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nissimkon My transition to an Ubuntu workstation

First things to do on a new windows 10 install are run the decrapifier.ps1 and install classic shell.

Problem solved. It is a shame that the default is so garbage but there's an easy solution.

You don't delete it because it's a liability in the maintenance account but it's an asset in the features account.

nissimkon VisiCalc's Spreadsheets Changed the World

I still prefer Excel to esoteric regular expressions in vim for parsing complex text to copy paste. For example extracting individual pieces of data from a bunch of log file lines or reformatting text into syntax valid in some programming language.

You can work up the correct syntax in the top cell with mid, left, right, etc. And then just copy down once you have it right and copy the resulting values to your editor.

There's also "text to columns" for parsing separated or fixed width text.

nissimkon Fun with Snapchat's Gender Swapping Filter

The population is small and more studies are needed.

I found this:

https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/MHRJ-05-2014-...

Unfortunately the suicide risk is still very high even for post transition trans population.

nissimkon Fun with Snapchat's Gender Swapping Filter

I used to think like that and then I learned that suicide rate is extremely high among young people with gender dysphoria and these medicines are known to reduce that risk.

nissimkon Lyft’s IPO Was a Success, Just Not for Investors Who Bought on Friday

Is there any rule or provision preventing them from short selling the stock in another account?

nissimkon I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

Yeah, I agree.. Doing enough prep to get a hundred percent acceptance rate is not worth it. And it is a level I couldn't achieve anyhow. I've done fine on my career with 50 percent or lower acceptance rate at interviews. It's one of the things I'm the worst at in this industry, but you only need to change jobs fairly infrequently.

I also question a lot of these "I landed every offer" claims. People often exaggerate their victories.

nissimkon Two creators are not always better than one

I would think that sales would be easier to measure than tech because successful salespeople have a track record with dollar amounts sold.

nissimkon The gig worker’s lament

With your own business you can contribute 2x the best employee 401k deal and it is also tax free.

https://www.mysolo401k.net/solo-401k/solo-401k-contribution-...

nissimkon War Story – The Mystery of the Very Long GC Pauses in .NET Windows Service

Anti virus causes so many problems on Windows systems. Even the included defender product. My laptop experiences random pauses a couple of times per day and I've correlated them with high CPU in anti malware service executable. It's difficult to cure without uninstalling anti virus.

nissimkon China May Have $5.8T in Hidden Debt with ‘Titanic’ Risks

Many investors in mortgage backed securities lost quite a lot in 07-09. Your statement is false. The fed bailed out the big banks but smaller players wrote down many positions to 0.

nissimkon Toyota Investing $500M in Uber in Driverless Car Pact

I thought the investment was to open a channel for selling more Toyotas. They're going to offer preferential lease deals that can be paid through Uber earnings.

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2016/05/24/toyota-inv...

nissimkon Bay Area cities are cracking down on free food at tech companies

Folks, these companies can still offer free food. At smaller companies in NY that don't have a cafeteria but want to keep the employees in for lunch they give out a seamless allowance. It works quite well. Not sure if it would scale to an office with thousands of workers but it probably could. Some places also order catering from local food vendors.

nissimkon Frequent versus infrequent developers, in languages and so on

I would generalize this for accelerated learning: Identify the minimum you need to learn to complete your next task and learn only that. This is difficult for two reasons. First, without the knowledge it's hard to identify what is the minimum you need to learn. And second, as someone with an interest in technology it's hard to stop yourself from going deeper. Solve the first problem by guessing with a bias towards learning less and solve the second problem with discipline.

If you proceed with this accelerated learning process you can start knocking out tasks using new technology rather fast and you will achieve better results. You may not know all the details of every language and tool that you use but you'll know how to get things done.

nissimkon Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

It's good you pointed this out because many people don't know. I took a first aid class and they taught us in an emergency situation, never say "somebody call 911!" Because everybody will think someone else will do it. Point to a specific person and say "you, call 911!"

It's the same thing.

nissimkon It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

No. Many smaller financial firms derive their advantage from technology. There are many areas of finance aside from high frequency trading and they all benefit from significant force multiplication from technology. Even in the lowly area of operations automation there are firms that achieve significant scale with a small number of personnel through technological advantage. Granted this is sometimes achieved with a combination of in house and commercial technology packages, and sometimes the overall system design is done by non-technical people who just manage grunts to do all of the work, to say that these companies are not benefiting from force multiplying technology is foolish. There are very few financial professionals left who are not technology people in some sense of the word.

Many firms benefit from better data. All that data needs to be acquired and managed. Many firms benefit from better analytics and models. Those models need to be tested and implemented.

Your number is low.

nissimkon Snapchat’s New Update Triggers Revolt by Millions of Teens

I'd like to see a discussion of this by people who understands social networks better than me. Facebook updates have been meet with similar backlash and usually result in more user acceptance long term. Is that because they are tweaked to meet expectations or the users get used to them?

It sounds like they choose to deemphasize streaks and a lot of users really love that feature.

Is there a better way to handle this sort of rollout?

nissimkon Uber and Waymo Reach Settlement

When Intel stole Digital's alpha technology the lawsuit ended with intel acquiring the Digital chip business. I guess that's also sort of money, but not exactly.

nissimkon Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution

I thought it relies on a multisig transaction.

nissimkon There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions

Transaction fees go to the miners. Lookup Bitcoin mining.

You'll probably find it's not worth it...

nissimkon An $814M Mystery Near the Heart of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchange

You can't short real estate easily because it's a physical thing. Subprime was bonds that were secured by mortgage loans on real estate. You can short bonds but it's not easy because you have to find some to borrow. But then someone invented credit default swaps for subprime bonds. CDS are derivatives insuring bonds from default. They are similar to futures by being a 2 sided contract where cash flows between the two parties and the winner pays the loser the difference. One side is long and the other short. In subprime they took it a step further and made packages of these CDS contracts so you could go short a ton of subprime all at once. These instruments coming out coincided with the top of the real estate market in 2005 and their peak popularity was at the peak of the subprime boom in 2007.

nissimkon An $814M Mystery Near the Heart of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchange

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Inc.

nissimkon An $814M Mystery Near the Heart of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchange

Futures coming soon. Look what happened to subprime when it became possible to go short.

nissimkon An $814M Mystery Near the Heart of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchange

Futures are opening for trading in the next two weeks on regulated US exchanges with daily / weekly USD cash settlement and central clearing. For every long futures position, someone else is short. I think that's a lot safer way to short bitcoin than holding tether.

nissimkon The Uncertain Future of Bitcoin Futures

Interactive brokers accounts can trade cme futures. Whenever these come out it will be just what you're looking for. The margin requirements allow you to short with a lot of leverage too.

Good luck.

nissimkon How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Startups

So that's why it destroys my battery.

nissimkon Disabling the Intel Management Engine

The op says no in the linked article.

nissimkon Facebook's 21-Year-Old Wunderkind Sayman Leaves for Google

Did this guy have to solve algorithm puzzles on a whiteboard?

nissimkon Music Fandom Maps

The integrated youtube videos are really nice in this page. I like this best as an introduction to music I haven't heard. I like Kevin Gates 2 Phones.