cpascal

This reminds me of a metaphor made by Burton G. Malkiel in “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”. He attempts to give a possible explanation to why there are star traders or funds that greatly outperform the market. It’s something I like to remind myself of from time-to-time.

The metaphor was a coin flipping tournament. You have a bracket of players who flip a coin against an opponent. In each matchup, the player that flips a heads advances to the next round to face another opponent who won a parallel matchup in the previous round. Suppose this is a 100 round tournament, that would mean the eventual winner would have had to flip a heads 100 times to win. You might look at this coin flipper and think they are an extraordinary coin flipper. That they have some innate ability to flip a coin and make sure it lands with the head sides up. In reality, it was just random chance that they flipped the coin correctly, they do not posses any more coin flipping talent than anyone else. They just got really lucky. You can potentially look at a successful hedge fund or trader through this same lens. They have survived the proverbial coin flipping tournament and random chance was on their side.

Can Citadel exercise any sort of discretion on what order-flow they'll fill? Can they legally tell Robinhood that they will no longer fill orders for GME?

You just run the previous version of the production stack in your "dogfood/operations" stack. Once you've fully rolled out production and have vetted it, you can upgrade the other one to match production.

At the risk of starting a language flame-war: if I were starting a new company or effort, my default choice would be .NET Core.

Performance is generally great and if you need to, there are lots of features in the language to allow you to further squeeze performance. C# is easy to pick up and has best-of-breed IDE support- you will get productive quickly. Also, you have an extremely large standard library at your disposal that is supported and dogfooded by Microsoft. Which is great because generally you do not need to install third party packages, but if you do NuGet is really easy to use.

Edit: Forgot to mention the stellar documentation provided by Microsoft.

I'm taking my second crack at learning Rust and I have to say I've made a lot more progress this second attempt. It could be just giving things time to stew in my head, but I really think it's because I'm using rust-analyzer with vscode and before I was using RLS. Rust-analyzer is a much richer experience and its informative error messages and suggestions lessens the learning-curve drastically.

Interesting. This combined with the H2+ could make a nice wireguard VPN gateway for a home network.

The H2+ is a quad-core 2.3 GHz intel board. Anyone know if that would be enough juice to handle a gigabit wireguard link?

The title of this submission is hyperbolic.

Merkel did not "blast" Twitter's decision. According to the article, her spokesperson said Merkel "considers it problematic that the president’s accounts have been permanently suspended".

Seconding this. Barkeeper’s friend is like magic on aluminum. If you use it regularly you can keep your aluminum pots and pans looking like they’re factory new.

The author of the Twitter thread links to another thread towards the end that notes the risk of a classified information breach isn't too high.

https://twitter.com/ericgeller/status/1347226499930230785

Obviously that doesn't change the fact that the entire building should be considered compromised and scrubbed.

A online bank with IMO great savings and money management features. They also had a fairly competitive high-yield interest rate on their savings accounts.

So something cool I noticed at the bottom of the page. There's a "Report Information" button that brings up a modal outlining several ways to report information to the CIA. The most interesting one to me being the option to report via Tor.

From the dialog:

> We go to great lengths to keep these channels secure, but any communication sent using the internet involves some risk. You can reduce some risk by using the Tor browser, a virtual private network, and/or a device not registered to you. You can access the Tor browser at ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion.

It really depends on your scale and how many messages you are processing per second. For a lot of applications, you’re absolutely correct, but if you’re scale is sufficient, a “micro” optimization like this is actually a “macro” optimization. Also the author of this article works at DataDog and I suspect the number of messages they process each second falls under the sufficient category.

For example, suppose you are processing 1M messages per second and you can shave 1 byte off the message size, that shaves off 1MB/sec of data that needs to be processed. If you’re paying for network bandwidth or storing the messages, that saves you something like 2.6TB of data each month.

2.6TB/month is not likely to be a huge deal when it comes to cost savings, but if you keep scaling the messages/sec or the bytes/msg you can start to get some significant savings.

Now I used message size as an example, and the article focuses on processing time not message size, but the point still stands. When you can make a micro optimization for something that is done a very large number of times, there are not-insignificant gains to be had.

I’m with you there.

I'm dreading the day Reddit kills the API's Apollo is using.

> The last time this happened, everyone involved was dismissed or resigned.

If you're referring to the 1976 scandal that's not completely true. Yes they were dismissed, but a large number of them were given a second chance.

The 1976 scandal involved 150 cadets but 92 cadets were readmitted after completing year of useful service as stipulated by the Pentagon. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/nyregion/west-point-cheat...

Liquidation preferences. Large investors can negotiate a liquidation preference with their investment. This means they will receive some multiple (1x, 2x, ...) of their investment from the liquidation proceeds. These investors can also be "participating members" which means after receiving their liquidation preference they can still receive their pro rata share of the liquidation proceeds based on their equity stake.

So if a company was liquidated for an amount at or below the sum of the liquidation preferences there's nothing left for the shareholders to divvy up.

You should be able to run Linux GUI apps via WSL2 on a preview build soon.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-in-the-...

I don't think so, but I would love to hear otherwise. My research indicates it can only support one external display up to 6K@60Hz.

> Just Buy M1 if you'd like to have a low-power, long-lasting, quiet, and performant dev machine.

I would absolutely love to buy the M1 MacBook Air (and I almost did), the performance is just too good. It’s nearly impossible to justify spending money on any other laptop. Unfortunately, I just can’t get past the single external display limitation. I did see there is a DisplayLink workaround to get multiple external displays working, but the performance of DisplayLink is not great and requires purchasing a dock.

It’s frustrating because I want to buy a M1 laptop, and the display support is a complete dealbreaker.

Assuming Apple addresses the display support in the M2 laptops, they’ll be an insta-buy for me.

It seems FAST isn't a complete substitute for Arecibo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...

Here's a video in his 6502 series where he hooks up the 6502 computer he's been building with this video card.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iURr3NBprc

I highly recommend his videos and kits. He's a great teacher.

Just wanted to say that I've been watching your Pi videos on YouTube over the last few months and I really enjoy them. Your video about trying to get a GPU working with a Raspberry Pi was particularly fascinating. Keep up the great work.

I like the idea of a vacancy tax that is proportional to the value of the property so that any year-over-year gains in equity are eaten up by such tax. I think turning a vacant property into a liability instead of an asset would do a lot to keep housing accessible.

You may not be aware, but PowerShell can now be run on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

https://github.com/powershell/powershell

Link from the article showing what features they are adding.

https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improvements#...

Perhaps this is because the url has a .info gTLD coupled with a political domain name and is getting tripped up by some sort of spam filter. It sort of sounds like a shadow ban.

> There are several points here that probably don't comply with code. The fact that an extension cord has been brought into a permanent circuit is probably one of them.

If you wanted to do this up to code, how would you do it?

> In C# 9.0, you can omit the type in a new expression when the created object's type is already known.

  private List<WeatherObservation> _observations = new();

This is something I've long wondered why I couldn't do and I'm glad I'll be able to in C# 9.

There’s some Win32 stuff you can hook into with your code for service management. These are things like service startup, shutdown, pause and resume. I can’t speak to the Win32 stuff, but .NET abstracts this and you just override a base class to hook into the service stuff. Windows then has a command `sc` to register your EXE as a service and then configure things like auto-start and service restarts. Alternatively, MSI’s can be crafted to configure your EXE as a service at install time.

IMO a lot of parts of Windows are a pain to develop on compared to Linux, but creating and managing services are one of the better/smoother parts.

Could it be better treatment protocols?