skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pardo's book is ballin'. Walk Forward Analysis is the key to a successful trading strategy. There isn't really any math in it.

I haven't really had much use for math in algo trading so far. I get ideas from looking at historical chart data, code up a base algorithm which implements an idea, and use genetic algorithms to find optimal values for range-bound variables (e.g., a float between 0.995 and 0.997) in the "optimization" step of WFA. I then run WFA across my defined in and out of sample periods on historical tick data directly from my broker (a few gb per year per symbol).

The most complex math I've done in trading so far has been writing some R scripts to generate pretty graphs. It's a stretch to call that "math", though.

WFA completely changed the game for me. I was aware of curve fitting and tried to avoid it before, but after reading about WFA it was like the wool covering was removed from my eyes...
I'm reading cnn report that quotes someone who says we underestimated N Korea's cyber attack ability.

Well, I think that's STUPID to say.

Many are saying it could be some teenagers somewhere in a basement that pulled this off. And guess what? A nation with 300 million is capable of getting people around some computers to hack. They can develop nukes (or claim to have) and develop short range ballistic missiles. If they are capable of it, they are capable of pulling something off that some teens in a basement do all the time.

And N Korea will do anything to protect the image/status of its fat leader.

In a sense, nothing to see, move on. It's only N Korea.

It's only the stupidity of the leadership at Sony that we underestimated, not keeping up security and then laughable response.
Ask HN: Why don't progress bars ever work properly?
I'm sending a text on my iPhone and the progress bar slowly moves from 25% to 50%, but then moves like a snail from 50% to 75%, then it zips to 100%.

Why are progress bars broken? Ideally wouldn't the progress be consistent from 1% to 100%? This reminds me of loading for old flash games, it was never correct.

Anyone know an answer?
Marketing and lying about a crappy product does the company no good. People will either pick up on it right away, or leave soon after using/buying it.

Good marketing teams will evaluate your product VS the competition and use the good parts for communicating the message. Amazing teams will also take the bad parts and bring them up to the product teams so they can confirm weak parts and put them in the queue to get looked at.

Marketing a bad product will only last so long.
In addition to RINA (mentioned below), also check out http://www.ccnx.org/
Algorithmic trading aids in price discovery which means better prices for buyers and sellers overall. Algorithmic techniques like statistical arbitrage help to even out cyclical or correlated market trends by exploiting them, and that means regular investors are more likely to get a better price at any given point in time.
Naa, Sony couldn't give a shit about security, it was a cost that they thought wasn't worth bearing. Its the same as any other company.

The problem is that a lot of the first release stuff came from HR. As we all know HR types rarely understand computers, let alone security. Even if they had a password repo that was super secure, it would be easier for them to share a spreadsheet, so they'll do that instead.

For all we know, Sony could have had fairly tight security. From my understanding there were hefty ACLs to stop various sides of the business talking to each other. Yet these were still breached, for a long time and lots of data seeped across.

The way the malware was written, and the actions of the hacker(s) leads me to suggest that this was an inside job. It is very had to sneak out large amounts of data, and fiddling with change control whilst not being detected is very difficult. Unless you know how to imitate the normal ebb and flow of work life.

The problem SPE have now is that they'll have to throw away everything and start from scratch. All previous data will have to be quarantined, all infrastructure from the server, switches, printers to the workstations will have to be disposed of. Why? because there is no way of proving that there isn't any malware still embedded.
I guess I've answered the threads question in a sense.

Though I wish I'd at least had a basic copy of Windows XP, and a good C++ compiler + some reference books.
It's more than liquidity, it's a combination of liquidity and valuation. The best analogy I can could up with is the following:

Blaming the finance industry for it's services is like blaming the shipping industry. The shipping industry doesn't produce anything, it merely generates value off your goods. If it didn't exist however, you'd have to haul goods yourself, at lower efficiency, and without immediate availability. It's not absurd to expect this industry to profit for that. Of course, if there is not enough competition, or if there is collusion between shipping companies, you're going to pay an "unfair" price (for most definition of fairness).

The financial market has enough competition that most modes of unfairness are almost fully compensated for, and whether it is fair will really depend on your definition of fairness; but it's safe to say it's almost fair for most definitions, I believe. If you're trading a major stock like Apple you can be sure you'll trade for a value near the market's best estimate of what the true long-term value of that stock.

Now think of a farmer selling grains. He, an ordinary farmer, has access to the global consensus of the value of it's product at any time: he can be sure he won't be ripped off and can sell for no more or no less than the value of his goods; he can choose to sell at any time, he'll be able to do so instantly. That's a really valuable service.
OK, but what's the value in that statement–what does "discussed" mean for him? Looking at the 2009 list, there are plenty of books still circulating in discourse. Asterious Polyp and the Dan Chaon, Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem novels are still quite talked about. Without context, I'm going to assume that is this just an acerbic, arms-crossed way to snub a popularly considered list.
Amazon Unveils One-Hour Delivery Service
This: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/vatpossmanual/vatposs14100.ht... I think. Essentially you can push the responsibility for paying the VAT from the vendor to the consumer in B2B transactions if I understand things correctly.
Programming skills are math skills. For example, how would you prove that your code is the fastest possible for a given task? A hunch? A stopwatch? Would it make a difference if you used a different language or machine? What if you could objectively compare the algorithm performance itself without conflating factors? What if you could prove it to others without having to simply trust that you are right? This is math. This is why you can't solve the halting problem or lossless compress past the Shannon limit no matter how hard you try. But it's also why a simple fractal contains an infinite universe of complexity. Don't be afraid of math, embrace it! Find some good teachers/books and maybe you'll find that math isn't some arcane priesthood setup by mathematicans, but that it's the language of nature, the most practical and precise way we have of explaining and understanding these things.
True, it should say: "EU wants to get more money from transaction for American companies."
Multiple factors influence the task being run, for a download it will be the speed that may vary, something being processed may vary too along the processing, same thing happens with file copy, many small files tend to be slower than a large one, and copying a mix of the will cause that too.
Some basic examples.

My British corporation pays an American company for Web hosting. However, the US company does not charge us VAT, so we have to charge ourselves ("reverse charge") the VAT at UK rates and then immediately claim back the VAT as it is used in our VATable supplies. The net result is zero but reverse charging means they get VAT revenue for situations where VAT is not reclaimable (many exist).

Another example is that my British corporation sells services to a, say, French corporation. We charge no VAT on this sale but the French corporation has to then "reverse charge" French VAT on the sale within France (and then claim it back, if valid). We then also have to file this transaction on an "EC Sales List" so that the various authorities can check that the reverse charge did occur.
Still better than "Who to Eat After the Apocalypse"
reddit temporarily banned phys.org in a move that was widely looked down on by the users and was eventually overturned because they (along with a few other news sites) were banned without notifying the community.

Now, they were rightly banned for gaming reddit (in the same way some of them have gamed and been banned from HN), but that doesn't reduce the intrinsic quality of them as a news aggregator.

phys.org is a news aggregation service, and in that they are immensely useful because they tend not to write from the position that more mainstream news sites do - that the reader is a complete moron.
It has CBD extract from hemp which has been shown to be the active ingredient in helping treat turrets and a few other illnesses, as well as helping with relaxing (unlike the "high" you get from THC).

Inhalation has also been shown to be a better intake method for some patients than the CBD capsules for those with illnesses.
Excuse my possible ignorance, but I would assume that multifaceted algorithmic trading would work to flesh out corporate transparency, would it not? Given the assumption that nearly every aspect of a company could be used as some type of weight, I would think that a "lesser company" could be deeply impacted if it had even a single data point that could be questioned.

I'm hoping that this segment of trading will work to push us in more of the (relatively) transparent corporate model that's practiced by the technology leaders like AAPL, GOOG, etc.
To suggest otherwise is to imply that US oil companies were deliberately holding back on potential profits by not pumping at full production prior to 2011

Most wells don't run at full capacity, and absolutely alter draw speeds to maximize the life and economics of a well. With the drop in prices many large energy companies with the ability to weather these drops in price will of course turn down the taps, reserving the limited holds of their wells for when the price returns. If you have n barrels of oil in your well, and you're certain the price will return to North of $100, might as well save them for then.

new discoveries and technology breakthroughs related to shale and fracking

Fracking is natural gas. On the shale side, it's worth noting that we've known about shale and how to extract it for many, many decades. The only reason it came into the forefront is that the price of oil on the global market finally made it economical -- shale oil is estimated to cost from $25 - $95 per barrel to extract and process. So the paradox is that the collapse of the world price puts a serious wrench in the shale oil production, which purportedly is the reason for the price of oil.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/business/21shale.html?page...

The shale oil industry has had booms and busts before as the price of oil fluctuates.
This person ought to understand ocean ecology better. If there's not enough sunlight for agriculture, fishing is unlikely to be more productive than it already is now with normal sunlight.
I remember seeing this on TV and not understanding why microsoft was threatened with a fine if they ship IE by default on their products.

Actually I still don't. Nobody ever stopped me from downloading another browser on windows, anyone who wants to do it will do it. So people did have a choice, they just didn't know they had it, and it's their problem, not microsoft's!

Could someone explain this to me?
Why isn't Apple forced to the same deal with iOS? Not only do browsers not have the same prominence but they actually have to use WebView for rendering. Not to mention the other apps Apple refuses to approve because of "duplication".
I think that the nationalism and counter-nationalism is a cold war remnant.

Everybody older than 25 watched a good number of movies where Russians were the threat. Mostly James Bond style movies, but you've got a few others in there as well.
Ask HN: What's the minimum level of stability do you use from libraries?
So do people just use the master branch, >=0.*, or do they have a certain standard for what they use?
I think at one point we're gonna have to stop calling this scientific studies unless it has been tested and repeated by at least 2 other independent labs.

Or we can continue like this and let the word science lose its meaning.
I explain that in this other post for EU guys: http://www.happybootstrapper.com/2014/eu-vat-changes-online-...

Reverse charge moves the VAT-paying responsibility from you to your customer in another EU country. The responsibility can only be moved from business to business.

You’ll write an invoice/receipt without VAT (or 0% VAT) and include a text “Reverse charge, VAT directive art. 44” and you are done. In practice the text is often missing, as people re-use the same invoice format they use for non-EU sales.
Awesome Stuff Social Media Marketing Does Right for Your Business
Ask HN: Got laid off. Stay in NYC or move to SF?
Got laid off yesterday and I have been given 2 months of time to get a new gig. If I don't, then I have to get back to my home country.

I have 3 years of professional Java/J2EE experience. I want to move into web development. I build all my side projects in PHP/RoR/JavaScript. But I am not a pro in web development.

I am a bit rusty with my DS and Algos. Need at-least 2 weeks to feel confident.

I always wanted to move to the Bay Area and work as a web developer there. Given the short time frame. Is it a good idea to pack my bags and move there or is it better to stay in NYC and try to find a gig here and later on relocate to SF?
Obama’s Justice Department secretly helped kill the FOIA transparency bill
Also, the higher the VAT, the higher the tax evasion in those countries. One reason this happens is because many businesses are at the limit of survival and cannot afford to pay.

One would think that somebody would get a clue that reducing the VAT would make it more affordable to more companies, but unfortunately law makers are clueless.
MIPS P5600 Beats Intel Core I7 for Single-threaded CPU Performance in CoreMark
So this is "what to eat after an apocalypse that is not the one we're actually facing". I would be far more interested in knowing how we deal with a "soft apocalypse" of fossil fuel depletion, drinking water scarcity, high ocean acidity, etc.
PostgreSQL 9.4 Released
From Wikipedia: "The first futures exchange market was the Dōjima Rice Exchange in Japan in the 1730s, to meet the needs of samurai who—being paid in rice, and after a series of bad harvests—needed a stable conversion to coin." Substitute gold, oil, stock, whatever for rice and the concept still applies.These are all things that need to be converted to coin in order for them to be of any use. Without traders, this would be extremely difficult, costly, and generally inefficient. With algorithmic traders it becomes even easier, cheaper, and generally more efficient.
Most of the world has mixed opinions about Russia, and the younger have a more favorable one.

http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/03/global-opinion-of-russia...
I heard from some dude in a black jacket that there's a nice burger place run by a guy with a brain the size of the planet, just near the restaurant at the end of the universe.. ;)

Seriously though, it does seem like we ought to be switching over to mycoremediation as quickly as possible, in order to prevent the apocalypse, not just survive it.

Also, the last paragraph of this article .. the feels .. seems like there should be ways to deliver survival shroom-kits to the poor and needy. If only it weren't all being used, instead, for war.
Honestly, I was quite disappointed with it. I thought the ending was really lacking and didn't fulfill the expectations the rest of the book set up.
The point of the changes is to prevent large non-EU companies from going "VAT-shopping": like a certain well known advertising company claiming to sell all their services from a low VAT country when in fact all the business dealings are done in a tower block in the centre of London.

Now they have to charge whatever VAT rate each country within the EU thinks is appropriate for their citizens & there's no "race to the bottom" effect where Google, Apple, Amazon et al try to play different countries off against each other to get the lowest possible VAT rate.

The next stage is going to be tax changes to try and eliminate the profit shifting that all the non-EU companies do by setting up subsidiaries in different EU countries and "licensing" their IP to them at prices that just happen to match the profits made in that country.

Unfortunately, small online businesses are collateral damage in this particular fight.
How does pay work in this field? It is commission or salery?

Do these programmers have a short career span. (lose x amount of dollars and you need to leave.)

How much could someone make in this field. Software engineers regularly make 100K so do these guys make more to justify the risk?
Thanks for the correction, I updated the blog post.
All of Packt's technical ebooks are now $5
I'm running through these at the moment. Some challenges have really heavy queues (ie: Challenge 3 has an expected response time of 1 month at the moment. ~8000 challengers are participating out of an expected < 1000).

It's an interesting format.
I'm not saying this is because of energy independence.

It's just that the best way to put pressure on a country like Russia, is by affecting the GDP. Unfortunately for Russia this has proven pretty easy since a big chunk of the GDP comes from oil and gas.
The economic sanctions imposed so far on certain leaders and on certain state-owned enterprises in Russia are about as finely targeted as economic sanctions possibly could be. Economic sanctions in general are meant to be a less violent alternative to military action. Putin has plainly organized an effort for Russian military units not in uniform to be operating in Ukraine in violation of Ukraine's national sovereignty, so Putin is already engaged in acts of war. Thus far, the response from the West has been intended to help the common people of Russia (and of Ukraine) avoid deeper involvement in war while still putting tough pressure on Putin to conform his foreign policy to international law.

The deep economic problems Russia now faces could have happened to any Russian leader who pursued a similarly kleptocratic, state-enterprise oriented economic policy. If Russia had a more free and more diverse economy, with a genuinely free press and rule of law, the daily life of the common people would be more resistant to economic shocks caused by the drop in the world price of petroleum, which is the major source of revenue for the Russian government.
> A sticky overflow flag would be great... "if properly scheduled"

That is the rub right there. Think about what this means. Every ALU operation needs to read whatever register contains this state and write a new value. So every ALU operation becomes serially dependent all all previous operations. You have just totally killed performance on out-of-order processors.

Processor designers work really hard to avoid these kinds of operations. In fact between the Pentium and the Pentium Pro (aka p6) the behavior of condition codes on several x86 instructions were changed from "keep old value" to "always cleared". We couldn't find any code that cared and it was never previously documented.

This code doesn't have to use branches, it could also OR the condition codes to some register after every operation. This would also hurt performance, but only for code that cares instead of all code.
This is exactly what we need: worldwide and on a large scale. Bundled with media support, grass roots call for action campaigns and much more.

Let them know we won't accept the status quo.
Because Opera, and before that the company behind Real Player, are anal like that and the EU went and agreed with them for some silly reason. They never did go after Apple, or Google / Android, or whatever for doing the exact same thing (pre-installing a media player / browser). I guess you could argue that Microsoft was singled out because their browser was an inherent component of their OS, but at the same time you could go after Apple and Android as well for their webview that is required to be used in all applications that need one.
that's why it must be especially sweet for N korea. they hate japan and US.
Magento 2 installation guide
You needed to be around in the 1990s to understand this. :)

Its sort of like Google search now where when you search for "ann arbor map" you get a giant beautiful link to another Google property and a few riffraff links to other competitors that basically nobody ever clicks on because it would take effort.

This is exactly where Microsoft was in the 90s / early 2000s with browsers. They had a dominant desktop share and they directly embedded IE and although there were alternatives, clicking takes effort and nobody did that. They just used IE. The EU forced them to provide an explicit, easy option to reduce that advantage.

Given Google's dominant share in search, it would not be surprising to me to see the EU force them to change this for the same competition reasons.

Also, it was a great way for the EU to shake Microsoft down for billions of dollars and ensure there was no one company more powerful than the EU, but I'll leave that to the conspiracy theorists.
Progress bars should show what? Percentage of "progress", ie. of the work done, or percentage of time spent processing the whole task?

In the first case, if a task is subdivided in 4 subtasks, we can assign 25% for each subtask, but if the third task takes more time, then the progress bar will move slower for this subtask.

In the last case, how do you predict the future?
India launches its biggest ever rocket into space
The idea - and I'm just explaining it, not advocating nor criticizing - is that when you have a overwhelming control in one market (in this case, Windows), you can't use that to push your way to the top of another market, since it's stifling the competition and reducing consumer welfare.
This is it. This is the tipping point. I'm donating money to the EFF.
full disclosure, I'm one of the authors of this

I'm not sure if it's clear in the docs that we've written, we have plans to include other databases as a source other then mongo. i.e. Using rethink Change feeds ( http://rethinkdb.com/docs/changefeeds/ruby/ ) would be an interesting way to get data out of rethink and into other databases, we can likely leverage redis replication in order to take data from redis and then push it to other data stores. We plan to make as many sources as possible able to function as both a data 'source' and 'sink.'

We use the otto javascript interpreter to embed a js runtime into the go app, so that it's reasonably easy to manipulate documents, I'm wondering what the community things about the way the application.js is laid out.

There are some rough edges here, but we're actively developing it, and excited to see people using it

also see our blog post:
https://blog.compose.io/weve-open-sourced-the-new-compose-tr...
So you on a .coop and your not sure that you actualy a coop?

Open, voluntary membership.

Democratic governance.

Limited return on equity.

Surplus belongs to members.

Education of members and public in cooperative principles.

Cooperation between cooperatives.