tdees40

The sad decline of Google Finance from best in class to also-ran is really depressing. I use Yahoo Finance now, which includes an outrageously easy API.

But this isn't the only natural disaster California should be concerned about...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862

Looks like this has already made it to the Wikipedia page for Kiss Trust:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_Trust

This is why it's important to differentiate between Marx's preferred political system (Communism) and the ideas of Marx more holistically (Marxism). Many of Marx's ideas remain compelling ways to explain our modern world (alienation, false consciousness, just to cite two), even if Marx's political ideas turned out to be a disaster.

The New Yorker actually wrote a wonderful article on solitary confinement that's a must-read for anybody who cares about the subject.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...

I'm saying that the bathrooms in Penn Station mostly consist of homeless people peeing on the walls.

Bitcoin folks need to understand that fractional reserve banking doesn't mean holding less in assets than you have in liablilities; it simply means that you hold less cash (or very liquid assets) than you have liabilities. What the author of this post describes is just fraud, not fractional reserve, and while libertarian types love to conflate the two, they are emphatically not the same thing.

Just to be clear, there are rooms that get peed in. Whether they meet the technical definition of "bathroom" is up in the air.

"Nutrient deficiencies are common, and supplements don't always work."

*Citation needed

I suspect they mostly want a compliant political infrastructure and relatively easy construction. NYC and SF aren't really known for either. Also, NYC would probably be biting off more than Google Fiber has any interest in chewing at the moment. They're still scaling up, after all.

I knew I shouldn't have joined that Hezbollah playgroup!

We were flying with my son (then six months old) recently, and he has a reasonably uncommon name. He was flagged by the TSA as being on the no-fly list, which caused us to have to submit to onerous additional security procedures and miss our flight. So, ya know, way to go, TSA.

I do feel like they may be underestimating the difficulty of putting together automatic translator code...

Dude, it's marketing. If you want to promote your language, don't make it offend people. It doesn't matter if the offense holds up to your personal views on what should and shouldn't be offensive.

And somehow we've gone from a minor request for the removal of vulgarity to "cultural imperialism". Sheesh.

If by "heavily" you mean there are a few notable (and exciting!) projects out there, then sure. But what percentage of working quants code in Haskell ever? Probably <5%.

The problem with Excel is a problem of state. It's great for viewing immutable information (although custom web apps aren't difficult for most basic tasks), but as soon as you get into running production processes in Excel things fall apart. A single stray keystroke populates a random cell, which blows up your calculations, and you can't figure out what you did. This has happened dozens of times in my career in finance, and I've found no reasonable solution to it.

Matlab, C++, C# and Java rule the roost in the finance world. Anything else is treated with intense suspicion by finance companies. (I was once at a very large financial company that wouldn't approve Python for use internally at all because it was open-source. Let that sink in. We used it anyway of course.)

And yes, R and Python are making real inroads in quant finance, but they still have a small market share. Most of the guys writing code either want MS Office integration (sadly all traders love Excel), raw speed (C/C++/Java), or easy prototyping (Matlab). People don't know Haskell, audit departments don't know Haskell, and Haskell isn't as fast as C++, so this is an uphill climb, but I wish them the best.

If you want to know the state of the art in quant finance, go stare at the horrible over-engineered debacle that is QuantLib and see what kind of programmers we have working in this area.

This is probably true. Competition is sometimes destructive. But these business practices are still completely illegal.

I've never understood this part of Taleb's argument. Of course, constant vol Black-Scholes does not hold. BUT NO ONE USES THIS. Everyone in the financial industry is well aware of the volatility skew, and spends lots of time adjusting for it.

B-S vols are putting the "wrong number into the wrong equation to get the right price" as Rebonnato famously said.

People always focus on small, dramatic causes of death (bike wrecks) and ignore the infinitely more common causes (heart disease). Biking frequently has tremendous benefits on heart disease in exchange for a modest increase in the risk of death (still low) from a bike accident.

The jive talk really adds to your story.

For most hauling cases, you can rent a truck/van from Home Depot for $20/hour or so. It takes about five minutes to do. Obviously that isn't everyone's use case, but Enterprise will pick you up, or Zip Car or even cabs is a valid possibility. None of these are all that difficult.

Ah yes, even better. But that couldn't even fly in NYC, arguably the place with the least car friendly political environment in the US.

The odd thing to me about cars is that people pick the most unusual use cases and then buy their cars off of that. So my dad likes to haul plywood once in a while, so he bought a pick-up. But 99.99% of the time he could use a subcompact. Likewise everyone knows people who have two kids and buy a van/SUV because they want an extra seat or two. You can always rent a car if you get into these sorts of situations, and it would be much cheaper than buying a huge car that runs with one person in it 90%+ of the time.

This is easy enough to fix from a policy standpoint:

(1) make free parking a taxable benefit for companies

(2) tax the hell out of gas/car registration, or at the very least tax it enough to pay for infrastructure

(3) no mandated parking minimums in new construction in cities

(4) get rid of publicly paid for parking

But of course this requires transit alternatives and popular support, which does not exist in places like Atlanta. I live in Orange County, and I bike to work (we have perfect weather and mediocre bike infrastructure), but people love their cars here.

The point of this is obviously that the USD is just as much as a construct as Bitcoin, which, sure! But of course the difference is that the dollar's value doesn't change by 20%+ in a day, so you can rely on it to execute transactions, sign contracts, set salaries, etc.

Bitcoin apologists have generally seemed to see Bitcoin's rise as a positive, which is somewhat true, but it has to be stable to be useful for ordinary people. A volatile currency is not a useful currency.

If a majority of Americans prefer extremists, then extremists we shall have. Such is the way of democracy.

For anyone uninformed on this matter, a few facts:

1) The Senate is a majority body, but it requires a 60 vote (i.e. 60%) threshold to cut off debate and force a vote on a bill; otherwise, debate continues indefinitely.

2) In practice, this obviously can lead to the Senate becoming a supermajority body if filibusters are routinely exercised. In the last 5-10 years, this has become the case. For instance, this is an example of a bill that "failed" despite receiving a 54-46 vote.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/04...

3) This rule change would only apply to presidential appointments. The 60-vote threshold would remain in place for other bills.

Is anyone using Dart in production? I'm not really a front-end guy so I don't keep as up to date, but it seems like this hasn't made much of a splash.