photon137

19 ms·

31.
by photon137 14y ago
"For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people" Very valuable insight. However, (b) in its own right, can serve as a fast growth business model - where the deliver
32.
by photon137 14y ago
This is a problem in London as well - most Tube stations have barriers but some of them don't and most DLR stations are barrier-less - so forgetting to tap costs you extra the next time round (ie for PAYG - passes are penalty-free). A possi
33.
Carmack: The Person(cplus2magazine.com)
2 points by photon137 14y ago|0 comments
34.
by photon137 14y ago
> index only scans will do wonders for append-mostly workloads Won't updates be actually slower once indexes are added to take advantage of index-only scans? Another issue that I can see comes not from having the index-only scan featu
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by photon137 14y ago
It's not as if the hardware isn't capable of doing awesome stuff (case in point: the idTech 5 demo from John Carmack [1]) - the software using it also has to be well engineered. Good engineering for managing hardware resources at the browse
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by photon137 14y ago
This might be relevant as a counter-point: http://world.time.com/2011/08/15/how-a-late-bollywood-icon-s...
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by photon137 14y ago
I tried to explain this in a post a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4087686
38.
by photon137 14y ago
Direct client access to a database as being the most prominent concern raised here (which to me was the main concern as well) - I will need to think about it. Say we magically got rid of the security problem (thus eliminating a middle tier
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by photon137 14y ago
But that could be done without a web-specific framework right? Say I had JavaScript on the client side send me a computation request to do something massive, say on a grid - I will probably run that using C/C++/Java there and return the res
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by photon137 14y ago
They buy mortgage-backed securities in the secondary markets which, in simple terms, are bonds issued by securitization agencies (well, mostly by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the residential mortgage area) to fund pools that buy and collec
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by photon137 14y ago
I'll add to this. Edit: consumer-level or corporate level credit won't be any cheaper - only a very specific type of credit, ie mortgages, would become cheaper still. As you've rightly pointed out, the Fed is targeting mortgage rates, and t
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Ask HN: If JavaScript could talk to databases
3 points by photon137 14y ago|8 comments
43.
by photon137 14y ago
Not really. Engineers venture out into the grey even more than scientists do - they solve problems of interest to humans - their job requires them to be grounded in reality and be sensitive to human needs and constraints (well, at least t
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Pixar's hair simulation system for Brave(fxguide.com)
8 points by photon137 14y ago|0 comments
45.
by photon137 14y ago
Ah no, go ahead...I was just answering a question here - satisfied with that :)
46.
by photon137 14y ago
There is: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-12/imf-says-bailout...
47.
by photon137 14y ago
Why not price the coffee at $30 then for millionaires? Surely the marginal utility of $30 to them would be similar to that of $5 to someone earning $60k? Why would one pay $5 for the same amount of gas one month and $3 in another month when
48.
by photon137 14y ago
This has got more to do with production and consumption of a physical good as compared to a "virtual" good than anything else. The marginal utility you mention for coffee is derived from the physicality of the product - and thus I think the
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by photon137 14y ago
That's a valid comparison - 2008 vs 2010 (versus the stupid VS6 comparison) - and one I agree with in many respects - especially UI responsiveness. However, paging-in after idle-time is pretty similar, in my experience for both 2008 and 201
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by photon137 14y ago
I am being serious. I'd rather doubt the seriousness of anyone moaning about an 11-second delay before they can start to code using Visual Studio while ignoring the features one truly uses Visual Studio for (which you have conveniently la
51.
by photon137 14y ago
That's too flimsy a reason for labelling a product as "going downhill", in my opinion - but to each his/her own. You do realize that VS2010 has way more functionality than VS6 - debugging parallel apps/attaching to native, non-native proces
52.
by photon137 14y ago
...has been going downhill. ...I'm referring primarily to the C++ IDE How, specifically?
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by photon137 14y ago
How advanced and how expensive? Numerix ( http://www.numerix.com/products-and-services ) is one. I've used them before at my previous job to handle client portfolios. In general you'd need to have separate licenses with the feed providers (
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by photon137 14y ago
You're welcome (I'm pretty sure I've set some sort of a bad precedent here :) )
55.
by photon137 14y ago
Well, it requires an unmanaged dll (NQuantLibc) to be compiled which would be pinvoked by the managed bindings dll (NQuantLib). The unmanaged dll will not be platform independent (I don't know if you'd be using x86/x64). It also needs to be
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by photon137 14y ago
I agree. It's quite messy. That's why I use the C# swig bindings instead and if I had to use Excel as a UI, I'd build my own plugins in C# rather than use the ones they provide - in a similar fashion as you've done with Python.
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by photon137 14y ago
This reminds me that compiling QuantLib is such a pain in the ass. I love QuantLib though - I use it via C# and there is an Excel plugin already available in the source code. As regards your example: (a) single-name options usually have an
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by photon137 14y ago
Oh, I can chip in here regarding big vs small flywheels. If you look at the purpose of a flywheel - ie storing kinetic energy - a bigger/smaller wheel can serve the same purpose. The reason we don't have "large" flywheels is twofold: 1. si
59.
by photon137 14y ago
I worked on designing such a thing while at university using differential angular momentum - kind of like a cube with a high-speed rotating wheel embedded in each face. The wheels on opposite faces cancelled out each other's angular momentu
60.
by photon137 14y ago
Actually, financial markets have employed non-Gaussian Levy processes in modelling derivatives for a long time (it is a bit different from the Levy distribution, I agree - but nothing stops the processes from having non-finite moments). For

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