MaxScheiber

The big index and mutual fund companies offer different allocations between stocks and bonds. You might start out with 80% of your account in an index fund (or other diversified basket of stocks) and 20% in a hedged basket of investment-grade, low-risk bonds. This percentage allocation would change over time as you got closer to retirement.

You're not going to get insanely rich off of this, but it is a decent replacement for the fact that savings account interest rates are effectively 0% these days.

I repeat, if the market were bad enough that these crashes actually wiped out your account over a 30 year period, nobody would make money in the market at all. Index funds are a low-risk, low-return investment with low management fees. They're a much better investment choice for a retirement account than algorithmically trading that money. And if you were good enough at algo trading to make solid returns over time, you might as well quit your day job and open a hedge fund or asset management shop.

That's a truism. I could say the same thing about algorithmic trading.

The fact of the matter is that the median hedge fund manager has negative alpha. It is extremely difficult to pick winners via any strategy. In fact, it's so difficult that for people who can do it, the resulting lifestyle and compensation is so great that the asset management shops that they work out have almost zero attrition.

Moreover, the whole point of passive investment is that the odds of that kind of a market-wide crash affecting your money over a 30-year timespan are infinitesimal. If the market actually were to devolve like that, nobody would make money in the market, regardless of strategy.

> Investors should be looking for ways to systematically protect themselves from the market's irrational mood swings.

Yes, it's called diversification.

I won't harp on the backtesting point, but what I will say is this: I'm sure that you understand the risk-reward tradeoff. It would be impossible to participate in any sort of finance and not know this concept. Quite frankly, the probability of 30%+ of your life savings being wiped out in an index fund is unbelievably low. You eat some return at the expense of lower volatility, but we're talking about a 401(k) here. We want that kind of expected stability.

Good job overall; I like the idea. It will be an interesting challenge to capture meaning from these raw text posts. For example, I tried to search for jobs in Florida, but typing in "FL" gives a lot of false positives. That will be the

Red-black trees via GADTs, courtesy of Penn's CIS 552 course.

With that being said, I've always loved this essay. As of recently, I've viewed it as relevant to the recent argument that programming should be a requirement in American public schools, either as a tool in math and science classes or a free-standing course. This kind of mathematical reform might actually be a prerequisite for programming and computer science, given that it would develop mathematical maturity much more effectively than the current system does.

I believe that understanding the theoretical backing is very important for making correct software design choices, at least at the positions I have held. Moreover, this base knowledge is a proxy for general awareness of complexity analysis and architectural trade-offs (why do we pick this structure over that?). I agree that we needn't consider single-source shortest paths every day when programming, but for companies that want to be sure they are making good hiring choices, this seems reasonable to me. Graphs, for example, come up so often in practice, which is why I refer to them as fundamental. It's not like we're talking about red-black trees here. Again, it's a proxy for one part of what makes a great programmer.

If you're talking about "tricks" like the tortoise and the hare solution to detecting if a graph has a cycle, then sure, I can get behind that. However, there is a base of algorithmic knowledge that you are expected to know, and it is entirely irrelevant whether or not you can construct it from scratch.

This is already the case, at least at Wharton. A number of the PE megafunds recruit undergraduates here, specifically Blackstone and Silver Lake. I only really know of one or two offers being extended per year, but that's because private equity shops simply have fewer entry-level positions -- they can therefore afford to be picky.

I'm sure that PE middle-market companies also recruit here (my knowledge here is more limited, as I gravitate toward the technology portion of my education rather than the finance portion), but it seems likely that students would take a bulge-bracket investment bank over a middle-market PE shop.

It's simple supply and demand.

What's interesting is that a similar thing happens after two years as a private equity associate, in that almost all PE associates are booted out after two years, being told that they don't have the skillset to be promoted within the shop. At this point, I believe that many employees move onto internal corporate development, but my knowledge here is pretty incomplete about what happens after that break in the track. ("Greatness", perhaps?[0])

[0] http://www.leveragedsellout.com/2007/07/breaks-in-the-track

I've been on the teaching staff of CIS 120 and CIS 121 at Penn for five semesters now (the second and third classes in the intro computer science series). Both have units on debugging, both in Eclipse and independently of an IDE. We teach students proper testing fundamentals, how to use the debugger, and how bottom-up design can make debugging much simpler.

However, it's up to the students to actually use these tools and techniques to figure out why they're so much more effective than print statements. (After all, could you imagine taking French while never having to speak or listen? Piano while never touching an instrument? Same principle here.) Some students will learn to use these tools quickly, but others can still logic through these courses.

However, everyone eventually learns. Take CIS 380, our operating systems class. The final project involves building a simulation OS with kernel, scheduler, file system, shell, etc. Pretty much all system calls aside from read, write, malloc, and free are written from scratch. Even for the hotshots that didn't need to learn how to debug, they eventually learn to use gdb, because you simply can't logic your way through several thousand lines of C, even if you did write them all yourself.

Any computer science or engineering curriculum that doesn't teach debugging fundamentals does students a disservice. However, we can't directly force students to practice these skills. It's up to them to try applying these techniques.

56.96124843225 ^ 56.96124843225

Wolfram confirms that it's pretty close to a full googol. Of course, you can keep adding digits to the end of the number to make it even more precise. Maybe I'll write a script to do that.

To quote (of all people) Maddox:

> I kept staring at "my" picture, looking for some glimmer of justification for its existence, I thought that maybe I could show this to my friends as proof that I'd seen the portrait with my own eyes. But I'm not in this picture, so there's no proof I was ever there. Even if I was in the picture, it could have been photoshopped. And why would I need to prove it to anyone anyway?

I used to do this when I was younger, but I've come to realize that:

1. A professional photo of a famous destination looks seriously better than an iPhone photo.

2. The only reason people take these photos is to get more likes on Facebook and Instagram.

3. Nobody actually cares.

I've found myself enjoying a photoworthy location much more when my head is out of my phone and focused on the scene itself. This notion has served as inspiration for a recent project and venture I've been working on.

All of this breaks the monotony.

Plus, there's something to be said for human interaction and contact comfort and whatnot. So what if I see an old friend and we reminisce about old times, maybe crack some inside jokes? Being with others is psychologically healthy.

I'm not arguing that everyone should pull a Walden. I myself will be moving into my fraternity next week, which has a television and an Xbox 360 (the horror!) and a beer pong table. But I'm certainly living in one extreme this summer, and if I had to choose, I'd definitely choose this one.

I think the bigger picture to look at here is that we, as humans, are creative. When we move into an empty apartment, we see a blank slate, prime for decoration. It's very easy to browse Target, Marshalls, or Ikea and want to buy things that look cool because hey, I have a decent salary and cheap housing. Case in point — I bought a Nerf basketball hoop as a spur-of-the-moment purchase. Haven't touched it once. I definitely had to use restraint on other such purchases. So I guess that's what worries me. It's so easy to acquire junk that isn't essential. A pretty Spartan summer definitely showed me what is really essential and what isn't.

I'm enjoying the life of frugality as a college student right now. My summer apartment has little besides my laptop, a couple of books, clothes / toiletries, my saxophone, and food. It's rather nice. It's hard to waste time being idle. If I'm bored, I need to be social and hang out with someone; I can't waste time playing video games or watching TV. (I'm fortunately pretty sparse with my computer use — GChat, vim, and music mostly.)

Every now and then, a friend, upon entering my apartment, will comment on how bare it is. I just smile and say, "Isn't it much simpler this way?"

1. Kutcher did a fantastic job as Steve Jobs. I was extremely pleasantly surprised by how well he portrayed the role and adopted Steve's mannerisms. You can even see his gait and speech evolve over the course of the movie.

2. My fundamental problem with the film was that it tried to cram so much into two hours that a lot of scenes felt fake and over-simplified to the point of being insulting. Extreme examples of this include the "I'm going to sue Bill Gates" scene and the Jony Ive scene.

3. The beginning is stupid and irrelevant. Also, Jobs's transition from idealistic hippy acid-dropper to steely-eyed businessman is portrayed in a manner of seconds and does not feel realistic whatsoever.

4. I still enjoyed the movie and would watch it again if it were on television. It certainly had emotionally moving scenes, and I wouldn't say it was a poor movie.

This is really a poor comparison. The issue with the legal industry is that there are too many bad law schools. Students from top 13 law schools simply don't have trouble finding BigLaw positions, sort of like how engineers from Stanford have their pick of top tech shops, or how Wharton undergraduates have a whole host of investment banking and private equity opportunities.

It's the law school candidates from poor schools that have trouble.

If the author's point was to say that anyone can log onto the Internet, learn Ruby for a month, and make a very respectable salary, and that this isn't sustainable...well, duh.

The rockstars — the people that read HN, the people that think about software engineering and computer science constantly, the people that don't stop tinkering and building — they're not going to have trouble keeping their jobs. They are the top 13 law schools, the target school investment bankers.

The difference between the automobile industry and the technology industry is that the tech industry won't be going away for a long, long time. One can easily imagine other forms of transportation, but computer science is here to stay, as far as we can tell. Even as we automate how easy it is to make a web application, we see new engineering challenges in different domains that still require the rockstars to be rockstars.

Yeah, we should obviously still be learning. That's why we're on HN in the first place. But I'm not exactly worried for the long term.

Maybe I'm too bullish.

I'm not impressed by someone who knows Java, C#, and PHP compared to someone who knows object-oriented program, functional programming, and programming in an S-expression language.[0][1]

I've found that a multi-paradigm programmer often has superior reasoning abilities about how to write scalable, readable code.

Language acquisition within a paradigm is usually laughably easy, once you've been exposed to that paradigm in the first place. Thus, I agree with the author's argument if polyglot is defined with respect to paradigms, not languages.

[0] I'm not sure if picking up a Lisp is considered its own paradigm, but it seems radically different enough to me.

[1] This sentence is, of course, a generalization. Someone who knows every nook and cranny of a language is certainly impressive, as they can do some really remarkable things. However, this generalization has usually held up, in my experience.

For Penn's fuller version of this course, check out CIS 552[1]. Dr. Stephanie Weirich is also a fantastic lecturer, and a GHC contributor to boot (IIRC).

[1] http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis552/12fa/

I get a fair amount of email (maybe one every week or two) from people with technical co-founder offers or engineering interview offers. I have no interest for various reasons, some of which line up with yours I'm sure. Here's my standard response:

"Hey John,

Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, I'm still a full-time student, and I won't have time to take on another part-time obligation next semester. Best of luck filling the position."

Sure, I might laugh with my friends about how positively stupid that businessman's email was. However, I'll be nothing but cordial to the person's face. I try to be cordial to everyone. You never know when your paths might cross next in life.

Moreover, an email like yours perpetuates the stereotype that engineers are socially awkward and hard to work with. As someone doubling in engineering and finance, I hear this all of the time in my business classes. It's something that annoys me to no end.

[1] Of course, that's not to say that my brothers are unintelligent (they're very bright). However, one of the most important life skills I learned in public school was learning how to get along with those "pleasant idiots," as you put it.

[2] And I'm not disagreeing that kernel dev requires a more authoritative leadership style than most pursuits, but it seemed that this conversation had dropped into speaking in generalities about life.