banned_man

28 ms·

91.
by banned_man 18y ago
How do you know that consciousness remains bound to the brain, which has lost all function? For that matter, there's no scientific reason to believe that my consciousness shall remain bound to my brain 5 minutes from now. My body and brai
92.
by banned_man 18y ago
I disagree, having worked on Wall Street for a couple of years. Finance prefers that you learn these sorts of things on the job. It's much better received to have majored in math or computer science than business, at least for an undergrad.
93.
by banned_man 18y ago
Why wouldn't it? It has been around for thousands of years, and we still have no objective answer to certain fundamental questions about why we exist, how consciousness came about, and what happens after we die.
94.
by banned_man 18y ago
It'd be best not to have any single industry be "king". The power careers tend to suck in a lot of people with bad motivations and, when talent is difficult to measure, such as corporate management, starkly insufficient ability. Also, it's
95.
Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go(chronicle.com)
76 points by banned_man 18y ago|52 comments
96.
by banned_man 18y ago
Trading desk, as a research quant. The office was open-plan, there were constantly people passing behind me, and expletive-laden interruptions related to market conditions were frequent. For the first 6 months, it was very exciting, but eve
97.
by banned_man 18y ago
Monogamy is probably out the window. I disagree, seeing as it's a shortage of women, meaning that multiple men would have to share a female partner. Polyandry is utterly impractical, as men would rather go to war than be stacked up by the
98.
by banned_man 18y ago
It's also idiotic because there are so many variations, and people can change. There are C players who have the talent to become B players in 6 months, and A players after 5 years, and B players worth having because of their other abilities
99.
by banned_man 18y ago
Yes, for several reasons. 1. Ignore, for a second, the diminishing marginal utility argument. What do most poor people spend their money on? Food, household items, and rent in low-COL areas. Mostly, these are commodity goods. What do most r
100.
by banned_man 18y ago
"Solving the right problem" is like the skill of "big picture thinking". It's clearly important, but the evaluation of it is subjective and case-based. What's nice about this tool is that it's relatively objective, for the most part, althou
101.
by banned_man 18y ago
I don't think it's necessarily that difficult to code for multiple cores in appropriate languages. The problem is that it requires a rethinking of what programming is and how it's supposed to work. It's difficult to test or examine concurre
102.
by banned_man 18y ago
Why was this voted down?
103.
by banned_man 18y ago
Pretty good assessment tool. I've been programming professionally for 2 years, and averaged 1.9, which seems about right.
104.
by banned_man 18y ago
Honestly, this could be a good thing. A minority of "the rich" are those who got there by being productive, innovative, and talented people. As long as we nurture a culture in which they can thrive (e.g. Silicon Valley) they'll stay, regard
105.
by banned_man 18y ago
Crystal meth is an entirely different animal than a lot of the amphetamines used as stimulants, though. Crystal meth is too destructive for people to be productive on it.
106.
by banned_man 18y ago
I generally agree with you. You're right that the economic environment can make hiring harder. There are more people looking for work, but the average quality of applicants is probably lower on the whole. The "extra" people are those laid o
107.
Beware the Perils of Caffeine Withdrawal(cnn.com)
22 points by banned_man 18y ago|38 comments
108.
by banned_man 18y ago
I said: he beat out far superior products in the early stages for no other reason than starting at Harvard, and having a couple journalists in his pocket. He got the talented people to work for him after the superior but less fortunate
109.
by banned_man 18y ago
When I first saw the headline, I thought the "heroic women" meme had crossed over to HN.
110.
by banned_man 18y ago
I feel like Lisp's big win over C, Java, etc. is its support for aesthetically pleasing functional programming. Much more of the difference between Lisp and Blub comes from functional programming than from user-defined macros. Macros are co
111.
by banned_man 18y ago
I thought this was going to be about Zuckerberg admitting that he beat out far superior products in the early stages for no other reason than starting at Harvard, and having a couple journalists in his pocket. Then I read the title more clo
112.
by banned_man 18y ago
SATs are taken as an approximation for a person's IQ, which is illegal to use as a hiring metric. IQ (and its legal proxies) is a crappy hiring metric, but unfortunately, it's better than pretty much everything else that's used (GPA, interv
113.
by banned_man 18y ago
+ annoying
114.
by banned_man 18y ago
A real trader would start trading anyway. Volatility? Just a number computed from a mound of stale data. Kurtosis? Sounds like a disease. Too much thinking for a game as simple as "buy" and "sell"!
115.
by banned_man 18y ago
I didn't know about it, and unfortunately won't be able to make it. Are there future NYC meetups planned?
116.
by banned_man 18y ago
Can you buy puts on a pre-IPO stock? I didn't think you could.
117.
by banned_man 18y ago
Shorting an IPO is actually stupid regardless of volatility. Investment banks tend to underprice IPOs by about 10-15% on average, and intentionally so. This makes allocation a favor, because of the obvious expectancy in being in on one. How
118.
by banned_man 18y ago
To be fair, I would imagine the average quality in the pool of 30+ year olds willing to work for Mark Zuckerberg is probably not representative of the age group as a whole, unless they're paid really well.
119.
by banned_man 18y ago
His 2007 talk was awful. He basically said: hire young people only.
120.
by banned_man 18y ago
This, uhh, has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but does anyone know if there's a way (synthetically, perhaps) to short an IPO? I repeat this has, umm, nothing to do with any particular company. Yeah. Just so you don't try to copy my t

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