dxbydt

105 ms·

841.
by dxbydt 15y ago
God, I seriously hope string-switching doesn't catch on. In a prev job, I saw this block of code - ------- public int getDaysInMonth( String month ) { if( month.equalsIgnoreCase("january")) return 31; else if( month.equalsIgnoreCase(
842.
by dxbydt 15y ago
You might be surprised - see this : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-16/death-derivatives-e... Other examples in the entertainment industry - say there exists insurance that your movie will earn a minimum revenue say 25 million usd.
843.
by dxbydt 15y ago
Such an insurance would probably be pretty much impossible. If you get a legit HTBRAI ( house trashed by random asshole insurance ), you've automatically created a market where these HTBRAIs are priced, bought and sold. That means you are e
844.
by dxbydt 15y ago
I agree that its financial porn. I disagree on the "dubious field" and "no value to society" premise - In the past, I've interviewed with and worked for several s/w startups that were/are much more dubious and useless than finance. Also, "
845.
by dxbydt 15y ago
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=USA+debt+vs+gdp In the graph, the debt is clearly starting to go parabolic in the last decade while the gdp stays linear. That's the problem right there viz. no cx can always beat a kx^2 for any c,k 'c
846.
by dxbydt 15y ago
I guess the accusation of superficiality is warranted if Sal is expected to weigh in with value judgements and instead he takes a hands-off approach. I think many of the soft-science topics ( econ, finance ) etc. aren't as value-neutral as
847.
by dxbydt 15y ago
Heh heh. Quite hilarious to see my premise voted down to minus one when its math ( two nodes below ) is voted up two points! If the premise is wrong, so is the supporting math. If the latter is right, then so is the premise. If the premise
848.
by dxbydt 15y ago
um... ok. Mathematically it helps if you don't think in naive terms as stock, company, team, risk, price etc. First of all, there are no stocks. A stock is just a call at zero strike with infinite maturity. So you short a stock, you're just
849.
by dxbydt 15y ago
Shorting an equity != Betting against the team. Also, Shorting an equity != Really risky. Shorting a vector of spots is just taking their dot product with a set of negative weights. After a time increment has elapsed, you switch the sign of
850.
by dxbydt 15y ago
http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk1/1989/8905/8905.PDF paraphrasing - " low frequency magnetic fields can produce changes in biological systems... Current scientific understanding does not yet allow us to interpret the evidence...Even mor
851.
by dxbydt 15y ago
" I haven't eaten vegetables since I was 8 years old...I eat any junk food I want" Ok, so most junk food uses some vegetables as a filler. Usually desiccated starch from potatoes & the like. So you are certainly eating vegetables, mayb
852.
by dxbydt 15y ago
"Every trader knows black-scholes doesn't work". This is getting tiresome. Lets please kill this canard. Standard Paul Wilmott reference: http://www.wilmott.com/blogs/paul/index.cfm/2008/4/29/Scienc... BS is one of the most robust computa
853.
by dxbydt 15y ago
When you model equities as log-normal ie. log(stock price) is normally distributed, and then use the geometric brownian motion to model the underlying, which spits out derivative prices using Black-Scholes. The problem is that normal distr
854.
by dxbydt 15y ago
" US is about to default technically by not raising their debt ceiling." 1. currently it costs 40,000$ to insure 10,000,000$ US debt, versus 1,700,000$ to insure equivalent Greece debt. though CDS prices are definitely trending upwards ht
855.
by dxbydt 15y ago
" I strongly suspect that it a lot like Brownian Motion" 1.Mkt isn't like BM. BM permits -ve values & any market index say SPY must be non-negative. 2. We (quants) model market indices like SPY as a log-normal process like so : dS = r S
856.
by dxbydt 15y ago
I think bringing in your nationality into the debate makes it somewhat irrational. You've said you are "an educated and affluent Indian". In reality, you are "an educated and affluent person". Whether you choose to live in India or choose t
857.
by dxbydt 15y ago
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=savings+rate+US vs http://www.google.com/search?q=savings+rate+US no contest. I use wolfram exclusively for all my economics homeworks. Google is quite useless for that. Say I'm crunching mortgage da
858.
by dxbydt 15y ago
I studied Ada 3 semesters & taught Ada 1 semester at WVU. I think it had to do with the fact that West Virginia Univ was big on defense, NASA & FBI projects which mandated Ada. Some of those avenues have materialized bigtime: http:
859.
by dxbydt 15y ago
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142406/Big_three_dat... "We'd never bring Hadoop code into one of our products," said Microsoft's David J. DeWitt. DeWitt is an academic expert in parallel SQL databases. DeWitt says that in MapRedu
860.
by dxbydt 15y ago
Agree with your premise. Disagree with your conclusion. What you've effectively called a bug is in fact a feature. The whole point is to take the proper-superset aspect of Scala ( ie. every java OO pgm will qualify as a scala pgm ), and th
861.
by dxbydt 15y ago
The one rule I've never broken is this - don't work on bad code. There's tons of really shitty code in "enterprise software" type places - IBs, banks & such. Its not too hard to get a 6-figure job at these places, but then the real fun
862.
by dxbydt 15y ago
Dude, 30 cents is a huge, HUGE deal. Dealbreaker even. And you don't have to be indigent to realize that. On wall street, IBs routinely send out managers who make seven figures to the exchanges to negotiate a 0.0001$ per share instead of 0.
863.
by dxbydt 15y ago
When I worked at Sun Microsystems, my manager & most of my colleagues used Windows. The inside joke was that Java performs much better on Windows than Solaris, but we weren't supposed to say that to our customers.
864.
by dxbydt 15y ago
The real drawback isn't the team leaving, its groupthink. I think we've all experienced this firsthand at some point in our lives, especially when we're getting hired for the first time - you walk into a room with the entire programming tea
865.
by dxbydt 15y ago
Valuation is not revenue is not profitability. Say your dicey tech stock has a beta of 2 & the S&P500 is expected to make 5% this year. CAPM says you'll have an expected return on capital assets of 10% given the zero risk-free rates
866.
by dxbydt 15y ago
Heh. That was quite funny, the way you put it. Seriously though, the chap who figures out controlled nuclear fusion will quite likely work out of a physics lab in a University both of which are funded by the ad dollars I you & the rest
867.
by dxbydt 15y ago
Thanks. The "only 3 innovations have lasted over 100 years" premise isn't original. I first heard it at a graduation ceremony and it made a lasting impact on me. Ofcourse the speaker was very charismatic & way more dramatic than I am :)
868.
by dxbydt 15y ago
If you want "fundamental" innovation, you simply aren't going to get it in a jiffy. Imagine if a person dead over a 100 years ago woke up today. What present day technologies would he have no trouble recognizing ? 1.Movie Projector. 2.Bulb
869.
by dxbydt 15y ago
exactly what i thought. the chap actually wants Node to mature & become Tomcat! Maybe when he reads about NowJS he'll want them to mature & become RMI. Heh
870.
by dxbydt 15y ago
Argh! If I'm in the midwest now can't I have worked in NYC before I moved here (which is what happened btw, now that you are so curious about my antecedents). And M has taken so many $ from me in the form of numerous OS updates & backup

More ›