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It gave me the punchline "We'll be back after a word from our sponsors."

My frustration is that you can't pass foo as an argument to another function.

>[In Ruby] There is good support for functional programming with first-class functions, anonymous functions, and closures.

This seems like a blatantly false claim to me since as a Python programmer forced to use Ruby for Sketchup, I have been frustrated by the lack of first-class functions in Ruby.

winstonsmithon Why the Bronte sisters may have died so young (2019)

The article seems to be based on an 1850 report initiated by Patrick Brontë. It's available online:

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/sanitary-report-on-hawort...

winstonsmithon Firefox 65.0 released

My experience has been very positive. I recently noticed that Firefox had become slightly slow to recover my session at start-up. I investigated and found I had over 1800 tabs open. With a few hundred tabs open start-up is amazingly fast. I never even think about performance otherwise because it has ceased to be an issue.

winstonsmithon Benzodiazepines: Our Other Prescription Drug Problem

The Ashton Manual is good resource, but the state of the art taper method as far as I know is the liquid titration (via suspension, not solution) micro-taper. See, e.g., https://www.google.com/search?q=benzobuddies+micro+taper+liq... .

winstonsmithon Not just bad health IT, but spectacularly bad health IT

Oops. I have linked the original here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16239176 . Apparently I can't delete this post.

winstonsmithon Equifax Lobbied to Kill Rule Protecting Victims of Data Breaches

When the creation and representation of crappy products entails fraud or other crimes the result would actually include criminal prosecutions by the DOJ (in a world where the DOJ weren't captured by party A's industry). Tying the two scandals together is the influence of the finance industry on regulation and enforcement through the revolving door, in both cases to the same law firm representing financial institutions.

winstonsmithon Equifax Lobbied to Kill Rule Protecting Victims of Data Breaches

I'll take a wild guess that he is alleging that Eric Holder's failure to prosecute any of the CEOs of the financial institutions that played a critical role in the financial crisis (by, e.g., making loans to people without incomes, packaging the loans into mortgage backed securities, and passing the resulting time bombs off to other parties) was appreciated by his former and future colleagues at Covington and Burling and their clients in the finance industry. That Eric Holder was very aware of that appreciation and anticipated that he would be rewarded for it.

winstonsmithon TIO: Try it online

I really look forward to using this. It would be a great help to mobile users if uneeded options, e.g., 'header', could be made to disappear to save screen real estate.

winstonsmithon Why regulators should focus on bankers’ incentives

Eg., AIG. The "magic" is that insurers can also be crooked, have CEOs with perverse incentives and effective immunity from prosecution, and be favored with bailouts.

winstonsmithon Why regulators should focus on bankers’ incentives

> If the insurance is correctly priced then the banks that don't pass the cost of risk on to customers should be able to compete nicely against the ones that try to.

This theory breaks down if you distinguish between banker and bank as per the article.

In the short term, the crooked banker with insurance can out-compete the honest uninsured banker by making high risk loans, not caring if the loans are paid back. In the short term the crooked banker can accumulate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and happily retire when in the long term the loans fail and the bank goes bankrupt.

The honest banker has to explain to his share holders etc. why crooked banker's bank is growing so much faster than his bank. His borrowers have to compete for houses against borrowers from crooked bank who can borrow more and therefor pay more for houses. His "under-performing" bank may become an acquisition target of crooked bank.

The requisites for this dynamic are the absence of fear of criminal prosecution and perverse incentives via excessive CEO compensation.

winstonsmithon Golden powers are nearly integers

>To show what we want, we must prove the stronger condition that F(n)φ - F(n+1) → 0.

Noting that {F(n+1)/F(n)} is the sequence of convergents of the continued fraction expansion of φ, your stronger condition follows from Theorem 5 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fraction .

winstonsmithon A Moneymaking Machine Like Few Others

I don't know about these guys, but according to Cathy O'Neil, D. E. Shaw profited by anticipating (c.f. index front-running) pension funds in a way that sickened her to the point of quitting.

https://mathbabe.org/2011/06/24/working-with-larry-summers-p...

winstonsmithon I Won $104M for Blowing the Whistle But Was the Only One Who Went to Jail

The narrowness of career paths for highly specialized attorneys combined with the possibility of entering an altogether different remuneration universe at the law firms the DOJ is theoretically adversarial to is what makes the revolving door spin, and the spinning of the door is what turns "adversarial" into "theoretically adversarial". That is the problem. I didn't say there was an easy solution.

The generalization of this principal to other government institutions (agencies, departments, offices including even the presidency) is one of the great problems of governance of our time. You can take the remuneration discrepancy as the "0=1" conclusion of a reductio ad absurdum argument against unfettered capitalism or as an argument that resistance is futile.

winstonsmithon I Won $104M for Blowing the Whistle But Was the Only One Who Went to Jail

It's the elephant in the room, textbook revolving door regulatory capture.

winstonsmithon Writing Off the Warhol Next Door

In case anyone doesn't know what you're talking about:

http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-15-16

A small number of taxpayers has accumulated larger IRA balances, likely by investing in assets unavailable to most investors—initially valued very low and offering disproportionately high potential investment returns if successful. Individuals who invest in these assets using certain types of IRAs can escape taxation on investment gains. For example, founders of companies who use IRAs to invest in nonpublicly traded shares of their newly formed companies can realize many millions of dollars in tax-favored gains on their investment if the company is successful. With no total limit on IRA accumulations, the government forgoes millions in tax revenue. The accumulation of these large IRA balances by a small number of investors stands in contrast to Congress's aim to prevent the tax-favored accumulation of balances exceeding what is needed for retirement.

winstonsmithon How My Mom Got Hacked

> Pre-Bitcoin, the scammer would have her call an expensive foreign premium-rate phone number or mail cash to a foreign address.

A foreign address is still an address, which if used to perpetrate crime on a large scale, would represent a point of vulnerability for the criminals even in a somewhat lawless country. Bitcoin's role in these crimes is analogous to an alternate universe, lawless by design, where criminals can retrieve ransoms anonymously and with impunity.

winstonsmithon Reconceptualizing major depressive disorder as an infectious disease

Submitter here. I ended up at that journal by following a link in this opinion blog at The New York Times: http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/what-if-were-wro... The author, Anna North, thinks it's legit. Also, it's linked to here by the NIH: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/1820/

winstonsmithon [dead]

There is also this similar thread at mathoverflow: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/1785/how-do-you-keep-your-...

winstonsmithon Alexander Grothendieck, Math Enigma, Dies at 86

There is an essay (in English and French) published last month on Grothendieck's life and work by Pierre Cartier who was a member of Bourbaki and a friend and colleague of Grothendieck's.

http://inference-review.com/article/a-country-known-only-by-...

winstonsmithon The $9B Witness: JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare

>I just pity Holder for mismanaging this. Or maybe there are more horrific details we haven't heard of yet.

Your pity would be misplaced; there are horrific details. A large part of the problem is that there is a revolving door between the DOJ and the law firms that represent financial firms (likewise for the SEC). Holder was assistant AG in Clinton's DOJ, then he moved to the law firm Covington and Burling where he represented the bank UBS among other clients, now he's back at the DOJ, and soon he will likely move back to the private sector where he will be handsomely rewarded for his service to the finance industry while AG.

The big picture is that the Obama administration is to Finance as the Bush administration was to Oil, but for horrific details about Obama's economic team, read this: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/larry-summers-and-the-secret-... .

winstonsmithon The $9B Witness: JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare

The solution in this century's financial crisis has been "handcuff none of the bastards", but it wasn't always so. I'm surprised you cite the savings and loan scandal as a case of criminals not going to jail because in that crisis there were over 1000 felony convictions of high level people (usually the CEO and CFO). Since that crisis was 1/70th the size of the recent crisis, by strict proportionality (all things being equal, etc.) there would have been 70,000 felony convictions of high level people in this crisis. All thing are not equal of course, but there weren't 70,000 or 7,000 or 700 or 7 convictions of high level people in this crisis. There were none! Things really have change dramatically for the worse.

William Black on Moyers and Company[1]: Sure. The savings and loan debacle was one-seventieth the size of the current crisis, both in terms of losses and the amount of fraud. In that crisis, the savings and loan regulators made over 30,000 criminal referrals, and this produced over 1,000 felony convictions in cases designated as “major” by the Department of Justice. But even that understates the degree of prioritization, because we, the regulators, worked very closely with the FBI and the Justice Department to create a list of the top 100 — the 100 worst fraud schemes. They involved roughly 300 savings and loans and 600 individuals, and virtually all of those people were prosecuted. We had a 90 percent conviction rate, which is the greatest success against elite white-collar crime (in terms of prosecution) in history.

[1] http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/17/hundreds-of-wall-street-exe...

winstonsmithon Division By Three (2006)

I don't know -- I didn't downvote you, but you might want to edit to indicate that x and y are not necessarily finite sets. (For finite sets, the result is trivial.)

winstonsmithon The Face Behind Bitcoin?

He (the banker) didn't get rich by just holding the keys, he got rich by getting involved in new tech early (credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, stated income loans, MERS, etc.). In fact, he helped build something he believes will change the world (easy credit for borrowers, safe high yield investments for teacher's pension funds). Never mind that these innovations lead to a housing bubble, a global financial crisis, the borrowers bankrupt and the teachers eating cat food in their retirements, the banker and all his accomplices think he is a cross between George Bailey and Albert Einstein.

The banker blows a housing bubble, Satoshi blows a bitcoin bubble. I would concede that so far the housing bubble has done far more damage, but if bitcoin "succeeds", that could change.

winstonsmithon The Face Behind Bitcoin?

These quotes are not just Orwellian, but straight out of Animal Farm:

>He doesn't like the system we have today and wanted a different one that would be more equal. He did not like the notion of banks and bankers getting wealthy just because they hold the keys," says Andresen.

"Four legs good, two legs bad."

>Holding the keys has also made early comers to Bitcoin wealthy beyond measure. "I made a small investment in Bitcoin and it is actually enough that I could now retire if I wanted to," Andresen says. "Overall, I've made about $800 per penny I've invested. It's insane."

"Four legs good, two legs better!"

Apparently, early adopters are "more equal than others" -- the Gini coefficient of bitcoin is near .9.

winstonsmithon What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

>But none of them beat this one by a Reddit admin from awhile back:

Are you saying Nathanspups is a reddit admin?

winstonsmithon Disingenuous Basterds: The oligarchs’ campaign to depict their critics as Nazis

>And it's certainly reasonable to analogize contemporary attempts to level the 1% with the corollary attempts in Germany in the 1930s.

It's not reasonable; it's quite perverse -- you seem to be confusing the Nazis with the opposing parties of the time. The opposing parties were for the elimination of class differences while the Nazis where explicitly for preserving them.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism :

This involved the idea of uniting rich and poor Germans for a common national project without eliminating class differences (a concept known as "Volksgemeinschaft", or "people's community"),

Essentially, the Nazis suppressed class based anger and encouraged homicidal racism and xenophobia. The Nazis were the defenders, not the oppressors, of the wealthy.

winstonsmithon Functional Programming 101 with Haskell

It's actually [n!e] - 1 where [x] the greatest integer less than or equal to x and e is the base of the natural logarithm. As nbouscal points out, the total number of heads is H=n!(1+1/1!+ 1/(n-1)!). Using the Taylor series for e^x, H = n!e - n!(1/n! + 1/(n+1)! + ...) = n!e - 1 - r, where r = (1/(n+1) + 1/(n+1)(n+2) ...). The remainder term r is easily seen to be less than 1, and H is and integer, so H=[H+r]=[n!e]-1.

winstonsmithon Functional Programming 101 with Haskell

= [9!e] - 1

(because your expression expands to 9 + 9(8) + 9(8)(7) + ... 9! = 9!(1+1/1 + 1/2! + ... 1/8!) = -1 + 9! e - (1/10 + 1/(10 11) + ...))