ellius

33 ms·

301.
by ellius 10y ago
Any recommendations of how to get at this as a self-taught programmer? I've picked up books on combinatorics and discrete math, but I still feel very far removed and don't know how to really take an interest and make the connectio
302.
by ellius 10y ago
I think to this point, the organizations that will really succeed in the future are the ones who aggressively hire people with a strong cross of building simple, usable and understandable technical tools who also understand business logic a
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by ellius 10y ago
The thing I find most amazing about this (I work for a bank) is seeing people make decisions based on version 812 of a workbook passed between 3 different departments with multiple pages where the count of line items doesn't even add u
304.
by ellius 10y ago
Season 4 also had the "needs of the many vs. needs of the few" and "is ignorance bliss" themes going on.
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by ellius 10y ago
That's likely part of their calculus. By shelling out shares in a massively profitable company, they tie their interests to the buyers, who are likely to have considerable influence and will further continue to prop up their regime.
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by ellius 10y ago
I work for a bank, and literally almost everyone I work with does this. By comparison, I use R for pretty much everything (minus some formatting in Excel). I have a far easier time identifying errors because than my coworkers, because inste
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by ellius 10y ago
The whole notion of being passionate about a skill or industry without any context regarding means or ends is odd to me. It's like saying you should be passionate about banking. Sure, maybe, if you're helping people purchase a hom
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by ellius 10y ago
I'm sorry but this is blatantly untrue. Look at any sanctions violation case, for example, and you find examples of stupid emails with bankers saying "DO NOT MENTION <sanctioned country> ANYWHERE ON THIS PAYMENT."
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by ellius 10y ago
Can you elaborate on how you've been burned? I want to integrate it into some work projects, so I'd like to be aware of potential pitfalls.
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by ellius 10y ago
Are there good ways to use Terraform internally / without online providers like AWS? I've just started using it with DigitalOcean, but I'd like to use it at home to do IAC with my whole setup. As far as I can tell the only go
311.
by ellius 10y ago
As a self-taught programmer without much in the way of "official" pro experience (I have another job and program just to increase capabilities in that role), Docker was a revelation to me. I've programmed lots of tools at hom
312.
by ellius 10y ago
"It's not enough for your computers to agree, you have to agree on what they're supposed to agree about." Credit to Matt Levine: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-01-19/banks-oil
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by ellius 10y ago
I'm self-taught. This was the first book that actually answered my question "but how does it work?". I'd been getting incomplete and misguided answers for years when I finally stumbled across this book in an HN thread, a
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by ellius 10y ago
We should really conduct a war on wire transfers if we want to catch criminals. The worst high-level criminals almost always move funds across jurisdictions with wires.
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HN: Amateur idea for an anonymity protocol
1 points by ellius 10y ago|1 comments
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by ellius 10y ago
Only in a relatively minor way though. The ruling states the President can remove the head at will, rather than requiring cause. American Banker actually had an editorial about this being bad for banks--it decreases the predictability of th
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by ellius 10y ago
I think the best thing about these leaks is that it reveals how far divorced the reality is from the ideal of politics. No one had much optimism about American politics before this, I'm sure, but there was at least some hope that when
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by ellius 10y ago
Probably not: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=10004
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by ellius 10y ago
Yep. Self-dealing is always an enormous red flag for fraud and other shadiness, in financial businesses especially.
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by ellius 10y ago
I saw an astute comment somewhere that boiled down to, "Look, it wasn't pitched as 'give us your opinion.'" You're dead on about more serious consequences, especially in the current political environment. You h
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by ellius 10y ago
Insofar as the logical basis for classifying them as "crimes," yes, I am. Not in terms of seriousness or morality, obviously. Also, conflating money laundering and tax evasion shows a serious lack of understanding. Tax evasion can
322.
by ellius 10y ago
It's actually the opposite of fraud, because laundering money involves transactions which frequently make a great deal of money for the bank. Look at the fat fees Goldman Sachs earned setting up the 1MDB transactions for Malaysia. Ther
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by ellius 10y ago
I'm not talking about tax. I'm referring to rayiner's initial point, which is that "right" and "wrong" have nothing to do with it. Businesses such as banks that intermediate financial transactions with sta
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by ellius 10y ago
Virtually all commerce in modern society is intermediated by fiat money, which is a product of the state. People are free to trade goods with Monopoly money if they want to, but if they want the security and backing of the United States, in
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by ellius 10y ago
Only in the sense that all crimes are "imaginary." Crimes are acts made illegal by law, which money laundering is. It's as illegal as murder.
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by ellius 10y ago
There are a few basic problems with money laundering regulation: 1. The state wants it done because the intelligence is immensely valuable, not just from a law enforcement perspective but also from an international realpolitik / Great
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by ellius 10y ago
Well, you know, defense contractor
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by ellius 11y ago
That's the point though: in some sense it's a circular house of cards. I linked this Edward Harrison piece higher up. Read the first paragraph and think about it for a minute. This is all a dollar really is, and its inherent, fund
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by ellius 11y ago
Edward Harrison has good piece on this and the concept of "currency revulsion": https://www.creditwritedowns.com/2011/10/currency-revulsion-...
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by ellius 11y ago
Taleb nails this in The Black Swan. He describes how capitalism is NOT meritocratic, it's more like it encourages people to blow huge sums on improbable ideas and, occasionally, they work.

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