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verdatelon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

As a comparison, take a look at this book -> https://nostarch.com/quantum-computing. I found it very accessible!

verdatelon Ask HN: Where do you find/filter/read the latest research publications?

MIT's technology review is a pretty good magazine for the newer research that is "stirring" the pot. They also review the latest papers on "ArXiV".. a service for researchers to put up pre-prints of their working papers.

www.technologyreview.com

verdatelon Skin in the Game as a Required Heuristic for Acting Under Uncertainty

Such a simple heuristic, but I think with far-reaching consequences. Last week, NNT posted a link to a news article with talked about a new law in an Indian state that required headmasters to taste the food that was served in the school cafeteria. This was initiated after a bad case of contaminated food and deaths resulting from it.

verdatelon Ask HN: can software be made "anti-fragile" (aka "better than just robust")?

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hURjZxTkxUTFZnMVk/...

For a more in depth treatment of anti-fragility. Read anti-fragility a couple of times. One of the one most important ideas of our time (IMO). Btw, your intuitive linking of "age degradation" is also pointed out by Taleb albeit in a different manner. His premise is that ideas that have persisted for a long time are anti-fragile. This is because they have been subjected to shocks, to ridicule, to experimentation and these ideas have become better. Age of existence is one of many indicators of anti-fragility.

verdatelon Show HN: Professional PowerPoint & Keynote Design as a Service Platform

its about the opportunity cost for me. An hour of my time spent doing actual research versus prettifying my slides is a no-brainer.

verdatelon Show HN: Professional PowerPoint & Keynote Design as a Service Platform

I'd use this as an academic tool.. I have presentations to give quarterly to representatives from funding agencies.. Typically around 8-12 slides in my presentations.. the slides I see/ use are really boring.. whenever I see a well done presentation, I perk up and pay attention. If you use this as a potential niche.. some high quality graphing work etc. would be nice..

verdatelon Ask HN: Constraint Solving Libraries for Automated Scheduling?

This might help --> https://www.shiftdata.com/

verdatelon Ask HN: I'm a Developer, I make good money, Where do I put it?

Index funds are great when you want to do direct deposits every month.. the don't have front-load costs so you can just set up an automatic transfer.

If you invest in ETF's which are traded like stocks then you have to contend with trading fees. The rule of thumb (I've garnered from reading blogs/ literature) is that if your portfolio is < $50,000, then set up automatic payments for all index funds.. however if you have a larger portfolio then it would be worth getting a discount brokerage account and using that to invest in ETFs. This is because having a larger portfolio means that your brokerage house will offer you a discounted trading fee. The advantage of ETFs is generally a lower management-expense ratio than index funds and more importantly you get access to things like REITs and other non-standard financial vehicles.

verdatelon I want to get into the startup industry, where do I start?

just did a startup weekend in Vancouver.. brilliant experience.. you should definitely do it. Will open up your eyes to a lot of possibilities.. you don't necessarily have to be an engineer/developer/designer.

verdatelon Ask HN: Social aspect to financial markets and stocks

thats a great recommendation. Thanks murtza

verdatelon Ask HN: Social aspect to financial markets and stocks

EDIT: Also.. just a quick market survey.. would you pay for this? Let's say a subscription-based service.. what would you pay for the capability to get sentiment about a stock ticker and related terms in a social media feed.

verdatelon Ask HN: Social aspect to financial markets and stocks

what are the legal hurdles you envisage? A simple recommendation based on social sentiment is what I'm thinking about.

verdatelon Ask HN: Writing my first multi-armed bandit solution..?

The theory of multi-armed bandits arises from the study of Markov decision processes (MDP). This field is also closely studied in and related to Stochastic Control and Dynamic Programming. A good book on MDP's is "Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming by Martin Puterman". It's fairly mathematical and is for grad-level learning. An alternative is another superb book "Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control" by Dimitri Bersekas.

A more accessible book is "Approximate Dynamic Programming" by Warren Powell.

I'm not sure if you know what a Markov chain is? Very roughly, any kind of data which changes its value (sometimes referred to as "state") and jumps to a new value is a Markov chain. The value that the chain jumps to is determined probabilistically using some distribution over all the states. When there are several Markov chains in parallel and each of them contribute to a certain reward and we are faced with the problem of which Markov chain to "control" or influence.. then it becomes a multi-armed bandit problem. They are not very easy to solve, except when certain simplifying assumptions are made. You can get a good start by looking at some MATLAB code from Prof. Kevin Murphy at UBC : http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Software/MDP/mdp.html

verdatelon Ask HN: Healthcare startups?

www.23andme.com - DNA profiler for ancestry and common gene related diseases/conditions