tdees40

It's hard to get excited about the guy who ran Nokia into the ground.

Bread + protein (peanut butter, lunch meat, etc.) + (possibly some vegetables, i.e. lettuce, tomato) is pretty easy to get under $2.00.

Morning meal: granola or oatmeal (cost: $0.25-0.50 per person).

Afternoon meal: sandwich, maybe bag of chips ($1.00-2.00 per person).

Evening meal: meat, vegetables, carb ($2.00-3.00 per person).

I guess if you compare it to eating out it's pretty cheap, but if you compare it to cooking (although there isn't much cooking in the mealplan above, really just dinner), it looks pretty pricey.

$65/week seems like a remarkable amount of money for this. I have a wife, and a kid, so that's $10K a year to go full Soylent. (I'm not really planning on this, of course, but that's the idea, right?)

Perhaps more to the point, Obama doesn't have the legal authority to prioritize certain payments. If he doesn't pay something, then he would be in violation of the law. He can't just unilaterally not pay bills. This isn't some little technical problem, it's a real constraint. If the debt ceiling isn't raised, Obama is both (1) required by law to spend certain monies and (2) not allowed to borrow to spend that money. This could provoke a very real constitutional/legal crisis with no clear resolution.

My father-in-law is a veterinarian, and he got a call one day from a Yelp advertising sales person, who made it clear that if he didn't buy advertising from them, negative reviews would start showing up. So I just treat Yelp as legal extortion.

I think the free market mostly answers this question. According to indeed.com, the average software engineer salary is $91K. So obviously a company (assuming they could properly identify them) would pay $910K/year to a 10x programmer. Are there people out there making that for pure coding (i.e. not management)? Maybe, but it seems doubtful. I would think that generally 99.9999% of programmers make less than $400K if they're just doing programming (I'm excluding things like options or equity in comp, which is mostly just a lotto ticket anyway). So the market seems to think that even the absolute best are 3x-4x programmers.

My one issue with this is that he was, by all accounts, alarmingly thin before the seeds did him in, and winter hadn't even arrived yet. It's hard to imagine him surviving the winter, seeds or not. So while the seeds obviously shortened his life, I doubt it was by a very large factor.

Um, the Windows division of MSFT brought in $19.2B of their $78B in total revenue. I'm no expert, but giving up 25% of your revenue is no way to run a company.

da Vinci isn't a surname and shouldn't be used as one. It'd be like calling the Duke of Edinburgh "Of Edinburgh".

See Wikipedia for more information.

Flat is irrelevant. Don't believe me? Go to Montreal. Outrageous topography, terrible weather, everybody bikes. Biking is about infrastructure and social networks. I live in Orange County, and nobody rides to work, but once they find out you ride, they begin to think that maybe it isn't such a big deal.

Keep in mind though that a 20-50% slowdown is pretty big in the browser world, especially given that those numbers represent a lower-bound for how much slower a GC browser would be. Would you trade your Chrome/Firefox browser for something 20-50% slower? I wouldn't, and I don't think anyone else would.

It does not, and this needs to change before Go becomes viable for applications like this.

So every twenty-two year old I've ever met has told me how boring their entry-level corporate job was and how they just want to get out. Fine. But recognize that your job is boring because entry-level jobs are boring. They just exist to see if you're sane and you'll do work; once you prove yourself you get more interesting jobs.

But most twenty-two year olds check out long before that happens.

Yes, this gives "elite" traders an advantage over the only-somewhat-elite traders, but I would suspect that most sane traders who aren't doing hyper-HFT-type trading will be unaffected. So it's a meh for me.

Do keep in mind that if you move to TX, your children will learn creationism IN SCHOOL. Also, they will likely learn about a white-washed version of slavery. This is a really big deal to me, and it should be a big deal to more liberals who move out there.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bryan-monroe/how-texas-school-...

Its resilience during the recession at least has something to do with oil. At least acknowledge that possibility.

Quick everybody, let's all trade this strategy immediately! We'll be rich!

Meh. There are a million of these things, and they all backtest great. It's not really meaningful going forward though.

There were people who saw it, sure, but lots more people who didn't. So saying he was a complete fool is just ridiculous.

"So it is reasonable to be wary of an industry of rich and powerful men eliding its own interests with that of the country at large, or of claims that techniques appropriate to fix problems in one field can be applied mutatis mutandis in another."

Words to live by.

It seems like the give-up on clarity of code isn't worth of it for most of this, but the tail call optimization is a nifty little feature to have.

To get it started, subcategories include:

1) High-frequency trading. Very programming oriented as trade latency is everything. You'll need to be really good at making C/C++ code really fast. Math is somewhat less important than other fields.

2) Derivatives pricing. Usually working for banks/hedge funds, and use various methods (Monte Carlo, PDE, transform) to price options. Will need to know C/C++ and/or probably Matlab, C# (Excel is king here, so MSFT languages is a big deal), and Python is on the up and up. Will need to have a serious math background. This is more or less what I do.

3) Algo trading. Uses mathematical techniques to find patterns and execute trades. Probably works for a hedge fund. Programming languages vary by fund and include Matlab, Python, C/C++, Java (one uses Ocaml). Less theoretical, lots of playing around with data.

4) Quant risk. Usually works for a bank or hedge fund in the risk department. Responsible for things like building VaR models. Usually requires light programming (VBA, although serious languages help), and some lightweight math.

Saying "I want to learn Quant Finance" is like saying "I want to learn programming," in that it really all just depends. There's an impossible number of fields and sub-fields, and many people know one field intimately but may not know another at all (high-frequency trading and derivative pricing, for instance, have little overlap). Also, some of these jobs (i.e. high-frequency trading) are about 90% programming, whereas other jobs tend to be significantly more mathematical. If you can't narrow your interests beyond just the exceptionally broad category of quant finance, then learn enough to figure out what subcategory you want to jump into, and then let me know and I'll give you a reading list, if I know anything about it.

Because clearly money and girl-banging are the only reasons to choose a career.

Second that one. On these sort of problems it's not uncommon to see 100x+ speedups. My general experience is that just re-writing this in C++ instead of Numpy you'd see a >14x speedup, so I'm pretty unimpressed at this point.

Two things: (1) The Law of Large Numbers doesn't mean what the New Yorker thinks it means. (2) Is issuance of a dividend really "financial engineering"? This is just a silly piece by a guy who apparently doesn't understand finance, tech, or investing.