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ChristianMarks

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Stopped coming here after some comments of mine here on HFT were downvoted by abusive financial types. A few years after my comments appeared, Ivy League economics professors made the same points. But enduring the animadversion of pompous know-nothings on Hacker News while waiting for the endorsement of Harvard University professors isn't worth it.

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scriptogr.am 10y ago

Scriptogr.am will go belly up 9/14/15

ChristianMarks
1pts0
www.psychologytoday.com 12y ago

Is it Time to Abolish Middle Management?

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1pts1
www.latimes.com 12y ago

Newsweek Bitcoin story quoted Satoshi Nakamoto accurately

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9pts4
mobile.nytimes.com 12y ago

In Search of a Stable Electronic Currency

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harvardpress.typepad.com 12y ago

Bitcoin: The Cryptopolitics of Cryptocurrencies

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2pts0
papers.ssrn.com 12y ago

The Truth is Terrible

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english.stackexchange.com 12y ago

What is wrong with the word "performant"?

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www.slate.com 12y ago

Good Riddance to Mt. Gox

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1pts0
www.onthemedia.org 12y ago

Unorthodox: Rabbi resigns over sock puppetry

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1pts0
mobile.nytimes.com 12y ago

Capitalism vs. Democracy

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www.computerworld.com 12y ago

Full-time IT job security increasingly wobbly

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1pts0
dianeravitch.net 12y ago

Teachers in Lee, MA, Return Merit Pay (funded by Gates Foundation)

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2pts0
svpow.com 12y ago

Elsevier’s David Tempest explains subscription-contract confidentiality clauses

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66pts11
publicsphere.org 12y ago

The Wall Street Dollar is toileting

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www.linkedin.com 12y ago

An understated job advertisement

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24pts50
inthecapital.streetwise.co 12y ago

Map of the flow of bitcoins around the world

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2pts0
3dblogger.typepad.com 13y ago

Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig and the Technocommunist Menace

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3pts2
www.uncomputing.org 13y ago

High-Frequency Trading: Networks of Wealth and the Concentration of Power

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17pts14
www.amazon.com 13y ago

Amazon review spat: author Nicholas Nissam Taleb versus economist Herbert Gintis

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4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 13y ago

Since I loathe sysadmin, I raised my rate to $500/hour. What would you do?

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www.techrepublic.com 14y ago

Virus prompts US Navy and DoD to switch to Linux

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2pts0
www.forbes.com 14y ago

Neutrino HFT communications link could boost high-energy physics

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2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

What does the HN community think of ITIL?

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1pts3
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Recruiter fee agreement?

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2pts6
www.wired.co.uk 14y ago

Matrix style chicken farming

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2pts0
the-scientist.com 14y ago

Elsevier Abandons Anti-Open Access Bill

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1pts0
www.againstmonopoly.org 14y ago

Economist David K. Levine on Domain Seizures

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5pts0
www.vanityfair.com 14y ago

Vanity Fair article "Enter the Cyber-dragon" hacking from China

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2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: please critique my personal statement

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4pts2

I visited the Amazon Bookstore in Columbus Circle when it opened. It was evident that with its vast computing and data facilities, Amazon can solve economic allocation problems with an accuracy and precision beyond the wildest dreams of the planners of the command economy of the former Soviet Union.

Unfortunate. University IT departments are susceptible to neoliberal evangelical insanity. When it happened to my department, I decided that I was unworthy to clean the digital bedpans of a destructively competitive, rank and pedigree conscious faculty and took off, never to support faculty again. Here's a rebuke to the smug, platitudinous know-nothings who insist that the university is a business. http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/proofs-that-un...

It has control mechanisms. What it doesn't need is precisely what you describe: a self-appointed, self-styled group of "leaders" who followed the wasteful winner-take-all, judgmental, rank and pedigree conscious ethos of their discipline.

Downvoters can take a warm piss on a power line. The researchers are quoted asserting the profound significance of their discovery. This is reason to be skeptical, given the field has a reputation for Nobel prize winners rushing to publish work they hear about from less well known researchers, and then claiming the less known researcher stole their ideas from them.

Self-promotion is suspect in this highly competitive, and not infrequently nasty field. It was known that there was some transport mechanism--now there are details. But I would caution some skepticism, especially when the discoverer trumpets the extraordinary significance of the discovery.

"Mathematics and the Internet: A Source of Enormous Confusion and Great Potential" http://www.ams.org/notices/200905/tx090500586p.pdf Is critical of scale-free networks of the preferential-attachment type, in particular of Barabasi's work. The paper is unusual for its polemic tone and for its name dropping. Researchers will trash each other in private--it is unusual to see this in print.

Much of the article is consumed with invidious comparisons of scale-free, preferential attachment network models of the internet with the authors’ own HOT (”highly organized/optimized tolerances/tradeoffs”) models: “In view of such a simple physical explanation of the origins of node degree variability in the Internet’s router-level topology, Stogartz’ question, paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘…power law scaling, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?’ has a resounding affirmative answer.” The authors seem to suggest by this literary reference that a scale-invariant model of the Internet is a “tale told by an idiot.” This would not be lost on the readership of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Its authors spare no opportunity to criticize their competition, as well as mathematicians and physicists generally, whom they regard as foppish, insular ivory tower aesthetes, whose nostrils are unacquainted with the bracing scent of an expertly soldered electrical connection.

Despite all of that, the authors are correct. I mention Doyle et al. because other authors have been critical of work on scale-free networks--this is not new. Doyle et al. warned about the misapplication of such networks to biology, though they mysteriously claimed that such failures of the scientific method "would reflect poorly on mathematics," as if mathematicians ought to be held responsible.

Yes. Many category theorists would find Moggi91 opaque. It could benefit from commentary and more detail than would be standard for a published paper, if the intention is to make the categorical semantics of functional programming with side effects accessible to a wide audience. I guess one could suss this out of Robert Harper's book on the foundations of programming languages, but I was thinking of something more direct.

Stop The JerkTech 12 years ago

That's one reason I use unexploitable public goods, like public tranportion, and go to salad bars not trendy enough for some kid to want to scalp.

OP, do not listen to the moralizers who tell you that you need to exercise discipline and will power. Let them deplete their limited reserves of will power and see how far it gets them: you can change your environment so that you thrive in it. And that beats relying on will power and discipline by orders of magnitude. Quit early and often.

"1.) Doing things you don't want to do, but are necessary for a paycheck or otherwise is a basic part of being a grown-up. Lacking the discipline to simply get such things done and move on is a huge handicap as it's burning loads of time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere."

Realizing that changing your environment so that it encourages the right outcome is orders of magnitude beyond being a basic, mediocre grown-up who relies on discipline and will power, which is easily depleted, to overcome an onfavorable environment. No one should settle for relying on discipline and will power. That's a moralizing exercise in futility. I've had this argument with my stepfather until he became abusive. The result: I stopped talking with him. It has been one year. Reserve your discipline for differential association and for improving your environment.

The Meaning of Life 12 years ago

Then again there are Nietzsche's three terrible truths:

1. Existential: death and suffering are inevitable.*

2. Moral: life is amoral.

3. Epistemic: most of what we think we know about the world is illusory.

*I include being downvoted on HN, especially under the new voting regime, under the category of suffering.

Edit: a reference, with additional clarification and justification for those who dispute the abbreviated claims.

Leiter, Brian, The Truth is Terrible (February 22, 2014). Daniel Came (ed.), Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2099162 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2099162

Piketty need not wait for the return of patrimonial capitalism for democratic and meritocratic institutions to be undermined by elite economic interests: that ostrich has already taken off, that horse has bolted, that rising tsunami has already smashed all boats.

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...

Suppose you do describe some IP for exclusion. Does this mean subsequent improvements or modifications undertaken on your own time and on your own equipment are not excluded?

I turned down a software job due to its all-encompassing, amoeba-like intellectual property terms. Instead, I chose to work in the public sector, which does not limit the freedom to pursue and own the intellectual work one does on one's own time.

[dead] 12 years ago

No, you aren't "yourself" in any sense that you could meaningfully account for. Whatever substrate lies below yourself is not accountable to you, and in all likelihood neither to itself or to anything else. Yet it is this unconscious substrate that is somehow responsible for most of what you do, without being accountable for what it does--only you may take the blame. There is little sense beating yourself up for biological processes in no sense under your control, though there may be a biological process beyond your control that, for no reason, predisposes you to assume you ought to be held responsible and to blame yourself when you lose control.

The Silicon Valley cartel conspirators helped to depress wages and increase unemployment. Universities have relied on cheap student and postdoc labor. Their game-theoretic strategy is cheap talking their serfs into the belief that they too may become masters.

ADDENDUM: downvoters can take a warm piss on a power line.