nuisance-bear

It's like military officers in failed states. They are covered head-to-toe in medals an epaulets.

"Honors is epaulets. My pop pop taught me that." -RPF

Clay Christensen used to tell a story about the atmosphere at HBS reunions over time. It sounds like this person learned early on the lesson that HBS graduates learn by their 25th reunion.

Edit: https://youtu.be/tvos4nORf_Y?t=470

If you carefully read OP's response in the PR, he says he tried static typing make_list in addition to iterate_list. Your comment elides the resource allocation step.

Like OP, I observed that static typing make_list yields little benefit. It's runtime is 3x the runtime of iterate_list. And that makes sense. I'm not sure why we'd expect Cython to speed up the allocation of large numbers of Python objects.

Günter M. Ziegler, Professor for Discrete Geometry at Free University Berlin, gave a talk on the Polyhedron shown in the "Melencolia I".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gw_SgnlSdk

This was a phenomenal article.

"A small number of unelected agents, operating largely behind closed doors, are increasingly important to the lives of millions who barely know of the existence much less the identity or inclinations of those agents."

A little bit of Python can fix at least that small part.

Here's an example that illustrates the phenomenon. If memory serves me right, index latency is superlinear in dimension count.

   import time, torch
   from itertools import product

   N = 100

   ten = torch.randn(N,N,N)
   arr = ten.numpy()

   def indexTimer(val):
       start = time.time()
       for i,j,k in product(range(N), range(N), range(N)):
           x = val[i, j, k]
       end = time.time()
       print('{:.2f}'.format(end-start))

   indexTimer(ten)
   indexTimer(arr)

Tools to make GPU development easier are sorely needed.

I foolishly built an options pricing engine on top of PyTorch, thinking "oooh, it's a fast array library that supports CUDA transparently". Only to find out that array indexing is 100x slower than numpy.

"In fact, I believe that those in power who snicker about credible reports of strange objects in the sky and stymie research into them, including access to classified data, have become a threat to national security themselves."

This seems to have become a deep-seated aspect of American culture. It extends into startup land as well. We on HN seem to be deeply skeptical of new applications of technology--like Dropbox and Coinbase--despite being highly receptive to developments lower in the abstraction hierarchy.

If you work in private equity, it's the worst. Your company isn't actively trading stock, but you still get banned from options, shorts, and need pre-clearance for every single trade. So you end up long SPY... even if you derive independent utility from actively managing your portfolio.

The law doesn't require this of course, but basically all money managers get their insider trading compliance program from the same 3 outside law firms.

Maybe we shouldn't burn ethanol in cars. Maybe we shouldn't load up every food product with corn syrup.

Supersonic cruise was an explicit design requirement for the F35, and it has been achieved using materials developed in the 1990s for the F22.

Your problem set sounds super cool, and it would be nice if DOD had a functioning acquisition process that would allow people with interesting tech to out-compete companies whose boards are stacked with current and former public officials. But alas, that's not the world we live in.

The sad thing is, there are probably dozens of proto Kelly Johnson's out there. But they've made defense industries so intolerable that none of them work there.

It also sounds like the time Max Butler exploited a buffer overflow in BIND to patch a bunch of DOD systems. As we later found out, he added some extra "functionality" to that patch. Who's to say FBI hasn't done that in some small fraction of cases?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingpin_(book)

I'd say this person is actually lucky Windows forced an update. Compute nodes fail, which is why you log state so you can restore your simulation or training routine. Instead of experiencing a failure in industry, they learned the "cache state" lesson in a low-stakes academic setting. Maybe they'll extrapolate the lesson and start keeping off-site backups too.

It's a lot easier to point at a fact everyone knows (Moxie took government money) than it is to find an exploitable bug in Signal.

This article is waste of time.

How is this materially different from the system we already have?

US dollars are just rows in a distributed database. The database is distributed over a network of banking nodes. The network is highly concentrated [1], and its super-nodes are already very difficult to distinguish from government in anything but a formal legal sense.

Insofar as I can tell, a digital currency would be the same thing as government saying "banks need to provide unrestricted access to their networks" which has basically happened already.

[1] https://www.ffiec.gov/npw/Institution/TopHoldings

People noticed. tptacek has mentioned it a few times on this forum.

I like Signal. I want to like Signal. But I find myself making an increasing number of excuses for behavior inconsistent with their roots.

I wonder if there is enough energy out there to propel a thin-client fork.

Robert Graham (eratasec) told a story that they threatened to falsely taint his security clearance if he didn't cancel a DEFCON talk.

Whoa, the press release does not match the results. Scroll down to Tables 2a,2b on pp. 26-27 of the NBER paper.

These are their 1 year horizon alpha's and tstats against Fama French 3 factor:

          alpha     tstat
   Long   6.5%      6.6
   Shrt   5.0%      3.7

Those numbers are economically and statistically significant.

There's a cautionary note at the end of the article reminding the reader that git still relies on sha1 (with mitigations). Recall that $10k worth of GTX1060's produced a sha1 collision in late 2019.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentat...

Greece implemented capital controls in June 2015. The United Kingdom struggled to keep them implemented in October 1979. I'd look at these episodes and the Asian Financial Crisis from 1997 as examples of the kind of thing Dalio is probably thinking about.

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

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