skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't use Twitter myself (either to follow anyone or to post my own stories), but I work for a large tech company, and I fundamentally disagree with the article's first assertion:

> Tweets have no value

For my organization, tweets do very much have a value - they help us measure the day-to-day sentiment of people interested in our company (customers, prospects, media, partners).

Our PR person sends a weekly update of all company-related tweets, organized by topic. (We don't yet categorize by actual sentiment, but that would be fairly simple to do. Since company-related tweets still typically number fewer than 100 a week, it's easy to judge overall sentiment without an algorithm.)

For our use case, at least, Twitter is pure genius. They've taken the natural human tendency to want to share thoughts and ideas with others (in spite of my own introverted personality, studies show the majority of humans are extroverted); they've made it VERY easy for people to do so (there's no guilt in NOT writing a long thesis, since you're limited to 140 characters); and they've built a platform that makes it easy to measure and organize people's thoughts and ideas by topic and sentiment.

Whether that'll allow them to ever turn a profit, who knows.
>The function of a jail is not to take revenge, it is to keep harmful people out of society

There have been countless words written on the subject, but one of the functions IS deterrence.

Look at it this way: you can try to launch a startup and guide it to a successful exit. If it succeeds, you get some nice cash in the bank. If you fail, you spent a few years and have no material gain to show for it.

Or, you can try to get away with a large-scale fraud. If it succeeds, you get some nice cash in the bank. If you fail, you spend 6 months doing community service and have no material gain to show for it.

Yes, it's obviously oversimplifying (ethics, experience/learning from a failed startup, what do you enjoy doing, etc.) But there has to be a significant cost of failure to prevent people from deciding it's worth a try.
If the coding is routine, I sometimes listen to my favorite music (EBM or psy/goa trance) while coding. I especially like to listen to music while coding if I'm in a noisy environment (earplugs are good too).

However, when I get to a really difficult problem, I prefer total silence without any distractions. Again, earplugs are good for that. But if I need to, I'll go for a walk somewhere quiet to think about it (somewhere with a whiteboard, and/or maybe talk the problem over with a friend/colleague). Or I might even have to sleep on it. In all of these cases, there's no music involved. Music is more for the relatively easy/routine coding.
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It is very likely that this was said by many, many people throughout history. Great ideas are rarely picked up by a single great person. See this extract from the introduction to a book about Borges' short stories, posted in my blog at http://inter-sections.net/2008/08/26/bad-bloggers-copy-great... :

[Borges’s] sources are innumerable and unexpected. [He] has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: ‘Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.’ Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): ‘We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.’ But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): ‘God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’”
Taleb wants financial services to come in two flavors: boring, predictable, public banking utiliies; and no-safety-net no-bailout risk-taking investment.

He sees current regulation as helping to create the monsters we have now, where the risk-takers are allowed to play with the money that's supposed to be stable.
Lately:

Rock (Tool, Porcupine Tree, Pink Floyd, Rage, Muse)
Post-Rock (Explosions in the Sky, Mono, Pelican, Mogwai)
Hip-Hop (A Tribe Called Quest, Gang Starr, Outkast, Digable Planets, The Coup)

The post-rock/instrumental stuff probably works the best since you aren't tempted to sing, and it helps to listen to something that is a little more repetitive.
You can't discount the apocalypse. You just can't. And this pan-phobic concept "black swan" is just various degrees of unknowable apocalypses that we are supposed to account for based upon their very unaccountableness. I don't buy it. Read the tea leaves first, then tell me about swan feathers.

The housing bubble was BLATANT. No black swans involved. I remember talking about it with friends in 2005. No big deal, really.
Live Events
Metro Audio-Visual Productions Inc specialized in Audio-Visual Production, Event Management, and offers Services which includes audio, projection, web casting and satellite broadcasting, special effects, event production and many more.
Ex-wife started Kuwait wedding tent fire that killed 43
The Best And Worst Cities To Look For A Job
White House says it did send unwanted e-mails
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I'd say only about half (or less) of them are attractive.

But it is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of the people on the list are female.
I should add that great startup success stories almost always involve founders who were awesome as well. (Netscape and Viaweb both qualify on this count.) It's just that being awesome isn't enough. Traf-O-Data had awesome founders, but it failed; those same founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, had better luck in their second venture.
That's like saying that the articles on particle physics that pop every once in a while here shouldn't be posted simply because I don't have the money or the resources to build my own particle detector. Some people find these things interesting. It's not for you to judge what others here may find worth reading.
"The increase is not relevant to what?"

I think he is saying it is statistically irrelevant. Such a small increase in such a small time period could be random "noise".
After all, you can only fly one spaceship at a time: http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/FAQ#Joh...
Rx: Xbox?
Whoever does marketing at PopCap is a keeper. "Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine" :)))
Are you talking about www.thefailingpoint.com? That's me, and I am happy to share my experiences. They have been in the massive up and down times. Success and failure. I find it therapeutic to write, and since my old engineering team is in Y!Combinator this summer, I got the religion about sharing what I know. They asked me for a compendium of all the stupid mistakes I had made so that they wouldn't make them. =) I joked it was too much work, but it turns out that it makes for some good essays, and I really hope to turn it into a published work. For now, I am posting all the essays online for all to read for free. Chapter 1 and 2 are almost fully posted. Please send feedback.
I think Taleb's main complaint is that Obama has not changed the incentives for Wall Streeters to put the economy at risk. Instead, we've had a big and apparently permanent transfer of risk from private to public, exacerbating the situation.

A Goldman Sachs executive just boasted that their business methods hadn't changed at all from before the crash. Think about that for a second.
So, what is the solution? Destroy the financial industry? Good luck.

Taleb is an anti-intellectual. He believes that all models are wrong and useless. To make it worse, he advocates that no further knowledge can be attained. The only knowledge and truth that is right is the "black swan theory". Come on, gimme a break!!! Aren't we HN'ers smarter than that? Why is Taleb's drivel being upvoted?!
I'd only suggest that your introductory text does a better job of explaining what the app actually does. I saw the website before I saw your description -- it obviously solves a problem, but I wasn't sure what the problem was until I read your description here.
I hear this from people all the time. From a financial viewpoint, the markets exist to transfer capital from those that have it to those that need it. In addition to that, the markets exist to transfer risk from one party to another. People outside of finance need to realize that companies like Goldman, when they are speculating, serve a legitimate purpose. They provide a mass of liquidity that otherwise wouldn't be there. So, before you start thinking about changing the way things work, imagine what things would be like if you attempt to remove speculators from the market. If you tie Wall Street's hands too much, last year's freezing of the credit market would look like a nice summer day.
Some of us just want to understand how things work.
Many people knew there was a housing bubble, but few predicted it would have such wide-reaching effects. Did you?
Context Switches are Bad, but Stack Traces are Worse
Bill Gates is only there because he's standing next to a bunch of hooters models who are obviously there for Warren's ineffable awesomeness. Warren is the most famous fundamentals trader there is, therefore he belongs in the picture, even if he isn't well known as a quant. I don't have any pictures of Richard Grinold next to pretty girls.

Buying a short, selling a long: it's still buying low and selling high if you do it right.

As for why I'm linked here: I haven't got a whit of a clue. My best guess is that someone realized I'm a big Lisp nerd.

-Scott
"You can't steal ideas from probability theory and statistics that have been known for centuries, rename it, wrap it nicely and call it a new, original idea."

Do you have any references to work centuries old that describes what Taleb calls 'Black Swans'?
Slayer.

If that's not available, I love classical.
You're missing a few things. The punishment of 10 years in jail didn't deter him. Why? Because he was desperate and viewed this as his only way out of a desperate situation. I'm sure there are many people that attempt the same things that he did for same/similar reasons. This punishment isn't going to deter someone that thinks: (1) They have the 'system' beat (2) This is their only option.
Yay for Criff Dogs. The Good Morning ... :9
I like the classical and chill selections at http://icebergradio.com
I think you're painting things with a very, very broad brush...

Algorithmic trading is NOT the same as high-frequency trading. What is algorithmic trading, actually? Using algorithms to support trading decisions? Or to execute the trades? You can use algorithms to "suggest" trades and manually execute them. Or you can let the algorithms execute trades automatically. Moreover, "high-frequency" is relative. For some people, high-frequency can be miliseconds, for some others, high-frequency can be minutes or even hours.

Statistical arbitrage is an exhausted field. The smart hedge funds have been moving to greener pastures.

To whoever is interested: find something more meaningful to do with your life than buy and sell abstract financial instruments. Want to invest? Invest in your education and leave the financial markets for the professionals.
"The housing bubble was BLATANT. No black swans involved."

Yes, but what was not blatant was that the housing bubble popping would kill Lehman Brothers, cause runs on banks and almost bring down the whole world economy.

Taleb's point is that you can't go around behaving like any system is, to borrow a phrase "too big to fail" - or rather too cleverly thought out/regulated to fail. To some extent this is simple engineering. I can test the resilience of my cluster to network failure by pulling out an ethernet cable and see what happens - maybe there's a small hiccup while systems fall back onto local resources, maybe nothing fails over properly and I am hosed for 12 hours. As I understand Taleb, his argument is that the economic powers (bankers, traders, politicans) spend too much time trying to figure out how to prevent network failure, rather than making sure that when the network does go out, it doesn't take your whole mission down with it. Because, no matter how well you think you have engineered the system, the chance of your network going out somehow, sometime is non-zero.

I do agree with the posters that Taleb overstates the cleverness of his own insight; but unfortunately, in his field, it seems that people really were too dumb/greedy to grasp this. Irrespective of what you think of his interpretation of events or the validity of his suggestions (and I too question them), I think as systems engineers we can appreciate the risk of designing political and economic systems under the assumption that they can't fail.
Yea. I was thinking that too. Especially his comment about 'a larger body of water.' I was thinking, "So you're a 300lbs out-of-shape guy in the middle of a friggin' lake, and you're going to swim to shore entirely underwater so that no one sees you? Gimme break!"
No need for references. Probability was started by a bunch of bored french aristocrats who wanted to understand risk and uncertainty. Read what they wrote. They're the original thinkers.

Last but not least: in the late 1990s, Lehman Brothers had a trading desk dedicated solely to extremely unlikely events. That was before the so-called "black swan" theory came along. They made money only once. On 9/11.

Taleb's good ideas are not original, and his original ideas are no good.
I had all my money in the foreign markets, and got out in late 2007 when it spiked down,

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=VEIEX&t=5y

...I wouldn't have made any connection to US housing and foreign equities, but I was looking at both, and I knew both were bubbly. I've since lost money on a few stupid trades, so it's not like I'm an expert or anything. But the fundamentals are usually clear to all. Right now, the macros on S&P PEs, long-term treasuries, and high-yield,

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=JNK&t=2y

...are clear, and they all scream "avoid". And that's the extent of my trading strategy right now.
Nassim Taleb: clown of quantitative finance
IIRC, there wasn't anything in there about him pleading guilty or not guilty... maybe there was no lawyer/trial?
The Whore of Mensa
GitHub over SourceForge
What BMW's turn signals tell about application design
> If Apple has no competitor, they'll continue to innovate...

I immediately thought of MS Word when this sub-topic came up. Since establishing its dominance in, let's say 1997 or so, few features have come along that have truly changed the way that users word process (the last one for me was JIT spell checking). But MS has been adding more and more features in an attempt to continue innovating.

There's a Word monoculture and there's innovation of a sort. I think the interesting point that you make is that it's unfocused innovation that seems to be either incremental or aimed at preempting possible minor complaints, rather than exploring new ways for users to create documents. Not that I'm critiquing MS specifically of this—I think this may be a general symptom of monopoly (and I wonder if the same would hold for Apple).
Your slippery slope looks pretty flat to me. Some regulation does not mean locking down the entire market. And anyway, Taleb is proposing complete liberation for speculators; the only thing is they can't do it and expect bailouts, and they can't get some quasi-official stamp that says "AAA", please invest widows' and orphans' money here.

From a financial viewpoint, the markets exist to transfer capital from those that have it to those that need it.

No, that's what communism was supposed to do. Under capitalism, we use the market to allocate capital efficiently, to its most productive use. Perverse incentives, like excessive bonuses or government bailouts without penalties, interfere with the efficient allocation of capital.
what do you do with the other table?
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I felt it received undeservedly little attention due to the time of the day it was submitted. Sorry for the redundancy.
Yet markets worked before mortgage-backed securities were invented. Have you read Talib's books? He's not arguing against taking risks, he's arguing that we shouldn't take risks that might bankrupt us, based on some high-falutin' economic model that says that the payoff is slightly larger than the risk, because the calculation is likely to be wrong. And he's arguing that because we can never understand these single events (the Black Swans) we must absolutely never put all our eggs in one basket. Resiliency is more important than efficiency, because in the long run the efficiency is an illusion brought on by imperfect understanding.
You should fix your code for testing the speed of the STL implementation. You intentionally chose to implement it in a scenario that discarded any previous results. The most common usage is for (std::list<x>::iterator it = list.begin(); it != list.end(); it++); Using your naive approach, of course the list is going to be slow to access each element. Keeping a single pointer in memory is much more efficient than spending clock cycles going back over elements you've already seen.

If you need the random access, or 32 bits is excessive to keep in memory (for whatever reason), a deque exists specifically for the purpose.
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If you read that part of the article, it says that he abandoned it prior to his faked death (a week prior he left it at a gas station or convenience store, iirc).

(No one reading the article? what is this? slashdot?)
Here's two, off the top of my head:

- HTTP requests regularly fail. Page loads, resource loading, uploads -- all of them. Sometimes the page renders without any CSS, sometimes it doesn't load at all, and sometimes my uploads just timeout.

- UTF-8 causes ... issues. For instance, I've run into truncation of comments at UTF-8 characters.
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I can't tell any difference in regular search results, but Bing Maps shows things like the Bay Area's www.openspace.org parks, whereas Google Maps does not. It was also harder to find (relatively) small parks like Acadia National Park on Google Maps compared to Bing Maps. I've preferred Bing Maps since I noticed this.
Ask HN: Multiple Brands instead of Multiple Levels of Service
This is something I don't see in the .com and tech world. Why not have multiple brands that separate levels of service, instead of having the same service with different subscription levels for features.

Using flickr as a example. They offer free and pro. Instead, why not have two web fronts (both using the same backend still). One is called Flickr and would be free, but the other would be Blingr which is paid and looks completely different, a new brand.

A good real world example is Toyota + Lexus (imagine on the backend it's the same people working).

Why do this?

It's easy to implement, and you can really tap in to the folks who have ego and love exclusivity and want to spend. Plus it's like having two separate companies/fronts now.
Having not read his book, was I the only person annoyed that he used the phrase "black swan" a dozen times in the first paragraph without qualifying it?

He could have been saying "You and your party may be the only hope we have for a resilient society insulated from negative oranges and in which everyone has the opportunity to benefit from positive oranges." for all the difference it makes to me.
To be fair, the work of Pascal and the Chevalier de Mere does not give much insight on how a water leak may turn into a mudslide. Whatever you may think of Taleb, his work is more of a popularization of catastrophe theory than it is basic probability. He even says as much in his writings.
I disagree with the parent, but don't think he should be downmodded (at least not below 1 as it is now). He's making a point which goes against what most people here probably have, but it's prompted more discussion and was made civilly.
Your twist on the poor being the group that "needs" the money is a clever little play on words, but you, and everyone else here, knows exactly what I meant. Companies need money. Investors have money.

As for some god-given right to bank accounts, I never said any such thing. It's not my fault, nor Wall Street's fault, that people aren't better prepared to understand finance. It's a dog eat dog world. If you want to keep hold of your money, learn how to invest for yourself, place it with a broker and accept that even they may lose money, or hide it in your bed. Those are your options.

Under capitalism, we use the market to allocate capital efficiently, to its most productive use.

You are not distilling finance enough. Your definition is a first-year economics definition. That's a definition from an idealized world. In the real world, companies exchange shares for cash. They invest that cash into the business to create value. Other instruments have their own purposes, but it's all about taking either money or risk and transferring it from one party to another based on needs.
That may be, but it seemed to be the charges to the corp. credit card that really made them suspicious. The cellphone seemed to just be a quick confirmation that he was still alive. Though it would seem awfully suspicious for him to abandon his cellphone without reporting it missing/stolen (even if the police tracked down the thief).

[ I'm assuming he didn't report it missing, because the article doesn't say so, and because it doesn't make sense that messages sent to unknown numbers from a stolen cellphone would mean that he's alive to investigators. ]
I don't follow news. All I would use Twitter for is broadcasting to and receiving from friends. Once I cared about letting other people see my thoughts; not any more. So to me, Facebook serves for what I want it to serve as. I'd imagine that's the case for others.

As I said, I understand Twitter, I just don't see a need to use it.
Programmers are Overpaid
Programmers are basically dumb when it comes to business. The other thing is that they have an overly high opinion of themselves. Just because you can write code doesn't mean you are a genius. It is much harder to find someone to run a whole company, understand everything, and make decisions than it is to find a nerd who sits all day by themselves writing code. Then, the nerd thinks they are so wonderful and should make the big money. In reality, they have an easy job that doesn't even take that much training to do. The thing about programmers is that they are too dumb to realize the value of someone that is good at business. The market, alone, proves that a good business person is much more valuable than a programmer. If you want to make money programming, go out and learn marketing. Then work on something important instead of all of your techno weenie projects. Stop thinking your too smart for everyone else. You're just a dumb programmer.
Bach. I find it perfect for coding because Bach is mathematically and algorithmically beautiful so it gets the mind working in those ways.

I find IDM, electronica to work pretty well too. Autechre, for instance.
Yes, I have read Taleb's books and numerous academic articles by him. My comment was not about Taleb. It was a direct response to the parent of my comment.