jplewicke

Boston, MA (not remote) MDT Advisers - We're a small quant investing shop working with machine learning, financial analysis, and the hardest dataset in the world. We have a paid internship that is similar to our full-time analyst position: http://www.mdtadvisers.com/careers/qea.jsp , but that isn't on our website yet.

You can email me at jlewicke@mdtadvisers.com with any questions you have.

According to their SEC filing, the source of the error was that they were using both percentages and decimals in the software, and someone thought that a decimal was a percentage. It's surprising how little your risk model does for you when you multiply it by 0.01.

Boston, MA (not remote)

MDT Advisers - We're a small quant investing shop working with machine learning, financial analysis, and the hardest dataset in the world. We have an internship that is similar to our full-time analyst position: http://www.mdtadvisers.com/careers/qea.jsp , but that isn't on our website.

You can email me at jlewicke@mdtadvisers.com with any questions you have.

I think we're at the more formal end of "business casual", but I normally wear a collared shirt and slacks, with no tie or jacket.

Boston, MA (not remote)

MDT Advisers - We're a small quant investing shop working with machine learning, financial analysis, and the hardest dataset in the world. We’ve got two main types of positions that we’re hiring for: a dedicated developer position, and a general analyst position that’s about 60% programming and 40% financial and statistical analysis -- http://www.mdtadvisers.com/careers/qea.jsp . The people, problems, and pay are good, and we aim for good work-life balance(e.g. no 60 hour weeks).

You can email me at jlewicke@mdtadvisers.com with any questions you have.

Would people be interested in an article on "How to Run a Marathon the Hard Way"? There's a ton of stuff out there on how to run a marathon in four months and survive it, but not very much on how to spend two years gradually working up through the shorter distances so you can feel completely prepared for the marathon.

I think there's a lot of enjoyment from the shorter races that it's easy to miss out on from just moving straight up to the marathon. The camaraderie in most local road races and running clubs is great, and can really improve both your social life and enjoyment of running.

Boston, MA

MDT Advisers – We’re a small quant investing shop working with machine learning, financial analysis, and the hardest dataset in the world. We’ve got two main types of positions that we’re hiring for: a dedicated developer position, and a general analyst position that’s about 60% programming and 40% financial and statistical analysis -- http://www.mdtadvisers.com/careers/qea.jsp . The people, problems, and pay are good, and we aim for good work-life balance(e.g. no 60 hour weeks).

You can email me at jlewicke@mdtadvisers.com with any questions you have.

If you're interested in Bitcoin, you may want to check out several other attempts at creating decentralized digital monetary systems.

The Ripple project is creating a system where each node can issue their own unique money, and where transactions occur over paths of mutual trust: http://ripple-project.org/

I just released Rivulet, an alternative Ripple server that should be useful for website owners who want to let their users engage in user-to-user transactions without having to centrally distribute currency to them: https://github.com/jplewicke/rivulet

Pelle Braendgaard has proposed OpenTransact, a standard for RESTful digital transactions, so that we can escape from this mess of incompatible APIs and help people transact in their choice of currency: http://www.opentransact.org/

Based on their election widget and access to demographic information, Facebook probably could put together scarily accurate, realtime election results.

My guess is that they're not talking so much about the broad market as about being able to predict individual stock returns relative to the market. Having access to search-, browsing-, and click-streams of most people doing research on stocks could give them a strong indication of the realtime supply of and demand for stocks before individual and institutional investors execute transactions. My search history is probably the single best record of what I've been thinking about, and any competitor with access to it would have an excellent idea of what trades I have planned. If all Goldman Sachs traders were even stochastically telepathic, they'd have an unbeatable edge in the market.

That's definitely true. The grandparent poster was referring to Patrick's top-ranked comment on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599181 , which dealt mainly with how amortization of Demand Media's acquisitions requires them to amortize each acquisition's costs as a quarterly charge over the next ten years. A similar point is made by John Batelle in the Wired article, and is another reason why non-GAAP measures like EBITDA that exclude amortization are widely used.

This doesn't say very much about whether Demand Media is profitable once you exclude amortization, but it is an important thing to consider.

Probably using Tynt - http://www.tynt.com/ .

Alex Tabarrok linked to a video of a British town's experiment with this on a roundabout: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi0meiActlU&feature=playe... . They saw a 75% decrease in waiting time at the intersection.

They had a fairly decent chunk of monetary stimulus: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-13/singapore-centra...

There's an Apache incubator project to develop one: Apache Hama at http://incubator.apache.org/hama/ . It's still in pre-alpha, and I haven't been able to find a way to see the source code.

You can also do this using standard Bellman-Ford or Floyd-Warshall if you set edge weights to be -log(exchange rate).

Their programs would be single real numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_computer .

MapReduce and Pregel.

The petition itself can be viewed at http://www.panix.com/~pspinrad/SELC-SEC-Rulemaking-Petition.... .

From /usr/share/dict/words on OSX, I get the following:

whenceeer (probable corruption of whenceever, and hence not legit)

wallless

bossship

demigoddessship

goddessship

headmistressship

patronessship

The former Once and Future Prince?

For those who are wondering, this seems to be a reference to the 2006 bankruptcy of Kongō Gumi, the previous record-holder for the oldest continuously-running independent business. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi )

What's also somewhat interesting is there's a non-trivial countable set of irrational numbers: those formed by taking the roots of polynomials with raitonal coefficients. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_number has the low-down, but it's definitely neat that square roots, etc. are still a countable set.

If you're interested in game theory and strategy and looking for a non-technical introduction, I'd heavily recommend the book Thinking Strategically by Dixit and Nalebuff ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310353 ). I'd been exposed to a lot of the concepts before, but they hadn't completely clicked until reading their engaging examples.

I'd love to see the cap changed to allow smaller investments by currently non-accredited investment. If we replaced the hard asset/income cut-off with an amount indexed by either income or assets, it would make crowdfunding of small businesses a viable option.

Since regulators don't want to see "Middle class family's life savings wiped out in investment fraud," allowing people to invest up to 3-5% of annual income or 2% of total assets in a given business would create additional sources of funding, prevent any one startup failure from being personally damaging, and give individuals the chance to invest locally in growing businesses.

This wouldn't have made sense twenty years ago, but the administrative requirements can be a lot more easily amortized by a central crowdfunding platform these days.

It's worth noting that BankSimple has a blog entry endorsing USAA as the best existing bank in the US: http://banksimple.net/blog/2010/03/21/the-best-bank-in-the-u... .

Google actually has rolled out a small step towards this. They recognize microformats and other bits of structured data, and use them to do things like supply the number of stars for a review or to populate friend lists for social networking sites.

Their official jargon is "Rich Snippets", and they have a couple posts on it at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introduci... and http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/help-us-m... .

Have there been any email clients/plugins that used Bayesian filtering to sort non-spam email into different categories successfully? For example, is there anything out there that would let Fred Wilson automatically tag all the emails he gets from entrepeneurs asking him to check out their sites and invest in their companies?

The word on the Street right now is that NYSE moved some stocks from normal electronic trading to human-mediated trading at 2:40 PM. They were trying to slow down unusual trading activity in those stocks, and they thought they could do that by giving their human market makers a bit of time to consider prices and do the right thing. Unfortunately, when they stopped electronic trading for those stocks, all the orders they would otherwise have handled got sent to a bunch of smaller electronic exchanges that didn't have enough liquidity. That started to tank a few specific stocks scarily fast, which triggered a bunch of stat-arb trades and plunged the indices down. Once that got bad enough, all the liquidity providers got spooked and backed out of the market for about 10 minutes. Felix Salmon has a good writeup at http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/05/07/deconstruct... .

This isn't necessarily everything that happened -- there's a ton of other rumors flying around about the yen carry trade and a lot of other random stuff.

That's quite the giraffe gaffe.