A few comments: > Eventually the scientists went so far as to develop an in-house programming language for their models rather than settle for a numbercentric

A few comments: > Eventually the scientists went so far as to develop an in-house programming language for their models rather than settle for a numbercentric option such as ASCII, which was popular at the time. I might be missing something obvious, but this makes no sense to me. ASCII is not a programming language. And although UTF8 has taken over, I think ASCII is still very common. > (To this day the company’s website, rentec.com, looks like it dates from the Netscape era.) That's not very fair. I think the design is quite modern and minimalistic, and the website has definitely had some recent updates. It uses jQuery 1.11.3, which was released last year. > When the bill came, they would pull out a special calculator that could generate random numbers. Whoever produced the higher number picked up the tab. I can't figure out why the author decided to include this anecdote. I also can't figure out why the scientists didn't just flip a coin. Another random thought: It's interesting to think that whenever I've bought or sold some stock in the past, that little piece of data has made it's way through all of their millions of lines of code, and all of their neural networks. They might have even made a few fractions of a cent based on my behavior. > By studying cloud cover data, they found a correlation between sunny days and rising markets from New York to Tokyo. Wow. That's incredibly interesting, and that's just one example. Alright, their code has probably read all of my tweets, too. And everything else I post about online. Especially on all the subreddits for investments and stocks. > I don’t know, like 90 Ph.D.s in math and physics, who just sit there looking for these signals all day long. Oh geez. Yeah, they're looking at everything. Traffic, Yelp reviews, Pokemon Go, Netflix ratings, flight delays. I don't know, maybe even newspaper horoscopes. Maybe the newspaper prints something that says Virgos are going to get lucky with an investment. And then they watch all of the online activity of all the virgo investors who still read newspapers. Oh. And all of those companies selling your data? They're buying that, too. This sounds like a fascinating place to work. I want to know some of their secrets. One more random thought: They knew Donald Trump was going to win. I guarantee it. And they probably made a ton of money on all those stocks that went up.