T_S_'s comments

Beg to differ.

Whenever I walk through airport security, I have Osama to thank for the millimeter wave inspection. And for the pain of raising money from non-accredited investors I have hundreds of historical and would-be scammers to thank. Bad guys make us limit our freedom.

Although we ask the government to protect us, they usually mess it up by ham-handed regulation. At the airport, the big show makes us feel safer, even though some experts say we aren't. The same thing has been going on in finance for years with Congress and regulators asleep at the switch with no idea how to control the bankers. They lack imagination and incentives.

We need to completely rethink regulation for investment vehicles. The goal should be to improve post-issuance transparency. Real transparency.

First thing we need is a live feed of transactions logs. All of them. Dirt cheap these days. No fancy accounting, I'll model the company myself thanks. I can share models with fellow investors. I/you/we can sell modeling capability to investors. More sunlight--less corruption, less risk.

The lack of transparency and disclosure that may about to be enshrined in Regulation A is like handing out the box cutters on the airplane to al Qaeda. The threat is not you or me. It's scammers. Right now about all the protection Mom will have is the SEC banning "bad actors" years later--if they get caught. Just like they caught Madoff. Professional financial accounting? Enron's books were audited by a top firm.

Instead regulation should require you to show me the money, continuously, with timestamps, please. Oh, and send me my government mandated Salesforce.com login too please. Let's do for banks too. Make it fair for everyone.

OK, now you can sell my Mom your stock.

Maybe Fidelity? PIMCO? Humble Warren B. of Omaha. Lots of other examples. Money is universal...like love. Kind of.

I took it as more of a nod to the old emacs joke (probably told by a vim user): “Emacs is a great operating system; too bad it doesn’t have a decent editor”

The title is linkbait if not trollish. However the article is just a technical discussion about the best way to implement exceptions in pure functional code. He prefers the way it is done in ML.

Really great. I wonder if there are other algos that are being overlooked because we are looking at them with the wrong cost model in mind.

Math is particularly tough on the ego. I remember one of my advisors said: "I try to decide if something is true. I work extremely hard to do so. Then when I am done, it seems clear that it was true all along, and the only problem was that I didn't know it."

Max 2. Local courts are "state" offices.

OK I'll bite. What's your number?

Let's see. 1 generation => Lots of compassion. 6 billion years => no compassion. So somewhere in between. How about you?

Not really. I am expecting my grandkids to still be the same species.

Who is "we" exactly? Go back in time far enough and you will find your ancestors are of a different species. So why are we throwing a pass to some future "alien" species? Is this some sort of cosmic chain letter we just received?

The arguments I hear on this subject really sound more like a guy talking himself into buying that Porsche (or Tesla!) than anything else.

Keep sending the robots!

Second that. All tiling window mangers. Much more efficient.

Are you a dev? Try awesome. Invest two hours of confusion and RTFM and you may never go back.

Hutton's book is excellent (and thin!). Work through that and you will learn about some deep stuff without even realizing it.

If anybody would like to run something like this at Hacker Dojo in Mtn. View, let's discuss.

You're giving to much credit to Madison. There were a couple of other Fathers around. Plus the Senate has evolved a lot since those days.

Overall I think the gridlock is overrated. If we get some bone headed politicians actually passing laws maybe people will start to care again who gets elected.

Odd. I had this problem in 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and it went away when I upgraded to 10.7 (Lion). The most obvious symptom is the machine does not seem to be able to make use of the inactive memory (the blue slice of the pie in Activity Monitor). I did not notice the problem at all when I first started using 10.6. When I hunted around on the help forums a few months ago I found lots of users with the symptoms, but nobody acknowledging the "validity" of the problem. In fact a lot of deniers out there. I wonder if it was quietly fixed or will recur after the system gets used for a while.

It certainly would if only one bank did it. However such a rule would have to be evenly applied. My belief is that this would drive down volatility in markets since it would end the game of "Old Maid" in a crisis. Depending on how many institutions were under this rule, trading volumes may decrease, although I could argue this the other way as well.

The solution is close to hand and it does not involve regulation--at least the kind that regulators want. The solution is transparency. Just make all the big banks report their actual transaction on a live feed. This simple solution would have been infeasible even 20 years ago, but not any more.

The implications would be enormous. No more need for accounting reports, indexes or anything else that requires a judgement call by a corruptible human. The job of watching the banks would pass from the power hungry (or worse, sleepy) regulators to the public (you and me).

Once upon a time I performed the risk mgmt. function for a portion of a large bank. We used a couple of servers running every night to track a few thousand positions. The system knew every detail of about 95% of the positions. Today a team of 50 could track the entire banking system--given the right feed. Make the same information I used public and open to competing teams of analysts and then risk becomes a known quantity.

Of course, banks and regulators would be strongly opposed to this approach. They will howl about privacy, proprietary information etc. But the fact is when you ask a bank for a loan, they know all of your relevant financial information in order to judge your risk. It's only fair for the taxpayers to turn the tables and end our old-fashioned and broken system of disclosure. And if the risky part of banking is driven into a part of the industry that doesn't share information, then their investors should do without a safety net.

I am one of the Directors. Hacker Dojo is a non-profit community center--a hacker space. It has a Board of Directors to keep the lights on and the IRS happy, and its members vote on operating policies. The Dojo is currently running a campaign to raise money for expansion. Part of the money has already been raised. We are located in the same neighborhood as Y Combinator's HQ, but are unrelated.