ethan_g's comments

No the gp is correct, references in c++ can't be null. Your code invoked undefined behavior before you did anything with a reference, namely *a which is a null pointer dereference.

I don't know why this was getting downvoted, because it's correct. All the banks repaid their TARP loans from the Fed at a significant profit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program).

Even QE, which is not a direct bailout but certainly helped banks' profits, was substantially profitable for the treasury the last I heard.

(edit) Let me add, I was no fan of the bail-outs when they happened. But I can't deny they were, in retrospect, really profitable.

Some people did, like Warren Buffett. https://qz.com/67052/heres-how-warren-buffett-made-3-1-billi...

>stable of smart people operate in the stable of the corporations writing arguments for newspapers and magazine

I'm not sure if you're suggesting Matt Levine is "in the stable of corporations", but if you read his article history, he's clearly not. One reason (among many) it's fun to read him, is his incisive criticism of his previous jobs in finance and law.

Unfortunately, regulations are complicated, vague, and enforced unequally.

And yes, sometimes they're even secret, because of fear that if their exact model is publicized, the banks will just optimize around it. "Security through obscurity", essentially. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fed-says-stress-test-models...

To be clear, regulatory capture is when the regulator advances the interests of the industry rather than of the public. Revolving door is a separate issue.

There's an interesting argument that the revolving door actually prevents regulatory capture through encouraging regulators to be more strict. The idea is that the more onerous the regulations, the more desireable it is for corporations to hire former regulators who know the system. "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

Matt Levine's take on it: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-06-26/strict-re...

Certainly the first thing that's apparent when watching pros play is their speed. However, after playing years of Tetris myself (though nowhere near pro level), I've really come to appeciate that speed is only a small fraction of what makes pros pro.

* Many multiplayer games give bonuses for combos (multiple consecutive line clears), T-spins, and Tetrises. Setting these up efficiently can require reading several pieces ahead and takes a ton of practice. An example where both players do a fairly elaborate setup, one with combos and the other with T-spins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mASSHXLTuU4

* 20G mode, made famous by games like TGM, drastically reduces the ability to manipulate the pieces. Even surviving takes new strategies (you're forced to play a lot of strange moves), much less making tetrises like the pros do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoU0DQh7zdU

* Some multiplayer games give difficult garbage, I'm thinking of Cultris 2 specifically. Clearing garbage efficiently, known as "downstacking", requires much more careful piece placement than regular play. It's hard to appreciate from video, but if you compare pros downstacking to a normal person, you can see they use fewer pieces to clear the same amount of garbage, which is a real competitive advantage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgK4aJ_3zCw

>I'd be very curious to see a proof of an impossible sequence which adheres to the official rules, as that would be quite a feat indeed!

It sounds like, given enough piece previews, you can play without ever losing: http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Playing_forever

I think a lot of firms already do something like that through internship programs.

By the way, that's not a 10% increase in individual performance, but rather a 10% increase in relative performance for your weight. People on PEDs will usually move up a weight class from increased muscle mass.

Edit: See here for a really detailed comparison from someone who knows what he's talking about: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/steroids-and-strength-diff...

World's Strongest Man, Mr. Olympia.

Indeed, Jamaica doesn't have strong anti-doping organizations and Bolt has teammates caught doping. I'd love to believe Bolt is clean, but I find it hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Keep in mind weightlifting has weight classes, so getting bigger muscles by taking lots of steroids is partially offset by moving up a weight class. Steroids can make small guys big, but big guys are expected to lift that much more.

Given the limits of what the human body can do within a weight class, a 10% boost in your total for the same weight class is huge. The article saying it's "modest" I think is misleading: while it's true 10% is small on an absolute scale, it's huge on a competitive scale.

To give an idea how overwhelming doping is on weightlifting performance, the IWF reset all the records in 1992 and again in 1998 as the old world records were essentially unbeatable as drug testing got better.

(Edit) If you're interesting in a very detailed essay on the topic, I enjoy reading Greg Nuckols: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/steroids-and-strength-diff...

I tend to agree with GP that this is suspiciously simple. I've only skimmed it, but the novel part of the proof appears to only be Thm 5-6 which is less than 10 pages, and it's not especially dense writing. So this would be a relatively simple proof. Moreover, the technique used appears to be rather incremental over known techniques, so it's surprising it would be strong enough to prove PvNP which is so far away from the frontier of known techniques.

Interesting that this is the second P!=NP proof from a University of Bonn researcher. Other one, by Mathias Hauptmann, is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04781

I never did hear the status of Hauptmann's proof (I'm not connected to academia so only know what I've read on the internet), but given it's been over a year without word, presumably there's something flawed.

I might not get too excited over this proof, either, until another member of the TCS community can vouch for it. There have been many serious-looking attempts at PvNP that turn out to have fundamental flaws.

AFAIK boolean circuits proofs generally don't relativize, so there's no need to discuss that.

If I could go back in time to my teenage self and give one piece of advice, it would be to do heavy squats. They're that good.

Though I'm not athletic by any competitive standards, being physically active has always been important to my health and well-being. I've tried a pretty good variety of sports and activities, and of everything I've tried, strength training--squats in particular--have had the best cost/benefit. Doesn't bother my joints and very few (if any) injuries. Doesn't take much time to get an intense workout done. Good for maintaining flexibility, especially after programming at a desk all day long. Fills my body with youthful hormones.

YMMV, but for me, squats are the best thing I've ever discovered for exercise.

No, this is not the approach at any of the large banks.

It's not the fine that kills you. It's when your customers lose your trust and no one trades with you any more. Goldman has a ton of competitors in all their businesses that would pounce on any angle they could use to lure away customers. Committing fraud, etc, is a quick way to lose all your customers.

Plus the SEC and other regulators have a lot of political pressure to nail the big banks for any misbehavior.

Big banks are paranoid about these things and have huge compliance departments to minimize the chance of anything going wrong with a regulator.

Research and trading have strong information barriers, to avoid just the sort of thing you're suggesting. Banks enforce this very seriously. Search for "Global Analyst Research Settlement" if you want the history.

The thing about this approach--where you learn by assimilation rather than structured study--is that it you need to have amazing intuition for it to work. One of the benefits of structured study is gradually building intuition of the definitions and theorems. For someone of Scholze's caliber, the intuition is already there before any study. Structured study of linear algebra probably wouldn't have done much for him other than assigns names to theorems and definitions that he already intuitively understands.

I might make an analogy to studying music: for the majority of people, it takes a lot of structured study to develop a good ear (i.e. being able to write down melodies and harmony after hearing it). For example, you'll study intervals, chords, and inversions, and extensive practice identifying them on hearing--just as you learn theorems and definitions in math class and do problem sets to practice applying them. But some people innately have a very good ear (e.g. perfect pitch) and don't need a course to teach them to identify intervals and chords. Even though they might not yet know the names of chords and intervals, they already "understand" them.