The Man Who Invented the World’s Most Important Number | Hacker News Reader

The Man Who Invented the World’s Most Important Number

bloomberg.com

12 pointsadventured10 comments

I was imagining this was going to be about Leonhard Euler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)

e is far more important than some interest rate which is proabaly calculated with continuous compounding anyway

Technically, it isn't a number. It's a calculated value. It's a different number every day.

> From his sitting room in Kalyves, Zombanakis can see the house where he grew up. He says he sometimes struggles to recognize the modern world of investment banking, where traders take home multimillion-pound bonuses and cheat their clients at the drop of a hat.

> “Back then the market was small and run by a few gentlemen,” Zombanakis says. “We took it for granted that gentlemen wouldn’t try to manipulate things like that. But as the market was getting bigger, you couldn’t trust it. You couldn’t control it.

> Banking now is like a prostitution racket run by pimps. There’s just too much money involved.”

This.

(off topic) this article has awesome "graceful degradation": It includes a super-low-resolution version of the pictures, which are then replaced with a high-resolution version.

Is that sarcastic? If you're browsing without JS, or even without first-party JS, the images are basically worthless. I'd much rather they used CSS to accomplish whatever they were going for there.

No, actually, I was not sarcastic. I was browsing this on mobile with almost zero bandwidth, and I got the text quickly and a crude image -- but clear enough to know I don't actually care about it.

For many sites, the entire site is often delayed because of pictures, or gets several layout events as the pictures trickle through (or, they never do, and it's not always clear if there should or shouldn't be an image).

What's your preference for a placeholder? Nothing? Broken image? That's fine, but I prefer Bloomberg's low quality version.

My preference would be something CSS or HTML based where if JS is off it still displays an image. I am not a super web developer or anything, but how about a fixed-size <div> block with the background set to the low-resolution version that contains the high-resolution version? Or just both images, stacked on top of one another with the high-resolution version positioned higher in the z-stack?

Looks like they didn't even add a <noscript> tag (though generally I think uMatrix doesn't play nicely with noscript because scripting is selectively disabled, not entirely disabled), which would be at least a token effort towards alleviating the problem.

I still don't understand why <img lowsrc=""> never took off.

Whatever happened to progressive jpg? You can get graceful degradation for free by just encoding your images that way

Reply on news.ycombinator.com