skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Good documentaries about finance?
I have always more or less hated accounting, but recently I had to admit that it can be as well very interesting => therefore yesterday I watched:

- "Enron - The smartest guys in the room" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/?ref_=nv_sr_1): kind of funny&scary at the same time. It shows the capitalism pushed to its limits; e.g. very interesting and/or crazy the fact that (if I understood correctly) they put their "future estimated revenues" into their current balances (even if I can understand their way of thinking being that "the current employees should benefit now for a great idea which might generate returns only in the future" the foundations for the estimation can be only purely speculative).

- "Inside Job" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/?ref_=nv_sr_1): the explanation about the "Credit Default Swaps" (never heard of CDS until now) was very nice, and the interviews are probably a master example about how things look like when "ethics" don't exist. Maybe a bit too heavy on the mix of short sequences of interviews.

- "The queen of Versailles" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125666/?ref_=nv_sr_1): this was just crazy, a master example of how money can worsen your life.

Any recommendations about other finance docs?

E.g. "high frequency trading" sounds interesting => it might be interesting to know what are the technical quirks, what the people behind it are, etc... .
Or maybe something that analyzes again more in depth what happend in 2008?
Or maybe anything that explains well some important concepts of accounting and/or finance, based on theory and/or historical events?

For example I did find by googling "Too big to fail", "Margin Call" and "The big short" but as they all involve big names (e.g. Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Kevin Spacey), I don't understand if they're fiction or not. I'm not interested in fiction.

Thank you :)
I'm a huge Hg fan, and this thread makes me miss it terribly, but being written in "a readable language" is pretty much negated by all of the shenanigans Mercurial has to pull (including a nontrivial amount of C and Rust) in order to be passably performant.
Which specific law(s) do you believe this breaks? While it is illegal for the house to cheat most places, and while a punter may break other laws trying to cheat (e.g. trespassing, tampering, etc), I'm not aware of a specific law against cheating. I'm also not aware of a law banning the distribution of materials that may help one cheat (except DMCA? Copyright?).
I've also got an MSc in mathematics, I and feel that that was barely enough time to just start scratching the surface.
Sure, that's covered by "Unless you actually need the component parts"

Either way, yes you should store the clean standardized data and not the input. I didn't think that was confusing. Also you can get the best of both options with a JSON field.
That's true, I was thinking too much in my box of software development it seems :)
I don't think "who should get the credit" is the important part of this.
If it's a public machine, (i.e. in an airport) I don't see how it could be illegal. If you have to sign forms saying you won't cheat before you play... well, that's different.
Well, at least with a consistent spec you can create a compiler for a good language.

Somehow, undefined behavior in C is a much smaller problem than it looks like. But the principle still applies.
If it were just btrfs being silly, I'd expect the high CPU usage to be attributed to a kernel thread, not to the hg process. But we'll see :)
Building a culture where discussion around alternate
ways of doing things ('this doesn't block merge, but...')
is accepted and expected (without becoming hostile/nit-picky
or devolving into bikeshedding -- if it's not blocking,
the submitter can always just merge)

Yeah, this is IMO an important thing you want to do in code reviews. Specifically, when it's part of an ongoing collaboration and the feedback can be put to use in subsequent reviews.

We had soooo much blocking nitpicking and bikeshedding at my last job.

The "code artistes" among us would block PRs for these sorts of debatable style issues and other nonessential issues that weren't even remotely blockers IMO. Those discussions were a real sap on productivity and team cohesion. And management was unwilling to give any direction.

(It was a particularly big problem on our team because our test suite was a real pig, and moving code through the build/test servers and out to production could take hours sometimes -- so highly debatable nitpicks could result in literal days of lost time)

When I wanted to give that sort of non-blocking constructive feedback, I always simply did what you mention: I left the feedback, discussed things with the submitter, and approved the PR. Not rocket science. Although, apparently, it was beyond some of our devs' comprehension.
Your point is about mass surveillance and the inauditable backdoor of ME, which is an important security issue by its own, and I'm definitely not optimistic about the situation, especially when Boot Guard rendered removal impossible.

What I was addressing there is a different issue, which was how the general objection of TPM in FOSS community came from - In the original vision of "Trusted Computing" around 2006, it was expected that a TPM and ME-based DRM would prevail in a proprietary system and lock every piece of media, software, and file down.

You can read Lucky Green's presentation from 2002 to understand more about the situation of that time. https://web.archive.org/web/20180416211840/https://cypherpun...

> You could create Word documents that could be read only in the next week

- Steven Levy

> Fritz Hollings Bill: S. 2048: Plug “analog hole” with 2048-bit RSA: Monitor out, Video out, Audio out. Microsoft: Additionally encrypt keyboard input to PC. S. 2048 makes it illegal to sell non-TCPA compliant computers: A $500,000 fine and 5 years in prison for the first offense; double that for each subsequent offense.

But fortunately, THEY were way too optimistic...

> As of 2015, treacherous computing has been implemented for PCs in the form of the “Trusted Platform Module”; however, for practical reasons, the TPM has proved a total failure for the goal of providing a platform for remote attestation to verify Digital Restrictions Management. Thus, companies implement DRM using other methods. At present, “Trusted Platform Modules” are not being used for DRM at all, and there are reasons to think that it will not be feasible to use them for DRM. Ironically, this means that the only current uses of the “Trusted Platform Modules” are the innocent secondary uses—for instance, to verify that no one has surreptitiously changed the system in a computer.

> Therefore, we conclude that the “Trusted Platform Modules” available for PCs are not dangerous, and there is no reason not to include one in a computer or support it in system software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html
Uber in talks to buy food delivery firm Deliveroo: Bloomberg
Consider this simple application of standard QM:

1) we have a one-particle system that has been prepared into a pure state by measuring the spin along the x-axis

2) we are going to measure the spin along the z-axis

3) the quantum state before is a superposition of the |up> and |down> states (in the basis corresponding to the Sz operator)

4) the theory predicts that we are going to find either |up> or |down> with equal probability

5) immediately after the measurement the quantum state will be either |up> or |down>, depending on the outcome

What is the answer given by the Everett Interpretation? What is the description of the initial conditions? What is the prediction of theory? What is description of the end state?

I hope the answer is not just handwaving and mumbling about "superposition".
IDE like features in Vim
A programming language is more than just semantics, Dart eco-system is a tiny dot when compared against C++ and C#.

Flutter deployment times aren't worthwhile enough to bother with a language with uncertain future.
Lamport suggests hierarchical proofs as a possible remedy. They're somewhere in between computer verification and the current prevalent style.

Lamport acknowledges it would make writing proofs harder, while reading them easier. The style doesn't help to communicate the intuition behind a proof particularly well; it's more useful for verification. Mochizuki, for one, would have to work harder to write his proof (?) in that style.
> So the goal is to enable authors and inventors to have exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries

No, that is the means of accomplishing the goal. The goal is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts".
I didn't quite back it past 'butt'
Which bullshit laws were unnecessarily harmful to you and that provided no benefit to the surrounding ecosystem?
This is a common objection from mathematicians, that is very understandable. I think both Lamport and Voevodsky’s have made important contributions here [1]. Namely in presenting idea from software that we use to manage _exactly_ your complaint.

The way in which mathematicians structure proofs has fallen behind the ways in which software engineers structure programs (which are isomorphic to proofs). The question is then to develop languages which encompass these modern methods.

This is really the goal of the homotopy type theory project, to provide a language which is both machine checkable and easy to use informal reasoning with.

[1]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/write-2...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOY-XE29_d8
No, it became atrocious. The world moved on and SourceForge did not, which is why superior offerings arrived.

And to your first "question", no. It had them in almost exactly the same incarnation as modern sites, but with a UX design language rooted (fatally) in the "best practices" of the web at the time. Unlike all the crazy things you'd have to do around FTP to get it to act like DropBox, SourceForge had the mentioned features built in from the start.

It doesn't really win GitHub any prizes to pretend otherwise, so I'm not sure why the pushback against simple facts.
I've seen several machines like this in various bars in Sweden at least.
If China, Russia or any other country target journalists its oppression and totalitarianism. If the US does it its not? This is alarming double standards by jingoists who do not believe in any values.

FISA courts, secret processes, secret orders are completely arbitrary and undemocratic. You can't hollow out the very things that define democracy and continue to call it that.
How does a secret court fit in a democracy? How does targeting journalists with secret courts and orders fit a democracy? Then what is the difference between totalitarianism and democracy?

Threads on China, Russia and others are full of commentators lecturing others about democracy and human rights. How can you hold others accountable for the very things you are guilty of yourself, how can this kind of hypocrisy pass in informed discussion?

It's this alarming dissonance, hypocrisy and complete failure to hold anyone accountable since Snowden's revelations that is providing cover for these kinds of shocking overreach. And in the absence of mainstream protest and activism it will keep getting worse.
Absolutely, this. We did the same thing -- [DONT MERGE] or [WIP] in the title.

That way you could get feedback from other devs, and pushing commits to your PR would trigger CI runs so you could be made aware of any build failures you were causing. (The builds took hours, sometimes, so running the full test suite locally was impractical)

We used Github but I'm sure it would work in a lot of workflows.
> Does that not feel arbitrary, to drop the repetitions?

If the conjecture turns out to be true, then that apparently arbitrary step turns out to be meaningful, because it uncovers a hidden relationship between the numbers A, B and C and their factors.
That's why as stupid as it is, this rivalry between the US and China might actually trigger something. It's sad that close-mindedness prevents meaningful collaboration, but if an Us vs Them mentality is what it takes to make leaps then it might be worth it.
I also retained ability to type on qwerty even though I've been using dvorak exclusively for the last 10+ years (I need to write a few commands on qwerty a few times a year).

I think that's actually the first time I hear about somebody who "forgot" how to type on qwerty after switching to dvorak/colemak. I wonder how long has he been using qwerty before switching.
I have never (luckily) had any problems with RSI, but have taken the time to learn layouts which hide special keys under the home row, accesible with combination of the Alt gr key.
Have you had any experience with that and how it impacts on RSI? From my perspective it should do at least an impact since I rarely move from home row even if I do a lot of programming.
I remember an instructor explaining during the math olympiad training program: "A proof doesn't have to be in any particular format. A proof is an argument that can convince other mathematicians."

At this point, it seems clear that we do not have a proof of the ABC conjecture. Perhaps someone will be able to improve this to make a real proof - after all, there were some errors in the first Wiles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but they ended up being minor errors that were fixed up once they were found. But what we have is not a proof.
Chimp communication is complicated enough that it can probably be called conservation, but I think they're one of the only species for which that is true.

I think most animals lack a wide enough range of responses to have a conversation.
Do you know why they migrated from Scala?
My God! This Titans' website needs urgent attention:
http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/top-english.html
I spent a lot of time at a previous job supporting an NDB cluster and I can attest first hand that it is awful.

Single node failures cause entire cluster shutdowns, the cluster then takes forever to recover and must be done in a specific order. In fact just thinking about it makes me anxious.
> Only one example of human-level intelligence.

It's better to think of this as "human-like intelligence."

Talking about "levels" implies a hierarchy of which there's no proof, and what evidence has been trotted out for it is backed by highly questionable religious and species-centric reasoning over a long time.
Then consider that many convicted felons also lose the right to vote.
My initial point what that your terms are muddled.

Your hypothetical could benefit from a preemptable (aka non-cooperative) scheduler, which can forcibly interrupt A, to allow C to start.

A cooperative scheduler (which is what JS has) is at the mercy of A to properly yield.

---

As for how to yield on the macro- or microtask queue of your choice, they are the same difficulty to write.

// HTML5, Node.js
await new Promise(resolve => resolve());
await new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, 0));

// Node.js
await new Promise(resolve => resolve());
await new Promise(setImmediate);

You're correct that setTimeout and setImmediate are not guaranteed to work on all ES runtimes, because they are HTML5 and Node.js specific additions. (As is the entire concept of a separate macrotask queue, which you dislike so much.)
too bad, does not seem BigInt made it.
Octopuses Given Ecstasy Reveal Genetic Link to Social Behaviors in Humans
What you want is probably TAI [1], Unix Time has leap seconds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
"I'm just curious. I saw you shuffling your checks with your right hand. Can you do that with both hands?"
I'd never thought of that. That's brilliant. I agree: it'd be nice to somehow control the order in which the diffs were presented to the reviewers!

This would IMO be a killer feature for Github or Gitlab to implement.

Typically, I explain complex PRs "manually" in the PR itself or by screen sharing them with the other devs, but this is not always very efficient.
A few favorites that come to mind.

- Betting on Zero. A documentary on the billion dollar short on Herbalife and whether or not Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. It is definitely biased towards making Bill Ackman look good (the guy who made it is friends with Ackman) but nonetheless is very interesting and if you are anti-MLM it will fit your view.

- Dirty Money. I wouldn't say it is straight finance but shows a variety of business stories that are very interesting. I thought the one on the payday loan guy was the most interesting. It is produced by Alex Gibney (who did the Enron doc) so if you liked that one then this will be up your alley too.

- The China Hustle. Highlights some difficult in investing in Chinese companies and how they differ in terms of standards and reporting.
Most big tech companies, AR/VR startups, game companies have graphics programmer roles that might do similar things.

Teams that specifically have the need for voxel-ish rendering include Minecraft (Microsoft), Roblox, Medium (Oculus), Media Molecule (Sony).

Outside of games, art tools and consumer apps, voxels are used in many medical and scientific applications.
My experience is that learning dvorak when you can touch type qwerty is pain since every key you are looking for will be hidden under your other hand.
If I were to issue a recommendation to someone in my situation back then I would say: Use only one hand for the first weeks!
V2 will be available as a custom suppository.
Because most mathematics is not constructive, and most automated theorem proving tools are based on constructive logic.
Where does it say Nitrokey Pro? All I see from this and previous posts is "OpenPGP token".
the rep is dated 2 years ago?
Doesn't Dart interop with JavaScript libraries?
They do have lots of ancillary revenue streams, but when you're talking about 100s of billions from ads then they just get overshadowed completely. Very hard to build an equivalently sized business in any other sector.

The major now seems to be on Google Cloud, but they have struggled there with bad marketing, lack of sales and support talent, and strange priorities. Seems to be growing now with the AI functionalities but there's a long road ahead.
I don't see the point to mentioning the specs of your old PC. My first computer had 4k and a tape drive does that mean software for your PC was bloated?
I had high hopes for MyRocks, then I got a chance to use it. The limitations, mainly being 5.6 and no coexistence with InnoDB made me reevaluate TokuDB and it was a better choice for a write heavy, low update, workload especially with interval flushing (non-fsync durable) commits.
Why? Advertising isn't going anywhere so there will always be providers of it, so why would Google not remain one of those providers?
I worked in a web app that used XSLT transformations of XML-formatted domain models to render HTML pages. You ended up doing the same sort of thing that React does, but with _far_ more cumbersome programming constructs. Functions done in XSLT were a nightmare.

The idea behind the whole thing was that the "web devs" could be hired for their HTML/CSS skills and never have to touch code. The reality was, they had to become experts in a peculiar, clunky, XSLT-based programming language of their own.
> The computer will not be able to make sense of this step either.

What does that mean, then? That a leap is being made that depends on the reader's fuzzy intuitions, rather than the established axioms? If that's the case, it's not a formal proof at all, no?

Or am I way off here?
Curious on how much cognitive dissonance is caused by this. "I believe they don't like me. I also believe I need them to like me."
Yep, it can go the other way as well. I'm not religious on this one. I know what my experience has been, but those are pretty specific cases. I may change my mind next year, who knows?
http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/IUTch-discussions-...
This is the correct answer. For some reason, the top-voted comment is some nonsense about Git's branching, which was never something I've desired or every found useful in a decade of rigorous daily use with both. To the contrary, git's branching model still trips me up all the time, specifically when I want to do things like list all the commits in the branch.

Basically the problem is that unlike Mercurial branches which are actually branches while git branches are just a pointer to a particular commit. That pointer has no knowledge about what other commits are in the branch and the pointer can be moved anywhere across the tree (even to unrelated commits) with ease. Apart from the reflog, it's basically not possible to ask about the set of commits in the branch. The best you can do is never ever move the branch pointer except forward and make a note of the branch that your branch branched off of so you can do things like `git diff my-branch..parent-branch` (`hg diff -b my-branch` iirc). And this is just one of dozens of git warts.
> That's why HTML failed as descriptive language

I think HTML and the web failed in general. Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. We went from abusing tables to abusing the entire document. We, in effect, eliminated all semantic meaning from a document by making everything generic tag soup.

The DOM + JS has largely supplanted HTML as the source of a web page. Especially when using tools such as React or Angular.

In terms of vision, the rise of native phone apps and the fact that every major site has a mobile version and a separate desktop version really highlights how the web failed.

I do node/React dev for a living. I'll be the first to admit this pile of hacks is total garbage. Mobile web is almost unusable. I hate it. I hate the sites I work on. Their UX is horrid. Native apps are so far superior that they make the web look like an embarrassing relic. But web development pays the bills and keeps the lights on.
The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

A fantastic overview of the headaches you'd have if you wanted to code all this.
This is such a great insight, and is one that I came across later in life. Once you realize how little friends/acquaintances care about the minute details of your life, it is very, very freeing.
iOS 12 Security Guide [pdf]
in which case you will need to implement a cavity-search algorithm
Who needs the semantic web when we have machine learning to extract the information we want?
Can’t tell if trolling, or you genuinely believe this. Are you talking about outside the USA?
Werner Koch (see previous announcements) isn't a cryptography amateur.
How to Show Hidden Files on Mac
A few observations:
1) This man, by all accounts, is free only because he has an extraordinary talent. It's not that his case for innocence was stronger than any specific other inmate's. It's that his talent attracted the attention of people that could work for his release. How many people without artistic talent are nonetheless languishing unjustly in prison?

2) Bureaucracies where the individual cogs (here the prosecutors) have no skin in the game, will always tend towards inhumane outcomes. They don't even need to hold the power of life and death over citizens for this to be the case. Prosecutors face no consequences for wrongly incarcerating people, so naturally, they tend to be overly aggressive in prosecutions.

When designing government agencies in the future, citizens should first figure out how to make sure the bureaucrats have skin in the game before they empower them. Once the bureaucrats are given power, they become petty tyrants. It's just human nature.
A few years ago I asked Mochizuki via email if he would be interested in organising with me an effort to mechanise his proof. At the time I was developing a collaborative interactive theorem prover, for which this would be an ideal application. He politely declined, and I am kind of happy about this now, because I need a few more years anyway before my theorem prover could be used for something like this without being a pain for its users :-D