zweiterlinde's comments

Not a small town, but the Philadelphia Tooth Fairy Project sounds similar: https://www.inquirer.com/philly/blogs/public_health/The-Phil...

I first learned about this from Radiolab: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/g-pro...

That's a bit of a mischaracterization I think. Exchanges have well-defined rules for clearly erroneous executions, and these are not the same in the equities (Knight) and options (Goldman) markets. If anyone else had made the options trades that Goldman did that day, their trades would have been busted as well.

The way we do this is to have a base image that has already yum installed or pip installed all modules (non trivial, anyway) that our package needs. Then the docker image that needs to be rebuilt (that depends on the first one) is just a minimal pip install away.

This is unfortunate---Colyer's summaries are well worth reading.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732393

You might be interested in this New Yorker article then: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/09/man-and-superma...

Ricky Jay is amazing. I went to a screening of the recent documentary about him, Deceptive Practice[1], which he attended and subsequently answered questions---enjoyed it immensely.

His incredible 52 Assistants show is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jljt5Ml28FU

[1] http://www.rickyjaymovie.com/

FWIW, the estimates I hear kicked around from Tabb Group and the like are more in the $1-5B range, not $10-50B.

Which is to say, even a tinier drop in the bucket.

What were the actual correlation values? I didn't see them reported anywhere.

Simply reporting p-values is insufficient; there is a huge difference between statistically significant (high confidence that the value is not zero) and significant (the correlation is large enough that it's relevant for anything useful).

From the plots I suspect the correlations are pretty low...

In their defense, the Times did print a piece last week about an increase in traffic fatalities:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/nyregion/in-reversal-new-y...

Agreed, though, that cyling in NYC can be incredibly dangerous. Every serious cyclist treats an accident as a "when", as you mention. And in my own experience (6 mile Manhattan commute, mostly on the Hudson), I could be in 3-5 accidents per week if not for extreme paranoia. I would not give up my helmet, irrespective of the legal situation.

I don't disagree, but I would suggest that if the "successes" are worth billions upon billions, then even "failures" are quite valuable as well, at whatever point in the processes they are still indistinguishable.

As hard as economic value is to quantify, "enduring value" is even harder. So I won't even attempt to make judgments on that front.

A startup bubble is the best thing that could possibly happen.

Look at it this way. There are plenty of talented engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs out there trying to build the next big thing. Due to the incredible scale and reach of the internet economy, those who succeed will become fabulously wealthy. But most will fail (or at least not reach that scale) due to various circumstances---a misstep in execution, a superior competitor, our simply bad luck. There are certainly many small successes, but success or failure can seem like an incredibly binary event.

Why should engineers shoulder that risk? That’s the raison d’etre of finance and investment. Let those with capital take on the risk, and give the engineers enough security so that a “failure” doesn’t put a talented person out of the game. If every startup that demonstrates that it execute on an idea and can clear some threshold of viability gets a reasonable exit, then the investors will still get enough Facebooks to generate a good return, and the startup teams are much less captive to chance and fortune with respect to whether they can pay the bills or not.

Hull is always the first recommendation. After that, it depends what area you're interested in. You could move on to Shreve for more hard core quantity material, or go to Tsay (Analysis of Financial Time Series) for a time series primer. You could try Natenberg for options material or Grinld and Khan for portfolio management. Not too much useful material on HFT out there. Agreed that Harris is useful but out of date.

Completely fair point with respect to the Apple comparison.

In the long run, I envision an enormous amount of economic activity flowing through micropayments, where everyone is giving/receiving payments based on their production/consumption patterns. In that world, their rates are too high. But for the world as it currently stands, it may be ok.

The term "micropayments" is misleading when the article's canonical examples are $12 and $19.99.

My idea of a micropayment is about $0.25, so a minimum $0.05 fee is way too steep.

The quotes around 'just' might indicate sarcasm here, in which case the comment is a criticism of a forced dichotomy between engineer- and design-driven.

Yes, you've hit the nail on the head. Especially in the case of dual-income homes, there is a discrete hurdle you must overcome that makes the marginal tax rate misleading. In this context, you have to make $40-50k just to break even. Ouch. And working hard enough to justify a $100k salary to bring home $30k? That's a disincentive, in my book.

Even further, consider the impact that this tax structure has on people deciding to take on debt for higher education (ok, so that's frequently a bad idea anyway, but there have been other discussions about that). A smart single person might well decide to take on $100k (or perhaps even $250k as the law professor seemed to imply) to raise their lifetime earning potential. But then two smart single people get married. They would like to have kids, but what was originally a reasonable investment is now quite a handicap because of the fixed cost + marginal tax cost related to the second income.

One key element that is missing from much of this discussion is an understanding of comparative advantage and its importance to society.

If someone has the skill and ambition to succeed in a demanding professional career,isn't it better that they do so rather than doing their own gardening for fear of being judged? In general, it seems obviously good for society for a married couple to both work and outsource some of their domestic responsibilities that others can perform more cheaply. But our current (and even more, our future) tax code discriminates against this heavily.

I've been dying for the inverse of lilypond;an app that would allow you to take a picture and turn it into text notation/MIDI would be awesome.

That said, I used lilypond a couple of years ago and loved it.

In the long run, it seems like approaches like ConCRT and User Mode Scheduling (Windows only, sadly) could address this. The OS can provide support for detecting any blocking operations (even page faults, for example) and doing task-level switching for you.