skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Limiting profitability to increase probability of success is one of the principles of professional trading. Take for example, every single spread that's bought and sold.

The good thing is, people have studied this. Because your argument is certainly plausible. What you leave off is that while you may "miss out" on upside, you also bank credit every month that you reinvest and compound.

I called making money in stocks a 50/50 bet, but it's not. It's biased toward the upside, a premium you're given to invest instead of lending (bonds). I've seen it calculated from 3-5%. So lets call the probability of profiting when you buy a share of stock 53%.

So let's talk about this study:
* It's not part of the study but, we're in a 5 year bull market. So if your point about missing out on upside is true, it would certainly apply in this market.

* At the beginning of the year, purchase 100 shares of every company in the Dow
* Each month sell the nearest OTM call, banking the credit received
* Compare P&L with a uncovered long position.

By selling covered calls you reduced your basis by an average of 8% and increased your Probability of Profit to 73%.

Here is a link to another website that has a write-up about the study. I emailed the research team at TastyTrade to get a link to the study itself. I've seen it on their website but can't find it now.
http://probabilitycapitalgroup.com/market-studies/using-cost...

And of course the wonderful thing is anybody curious can backtest this themselves. There's a lot of ways to do it, but the trading platform Think or Swim is free.

I'm not advocating what I don't understand, or what I don't have experience with personally. Honestly, i don't buy long stock very much, I prefer options strategies, but for example I'm long AAPL stock, and I've sold the $110 covered calls.

Addendum: I understand the resistance. Most peoples first (and only) experience with options is buying an OTM call or put. They almost always lose their money, think 'wow what a racket' and swear it off. Moreover a general distrust of market makers, hft, etc, and people stick with the status quo. But the reason I love trading with options is because I get to pick my own probability of profit.

You are right on one thing, though: The style of trading I do does not enjoy or rely on the "big win" of holding a big position that goes up huge. My style of trading is: 50 small positions in uncorrelated underlyings that give me a number of individual occurrences to let probabilities work in my favor -- to eliminate statistical variance.

Edit: To be totally clear, I do not advocate buying OTM calls and puts. I'm talking about taking the other side of that trade.
I had a similar reaction. I knew the point he was making, but I didn't like the way he has making it. I think that if he came right out and said his point - articulated succinctly by Chinjut in a sibling comment - it would be a more effective essay.

Dispense with the cute semantic quibbling, and present your real point.
The fact that they are not being notified is exactly it.
Go argue with Random Walk and Efficient Market theory. It's not a notion I just made up.
Very interesting and I wish to say thank you. Pat C. in Texas
Actually junk in LEO is very problematic, you have to pass trough LEO to get any where. LEO is the only feasible placement for permanent/long term special habitats.
Junk in LEO tends to have very erratic orbits, and small junk tends to skip on-top of the atmosphere like rocks on the surface of a pond rather than just crash and burn.
LEO junk is also much harder to track due to the limited coverage earth based stations have.
And i don't know about you but i will be very worried about 100,000's of bullet sized fragments of silicon carbide (the stuff they make brake discs from for high end sports cars) potting used for high end electronics flying around at 30,000 Km/h...
Did anybody stop to notice the date of the article? I'm confused by the conversation herein. I thought this was posted as a sort of mockery of the author. After-all, if you put your money into an index right when this guy told you to, you would have lost your shirt.

If you had a while until retirement, that wouldn't be a big deal, since it would now be back along with more, but what about the folks moving their IRA out of balanced bond and commodity based funds with some growth stocks, etc. (i.e., hedged) and essentially into the S&P 500, at 60 years old... like my parents did.

The best advice to anyone is to buy indexes after a major market crash; only then will you reap rewards without nearly as great a risk. Here's the catch: most of you will disagree; that's why 10% play and the other 90% pay.
Uber sucks. Have you ever taken a cab in a city with decent cab service? You just hold up your hand and an experienced driver takes you where you're going. With Uber, you futz with the app, then the driver circles the block trying to figure out where you are, while three cabs pass by you, and if he doesn't cancel the pick up after giving up, futzes with the GPS and takes you along an inefficient route because he doesn't know better.
why only dual core!?!?!?!?!

This thing would be amazing, if it were quad.

I think I'll still go with the wandboard for now (quad core arm A9, 2GB ddr3, sata port, 2 microSD slots, gigabit ethernet, etc)
This would be more valuable if the site also compiled as much aggregate information about what makes and models of IP-connected camera were most common. This would at least shame the manufacturers into designing products that help people set these up these cameras securely.
Yahoo did this first. They weren't keen on the peanut gallery making inappropriate comments on serious articles.

I have a peanut gallery, I mean Comments button on my website for my mobile apps. It sends me an email and sits in a moderation bin. They are always support oriented so it works out great. This way spam is also directed to my email instead of the website.
Mostly the former. Some think they are the latter, but a lot of outright criminals will explain to you how they are actually justified using their own carefully-crafted moral code that always conveniently allows for their behavior. That's what I mean by forcing their own morality on the world.
just an fyi for those who don't know -- BeagleBoard is run by Texas Instruments (TI).
>They find the server...

I doubt you could host a large scale operation on a single server. Given the volume that SR1 && SR2 received, you would need more servers at some point. At that point you either need to hit up craigslist again or host via cloud providers. (of course all of this is assuming that the first guy you met on craigslist was not an undercover agent).
I think this article about Japanese companies' aversion to layoffs was fascinating when I read it a little while back:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il...
You're certainly correct, but if you compare this:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/indent

with this:

https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/

even just by line count, you'll see the difference in philosophy.
I think I address that with my last sentence:

>I'm not arguing that depression is the opposite of happiness; however, I do not think it's unreasonable that if people are overall less happy, this will increase the incidence of depression.

None of what you say contradicts this. You point out

> Depression can be wholly orthogonal to "regular" emotions.

which is certainly true, but it also can be quite parallel to them. In my experience, my worst episodes of depression were usually triggered by periods of profound unhappiness, even if during these episodes the experience is not the same as being continuously unhappy.

(Characterizing depression as coming in "episodes" is also misleading, as it is generally ever-present to some extent; but any characterization less than several pages long is misleading. I'd appreciate the benefit of the doubt that I understand the other issues and subtleties in play even if I do not discuss them.)
PayPal's job recruiting secret: Hackathons
"know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won"

What exactly has been won here? There have probably been ultra-driven people for as long as people have been cooking or gardening or "scratching dirt." Being ultra-driven and ambitious is probably as boring and quotidian as any of those other things.

All of us die, it is usually unremarkable, and after a while no one remembers. You're optimizing so that you spend most of your life doing the things that seems most meaningful to you. Those people who are having children and watering gardens are probably doing the same. Each type of person can do that without condescending to the other type of person.
I'm not sure sadness or lowering your opinion of the country is necessarily the right takeaway here.

I've been enamored in Japanese culture ever since I visited the country, and have gained a handful of penpals in my quest to learn 日本語 - at times we discuss the different in culture relating to employment. To them, the riskiness in American (and to a large extent Western culture in general) is insane.

I am not risk averse in the slightest - I've gambled my future on gut feelings and judgement calls for as long as I can remember. But I don't think this makes me better than someone who takes a safe approach to things. Is risk taking inherently better than a safer approach? Why would it be?

Our way of life sounds just as dismal to a large portion of the Japanese as the salaryman way of life does to a large portion of Americans.
Regarding mistaken authorship: whoops, sorry. That was inattentive on my part.
Autonomous transit will not deploy in 5-10 years, I guarantee you.
Important to note you haven't given up vehicle ownership though. You just haven't switched types of ownership. Uber needs to be more than your 5% edge cases if we're talking about disrupting ownership habits.
you are probably going to be one of the few people to meet up and do a cash drop for the server. Which is automatically going to make you standout to the hosting guys. Thus, MUCH more identifiable.
I love that we are bringing people into the industry, but I wonder if it's really responsible to plaster figures like "$80K for 3 months of easy training" is really a responsible way to market that... I know you have to pragmatic to some degree and speak to people in the language they will listen in... but people who go into coding "just to make money" generally end up like anyone who goes into a field just to make money without any love of the craft: unhappy. After 20-some years in and around tech, I have come to just accept this cycle while humming Elton John's "Circle of Life" in my head: "Make a ton of easy money in tech!" ::>> "So many people in tech just to make money." ::>> "Tech Crash Due to Overhype About How Much Money There Is" ::>> "No one makes money in tech - go get an MBA" ::>> "Someone in tech made a ton of money!" ::>> "Make a ton of easy money in tech!"
Meh. While entertaining, this is a fallacious allegory. This fails to consider the divisibility of bones, some dogs getting more than one bone or the fact that in real life scenarios that the number of bones can fluctuate (more or fewer bones).

Furthermore, the site states that there are 1 million unclaimed bones. While I won't argue either in favor of or against that figure, but assuming there are unclaimed bones, your allegory would be more correct if there were something like 105 bones and 5 dogs still went went hungry every day despite the 5-bone surplus.
This is exactly what I'd hoped the essay would be about when I saw the title. While reading his essays about what YC looks for in founders, I've been amazed by how often I've thought to myself, "Wow! That's just like me." My rejections prove I have many faults too, and they help me to dig for them and improve.

I'm afraid that I get too excited while reading the parts that resonate so strongly with me that I gloss over important attributes where I need improvement. An essay identifying characteristics that made founders look very promising whose startups ultimately failed due to controllable variables would be very helpful for me. I'd be able to relate to characteristics I may (think I) have, and learn that those aren't enough. Or I'd learn that those characteristics are easy to mimic, that I'm not so apt as I imagine, and I'm just fooling myself about characteristics where I need far more improvement.
Those figures can be shocking at first but if you think about it the problem is not those 85 richest having as much as the poorest 3.5B. Probably those 85 people reinvest a huge part of their net worth in assets. It is not as 85 people consume as much as 3.5B people -- shifting consumption from the top 85 to the poorest 3.5B would not make a difference.

You couldn't do much for ~1.5 bn people living in poverty by redistributing wealth from the top 100 richest.

But when you compare the resources developed countries have, and compare the average living standards of developed countries against underdeveloped countries, then you have a huge difference.
> GNU's child Debian provides access to non-free software

Correct. That's why Debian is not in this list of Free GNU/Linux Distributions: http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
I thought user flags could only kill a post under 10 points?
DLA (diffusion limited aggregation) or twists on that. Alternately, recursively subdivide a space randomly
Sounds like summer ended and everyone returned to work increasing demand and thus surge pricing (best guess) Then you had Oracle World and Dreamforce too.
It totally blows my mind people still fall for this bullshit split sleep meme made up by an historian.

So we take medical advice from historians now?

I do know in the world of science that shift workers get a lot of cancer. Which is not split sleep exactly but close enough for me to not be forcing myself against nature to split sleep.

Some creative people work all hours and some bodies are weird but don't buy into this is 'common and natural thing' meme.
I'm pressuring everyone I know to into giving money to the Chocolatey kickstarter! I want it to work! Chocolatey is amazing, there's not much missing for it to be an obvious choice for any command-line user.
Interesting point. Nobody thinks they're the bad guy, but some people are only considered the bad guy by the state, rather than almost everybody. That's the latter group to which I referred.
Man I've done a lot of both and feel that exact opposite. Cabs are the pain and all the futzing to pay and tip squirming in back seat with bags etc.
Oh ho ho no you don't. That's security through obscurity, and that's never ever OK for anybody.

I never understood this attitude. It has always been my experience that obscurity is in fact an important part of security. It's a weakness when mistaken for security, not when understood as part of it.

Sadly, I do actually have signatures (with version information) to mute.
In my opinion, there are probably some persistent quirks and patterns in human minds and computer programs (also written by humans) which may not be fully exploited by most market participants in some markets (esp. Emerging and Frontier markets). One well-known pattern is Momentum trading, which is also a basis of Market Crash prediction model by Prof. Sornette, with a history of several accurate predictions. [1]

> “a few funds that at any given moment outperform the indexes.” But over the years, he explains, their performances invariably decline..

There are a few hedge funds that, over decades, still beat the market. Medallion Fund, according to public knowledge, consistently generates above-market returns, never had a down year, and even returned 80% in 2008, when stock markets all over the world crashed. Its trading model is a highly guarded secret. It does not even let outsiders invest (with exceptions for a few).

The fund belongs to Renaissance Technologies, founded by a renowned Mathematical Physics professor, Jim Simons, and employs many PhDs in Physics and Math. (This book writes about it in fair detail. [2])

[1] How we can predict the next financial crisis: http://www.ted.com/talks/didier_sornette_how_we_can_predict_...

[2] The Physics of Wall Street:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Physics-Wall-Street-Unpredictable/...
It's Java's take on this. Java's version is somewhat longer, however.

public delegate void Action<in T1>(T1 arg1);
public delegate void Action<in T1, in T2>(T1 arg1, T2 arg2);
public delegate void Action<in T1, in T2, in T3>(T1 arg1, T2 arg2, T3 arg3);
public delegate TRet Func<out TRet>();
public delegate TRet Func<in T1, out TRet>(T arg1);
public delegate TRet Func<in T1, in T2, out TRet>(T1 arg1, T2 arg2);
public delegate TRet Func<in T1, in T2, in T3, out TRet>(T1 arg1, T2 arg2, T3 arg3);
GitHub.io on my own domain ^_^
Gauging interest for a new Startup
I've spent the last 6 months building out a web app. It's premise is Catering for home cooked meals. You can sign-up as a Caterer, or you can order as a consumer. There are different categories i.e. Italian, Chinese, Japenese, Indian and you can order a REAL home cooked meal from any of these ethnic groups. We're creating jobs, and a greater selection of quality food for delivery! We're launching in Toronto but will eventually expand into other Cities throughout North America.

I'd like to gauge interest!
Physicists determine being rescued by the Flash is worse than being hit by a car
Isn't Uber/Travis always making little comments like "if we can get you a car in 5 mins, we can get you anything in 5 mins" - they are tuning an enormous logistics engine with unlimited optionality. Cars are just the start... Boober here we come (according to the ceo and pandodaily)
Eh employees are compensated based on the market rates - which employers collude to depress - rather than value they generate. Company profit is revenue minus cost after all.
There is not much overhead with Rust iterators at all. They are essentially concrete versions of the deforestation that Haskell can do to avoid constructing intermediate lists, and compile to code that is close to the equivalent C (the functionality is all statically dispatched, so the compiler can inline and optimise the calls). This is a case of having experience with and trusting one's tools.

I wrote a blog post a while ago that used iterators heavily http://huonw.github.io/blog/2014/06/comparing-knn-in-rust/ , as you can see the performance is good.
> the viewpoint of the American Programmers you know: More Money > Better Quality of Life.

The article addresses this directly, with an unattributed quote that he then expands upon:

> “Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.”
Interesting premise. Is there anything to read up on New Deal influence in Japan?
Well then, good news! Such usages of iterators in Rust are almost always result in the same code that would be generated by old-fashioned, hand-written loops. The 'trick' is that the methods (and the closure!) are inlined, and generics are specialized at compile time.
http://intomoviesapp.com, Community for movie and TV show fans. Right now only available for iOS platform but also working on android. Please try it out!
That link is fantastic.
The Man Who Disobeyed His Boss and Opened the Berlin Wall
> There are actually 3 outcomes, which you should know if writing covered calls because you are essentially betting on the third option, which is that the stock stays flat, ie it doesn't move.

No, you're just betting that it doesn't go past your short strike, which could be few percent above the current price.

The strategy is simple: Most long options expire worthless. Selling something that will soon be worthless is not a bad business.

I would imagine you would agree with my statement that buying OTM calls and puts is bad investment advice and likely to lose money?

Yes?

Ok, then why are you so against taking the OTHER side of that trade?
The reference was to other mutual funds. Hedge funds are not accessible to the average retail investor and invest in things that average investors don't have access to.
Common Music: algorithmic composition in Scheme
An Epidemic of Thyroid Cancer?
Bill Gurley's post is very interesting and in-depth. One thing he doesn't mention is the potential of UberPool(combining multiple passenger trips into a single car) to further increase demand. I wonder why is that ?
Software Carpentry: Programming with Python
The biggest part of the reaction to the iPhone among domestic engineers is "#()(#%0) Why, why, why?! We had the screens and the capacitors and the CPUs and the memory and the buttons. Why isn't the iPhone a Sharp or Sony product? Who cares if they're eventually assembled in China, nobody wants that work anyhow [+], but think how much Japan: We've Still Got It karma it would have been worth to create the defining product of our age."

My take on the answer, by the way, is that the iPhone is a 20% hardware 80% software product, and Japanese hardware manufacturers were not well-positioned for that opportunity. That has, sadly, not changed. You would think that Google solving the software problem for them would give them a bigger opportunity, but that hasn't been borne out in practice, to my understanding.

Anyhow, the fact that mobile phones are widely perceived as Chinese is not entirely accidental. Something like 40% of the BOM might be Japanese products, but a Japanese CPU and a Japanese camera and a Japanese gasket plus a Chinese paper box is perceived as a Chinese cell phone. Japanese tech firms have very keen memories of the 1980s and don't want to be the "yellow peril" again, for US politicians/companies to take swings at to protect domestic industries.

Nominating China for the role of punching bag? Triple bonus points. (Japan and China have a... storied relationship.)

[+] Exaggeration for comedic effect. There exist many Japanese folks, including those in industry, who would be happy if a larger portion of the supply chain were purely domestic.
If results were randomly distributed, you'd expect a very few funds to perform that way.
Here's a quad A15: http://www.arndaleboard.org/
Nicely done - for a moment I thought this app was officially from Google because of the circle icon. :-)
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there's much resources online that say "Learn How to Become a Software Engineer!" without costing you three/four years of extra education and a sizeable sum of money. I'm learning how to program at the moment alongside my degree, and almost all the resources I've seen online are oriented towards web development; consequentially, that's what I'm learning, even though I'd much rather be learning whatever lets me go program things like rockets, robots, self-driving cars, etc., with the hope that I'll be able to eventually move towards that end goal.
Often the IPUs will provide an interface to setup a PRU systeml... but, "so easily"?

While the functionality will appear on the spec sheet, it can be difficult to program. If you're using GCC, you'll want permission from your husband/wife/roommates before you start, because you're going to be occupied and accruing some significant brain damage. (I'm a hobbyist, not a professional.)
The whole point of the article is that retail investors investing in index funds almost always beat the professionals.

Options have several characteristics that make them substantially riskier. Even selling covered calls is much trickier and riskier than investing in an index fund and likely to have poorer results.
>After-all, if you put your money into an index right when this guy told you to, you would have lost your shirt.

Not if you held it until now.