Hacker News Reader

T_S_on SOPA Hearings Delayed, 140,000 Americans watched the hearings

Great idea. Who owns Congress?

T_S_on “Entrepreneurs get distracted by fundraising, so I just did that part first.”

New idea for funding strategy: Rent a name-brand entrepreneur for your idea. Or maybe it's an old one.

I've got a great bug prediction tool: ghc, the haskell compiler. Whenever I use a value of the wrong type my program won't compile. In my code it is always a bug when that happens. (Some smarter people can write non-buggy code the compiler doesn't like.)

Sometimes I can trick ghc into using the wrong type. Like when I use "String" to mean "File". That's when all the bugs show up as run-time errors. But I should know a string is not a file. And hopefully somebody writes a module that knows what a "File" really is and stops me from writing buggy code if I use it.

T_S_on The real reason you can't hire developers....

3. Weird extra steps...riddle/puzzles/challenges might seem cool to you but might just seem like another hoop to me.

I can't wait until this business fad is over.

T_S_on Nvidia Opens CUDA Platform, Releases Compiler Source Code

I think you meant OpenCL is not going away, and I agree.

T_S_on Flow Analysis & Time-based Bloom Filters

tl;dr A Bloom filter implements the predicate isMemberOf efficiently--at the cost of some false postives. Its performance degrades when the set is large. Solution: index your set by time, implementing a Bloom filter for each epoch.

T_S_on The single most useful Emacs feature

Ctrl-k

T_S_on The Brilliant Way To Negotiate In Three Easy Lessons

That was confusing as hell.

T_S_on How to build a portrait with dice

Wonder what the reverse side looks like. Come to think of it it would be cool to slice the dice, to save weight and numbers.

T_S_on Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”

Basically he's saying investors are dumb for making it hard for his now large company to hire engineers. Get out the violins.

T_S_on The Philosophy of Computer Science

One thing that interests me is the "inductive leap" implicit in all modeling situations. You have empirical risk minimization, Bayesian, MML, MDL and others all taking a different approach to taking the leap. You also have the "mind projection" fallacy Jaynes liked to talk about.

Understanding what modelers do is a good way to understand what AI will be doing.

T_S_on Zynga Chief Seeks to Claw Back Stock

"A company that abused its bargaining position like this should not expect to be able to hire good employees in the future."

It seems the company does not believe this to be the case. Possibly they are in a better position too know. Or they are beyond the phase where top talent is required to de-risk the business. Very calculating either way.

T_S_on Nassim Taleb: End Bonuses For Bankers

What I am suggesting is to allow the public and analysts to see the detailed positions of the institution and make accounting superfluous. We can view accounting as an extremely flawed model that lacks timely updates. By operating in the sunshine an array of activities permitted by information hoarding will no longer be sustainable.

T_S_on Nassim Taleb: End Bonuses For Bankers

This fails because it ignores the root cause. All banking crises are informational in nature. Circulating more of the right kind of information is nearly all the regulation you need. What information? Positions, live or daily, in detail. No more too big to fail, and many other problems simply disappear.

In contrast, most regulatory proposals betray a belief in installing a tough cop of some kind to combat 'evildoers'. Guess what, the evildoers are just people doing their jobs. We need to tweak the system to stabilize it, and for a regulated industry like banking the government has all the power it needs to do so.

T_S_on Why Daylight Saving Time Should Be Abolished

While we're at it...

13 months, 28 days each = 364 days Plus 1 or 2 special days at the beginning of the year. Much easier to figure out the day of the week for your next meeting.

We could name the 13th month Jobsuary, or you pick.

T_S_on How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates?

Gates did an amazing job of taking advantage of my many bosses ignorance in the early 90's. We all still pay for that, though less and less it seems. Thank goodness he left Balmer in charge.

As for the the whole redemption through philanthropy thing, it's fun to watch the wealthy compete in the legacy game. Go Bill!

T_S_on Why the SEC Won’t Hunt Big Dogs

I think you have a point even though it is a gray area. However, I think that having the government focus on Real Transparency (TM) as a prevention instead of criminal enforcement would be a far more effective systemic reform. Not that I believe it likely to be implemented anytime soon.

T_S_on Why the SEC Won’t Hunt Big Dogs

The crisis was fueled by people showing up and doing their jobs. Think about that.

The hunt for the criminals is a waste of time. People were acting aggressive, not criminal--with notable exceptions that could happen in any era. In fact, finding scapegoats will make the problem worse. It leaves the system intact and fools everybody into believing the problem is fixed.

Credit and risk has always been a problem of information. In this era we have more tools than ever to manage them. However the rules require a major rethink to get the right information circulating.

Now, if you believe it is a systems problem, what's the solution? Here's one: Transparency. Not the SEC's version of quarterly accounting quibbles. Just tell me the the end-of-day positions of every "large" participant. 20 years ago that would be too much information to process. Now it would be no problem. Lots of little agencies could process the information.

The impact would be enormous. The informational advantages of large institutions and so-called speculators would simply disappear. Nobody would be able to grow to be too big to fail, simply because they would have a harder time trading. If you are starting to feel sorry for banks having to supply this type of formerly proprietary information, just remember, they have the corresponding information on you and you don't complain.

T_S_on Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

Eventually, by making a fresh account, taking checksums of its dotfiles, adding an applet, and taking checksums again, I found out that the new panel configuration lives in a file called .config/dconf/user that is an opaque binary blob.

I think the OP is a perfect candidate for Arch Linux.

T_S_on The best thing Tim Cook didn't announce

Is it just me? I like the form factor of the 3GS much better than the 4/4S. I was hoping they would go back to that with the 5.

T_S_on Is Haskell the Cure?

The ecosystem for Haskell is improving rapidly. My startup built a computer vision application on top of easyVision and with the intention of rewriting it in ObjC. Instead we are working with the Haskell community to target the mobile platform. A year ago that would have been a dicey bet.

About our Haskell experience: Yes, the learning curve seems steep, but mainly because of the things you have to unlearn (OMG no for-loops!). However, functions are the most modular things ever invented. That translates into an uncanny ability to add features quickly. A sophisticated type system catches many errors at compile time.

T_S_on How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing (2009)

Trading of securities is a regulated market. The rules about what information is available to the market are a combination of tradition and regulation. But they are man-made and arbitrary. I argue that the current fashions in regulation starve the markets of information and contribute to crises.

I'll give you just one example. Large traders attempt to conceal their identity. This leads to a lot of gamesmanship, as you point out. If this information were released with every order placed then I would argue a lot of volume would dry up and volatility would decrease.

T_S_on The Entrepreneur’s Guide to (not getting kicked out of) Coffee Shops

The antidote to coffee shops in Silicon Valley is Mountain View's Hacker Dojo. Drop-ins welcome.

T_S_on How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing (2009)

Nice example about how lack of information leads to volatility in markets. If you are looking for prescriptions to fix our financial markets, increasing transparency of trading would do wonders to eliminate speculation and refocus investors on value.

T_S_on Category Theory for Dummies [pdf]

Thanks for that link. It is much better than the one headlined.

T_S_on HP Names Meg Whitman President and Chief Executive Officer

Will we ever rid ourselves of corporate-speak? How many bits of information here?

“We are fortunate to have someone of Meg Whitman’s caliber and experience step up to lead HP,” said Lane. “We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead. Meg is a technology visionary with a proven track record of execution. She is a strong communicator who is customer focused with deep leadership capabilities. Furthermore, as a member of HP’s board of directors for the past eight months, Meg has a solid understanding of our products and markets.”

T_S_on The Google Wallet, a lifetime log of your purchases

Most people here are assuming that Google will have the line items on your receipt. Credit card companies normally do NOT get that information. It takes extra work for the merchant to provide it. The top line data is both less intrusive and less useful. Does anybody here actually know what data Google will be collecting?

T_S_on The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello

Makes me think of Trello shots. Made with Pee Cola.

T_S_on The Pay-It-Forward Culture

I can't think of a better place that exemplifies this than Hacker Dojo in Mountain View.

T_S_on Algorithmic Trading is Not High Frequency Trading

I understand the industry quite well and from experience. BTW My only daggers were aimed at HFT.

Let me be clear. Anybody that puts an order in not expecting to get executed but to create favorable conditions for their next order is engaging in what I call "high speed rumor mongering". There are lots of variations of this game. Never happens? Always happens? You tell me.

But markets aren't chess. "Rumor-mongering" is a legal term I chose on purpose. It is generally prohibited because it destroys liquidity in markets, which hurts investors and issuers. The term is intentionally objectionable, but not inaccurate. Just don't trouble the regulators to figure it out.