News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

arc0

Re:A computer science study plan to become a software engineer on Thursday December 17, 2020 @05:03AM (#25454181)
Never heard RenTec described that way, the only information that seems to be out there is that they use much simpler algorithmic techniques than people imagine, mainly just linear regression. Whatever unique insight they have, it's more likely to be based on pure mathematics than cutting edge algorithms theory. Also, they were not the first quant fund.
Re:Bitcoin breaks above $20k for the first time ever on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @11:16AM (#25444307)
The whole "you can't use the past to predict the future" thing goes both ways. It's pretty poor form to give unwarranted investment advice based on ignoring one of the few steadfast principles in finance.
Re:Empire of Fantasy on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @11:28AM (#25431766)
Wasn't Tolkien a lifelong, devout Catholic, who himself inspired Lewis's conversion to Christianity? I don't think it was a gulf between them.

Tolkien famously rejected the Vatican II reformations, and continued to respond to the priest in mass in Latin, rather than the vernacular.

Re:MicroStrategy's Bitcoin Debt Bet on Monday December 14, 2020 @08:59AM (#25417550)
Unlikely, given the insane growth of Bitcoin. If you invested a million dollars equally across a thousand schemes ($1000 each), with one of those being Bitcoin at $1, and then everything but Bitcoin failed, you'd be up almost 19 million dollars.

Same principle as a lot of VC, if you invest in fifty failed startups and one Facebook, you win.

Is WhatsApp a profitable business on its own? What happens if they are forced to spin out and then go bankrupt?
Re:Morgan Stanley to Shift About $120B of Assets to Germany on Thursday December 10, 2020 @08:41AM (#25373572)
Are German bankers paid that much more than British bankers then?
Re:Morgan Stanley to Shift About $120B of Assets to Germany on Thursday December 10, 2020 @08:07AM (#25373255)
How much is $120B relative to the total assets held in the UK by Morgan Stanley? The number of jobs which have been moved out of London seems relatively small (7500 across the entire financial sector, single companies in London employee more than that).
Re:Ask HN: What's that Game that predicts your choices? on Monday December 07, 2020 @12:38PM (#25334533)
It seems to have become quite bad with people too. I think it's been overloaded and has too many things to consider now. I tried to get it to guess George VI, and despite telling it he was dead for over 20 years it asked me if he had over 100,000 subscribers or had 'collaborated with Shawn Mendes', this was within the first 15 questions.
Re:Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @11:06AM (#25277656)
I've noticed a shift in the last decade or so from self deprecating to self loathing. People seem loath to admit that we are one of the richest, most privileged, most developed countries in the world.
Re:The $2B Mall Rats on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @07:55AM (#25275889)
I split time between a major world city and a small (10k population) town. Both have many independent businesses. Where do you live that this is not the case?
Re:Ethereum 2.0 launches on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @10:15AM (#25265866)
Why not just engage in this conversation in good faith? It's very unbecoming to act as if you're a neutral party who can't understand tech jargon, then drop a dense paragraph about TCP/UDP to back up your point.
Re:Existential Haskell on Friday November 27, 2020 @10:18AM (#25229315)
Yes. Haskell is used by many companies, from small startups to hundred billion dollar corporations.

Fighting spam with Haskell -- https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam...

The Joy and Agony of Haskell in Production -- https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/production.html

Haskell in Production: Riskbook -- https://serokell.io/blog/haskell-in-industry-riskbook

Haskell at Barclays (talk, not an article) -- https://www.infoq.com/presentations/haskell-barclays/

Re:Existential Haskell on Friday November 27, 2020 @09:10AM (#25228805)
Not really, it definitely assumes some background with Haskell, but it's far from 'veteran' level. All of the code samples except for the very last section only use elementary concepts.
Who is the house, in this case?
Re:Tips for Performant TypeScript on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @10:30AM (#25199314)
Deno[0] supports running TypeScript without needing to compile it to JS.

[0] -- https://deno.land/

Re:"Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @09:37AM (#25137205)
Facebook already pays people with the exact same credentials 1/3 in London what they would in California, despite London being similarly expensive. These companies do not pay anyone solely based on the work they produce, it has never and probably will never work that way.
Re:What Gödel Discovered on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @08:24AM (#25136450)
Gödel's proof does not apply to any single axiomatic system, it applies to any computable set of axioms that can talk about numbers, quantifiers, addition and multiplication. This isn't arbitrary, it's a set of properties required for just about any interesting mathematics to take place.

The formulae are accepted because Gödel gives us a mapping, he proves that we can convert any formula into a number without losing information.

Re:What Gödel Discovered on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @09:12AM (#25123906)
To me it read as though the author cleverly worded it as 'he could do something like this' to separate Frege's idea (theory of sets) from the specific example.
Re:What Gödel Discovered on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @09:11AM (#25123891)
The conversion of formulae to Gödel numbers is basically an implementation detail, the fact it can be done allows us to define theorems on the natural numbers that describe properties of the logical system. Encoding an invalid formula is of course possible, but I don't see why that would be a problem, it doesn't inherently 'prove' anything.
Re:Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft on Friday November 13, 2020 @04:29AM (#25080626)
No it's not, the creator of Homebrew has nowhere near the clout of Van Rossum or Thompson. I don't think it's a big enough or technically complex enough project that its author should expect to skip the standard interview procedure, whereas the creators of Python and C absolutely should.
Re:I sold Baremetrics on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @11:55AM (#25048069)
It's absolutely not true, these companies have tens of thousands of developers, there aren't enough graduates from top universities for that to be the bar. That was maybe the case 15 years ago.
Re:We Tested Comma AI's OpenPilot on Friday October 16, 2020 @10:12AM (#24800980)
He streams on Youtube/Twitch fairly regularly, just from watching it is totally obvious that he is a genius-level programmer. The speed with which he reads and comprehends academic papers is incredibly impressive.
Re:14,000x Speedup (2015) on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @10:04AM (#24765635)
I think that's kind of a malformed sentence. Programs themselves do not suffer or not suffer from the halting problem, it is only a problem when considering the space of all programs.
Re:14,000x Speedup (2015) on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @10:03AM (#24765627)
What part of Turing's proof do you find unconvincing?
Re:14,000x Speedup (2015) on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @10:00AM (#24765596)
The busy beaver function assumes infinite memory, it is defined as a function of the number of states of the Turing machine (in a programming language this is program size). If it was memory then it would not be an undecidable sequence.