dchftcs

That is already a first and most important "why". It may be a little bit too terse, but mathematics didn't evolve by knowing the applications before doing something.

Without doing some playing around from sqrt(-1) and discovering how it connects one thing to another, nobody is able to come up with real applications. You need to at least build a placeholder of the concept in your mind before you can examine what's possible.

So a person with a similar mindset as those who were the first people to use complex numbers, would just try to find a way to express a square root of a negative number and see how it goes. It starts with a limitation of an important tool and tries to close a perceived conceptual gap. The mathematicians themselves that write this book probably all think that way. I wouldn't call myself a mathematician but I didn't need anything more than that sentence to believe someone was motivated enough just from that reason alone.

So really there's a whole audience out there - arguably that a professional mathematician most wants to address - that could appreciate this sentence just as-is. So it's not true that it's natural to think the audience requires further explanation. Whether you should care is another matter. But as this is a book about linear algebra not complex numbers, some others would have accused the author of digression if he granted your wishes.

So I don't think what you're demanding is fair. Maybe it's a reasonable request after the fact, but it's a little too harsh to think it's something the author must have addressed in his text to his intended audience. This kind of inquiry is what in-person teaching is useful for.

If I were to say combined 5 years of professional experience in rust + C++, employers would definitely want to see the breakdown, unless they really don't care if it's 0+5.

(And in the case of my claim, it is indeed 0+5)

This looks like the moment of truth for Waymo. Waymo had self-driving for years but rolled out slowly as they prioritized safety. Competitors seemingly had caught up pretty quickly, the space got crowded and for a long time people were thinking Waymo moved too slowly.

But now it seems their strategy is paying off, at least in terms of developing an acceptable solution. It still remains whether they can monetize it well, but other people will have to more or less adopt Waymo's model or they won't have a business.

Knowing about software, if the key differential factor is how well you can handle a long tail of edge cases, it'll take years before others can compete with today's Waymo in fully autonomous self-driving cars. If you don't have an architecture and culture to obsess about edge cases, it could even be easier to tear down the software and rebuild.

It would be more analogous to hft if

1. Platforms could detect they're sellng the same piece of good and automatically sort by price

2. There's no material difference between vendors other than pricing and offering, e.g. in customer service

3. vicious anti-competitive behaviour like those illustrated here are heavily regulated

When all these are true the vendors that survive would be ones that offer the best price among those who offer goods of the same level of crappiness.

It's tough to see the arguments, I can't sympathize with her because doesn't seem to be offering arguments in good faith.

To her credit, gender discrimination is hard to prove and perhaps she felt she really had a strong case (based on the risk she took - this action may close some doors for her), but allowing these arguments to go through really erodes what facade of meritocracy we have left in the industry.

The claims seem to be have gone as far as saying she should have been hired as VP. Her background was senior tech management at a bank, which no doubt is a significant appointment, but I don't think it's easy for anyone to argue that bank tech management easily transfers to big tech.

Giving L8 and presumably a sizeable raise from her bank role means Google already valued her experience very highly. Much more highly than I would have tbh; if someone was top level management in an bank, effectively at least partially responsible for the poor culture of bank tech, and then hired as senior tech management at my company, us grunts would be running for our lives. As she didn't get consistently stellar performance reviews as L8 (which Google uses as argument), the only thing one can argue for is that the performance reviews were biased - which again to her credit tends to be hard to prove - but there's no reason to believe that say a third party looking at those reviews would have given her a promotion.

I also can't fathom someone is arguing in good faith that at this level MS in CS should be a barrier. It should be clear to any Google L8 that MS in CS means absolute jack shit for anyone who manages to get to L6, if not L5. It should only be a factor in junior-ish hiring. For one, Google's technical work even at L6 level can literally shape curriculums at universities. It may just be a legal tactic but I don't want US courts to lend any credibility to this argument, and anyone who wants the court to sanctify this point is basically someone that damages my profession and I don't want near my jurisdiction.

I guess you're referring to my specification of low-margin. As I also specified SME, what that means is both low-margin and low-revenue. And the true intented meaning is that all cash flows one might want to tax (mostly with progressive rates) are small.

There's sales tax for customers, income (and payroll) tax for employees, and then taxes on dividends, and then capital gains on stocks. Low-margin SMEs contribute proportionately very little tax compared to Google when we account for tax contribution this way.

Public money indirectly comes from the most profitable companies, so it's not as bad as you suggest. I'd also say there are worse freeriders of academic research in the economy than big tech.

I think you got the direction reversed. Here you have a reduction of B(x,y) to the halting problem, which only shows that (a subset of) halting is at least as hard as B(x,y). You need a reduction from collatz to halting to B(x,y) instead. Collatz to halting is trivial, halting to B(x,y) seems a bit less so - you need to precisely define which subset of halting problems can be reduced from Collatz yet is no harder than B(3,3).

Banks are not good businesses for a shareholder. When a bank is in trouble the shareholder tends to be zeroed to protect deposits. PE ratios for bank stocks tend to be bad.

You have a lot more leverage being a big client of a bank than its shareholder. The pecking order is roughly big client > senior management ~ shareholder > other senior employees > smallish client > junior corporate employee > retail client ~ teller.

They did say it didn't work. The overwhelming majority of finance stuff in published work doesn't work, because they're either too simplistic, poorly backtested, or they get exploited too quickly, so beating those doesn't imply you can run a hedge fund.

The main part here is that it's one thing to predict price action, it's another thing to trade profitably - and in particular they were not able to beat fees, which is a common hurdle if you're new to HFT.

I said "derivative", not equivalent.

Also, TFA used singularly is different from just saying "the article", e.g. when you want to imply RTFA. Within your comment you could see the "F" part was quite out of nowhere and can be considered rude.

I guess the more useful and original one is RTFA, and TFA is a derivative that gets used sometimes.

There's a cookie I took out of a package for a nibble. You could say I'm eating that pack of cookies. Not justifying the sensationalist title though.

I don't think it's due to gender per se (not that this necessarily matters to the trial). More likely SBF just found her to be the easiest to exploit. There's certainly a correlation (a dude would have slightly different reasons to allow himself to be exploited), but my priors are that gender isn't the direct cause here.

Sam Trabucco joined later but made much more. It's strange that she would take such a risk for a meagre 6 million, and presumably knowing about Alameda's finances and profitability. Maybe she was not that into money and had other motivations...

I don't think they would have stopped at Apple.

I'm pretty boring in person but there are definitely times I know strangers are curious about me. And those tend to be times I really don't want attention.

Disengagement works because not everyone out there is trying to talk to everyone. If you change cultural norms such that every child should talk to strangers a lot, it'll be tiring to have to do this "disengagement" 10 times a day.

> This feels like such a non-news. They've pretty much created a language which is deliberately dumbed down to be 20 years behind other languages, then they are proud that they could speed it up with a feature that was fairly well-known almost 20 years ago.

Sounds like the average iPhone reveal to me.

Bribery is bad primarily because it asks for someone to abandon their duties for personal gain.

As the head of the state, his is responsible for the state, and not more.

Here, he asked US to pay the state instead of himself. Whether or not it would actually turn out to be a net benefit to the state is one matter, but given the information we have, he acted in accordance to his duty. You can't call that bribery.

Maybe you think he has a moral obligation to not keep quiet, and he defied that obligation. But no, that's not how it works. A head of state that chooses this as a hill to die on, regardless of trade-offs, is one that fails his people.

I also agree it's kind of sad that the best minds are trying to squeeze 1bps of extra profit out of ETF trades or worse, trying to figure out why an option is implying SP500 should be trading half tenth of a cent higher. And I believe it's a deep structural issue with the misalignment of incentives of society, where individuals are not to be blamed but everyone is complicit.

He can lead by treating his technology employees better...

One way to look at is that the more people who can figure out how to make money in a crisis without adding to said crisis, the less severe the crisis becomes. If someone can price distressed corporate bonds better, they will bid higher, and bagholders of companies that actually have decent prospects (but are hurt by market anomalies in crisis situations) can then lose less money, compared to the alternative.

As an analogy, imagine that your home is wrecked in a hurricane, but a scraps dealer is able to offer money for what's left. If there's only one scraps dealer around, they will absolutely rip you off and pay you just enough that you'd be livid and kicking but still aren't motivated to find a way to sell the scraps yourself. But if there are two scraps dealers competing for the wreckage, it'd be easier for you to get a market deal.

Scraps dealers improve their profitability by finding better ways to sell the scraps, so in a competitive environment, you could indirectly benefit from their experience. You make them sound like terrible people by saying they "make money off a disaster", but objectively their existence is a net benefit to the situation. One thing that can make this argument break down is that scraps companies may rely a lot on information asymmetry and price gouging, but that is actually less of problem for financial transactions that can be systematically electronified, where there's a lot of regulation and said regulation is more easily enforced.

Making markets efficient is a very abstract concept that people makes people feel disconnected from the benefits. But in this abstract way, it does contribute to the economy.

Not enough smart people thinking like Jane Street (or any large trading company with a track record of managing risk), but still performing financial activities, is arguably what causes financial crises to begin with. Think people buying into schemes based on returns that are too good to be true, bundling bad mortgages without modeling it properly, or banks not taking clients' money seriously.

I think a better analogy can be drawn by just considering the physical version of some things. For IoT, you can say if someone discovers a specific brand of physical lock can be broken in unexpected ways, they should be allowed to communicate this in a way that benefits the users of the lock without facing any legal risk. For internet banking, you can discuss a physical vault that safekeeps everyone's gold, and say that someone who notices a broken lock should not be punished for telling the vault manager to fix the lock. Unfortunately the common situation is that the lock company and the vault manager will sue because they don't want to admit they put their users and clients at risk - it sounds absurd, but that's what happens in the electronic world.

What you're saying is privacy. Lack of interoperability is like you uploaded code to github from one computer, and then fail to download it to another because the encryption algorithms or something are not compatible.

Other than the obvious confounding factors, I feel this has to have some cherry picking or selective interpretation of what is a non-violent movement. Almost always there's some non-violent action preceding a violent movement, the question is at which stage they get quashed, fail to become much bigger, and then people have to resort to violence.

Depending on the scale and complexity, if you make no effort to control resource usage, costs grow exponentially, sometimes even without growth in business because the requirements just become more complex. For a certain optimization, you may save 1TB today, but end up saving 2TB some years down the road; just a few of these decisons you could be looking at a difference of a magnitude or more, sometimes even at larger scale. Overall there's always a balance to be struck.

>I'm sure all their competitors do the same for the same reasons.

Trading firms tend to build a lot of their own tech, but Jane Street is special in that they build almost everything in house. Ocaml is practically their own language. No other competitor comes close to this level of owning the entire ecosystem, including programming tools.

This is a question about theoretical possibilities and what you're saying seems to be a rigid belief in an answer "no". But you provided no evidence or justification, except for "with current technology", which answers nothing about the theoretical question.