skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are plenty of professional investors who have beaten the market year after year, and by a lot more than single digit percentages. Multi-decade returns of 20% and above are well documented. I personally invested in a fund 12 years ago which has returned a compound 21% pa return over that period, so I know that they definitely exist. The chance of this happening due to luck is impossibly low.

Some professionals have an edge by developing a model of the market that suits their particular risk levels/cognitive model. As long as that edge continues to work, they continue to outperform by large amounts. The edge might be extraordinary discipline, it might be a allocation size model, it might be a risk-management model. The edge has to exist, and most importantly, it has to match the psychological profile of the individual.

The mistake is not that the EMT is particularly true, it is that amateurs approach the markets with the hope of replicating the results of the professionals, and that amateurs think they have an edge, but they in reality do not.

If the Efficient Markets Theory is to hold true, then in no case should people have multi-year returns well in excess of average. Since this is true, then most people will say that the theory is false. I don't really have a dog in the fight- I don't care either way. But I don't think you can say that it is chance that causes people outperform the market, because there is far too much evidence to the contrary.

As for the 'people studied for years' bit - I don't think that strengthens any argument. The research world is littered with theories that have failed, and length of time spent researching has little correlation with factual correctness. Ultimately, more theories have to fail than succeed in order for knowledge to be gained.
Overall this is a very weak and one-sided blog post. Even a simple search would have answered his questions about why Scala doesn't use Hindley Milner type inference:

http://www.scala-lang.org/old/node/4654

How this post got voted up to the front page really makes me wonder. "Clojure programmer gives Scala 1 star", what next "Ruby programmer gives Python 1 star"?
Another thought 'cause I can't stop myself: if Satoshi is a collaboration, anyone outing themselves as part of it is making it harder for others to keep their roles secret. So if Nick + friend(s) were Satoshi, you couldn't well expect him to talk about it.
You've just described the hedge fund industry. Well that and insider trading.
> Hmm, if you can reasonably expect to gamble away $100k without much worrying, congratulations, and also this article probably wasn't' written with you mind.

I'd actually argue that a good number of people with $100k savings could easily lose it without much worry because if you're able to save up that kind of money you probably already have a good enough job to replenish your savings after a few years.
Just for an anecdote that somewhat differs with the popular sentiment here: Thumbtack paid 5-figures for the domain (thumbtack.com) on seed funding long before any traction.

There is no way to prove whether or not we would have been as successful with a random domain, but I think in the early days it helped make us seem more established to the non-tech savvy user (which was and still is the majority of the users) than we were at the time. I think if your users are more tech savvy it doesn't matter as much, but for "consumer brand" types of things, I think if your name is good, and your name and domain name match, that will be noticed and will make you appear more reputable.
I've been in enough code reviews of Scala that did simple things like string processing that inevitably got sidetracked into a navel gazing discussion about type theory, pattern matching, and functional programming to not go near the language again anytime soon. You simply couldn't understand the code without understanding tons of incidental complexity about the language.

The Clojure community has its navel gazing of course, but every time I've been exposed to some crazy idea in that community it was always through the lens of providing real leverage for real problems. Most of the time when I've dealt with people trying to explain concepts to me for Scala code, I've walked away wondering what the point of it all was (beyond the fun Computer Science.)
The problem with Fedora is that it is bleeding edge - and can be a bit unstable. So they let things go into Fedora, wait a year or two for it to stabilise and get the bugs worked out, and then it goes into RedHat/CentOS.

That is, at least for major versions of software - they constantly update packages with security fixes that might come out, and continue this for years. This means even backporting security fixes from newer releases.

So you use CentOS when you don't mind packages being a little old, but want a very solid system with long term security updates (and there are the Software Collections coming out which let you get newer versions of certain things - like Postgres which is still 8.4 in the stock install)
4K is totally doable with a single GPU if you drop to using medium/high instead of very high/ultra quality settings for even the most demanding of games: http://hardocp.com/article/2013/11/11/geforce_gtx_780_ti_vs_...

For the majority of games 4K won't pose an issue whatsoever with a modern high end video card.
I don't know. If you're a tech-minded person, and you have a decent idea about where technology is headed, you can make some bets that will likely outperform the bets that portfolio analysts are making.

I doubt, for instance, that the effect of Bitcoin was fully priced into the value of Western Union, as soon as Satoshi's paper was published.
I'm really curious of what "sound" you're talking about.

I've been working with Scala full-time for the past 2 years. Prior to that I worked with Perl, Python and Ruby and I still work with these languages for quick scripting or if the codebase demands it.

Scala code-bases tend to be based to a higher degree on good engineering practices. Scala itself is a much more static language than a language like Java, hence it gives you plenty of compile-time safety, with its static type system being one that helps you, instead of staying in your way. Even a tricky feature (now market as experimental SIP-18 and so they have to be explicitly enabled), like implicit conversions, is far more safer than the monkey patching that goes on in Ruby/Python, as it's lexically scoped, doesn't modify anything and the compiler throws errors if there are conflicts.
This is quite true. There is such thing as too much information.
pknerd , I tried to reach you on linkedin but email me at steve@stevemorin.com
Perhaps you should read a bit farther down that Wikipedia page:

Anyone can register an org second-level domain. Although org was recommended for non-commercial entities, there are no restrictions to registration. There are some instances of org being used by commercial sites such as craigslist.org.

Refer all complaints to Craig Newmark.

It's been decades since anyone cared what those suffixes used to mean. Just look at all the .co domains. And how many of those .cc domains are really in the Cocos Islands?
"So... what are you in for?"
Safe? I'll send my drone to steal your balcony package seconds after Amazon has left.
AOT is a Mono extension to .NET, there are some cases it doesn't work and generics can cause some of them. See: http://www.mono-project.com/AOT for more details

For .NET proper, new machine code is generated at runtime. I believe (but do not know for sure, offhand) that it basically takes the IL definition of the generic method, slots the now known type into it, and JITs it to get the machine code it needs. I do know that there are couple bits of IL that are meant to make it possible to write the same code to deal with both reference and value types, which is probably related.

Ngen (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6t9t5wcf(v=vs.110).a...) let's you transforms assemblies into machine code up front, while still being .NET proper. However, if it can't find a use of generics with concrete types found at runtime (ie. you generate a List<int> via reflection) you'll still load up and use the JIT (see some discussion here: http://stackoverflow.com/q/16647568/80572).

I don't use AOT or Ngen regularly, so the particulars may be a little off in my explanations. But that's the gist of it.
I know how to do that and it generally requires roting the device or buying an app.

It really bothers me to find out that Google is taking away a feature specifically to appease T-Mobile. Pure Android experience no more.
I was given $2k when in highschool by my grandfather to trade on the ASX. It was an amazing learning experience over the three years I did it. I stuck to mining companies, got very involved in understanding the industry, and had an amazingly lucky break -- one of the first companies I invested in (most of the money I was given, as my admittedly amateur research made it seem like it was undervalued) increased in price 20 fold over the 3 years (and continued well after I sold). I ended up with $25k when I finally sold all of them.

That's when I found out about capital gains tax ;) I was very lucky to hit the jackpot like that, and despite winning numerous Australian wide highschool trading competitions (my favourite was a FOREX day trading sim, in real time with the market against teams from around the country in the room with us! Came first with my best friend) to this day I've not invested another cent into the market, for the reasons outline in the article. It's a lot of fun, and I've done well, but I'm not good enough to compete with the big fish; without that, it's too risky, unless I know something they don't!
Yelp graph: checkin-based business clustering
I'm not too enjoyed by the thought of privately owned drone fleets, for different reasons, some related to privacy and liberty.

Keep in mind that not every reader leaves a comment.
Can you provide more links to where I can buy them?
Just to share my experience as this is one of the rare edge cases that I have encountered:

Switching from dd-wrt to Merlin's ASUSWRT, I find that it kinda screws with airplay.

When I play a movie, I'd usually select the sound to output to my Airplay speaker on my apple tv. After switching to Merlin's FW, I tried playing a movie and there was interference and distortion in the sound.

I suspect its due to the ethernet connection/port that brought about that problem since the issue went away when connecting the apple tv via wifi. I only use shielded cat5e cables btw. All in all, the problem went away when I switched back to dd-wrt.

I remembered spending a whole Sunday just to figure that out. Also, I'm not sure if its just isolated to Merlin's ASUSWRT since stock ASUSWRT might also be affected(I didn't test).
MonkeyBrains
Silicon Valley catches Bitcoin fever
4GL and MUMPS? Sounds like you've spent a bit of time in the dark corners of the healthcare industry. My condolences.
That's true, and an important point: if you expect your personal earning power to grow at a rate far greater than 8%, then investing your principal now will have little effect one way or the other. But investing later will, so it's good to be prepared with the right strategy for you (whatever that is).
Well there's a reason I put quotes around it.
Awesome - an OpenSSL package with TLS 1.2 support was something that I've really been wanting for a long time! I was starting to think I'd have to wait until CentOS 7!
I have extra kidney to sell if anyone's interested. Payment will only be accepted in Bitcoins.
Not fully, but mostly. See comment 64 of issue 909. https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=909
It really doesn't, does it. It's quite rare to see all the text properly embedded in what appears to be a scanned paper document.

Also curious that it specifically mentioned 'jhprotominer', a miner for 'protoshares', which appear to be related to 'bitshares'; yet another cryptocurrency that's about 2 months old. Interesting that of all the articles mining LiteCoin on AWS, there's been no such issues.

I can't decide if someone's trying to get protoshares into the news, or scare miners off them. But I do have a hard time taking this one at face value.
The number I'm most interested in: the false positive count.
It's amazing you were able to type that from so far up pg's ass. One demerit for not using a numbered citation [1].

[1] Imitation is the sincerest form of groupthink.
Not too mention the Thunderbolt Display is outdated with its MagSafe 1, USB 2.0 ports, still present FireWire and it's thicker than the new iMacs.
We've been doing a rigorous study of the performance of "the experts" at http://backrecord.com . Some results so far: (1) we have no evidence that anyone (via publicly available statements) can time broad market movements, including people who are widely implied by the media as being able to do so. (2) no evidence that anyone can predict anything on a short timescale (< 1 year). (3) Assuming no selection bias [not necessarily a very good assumption], enough statistical evidence to suggest a minority of market commentators can beat the market on longer timescales that we feel it is worth pushing the study further.
No they aren't. They wouldn't pull you over if they lacked evidence. Are you seriously suggesting saying nothing even if it is abundantly clear what happened? If you admit it and explain why you did it(maybe it was just a stupid mistake) you have a chance of not getting a ticket. Only time in my life I was pulled over and I explained what happened and why I made the mistake. Got off with a warning.
This tactic seems to betray a certain amount of naivety with regard to how closely most real-world HTTP implementations follow the specifications. (Hint: they don't follow the specifications.)

Remember Postel's law: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."

Unfortunately, you will have to return URLs to your users that are invalid. You will have to parse slightly malformed dates. Your clients will expect to be able to pass through malformed values from bad endpoints and not introduce a point of failure in your library. (Do you know about the "Cneonction: close" trick, for instance? All real-world proxies do all sorts of batshit-crazy HTTP header munging.)

If your library can't accept and pass through arbitrary strings for arbitrary headers, and return them to users, and then accept them back again, then it is unlikely to be successful in any sufficiently complex and robust HTTP service.
But that means on aggregate of all bet you made, it would still be worse than market average.

Also, that just adds another layer of difficulty altogether. There are probably fewer people that can predict the future of technology than the financial market.
You know, I think I saw that too. If it was the one I'm thinking of, the results were memes. I vaguely recall the one for couchdb being something like a cartoon about um... "no SQL? so how do I query it?" "You don't; you write a distributed map/reduce function in Erlang." "Did you just rell me to f*ck myself?" "I believe I did, Bob."

...or something like that. Damnit, you'd think that'd be specific enough for google to turn up something...

Edit: Woot, dbarlett got it. I think I was failing due to my incorrect recollection that it mentioned mongo and couch, and not nosql in general.
It's not a perfect cycle. LA's terrible smog was not a result of not caring, it was a result of the catalytic converter not existing.

Guess what, the catalytic converter exists now.
Why Everyone Will Totally Read This Column
When I got started, I found Effective Go [0] and the Go Blog [1] extremely helpful. Effective Go goes over important properties of the language and Go Blog often go over important issues related to both language and standard libraries. I learnt about slices, interfaces, and json library all from Go Blog.

Also I think the best way to learn a language is to use it instead of reading a book. Pick up one of you old projects, and rewrite it in Go. Or pick up a new simple idea and implement in Go.

[0] http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html
[1] http://blog.golang.org/index
Indeed, DEEP in the east coast systems. But, it was great for me, it was literally name my own price consulting (lawyer rates) with multi-month contracts. I would guess it still is a name your own price market if you have the stomach for it. Travel and horrible tech.

I was in an odd position of having picked up 4GL and MUMPS via odd random ways when I was 19/20 -- so when everyone who used to maintain those systems vanished, I was around to step in and bill like crazy for helping them port OFF those systems onto more modern tech. Every port a MUMPS app to Erlang... I have!
As soon as the startup get any press, all domains will be gone and kept at ransom for you to cash out for insane amounts.
Absolutely. It was really interesting to see him in that kind of character, you rarely get that kind of spontaneous reaction out of him nowadays.
Looks like someone implemented this: https://bitcoin-checker.appspot.com/
I have a Seiki 39in that I use as a second monitor for my rMBP - the PPI (110) is the same as the Apple 27in Thunderbolt and they have roughly the same picture quality once you calibrate the Seiki. 39 Inches of uninterrupted space is awesome the only downside I've noticed is some mouse lag under OSX which can be fixed with some quartz settings that then cause screen tearing, I've read it's not present under windows so maybe it's something that can be worked out with a software fix.
I disagree.

Individual stocks tend to be pretty good for hedging out your own risk/rewards. For example, I've taken a rule of thumb to not invest into Technology, because I work for a company who is tied pretty strongly to Technology.

Buying "market averages" may have me putting up multiple eggs in one basket. Take SPY for instance, its top holding is Apple right now.

Now, I can buy SPY, and then hedge against technology by buying individual stocks in Coke, Johnson and Johnson, and Plum Creek Timber.

Will I beat market averages? Probably not. But when the technology sector crashes (and one day in the future, it WILL crash again), I may be out of a job... but at least Coke, J&J, and Plum Creek Timber will not crash with me.

I can guarantee that my holdings in SPY (a general S&P Index ETF) will crash in the next "Tech Bubble crash", but I'd be very surprised if my other holdings crashed with it.

There is more to investing than just maximizing your average gains. Minimizing risks, and spreading out your assets by nature reduces the amount of gains you will get... but your financial life may be safer as a result.
please tell me it was some kind of joke
You may have saved nearly $30K, but how much business are you losing to those people that type in the .com version trying to get to you. The parked page may have ads from your competitors. What is the value of all that potential (albeit difficult to quantify) business?
I'm interested in learning more about quant-like involvement in the market, just kind of as a hobby for cold winter nights. Would you say the odds are so bad even that would be foolhardy? I don't need to make money, just have something interesting and not loose too much money.
I for one am awaiting the time that we can finally look up and see nothing but thousands of drones hovering ahead, eclipsing the sky.

one question.

1. whats to stop some hooligan from throwing a rock at one or standing on his roof and catching one and stealing the package.
Facebook in talks for its first acquisition in India
> The only real outlier being Javascript which gets its popularity from being the only option for the browser.

This is probably the reason for Javascript's popularity, but if you ignore some bad language design, Javascript is a very simple language with a very small number of concepts that you need to understand to start getting work done in it. Even Python (which I think is the simplest of the widely used dynamic languages) has a larger number of concepts that you need to understand than Javascript.

So I don't think Javascript it's an outlier according to your theory, it's very much a simple language, the only remarking features compared to C/Java/C#/etc are the fact that it's dynamic and that some corners of it are badly designed, plus exceptionally badly designed API if you're doing anything in the browser that's not abstracted by a platform library.
Bitcoin might need a “Red Hat moment”: a Bitcoin Bank
We simply disagree on this. I would rather use almost anything else except the random DSL wasteland that is Scala. Even Ruby or Python (with the horrible GILs) is preferable.

The groups I worked with made different determinations than your team, but if you guys love it, enjoy. Seriously, if you find a technology your whole team loves, you are KILLING it.

Both companies I worked with have since dropped Scala (after literally hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on the attempts) entirely internally due to maintenance and talent acquisition issues.
I'm sorry, but huh?

By "easily" do you mean it happens for some measurable number of small-money participants (of which there are many, of course)?

Or do you possibly mean that you invest in 10 different stocks and one doubles?

This sounds like optimism bias.

There is no basis for returns to "go down as numbers go up", except if you are forgetting to average in the losses when the numbers were small. (Maybe because they are small they don't feel like they "count"?)
Rainbow Loom, one of the top toys of the year, website design from the 90's
The interesting bit is that this isn't an equilibrium.

If a well-managed stock will not sell better than a poorly managed stock (which is the case if everyone uses "whole market" low load index funds, which seem to be the best performers right now) then there is no longer any incentive for management to manage well.

Now, I'm not saying that you will make money by picking stocks; what little I have in the stock market is in a broad index fund, too. I'm just saying; this isn't a sustainable situation.
YouTube Video Speed History
Has anyone calculated the energy usage of sending a 1kg package 10km alongside 100s of other packages on a diesel powered UPS truck vs sending it by itself, hanging below a battery powered octacopter? How much more/less energy does the octacopter consume per package?
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. But if you really are serious, criminals can already use drones and there is no profitable reason any private business would want to track you with drones (and if it did become an issue we could outlaw that specifically without stopping legitimate uses of drones.)

As far as "polluting the sky" that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Flying robots delivering packages everywhere sounds incredibly awesome to me, and if not, well we can't please everyone's aesthetic preference. Our current infrastructure of cars and pavement everywhere isn't particularly beautiful as it is. Electric drones flying back and forth don't require any new infrastructure or "destroy the sky".

I also doubt there would be drone's everywhere. Maybe, but I'm guessing it'd just be something you occasionally see. You might not notice it at all depending how high they fly.
Currently #2 on Amazon[1]. Funny thing is, markup is relatively modern, and the site is super fast, no javascript, few resources loaded. Is it an effective site?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Toys-Games/zgbs/toys-and-...
I initially had the same concern. "Golang" is a better keyword than you might think. Google is pretty smart to interpolate where it might be missing on certain pages.
This is the basis of well known - potentially hypothetical - scam. Send 2^n emails out, half stating that stock X will go up tomorrow, half stating the same stock will go down. The next day, split the addresses that received the correct prediction in half, and repeat.[1]

[1] http://ask.metafilter.com/216295/Is-this-famous-investment-s...
http://www.reddit.com/r/everymanshouldknow/comments/1rsizj/e...

some useful information. followed by a reddit thread which may be less useful.