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Tokens are fraught with fraud, but the impetus for research is upon the individual. I fear that regulating this will stifle innovation with little benefit to end-consumers in terms of safety, because people will still get swindled out of their money by other legalized means.

zallarakon Mathematical Foundations of Computing (2015) [pdf]

I took this class. Keith is a wonderful teacher. This class sparked a love of math within me and was a mind expanding experience.

zallarakon Hedge Fund Math: Heads We Win, Tails You Lose

The fee structure is very simple and transparent. Customers didn't get tricked or legally trapped, they just didn't consider what happens if the fund loses money.

zallarakon Don’t let your anger persist

Disagree - it's not just western culture.

“Protect yourself from anger for its beginning is insanity and its end is remorse.”

- Ali (Islam)

"When anger rises, think of the consequences."

- Confucius (Chinese Philosophy)

zallarakon Life as a Middle-Aged Geek

Can you elaborate? Do you have any personal experience that makes you say this?

zallarakon Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?

Books about economics- read Keynes and Friedman.

Economic history- lords of finance, too big to fail.

Most quant finance books are low quality and I'd suggest avoiding them.

zallarakon Reasons not to use Firebase

Firebase is great for a couple of use cases - not for an entire SaaS app.

Would I use Firebase as a replacement for a relational DB in a traditional SaaS app? No. However, if I had to add real time chat to an app that had no other real time components I'd probably use it.

I agree with many of the author's critiques of the platform in general, hence my suggestion at using it sparingly when you fully understand the cost benefit analysis. If used correctly (real time features that don't involve mission critical data) Firebase is a game changer.

zallarakon Haskell Data Analysis and Machine Learning Cookbook

That line of code was demonstrative. The actual book uses 'Data.Char.IsSpace' which properly handled it.

"Returns True for any Unicode space character, and the control characters \t, \n, \r, \f, \v."

Before you chastise them for not handling something, verify it. I'm not affiliated with the book but you probably deterred people from buying it.

https://github.com/BinRoot/Haskell-Data-Analysis-Cookbook/bl...

zallarakon The Fintech Bubble

Great point! What you're saying is that we can get some benefits for 0 effort if we employ the right software tools. Totally agreed.

zallarakon Tech workers think Silicon Valley and startups are losing their luster

I understand your frustration, because when people measure by silly things like LOC then you get a bad environment for developers. I looked on your website, and you have an impressive background and have worked on lots of super interesting projects!

zallarakon The Fintech Bubble

A middle ground wasn't advocated, he was basically saying "let's keep the pace of innovation constant, but improve quality". Putting incremental effort into quality and testing probably requires you slow down your rate of experimentation, no?

zallarakon Tech workers think Silicon Valley and startups are losing their luster

A huge problem in my opinion, is employee equity and compensation. No doubt, VCs are risking their money. But when you look at the system taking a few steps back, you see tons of VCs have made insane mounts of money in the last decade. Enough to buy castles, sports teams, and their own private islands.

Then you look at the swaths of tech workers who were there at the early stage. I've seen multiple large exits in startups. Places I've worked at or have had close friends. People who were there at the seed stage with barely a MVP, who built products, pulled all-nighters, and worked 7 days a week. Upon acquisition, the VCs made 10s of millions, the founders made 10s of millions and the employees got new car money (for 2 years of intense work getting paid well below market).

EDIT: Another interesting point that is a bit too off-topic and lengthy for this comment is that most startups simply don't realize the value of (5+)x engineers. I've worked with people that are astronomically more efficient than entry or mid-level engineers who make 100-130K, yet they make around the same amount. Its very worth it to find these people and pay them 2-3x market and retain them. I'm not talking about algorithms wizards (although these people tend to be decent algorists too), I'm speaking of engineers who can work on all levels of the stack and ship code that is simple and works. They understand business needs and don't get caught up in self-gratifying projects. They use a mix of new and old tools, selecting them for reliability and efficiency.

zallarakon The Fintech Bubble

Stopped reading at: "I think that as a community we need to increase our collaboration and diligently eliminate bugs and bad designs without slowing down innovation and research."

zallarakon A Tragic Loss

No other auto maker would do this. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this makes me respect Tesla even more.

It's also a reminder to engineers to have an extremely high bar of excellence.

EDIT: thanks for telling me I'm wrong. This was a self-serving blog post on their part to damage control.

zallarakon Warren Buffett: “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich” (2011)

I'd hesitate to conclude that tripling the IRS budget would improve their level of enforcement.

zallarakon ContinuouSQL Triggers

This whole example represents a common workflow in fraud detection (alerts on data that hits a certain pattern). However, when I worked at Braintree, doing this real-time was tough and we'd analyze stuff retrospectively.

zallarakon How to Pass a Programming Interview

Are you committed to working as a professional programmer? If not, a rapidly growing area where lots of help is needed is the intersection of computer science and law. Lots of bad laws exist on security and privacy, because the people who drafted them don't have a CS background.

If you do want to work as a professional programmer, try just typing through solutions and understanding them. After lots of exposure, you'll start picking up patterns. Dynamic programming and greedy algorithms are taught so quickly that I'm surprised students generate intuition for them! Feel free to get in touch if you're struggling. Best of luck.

zallarakon Open source is now ready to compete with Mathematica for use in the classroom

The true value of Mathematica lies in its vast, high quality, integrated data sets and domain specific algorithms. As far as a teaching tool for math, it doesn't make sense to lock into a proprietary tool.

zallarakon Life is Short

Marriage definitely made me prune bullshit from my life. I can only imagine what children would do.

I would include Anger as a subcategory of bullshit. It promotes irrationality and the after effects hamper you. In the renowned book "Emotional Intelligence" the author says that the best thing to do when angry is to focus on controlling it. The more it grows, the harder it is to escape.

zallarakon Are Your Programmers Working Hard, or Are They Lazy?

One of the most enlightening moments I had when working with engineers vastly more capable than me was the disproportionate amount of time they spent planning and designing versus coding, and how much faster they moved as a result.

zallarakon Ask HN: So I'm being let go

You have an excellent skillset. I think you'll do great! If you run into any hiccups, feel free to email me (see profile) but I think you should do fine :-).

zallarakon The Macro

Really impressed by the fast page loads and readability. This matters more than anything and they nailed it. I wish other publications thought like this.

zallarakon Hearts on Twitter

I disagree. It is wholly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Twitter can't be fixed by putting so much thought into an icon - the core engagement of it is slightly broken. Chris Sacca had a great article on what is wrong with Twitter [1]. TLDR: changing stars to hearts won't move then needle.

The fact that they devoted an entire blog post to it makes me feel like they're headed in the wrong direction.

[1]: http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...

zallarakon Ask HN: What visa do foreign YC founders use to stay in US beyond 3 months?

Hopefully someone from the government is reading this, and realizes it's time to simplify this bureaucratic process.