Muted's comments

1) What makes a language like Fortran so intimidating?

I'm not sure, I would like to know the answer to this. At least for modern Fortran.

2) What makes Fortran so much 'faster' at computation than C?

I don't know if the computation of Fortran is always faster than C (I thought they were comparable), but at least in development time, it was a huge improvement for me. I was forced to use Fortran 2003 at university for numerical simulations etc and expected it to be terrifying but found it very pleasant. Instead it was when programming C later on that I got slightly frustrated.

- It's easy to learn. No need to learn about pointers etc.

- It's very math friendly. The fact that you can easily extract and use sub matrices/array is probably my favorite feature. In C I needed to write loops, pass around array length or matrix sizes, etc. Multi dimensional arrays got annoying to work with and ended up writing matrices as column-major vectors.

- It has some nice built in functions such as matrix multiplications (no loops for this). It also has great math libraries like BLAS/LAPACK

- Offers OOP

I haven't made use yet of the advantage I hear most often i.e. for HPC.

As others have mentioned this is indeed not true and is referred to as the Martingale betting system [0]. In the case of casino games Martingale still has negative EV. Your EV for any round n is (1-q^n)B-q^n(B^n-1) (chance of winning within n rounds times amount won minus chance of losing n rounds times amount lost) [1] which is B(1-(2q)^n) with B the initial betting amount and q the chance of losing. Since in any round your chance of losing is always slightly greater than 1/2, you will have a negative EV in any round you play, there is no number of rounds for which the EV becomes positive.

The standard deviation of this is fairly large though so that the chance of this happening is very small but nevertheless it isn't zero and what you lose is more than you can expect to win. As sleepychu mentioned, the amount you bet goes up exponentially ($1M after 20 rounds).

Aside: It is sometimes said that in order to do this "double when you lose" strategy, you need to e.g. "stick to red for the entire run". This is false. If I bet red-red-red-...-red-red I am just as likely to win/lose as when I bet red-black-odd-odd-even-...-red

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%2...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

I understand this for products that have product-market fit. But what about products that aren't generating any revenue yet? Wouldn't the fact that someone is willing to pay to develop it further for them indicate demand for the product? Also couldn't this be viewed as doing things that don't scale by building a product that one company loves? How do you draw the line between this, and creating technical debt?

Paul Graham wrote an essay on this topic which might help you. http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Michael has also talked about how to pitch investors in a similar, clear way. [0] It's part of the "how to start a startup" series.

[0] https://youtu.be/SHAh6WKBgiE?t=1227

I experience the exact same thing. I get an idea for a side project, get really excited about it, think about all the great things it could do, work on it like crazy for a weekend, and then never touch it again. I got to a point where I got really frustrated with myself that I can't finish anything. So this past Saturday I picked a really small simple project I had and said to myself "No matter what, I'm doing a ShowHN before I go to bed." So (after some hesitation) I did [0]. It really helped knowing that the HN community doesn't tear down ideas or projects. And while this was not a big, badass, super cool project like some others, it does feel good to have finally put a project out there.

Based on this I would say, define a small simple project that you can finish before losing motivation or succumbing to fear of failure, and then just get it out there. You will receive valuable feedback and learn a lot. You have little to fear as the HN community seems to shine at not making you feel embarrassed about what you've made. At least this is the impression I got from watching previous ShowHNs.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930331

Thanks for the feedback! The ErgoDox is indeed one that's on my todo list =), along with the unicomp, ultimate hacking keyboard and a few others.

Earlier this year I finally bought a decent keyboard (Kinesis Advantage). While I was searching for what I wanted, I put together a list of keyboards with some features and have just put it online. Hopefully it can help others in search of a good keyboard. I'm sure the list is incomplete (both in terms of keyboards and listed features). I'll be adding keyboards in the coming days. Feel free to give feedback and suggestions if there are certain things missing.

(e.g. I was thinking about adding filter for cherry mx key color)

If you are interested in learning the basics of Machine Learning I really recommend Andrew Ng's course on Coursera[0]. It starts off very basic and requires almost no prior knowledge other than some linear algebra. It evolves to more advance topics like Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, Recommender Systems, etc. It is amazing how much you can do after just a few weeks of lessons. It's a very practical course with real world examples and exercises each week. The focus is mostly on using and implementing machine learning algorithms and less so on how and why the math behind them works. (To me this is a negative, but I'm sure some people will appreciate that.)

[0] https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

I saw my dad looking at charts one day and asked him what he was doing. He explained some stuff and the idea of owning part of a business really appealed to me. I could sit behind a pc, own part of a business, and make money doing it, what wasn't to like?

Since my dad wasn't the richest investor in the world, he wasn't the best so I started googling and quickly came across Warren Buffett. Not only is he the best (personal opinion), he also had a strategy that resonated with me. I had read basic books on technical traders, position traders, day traders and none of that made sense to me since they often neglects the underlying business. (I also didn't find traders close to the top of forbes' list.)

Once I found something that made sense, I pretty much watched every video online or tried to read every book he recommended. Luckily Warren Buffett loves teaching so there is plenty online you can find. The intelligent investor is definitely a must read. So is "security analysis", "common stocks uncommon profits" and a bunch of others. Here [1] you can find a list of "Buffett approved" books in case you run out.

[1] http://www.bookwormomaha.com/store/c-2-berkshire-hathaway-20...

NPV = SUM_t Rt/(1+i)^t (wikipedia). This is similar to your formula. If Rt=constant for all t and t is infinite (hence in perpetuity), the formula simplifies to what I have. More info can also be found here: http://www.investopedia.com/walkthrough/corporate-finance/3/...

Warren Buffett has also talked about this in numerous interviews. He says that it really depends on what interest rates will do in the future that will determine whether stock prices are currently high. If they stay the way they are now for a while (close to zero, and even negative in some countries), stock prices are not high. The reason for this is that interest rates act like gravity on stock prices. If interest rates go to zero, P/E ratios can go to infinity. Mathematically this can be seen by looking at DCF or NPV analysis where you divide by the discount rate, which is highly correlated with the interest rate. Take for instance a security that yields $C/year in perpetuity. The NPV of that security is NPV=C/r. As the interest rate r approaches 0, the NPV goes to infinity and hence has infinite value. This means that it is ok to pay a very large amount for the security, since you can't get a better return anywhere else.

But of course the question is, will interest rates remain low? Basic economics would tell us the answer is no, because the FED and ECB have pumped billions and billions of dollars/euros in the economy on a monthly basis meaning the supply of money has greatly increased and hence the value should drop and lead to inflation and hence higher interest rates. But this clearly hasn't happened (yet) and I haven't really found anyone who has a good explanation. Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and Bill Gates all expected this would of already happened a while ago. (TV interview on CNBC)

I'm actually surprised how small and how few donations there are from big companies. Especially since donations to openssh (and libressl) also seem to go through the openbsd foundation. IIRC Facebook and stripe are each giving $50k/year to the gpg project. No big tech company other than Microsoft is donating more than $25k to openbsd foundation (unless there are other means of donating that I'm missing).

I agree that would be cool! I actually worked on the earlier version of that as my master's thesis[1]. I think it would be cool to do this in a less controlled environment where the track isn't necessarily preprogrammed. (Currently there is a camera with IR filter above track and an IR light.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-oikffGxOo&nohtml5=False

I lived in Zürich for a year and remember seeing an ad on the train for work at a grocery store that paid 4k CHF ($3910) per month. The college I was attending paid 35CHF ($34) an hour to students who did work for their department. Just to put it in some perspective. The cost of living is also ridiculously high.

Though I haven't used it in the last few months, Fortran (2003) is my language of choice for math related stuff. I used it for the first time about 5 years ago and haven't found a single reason why I'd use C/C++ instead. It offers OOP, dynamic memory, easy array manipulation, no need for pointers, ...

I'm also confused about this. I don't understand what is wrong with Fortran. In school we learned Fortran 2003 for numeric simulations etc. For my master thesis I programmed in C and there were a lot of things in C that I missed from Fortran. 1) Fortran is easy to learn, no need to know pointers etc 2) very math friendly, easy to extract subarrays/submatrices etc, no need to pass around array lengths etc. matrix's are really easy to deal with. I remember in C we ended up rewriting all two dimensional arrays (matrices) to column major arrays cause it was a pain to deal with (or maybe we were noobs) 3) useful built in functions such as matrix multiplications, in C you end up writing a lot of functions to do what seem like very simple things 4) Great math libraries such as BLAS/LAPACK 5) Seems to me like it less error prone than C (spend a lot less time debugging)

This is just my experience with it. Somewhat to my surprise I really ended up liking Fortran, and the new code doesn't look at all like the old code. For what we did it was also slightly faster than C. If I were to write a numeric program I wouldn't think twice about what language to use. I feel like Fortran is an undervalued language for calculations. But then again, I am by no means an expert.

Here are some books Buffett has recommended, I'm sure there are tons of other books, these are just the ones that have stuck with me.

Investing: 1) The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham 2) Security Analysis - Benjamin Graham 3) Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits - Philip Fisher 4) The Little Book of Common Sense Investing - John Bogle 5) The Most Important Thing - Howard Marks

Economics: 1) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith 2) Where Are the Customers' Yachts: or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street - Fred Schwed 3) stuff by John Maynard Keynes (never heard him mention exact title)

Others: 1) Poor Charlie's Almanac - Charles Munger 2) Business Adventures - John Brooks 3) How to win friends and influence people - Dale Carnegie

Then there are some things I've never heard him explicitly recommend but I think are definitely worth reading: 1) Letter to shareholders (all of them, you can find the ones of his partnership and earlier ones online) 2) The Snowball - Alice Schroeder 3) Tap Dancing to Work - Carol Loomis (There are tons of books on Buffett, but these two are friends of his)

Also, if you ever go to his shareholders meeting, there's a whole list of "Buffett approved books". Some that I can remember from this years meeting (other then the ones mentioned above): 1) all of them found on https://www.poorcharliesalmanack.com/ 2) Dream Big - Cristiane Correa 3) a bunch more that I cant remember

Finally on his investing, he has laid out a bunch of times what he believes is best for ordinary people who aren't going to devote most of their time to investing namely, buy a low cost index fund (he recommends Vanguards, I believe it was this one https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0540&... ) I'm not quite sure why so little people (that I know) listen to him. It seems that people want to show that they can outperform the market, but rarely do.

Well I can't help you on what's financially the best choice (I'm not in the US). But I might be able to give some suggestions on how to live based on my experience.

First off, don't care about other people. There is no reason to think about what effect it might have on your employer, or who gets screwed when you make certain decisions. If you end up dieing because your treatment sucks, you won't need to feel sorry. You really need to be selfish, the stakes are too high not to be.

That aside, what you said sounds very similar to what I had. When I was 15 I also discovered lump under my armpit, ended up being Hodgkin lymphoma. If that is what you end up having, you should be extremely thankful. First of all because if you need to get a cancer, that is the one you want (at least that's what they told me). But also, in this endeavor, you are probably the lucky one. At least in my case, the worst part was seeing what it did to my mother and brother. I knew exactly how good/bad I felt but they could only guess at it.

As to what to do, well this varies significantly from person to person. Some people I met in the hospital wanted to learn everything about the disease, why it occurred, what they could have done to prevent it, how they could of discovered it sooner, ... Other people socialized a lot in the hospital and talked to each other about chemo side affects, ... For me this all seemed like a waste of time since in 8 months or so I would be a "normal" person again. I tried to keep my life as close to normal as I could. I got to the hospital and left as fast as I could, continued to go to as many classes as possible, kept doing the same hobbies, meeting friends, ... So I would suggest, just do whatever makes you happy =).

Anyway, hope this is somewhat useful. Good luck!

Yes, but as far as I know you can't buy indexs directly. You need to buy them via an ETF or fund that tracks a certain index. For instance the ticker VOO and VUSA are Vanguard's ETF's that track the s&p 500 in respectively dollars and euros. I'm sure if you google a bit you can find a lot more index trackers.