skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of people are leaving comments critical of his goal of beating the market as playing a zero-sum game, just pushing wealth around, having no value for society, etc.

This strikes me as dubious and high-handed, to say the least.

First, as to the value of the endeavor. He is trying to, in his words, "come up with an algorithm that finds pockets of profitability in a cloud of probable randomness." If he could really do this, it would create capital flow, the ability to borrow, and so on, for people that could turn it into wealth that would not otherwise have access to that wealth. Financial markets serve a real function, and beating the efficient market hypothesis would improve their ability to fulfill that function.

Second of all, he's extremely interested in the problem. He's obsessed with modeling complex systems and sees this as a sort of holy grail. Surely the fact that he's interested in it and values it counts for a lot, especially if you grant the above point, that there is a value to what he's doing. He has his reasons for being interested in it, and it's a productive endeavor.

I think it's false that his lack of progress, or the reasons that he's frustrated at his lack of progress, have to do with these aspects of his goal. It's more that he's working on an extremely hard (arguably insoluble) problem where it's hard to see incremental gains. This is a problem that ambitious people in many different fields face.
Do-It-Yourself Downsizing: How To Build A Tiny House
Gain Self-Insight Through Abstract Thinking
Fantastic to see some of the mystic being taken out.

Next up: engineers! (No, we don't all fix cars or build bridges… ;))
On the last question give me a little time to look up a paper. I'll post it. Essential it shows how the strategy of most long-short hedge funds work. I'd have to look again, but one of the major high frequency strategies uses a version of this.

I'd love to read it, but the easiest way to answer your second question is to point you to 'A non random walk down wall street.'

One huge assumption that Black-Scholes makes is that returns are normal distributed. This is not done for empirical reasons rather mathematical ones, namely it is so convenient.

Edit: Pdf http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/conference/2007/liquidity...

Some meta data and such if you don't feel like going with a pdf:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1015987
Thought the same! Will send mail this week.
70% say social media influences buying decision
Wouldn't it be simpler to use VirtualHost so you only respond with content to requests for your domain?

Then set it up so requests without the domain name get a 301 redirect to the canonical URL.
I heard that one of the updates for ios4 is that it would maintain a wifi connection when put to sleep.
My mother was down on the floor of the NYSE the other month, and she got the opportunity to corner a trader who she noticed was relying heavily on algorithms.

She asked "What's the difference between a good trader and a good algorithm?" The trader said "nothing.If you're buying 1000 shares, it's probably better to simply put in a market order. A large hedge fund seeking to buy many hundreds of thousands - where the difference between paying 8.30 and 8.31 a share matters - algorithms can actually be helpful."

The issue here is the definition of "trader." For this guy, trader is a person who executes large trades for an investment manager. A trading decision is not the same as an investment decision, and in that vein many trader's motivations are simply to buy a desired quantity of a financial instrument as cheaply as possible.

If you're buying 1000 shares, it's probably better to simply put in a market order. A large hedge fund seeking to buy many hundreds of thousands - where the difference between paying 8.30 and 8.31 a share matters - algorithms can actually be helpful.
If you're buying 1000 shares, it's probably better to simply put in a market order. A large hedge fund seeking to buy many hundreds of thousands - where the difference between paying 8.30 and 8.31 a share matters - algorithms can actually be helpful.

Humans are probably better computers for figuring out which stocks to buy and sell to my mind, but there's certainly a place for algorithms if they are not too high-minded.
Because I think the OP is making a value judgment.

You don't want to "burn down the internet" if you merely think some people on it are less well informed than you are, only if you think they are lesser people who don't deserve it, or to protect yourself / your group identity from "them".
Which brings up a good point: how _does_ google find these domains? Are they just blindly scanning the entire IP block?
If marijuana or any other drug for that matter were 100% legal tomorrow nothing at all would change from the way it is now. The people who want to use it will still use just like they do now. The fact is that even being illegal most places it is incredibly easy to get.
Agreed. I'm 28, soon to be 29 and I have achieved a great deal less. That kind of experience, though sour, is pretty awesome, at the very least you should be able to get yourself into a highly paid quant position at a finance firm.
Computers are born color blind. They have to be taught to discriminate
This article definitely speaks to my experience starting in Clojure. Lots of the Clojure pioneers seem to develop in Unix environment like Linux or OSX. A lot of times, their unix shell build scripts are not directly portable to Window's cygwin. Yikes.

That being said, with a lot of the Clojure IDE plugins and build system reaching usable maturity, the n00b experience has gotten a lot better than when I started a year ago. So, keep up the good works, guys....
"The new rules, many of which will take effect over coming months, treat dispensaries a bit like pharmacies and a bit like casinos. Felons will soon be prohibited from owning dispensaries."

Are people with DUI's or other alcohol related offenses banned from owning bars? I don't know personally. If they are then I am okay with this.
Indeed,

>I've never lived in Berlin myself, but in standard German both versions - with and without the indefinite article - are 100% correct

I find this intriguing as my German language instructor (we focussed on grammar and technical language but also did conversational German) informed me that "Ich bin ein Berliner" was simply wrong and that it was a kindergarten style mistake - as I blushed and corrected myself "Ich bin Patent-prüfer".
To beat the market you HAVE to predict what trades others will make in the future. It is easy to use math to make it appear to be a numbers game but that is just abstraction. The reality is that people buy and sell stocks for 1000s of different reasons.
In order to respond to this post with the level of seriousness it deserves, I have prepared my true comment in a visual form:

http://skitch.com/petercooper/dkny7/3d
Pardon my ignorance, but I'm genuinely interested...

Is ~20+ sales per day considered good / high for a just-released iPad application?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/hn/your_rationality_is_my_business/
Logitech MX 5500 - Awesome keyboard, best keys ever, Bluetooth connection, and this is part of keyboard- mouse package. The mouse is totally awesome, def worth the money. probably one of the most expensive keyboards from Logitech, but worth the money. Awesome battery life too.
Zoom, all other multimedia keys too.
really lightweight, and very nice keys.
Great article but when I read the article title I thought the game was sold outside of the app store. Is there a centralized online store for selling web apps that live on the home screen and act like native apps?
I think you need to categorize your feeds by importance. There are some sites you will surely want to catch everything from. There are others where you do not. Do not categorize your feeds by topic but by importance.. that way you can read the "Must Read" folder every day and hit mark all as read on the "Less Important" (or similar) folder if you haven't got the time. That's how I manage my Google Reader and it works a treat!

That aside, relating to filtering the news, my site at http://coder.io/ is doing exactly that but with only coder/programming related news. Still in alpha and very early days but I'm hoping it will resolve the problems you raise for one tiny niche.
This type of thing has been done before:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FatKat_(investment_software)

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/finance.html

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/25308/

I'm sure there are other examples. I think part of the problem is this guy thinks he can get rich quickly with just the right set of programming instructions.
> I have had pages without plugins lock up and refuse to accept clicks

Ha, I've been getting this a lot recently, personally I'm blaming the firefox sync tool.
All this is only undermined by the fact that the financial sector and the stock market in particular involves mostly fictitious money. There is no problem that it solves that could not also be solved by saying "here, I conjured you a million dollars out of thin air, act as if you had it". The market is, as it were, a MUSH.

There are certainly plenty of talented people working in finance. That talent is just completely wasted.
This is what happens when you play a zero-sum game. Even if you win, someone has to lose.

I don't see the causality. He has yet to succeed because it's an incredibly difficult problem domain. There are problem domains of similar difficulty that benefit people that he could have chosen and still be in this position.
1) I see now where misunderstanding is coming from.
I'm stating that government is poor at innovating.
You are stating that government is a good source of funding.
These statements do not contradict to each other.
I agree that government funds lots of projects.
It's just that practical results are not impressive at all.

2) Considering the cost of "Man on the Moon" project, the benefits for us are pretty slim.
If I take from you, say, $10K, and then give you back $3K, I can claim that you should be happy, because I'm helping you by giving $3K. Right?
3) CERN is NOT a government.
Every website should have a similar redirect rule in there somewhere (I implement it in PHP). If someone hits yoursite.com, you probably want to redirect them to www.yoursite.com. I whitelist my domains such that if someone goes goes to anything that points to my server and isn't a valid subdomain, they get redirected to www.
I checked out Idaho's economy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho#Economy

Some highlight:

Low income taxes(1.6% to 7.8%) but high sale taxes(6%)

Electronic manufacturer being a biggie industry. Accounts for 25% of tax revenue and 70% of all exports.

But it doesn't seem to have anything special in term of economics.

The state constitution doesn't reveal anything special either. It just said that the budget should be balanced, which I think is part of all other states' constitution.
This is a great question, but I'm not sure "kill" is the right way to look at it. The better question might be, what makes it less relevant? I have a hard time believing that Facebook will ever "die." A lot of websites that were once hot and the leaders in their categories are pushed to the side as a somewhat tangential/very similar product is introduced. I'm thinking Yahoo and Myspace as two examples.

Both Yahoo and MySpace are still around (and still very relevant for some), but have shifted as Google and Facebook respectively have come in. They've become less relevant in what we think as their core competencies - Yahoo for search (though their drive to be a portal might have done them in) and Myspace for social networking. What is interesting is how both of these companies have evolved into I would say more niche specialties. Yahoo has great finance and fantasy football tools. MySpace is now the place for music/bands to post their work (The first and probably only time I went to MySpace this year was when I stumbled on a link to the very popular TV show Glee tryouts (a friend was trying out I was supposed to vote for) on MySpace. It got me thinking, why wouldn't they do this on Facebook, soon recognizing that Facebook couldn't support the type of functionality required for the contest. Could that be potentially something Facebook will suffer for in the future? Probably not that one example, but maybe a suite of features.

I guess my point here is that I doubt Facebook will ever "die." The only time that I could see it dying (nice post TomOfTTB) is as it's a complete generational shift where our generation's kids (I'm 23) use some wildly new disruptive technology that's more relevant for the time. My guess is, though, our generation will be using Facebook for many many years to come.

I will be interested if and how it evolves like MySpace/Yahoo. Will it end up niching itself? I took an informal survey of friends who talked about using Facebook explicitly for "what's going on with my friends" (aka stalk their facebook albums and walls to get up to date on what's going on) as opposed to Twitter which is (for me and some of my friends at least) much more about "what's going on in the world? what articles did these cool people I respect find?" Pictures on Facebook are done very well and I could see that being a future niche.

It's a fascinating time to be involved in the internet as it's still to young almost to have "history" or "throwbacks" (some might disagree, I know). I would guess that the "movements" TomOfTTB refers to will be happening throughout the history of the internet. To give an metaphor with the auto industry, it might be like the revival of the VW Beatle/Bug cars (popular in the 60s) get revived 40 years later. It might be that a website like MySpace (or even Facebook someday) goes out of style one decade, but then somehow comes back. It sure will be an interesting ride whatever happens!
Just wanted to add this, so you have another option:

Do-It-Yourself Downsize: How To Build A Tiny House
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1281092...
swinger-ish nerdhemian folks

That's the most ridiculous phrase I've seen today. It also perfectly describes me 10 years ago :-)
I realized this only after accidentally heating a metal cup.
The argument is that because watching 3D movies forces your eyes to focus in a different way (which is true), you'll forget how to properly focus objects in the real world. I think that's a bit sensationalist, and akin to the argument in the 1800s that the enormous speed of railways is hazardous to your health.

It's not even like 3D images are a completely new invention. The article even mentions stereograms, which have been around for many years, force your eyes into a position that's even more extreme, and have been really popular at one point. I don't remember a widespread outbreak of lazy eye because of those pictures.
Seems like the argument here is that because this person can't mind his own business I need to hear about it. Not sure about anyone else but my life is complicated enough without me taking on the problems of other people who aren't asking for my help in the first place.
Interesting that the "before" virtually always are chemists in the lab, wearing a white lab coat and playing with some liquid, usually in a conic beaker. Aside from the "normal person" angle, it's interesting that the prototypical scientist is never a physicist or a field biologist, much less something as exotic as a computer scientist.
Yep, indeed. Though still worth a read for the comments alone.

Nowadays Rubinius' JIT VM is implemented with LLVM and, obviously, is much more sophisticated.
To clarify:

* Google isn't a domain registrar. If they were then one would hope that google.com would be registered under them, not markmonitor.com (a popular corporate registrar)

* The server hostname is a subdomain of amazonaws.com and doesn't require registration.

* In fact, the entire name is autogenerated from the IP address using a simple substitution rule.

* I'm not sure how Google finds these, because their own "what links here" doesn't turn anything up.

* Side note: while searching for backlinks in Google, I noticed that this article seems to have been copypasta'd to a dozen other blogs. That's SEO, baby!

EDIT: Damnit HN, you look like reddit, why can't you use a sane text preprocessor like reddit?
I agree. Disparaging speculation as "zero-sum" and therefore inherently bad is non-sense. In almost all mature industries such as grocery stores, auto sales, lumber, appliances, etc., any individual seller's gain is some other seller's loss. So what? They are providing a valuable service and if profitable in the long-run are doing so at lowest cost, highest value to their customers.

Financial speculation has a long history of being disparaged by various anti-capitalist demagogues. Speculation is a zero-sum activity between speculators but, from an economy-wide perspective, speculators nevertheless perform a valuable function in the dissemination of new information and the formation of prices. This latter function is why it is so hard -- the identification of an arbitrage opportunity and acting in the markets to make profits means that price differentials fade away and thus the potential for profits. A speculator has to continually find new opportunities in order to make money over the long term.
Microsoft has not actually made a profit on the whole xbox debacle, something Sony managed in the first generation. Microsoft does not know how to not waste money, because they haven't had to for so long. They do it with everything, sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn't.

If Microsoft had just invested all that money in the bank, they would be a far richer company than they are now.

Of course, the xbox may start returning benefits now, or it may disapper in the next generation.
Doesn't currency inflation just delay the day of reckoning? If the political will doesn't want to fix the root problem, than all the inflation in the world won't fix anything.

Can you name the administrations that has been saved?
Well with the money you save you can even build another hackintosh as backup.

But if you value the time to buy parts and assemble them more then a mac is good for you.
The term "complete failure" is more revealing about your draconian idea of success. You should take a look at your own words : "they have never found their Holy Grail" [therefore, they joined the ranks of Academics as a testimony of failure].

If you're running after the Holy Grail, you have no choice but to be a hero. What kind of pressure is that ? In fact, most of the answers are in front of you, in the way you express yourself.

For instance, the myths of the Holy Grail and Tantalus are ones of insoluble challenge and dilemma. Therefore, when you are wondering if the Holy Grail exist, where it is, and if you'll ever reach it... You are probably asking the wrong questions.

Instead, you should ask yourself : "Who am I ?". Do you want to be rich, or do you want to "beat the markets" ? That's 2 different things, one is a mere consequence of the other. Where is your priority ? As it's not clear from your writing, I suppose it's not clear in your mind either.
> You can't advance in a career in the sciences without accepting on some terms evolution by means of natural selection so who cares if a bunch of people don't agree?

Because we're afraid that that could change.
For one: Scientific illiteracy →
Biblical literalism & religious fundamentalism →
Prop 8, the Texas school board, citizens voting as proxies for religious leaders

Relevant to the article, herd immunity is compromised by those misinformed about vaccine safety.
It's possible another user of that DNS name (they do get reused) linked to it at some point and Google picked it up.
I don't think this is arrogance, no one is lacking in humility and skepticism. It is more a matter that any and every claim need not be treated with the same sort of gravity as a rigorously investigated subject. The scientists in question are most likely dismissive of people purposefully ignoring evidence that does not fit into their world/political views rather than view points rooted in scientific data.

It is absolutely important to care what others' think when it comes to topics in science. We live in a society, and others' views and ideas unfortunately will most likely impact people other than themselves. People are free to be as ignorant as they want in isolation, but the moment they start affecting policy, we should care.
No centralized store, but Apple maintains a catalog of webapps for iOS: http://www.apple.com/webapps/
Almost anything where you create something would be better.

Then again he/she is creating software and algorithms.
Soon to be followed by "why you should understand what an API is".
Thanks! I wonder what is keeping Apple from trying to cash in on some of these apps as well. Looks like there is a submission process and possibly a review process for these apps as well.
Well, it would be nice if the author had (or if someone with expertise would) write up some rationale on the strategy and benefits of having APIs. Certainly distribution or monetization can both be benefits of a well crafted API, but if it is pursued blindly for the sake of having one, it could be a way of letting value slip out the door.
I have a two year old daughter. She means everything to me. I hope that if she were interested in pursuing a career in computer science there would be nothing to dissuade her. Unfortunately, given the lack of women in the field, the perception is that this is primarily a career for men.

I have a one year old daughter, but I think my bias is one of a gritty commoner brought up surrounded by gritty, strong London women. Whatever my daughter ends up doing, I'd hope she can fight, drink, argue and cuss any of her male compatriots who dare piss her off under the table.

Most of the women I know and respect in our field are ass kickers. They have strong personalities (even if they're not outgoing) and speak their mind - most don't freak out about gender issues, even if they've had problems in the past, they nip things in the bud. I love these guys not because they're women or "feminine" but because they're being themselves, getting on with life and not using their gender as an excuse for doing anything differently.

Given this, I don't think we should make an extra effort to make women comfortable. We should make an overall effort to make people comfortable (I suspect most men don't like the bawdy "manly" behavior either), diminish the concept of gender and gender roles, and be more tolerant of each other.
... Google is a registrar and has been since 2005.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/01/31/google_is_now_a...

http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/accredited-list.html