barriers to capitalistic innovation. One might be eager to suggest that such a law would have saved us from the most recent crisis; however, any suggestion to that effect should include an analysis of the historical impacts on the economy had such a law been in place.

Re: Startups Get Hit By Shrapnel In The Banking Bill

Louis Marascio — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 11:06:27 -0000

And to be clear, while I have a serious libertarian bent I am not an ideologue. I am all for the government establishing fair reporting and disclosure requirements to ensure that people are enabled to make fully informed decisions. I don't believe that the government should try to make those decisions, en masse, for large segments of the population.

Re: Startups Get Hit By Shrapnel In The Banking Bill

Louis Marascio — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 11:02:12 -0000

Why doesn't the US government review every real estate transaction to ensure someone isn't buying swamp land in Louisiana? This is selective nanny-state politics applied where most politically advantageous, and it's unfortunate.

Re: Startups Get Hit By Shrapnel In The Banking Bill

Louis Marascio — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:58:21 -0000

The legislature doesn't protect me from the gas station guy stealing my money. They don't protect me from the car salesman from selling me a crappy car. That's the police are for.

Re: Startups Get Hit By Shrapnel In The Banking Bill

Louis Marascio — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:25:31 -0000

Practically, I agree. I just find it unfortunate that there be any number at all--the government shouldn't be telling me how to invest my money, because they certainly don't tell me how to waste my money.

Re: Startups Get Hit By Shrapnel In The Banking Bill

Louis Marascio — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:24:24 -0000

Leaving the US isn't the answer. Why not rally a campaign against him and exercise what makes this country great?

Re: Startups Get Hit By Shrapnel In The Banking Bill

Louis Marascio — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:19:53 -0000

Why 25k? Is the government really the best group to tell me how I can spend my money? As Mark pointed out, there is nothing to stop me from mortgaging my house and gambling my money away... why are they trying to stop me from investing it? Nanny state politics are unfortunate.

Re: AVC Redesign

Louis Marascio — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 07:10:32 -0000

Full post please Fred, it makes your reader's daily routine much easier.

Re: Selling to enterprises

Louis Marascio — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:25:02 -0000

These days the valley of death is a bit more complicated. It used to be that to get to the customer you had to have a traveling, relationship focused, field sales force. You needed enterprise account managers to build relationships, field sales engineers to handle complicated hardware & software installs, and when customers had problems you rallied the troops and flew everyone and their mother on-site to make sure the customer stayed happy. This is hard, and I would agree with Chris Selland that the valley of death, given those constraints, actually goes up to $250k--or even higher.

These days, however, there is an alternate route. SaaS deployments allow us to keep our field sales force at home and ease of demonstration allow for an emphasis on inside selling rather than top down big-bang relationship selling. The overall the cost of sale is dramatically reduced because customers can see value quickly--an enterprise software demo in 30 minutes!

I would think of something like this. A given "enterprise software" company's personalized valley of death will be a function of:

(1) the type of product they are selling: does it require a lot of back end integration, complicated personalized setup, deep understanding of the business, etc before a customer can realize value.

(2) product install and pricing scalability: can the product scale down so that it can grow from within: Atlassian is a great example of this. Their products are very much enterprise software, but they grow from within at the team & departmental level eventually being deployed as standardized solutions across the enterprise.

(3) culture and organizational design: going after the "enterprise" with an "un-enterprise" model like this requires an organizational design that fits with the goals. You have to hire a sales team that is consistent with the selling and pricing strategy. You have to build a support team that understands how to support large demanding customers without just throwing people & money at problems. And, most important, you have to build a product that enables both of these things to happen.

It is possible to sell to the enterprise but have a much smaller valley of death, but not if you go-to-market with the traditional enterprise model.

Re: FRC's Exchange Fund: VCs are from Mars, Traders are from Venus

Louis Marascio — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 10:50:19 -0000

While stress might be a motivating factor for FRC to do this, in my eyes it looks more like a way to do two things. First, it helps build a stronger community amongst the leaders of their portfolio companies; and second, it provides a way for FRC to differentiate their investment vs other firms.

Ultimately, this is one way that FRC can drive a continuous virtuous cycle amongst the leaders of their portfolio companies. I like it, and I'd be surprised if exchanging a small portion of ones stock into the fund really does relieve any stress what so ever, especially amongst the type of leader that has been funded by FRC.