owinebarger

I agree with his assessment. Any data representation can be construed as a graph - this is the basis of garbage collection. Besides the areas where graphs (or networks) are explicit in a problem, the most powerful use comes in analyzing a given model/algorithm. If you don't take that step to the meta-level, you might not see the use for graph theory.

Depressing stuff.

The best opportunities aren't the ones being screened by HR. Most job postings look like someone got a description of the job from the manager, looked for the sentence fragments that could be classified as skills or experience, then put those in as the list of requirements.

LinkedIn is probably a closer approximation to what's needed, but as far as I can tell it's hard to get far out of your acquaintances with a basic account.

I expected an article decrying unions, but found one decrying the licensing of doctors and lawyers.

To use the case of florist licensing to condemn all licensing is an egregious leap. In general I believe it is sound policy to license professions where the ordinary consumer of their services cannot be expected to know how to judge their quality. Highly specialized professions dealing with the general public such as doctors and lawyers are obvious candidates. For the actuarial profession, you might argue that the hiring companies should be sufficiently sophisticated to judge their competence without formal credentialing. The hidden consumer in this case are the insurance regulators and the public relying on them. And, in fact, companies don't always require credentials in actuarial roles, but regulators won't accept annual statements without a supporting statement from a properly credentialed actuary.

I think lawyers are a problematic case. With most professions you can go to court if the designated gatekeepers are acting in an illegal or unethical fashion. The state Bar association, on the other hand, is going to be nearly impossible to fight for anyone who plans on making a living as an attorney. So, while I do support the goal of ensuring a base level of competence for a professional that may be the only thing standing between you and a jail cell, I am deeply concerned about the current mechanism for achieving that goal. The completely free market leaves too much blood on the floor for my taste to be worth considering as a solution.

You are confusing the pragmatics of the decision to take the plunge into marriage with the underlying relationship. I'm interested in entrepreneurial risk-taking, and the kinds of considerations and miscalculations discussed in the article are entirely relevant. There's nothing metaphoric about it, though you may find some of the obscuring detail extraneous or expressed in an insufficiently detached manner.

I thought the obsession with the clock and nefarious ulterior dating motives didn't start until 30-something.

Now that you mention it, though, when did marriage and children become either nefarious or ulterior reasons for dating?

The second sentence of my earlier post was my idea of comedy.

This article isn't about sex, or even relationships per se, it's about evaluating the riskiness of a particular kind of venture, and how women evidently miscalculate the opportunity cost of finding "Mr Right".

First, "settling" is a highly offensive term. Anyone using that term is living in a fantasy world. I read the author as using it facetiously, though, since that is pretty much the point of the article.

Second, she soundly observes that marriage is basically a business partnership, except she considers it nonprofit (I do not). Assuming you aren't somehow committed to the single life, you should evaluate marriage opportunity based on your appetite for risk and a frank assessment of the opportunity at hand. Just as you shouldn't base decisions on sunk costs, you should ignore illusory opportunity costs. Physical capital decays, if you want a return on it you'll have to take a risk before it loses all of its production capacity. Of course, the older you get without taking a plunge, the easier it becomes to see the illusory nature of the opportunity cost you might have been using.

This all assumes you have a marriage opportunity that you can see having a profitable return (profit measured in happiness here). I would go so far as to say that it's impossible to judge marriage as an institution to be inherently profitable for you personally; it will always depend on the particulars. You might think marriage sounds like the place you want to be, but if you don't find a good partner for yourself in particular, marriage isn't for you.

As long as you don't have kids and both spouses have careers, getting out of the marriage is relatively easy. On the other hand, you only get one life, don't waste it avoiding risks whose most catastrophic downsides are not that bad.

I have assumed you aren't marrying a black widow or having kids with an affinity for patricide/matricide. But worrying about the latter is like worrying about being hit by lightning while not batting an eyelash over driving a car regularly. Avoiding the former is a matter of due diligence.

It would certainly be nice for work supported by public funds, but that isn't the way it is now. I'm assuming the OP needs the information in the journals now or in the near future, so he has to operate under current conditions.

I think they're trying to reduce the impact of the superhuman levels of concentration displayed by the uberhackers. I don't like it.

If you need more than a few ACM papers, it probably is.

I have to strongly agree with your second paragraph, but finding the good opportunities is the trick.

I agree with your assessment of learning a new language != getting better at programming, as well as how you become an expert in a particular field.

After reviewing these comments, it seems the interesting aspect of Giles Bowkett's paragraph is the emphasis on networking your way to a person with a need. It's easy to get blinded by the easy access to openings posted on job boards to the existence of non-advertised positions and enterprises you may not be familiar with. Rather than "job-getting" skill I'd call it "opportunity-finding" skills. Getting past HR can be a bear.

The paragraph that hooked me has not been addressed in other comments. That is:

  Most programmers I know seem to respond to job searches
  by learning new programming languages. The logic there is
  pretty weak. "I can't get a job with a language I know, so
  why don't I see instead if I can get a job with a language
  I don't know." Learning new languages is a good thing, but
  there's a time and a place for everything. It's never a
  matter of your skills being stale; there are still COBOL
  jobs out there. If you're good at programming, and you
  can't get a job, the skill to improve is not your
  programming skill but your job-getting skill. If you've got
  a task that requires two skills, and you have one of those
  skills down solid, but you suck at the other skill, the
  thing to do is not spend even more time perfecting the
  skill you already have down solid.

They forego revenue in exchange for the loss control. It's economically equivalent. This is like those discussions of whether taxes that are charged directly to businesses are paid by the business or by their customers.

As for the other, I admit health care insurance has its own peculiarities that make it a distinct field of insurance. And, no, your last assertion is incorrect. I have the advantage of having actually worked in the group pricing department of a major health insurer, so I'm not just speculating here. In lieu of further banging my head against the wall, I'll point out that the syllabi for the SOA's actuarial exams are available to the general public - just look in the "education" section of their site.

Offered as an addendum to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160552

To some extent, they do in the form of a premium rebate, though it is unlikely to be large enough to be a substantial reimbursement for a single policy period - perhaps over the life of the policy the cumulative rebate might cover the up-front cost. I haven't worked in casualty, only health, so I can only speculate.

The better comparison would be with Worker's Compensation insurance, where the loss control mechanisms are ongoing.

As far as what the policies would cost, I don't know. Even if routine medical care is fully covered, a lot of people won't take advantage of it for whatever reason. An insurer's actuarial models will build that expected frequency into the projected cost.

If it bothers you sufficiently, you may consider most health plans to be the sum of a "real insurance" policy and a routine health discount plan. There are health plans that truly avoid assuming substantial risk, although they do so by getting providers to assume the risk. Those plans do retain the risk of providers in their network going bankrupt where prepaid capitation would be lost.

I have no idea what definition you are using for "standard insurance." Health insurance does cover routine care, but that's actually a loss control mechanism in the longer term.

Health insurance sold on a group basis is underwritten on a group basis. That does not have anything to do with whether it is "real insurance." Health insurance sold on an individual basis is underwritten on that basis, but rate differentials may be severely constrained by statute or regulation.

These do not affect whether financial risk is transferred. The routine care issue does impinge on a valid consideration of whether the transferred risk is "insurable", but since these are short-term contracts it is not fatal.

The problem for healthcare insurers is that healthcare is a product often obtained while under duress. Patients have to trust their doctors, so they'd much rather call their insurers greedy than the people to whom they entrust their most valuable asset.

If you want to look for greed in healthcare, look at medical schools, hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers. Insurance costs are a simple reflection of the incomes of those parties. State regulators (for small group and individuals) and shopping around by sophisticated consumers (large groups) assures that.

You would be wrong - reserves are there to pay for liabilities already incurred. Social Security is basically a Ponzi scheme without the deception. You're right about the "Social Security Trust Fund" - can you imagine a state allowing a private insurer to buy its own bonds as assets?

And what makes you think you aren't lumped in with your neighbor?

Every rational form of insurance relies on distributing risk over groups of independent risks to obtain the benefits of the central limit theorem. There are some very specialized policies, and the Lloyd's syndicate, but anyone wishing to avoid ruin will diversify their risk.

CA appears to be imploding. I went to a college in LA in the early 90s. I recall it with the warm fuzzy lens time provides, particularly in the winter, but the property values need to be heavily discounted by the government's debt, built-in long-term deficits, and basic insanity of being run by contradictory mandates. And they have not been, at least not yet.

TeX has a lot of shortcomings as a language. When I was writing my dissertation I would have been able to list plenty of them, but the most obvious was the gratuitous use of dynamic scoping instead of lexical scoping.

It can be very tricky to selectively expand parts of a subexpression to create a block and then return to the head and execute the block you've created. Without lexical scoping it's difficult to safely create CPS macros.

Actually, it's a decimal point shift, which is a little easier than general division.

You might be surprised how widespread the non-understanding of division is among the normal population. That includes the accounting profession, who have mastered addition and subtraction, and possibly multiplication as well.

It's not clear whether an understanding of division is really required for Google's marketing or not.

I don't know about the IRS, but if you were counting on the benefits of liability limitation, you shouldn't. Based on your description it would seem straightforward to "pierce the corporate veil".

Patents are not a reward for creativity, they are to reward disclosure of an invention that otherwise would be kept a mystery.

You would think so, but in fact the unemployment "insurance" agencies of some (many?) states are overtly hostile to using your time to build a startup rather than unsuccessfully seeking a position as an employee.

In Connecticut, for example, the statutes say revenue from self-employment should offset unemployment benefits, but the state agency has chosen the highly creative interpretation of "revenue" to include potential capital gains your efforts represent, and the notional amount of salary you should be paying yourself for the work you do for your startup, including, say, writing a business plan.

It does seem like they are shooting themselves in the foot, but the unemployment "insurance" fund in CT is already living on debt.

The author conflates usage in situations where conclusions are certain ("It turns out Fermat's Last Theorem is false." * ) with ones that merely express the author's opinion or conclusion: "After a life long quest for the perfect smoked meat, it turns out I hate pastrami." In the latter case the author is only telling you the conclusion he's reached, not attempting to convince you of its truth.

* Yes, this sentence is false.