huntse

That doesn't make your statement any less false. It might suit your metaphor for that to be the case, but facts are stubborn things dude. Pretty good rendering here http://www.greatmodernpictures.com/drawinggal15lg.jpg

What about this one? Look like someone making mistakes in introductory drawing class to you? http://www.art-wallpaper.com/4056/C%C3%A9zanne+Paul/Sketch+a...

How about this? Beginner rendering perhaps? http://amica.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/AMICO~1~1~3...

The problem is you can't quite bring yourself to admit that you picked a really bad example. You wanted someone who's technical deficiencies were made up for by their conceptual skill, and you chose someone who could draft their ass off and also had an incredible ability to choose fantastic things to produce.

That is a truly spectacular drawing. Astonishing.

Well the claim that Cezanne couldn't draw is pretty obviously contradicted by his sketches, especially when you look at them "in the flesh".

let's look at that claim in detail. For example, does this http://www.greatmodernpictures.com/drawinggal15lg.jpg look to you like it was done by someone who couldn't draw? It's pretty darn accurately drafted.

I'm surprised anyone noticed.

Larger and more profitable. The sort of things that will get your cv noticed by the right people around here are: Haskell, some sort of particle physics or similar simulation experience, and/or games programming experience.

Oh, and for goodness sake don't put down on your cv that you've read the first 13 chapters of Hull and know Ito's Lemma and the Black Scholes model. (Unless you just want to give people a good chuckle.)

If you really want to bone up on your financial maths with a bias towards a job in computational finance I always recommend people read Joshi. http://www.markjoshi.com/

Messiaen was obsessed with symmetry and patterns in rhythm (see his explanation of "non-retrogradable rhythms" in "The Technique of My Musical Language"). It's silly to say that he couldn't be aware of the pattern he was creating.

So I have a really interesting job in the front office at a real investment bank. I have worked here for several years and have used (among others) perl, python and C++. I have touched precisely 3 lines of java in all my time here.

Our development cycle is super fast, yet I work on very sensitive applications and infrastructure (real time trading, pricing, risk etc).

Bottom line: Jobs vary significantly in any industry and within any firm.

K is an interpreted language.

...oh, and covered bonds linked to a specific income stream is also not new. XS0271006602 for example is a covered bond linked to the income stream on a chain of pubs in the UK.

Yup having a secondary market is extremely important. That's why it already exists (just like mezz finance, which is what he has reinvented here, also exists). The idea of having an instrument that pays linked to a particular income stream is also not new - covered bonds, asset-backed securities, pfandbriefe etc for example all work this way.

Nothing new here. This "third thing" is mezzanine finance. Mezzanine finance sits between debt and equity in the capital structure and mezz investors choose a variety of risk/reward options making their investment more debt-like or more equity-like.

The coupon stream on mezz notes can be linked to income on specific assets (like covered bonds).

Subordinated debt and preferred shares are examples of mezz finance instruments.

The appendix to Chris Okasaki's "Purely functional Data structures" has to be right up there.

Well to answer your final point, there is never any absolute guarantee, but your best insurance against unemployment is to become really good at what you do. The second best is to make what you do be something commercially valuable. If you combine these two it's very unlikely you'll ever be unemployed for long.

Now to the first point. The most important part of learning is the process itself: ie learning the thing itself is less important than becoming good at learning. Once you have a sound grasp of the basics, the more diverse your curiosity and the deeper the insight you are able to gain into each specific technology, the easier it will be for you to pick up new ones. There's no excuse for ever becoming obsolete. Read widely, maintain your curiosity and keep learning.

Finally, the technologies you have picked may or may not be the way of the future. The future has a way of being unpredictable. Don't be so sure that you know what is going to happen that you close your eyes to what is actually happening.

I just checked my website before remembering that I don't have any colour on there at all. None.

It's all black, white and grey.

I am a diversity badass it seems.

So it's a bit of a stretch to claim (as this article does) that the "many worlds" interpretation of QM is a physics fact. It is a possible interpretation of the model which is impossible (at least I think that's the case) to empirically verify. Some pretty eminent physicists (Roger Penrose for example) believe that the "Many Worlds" interpretation is pretty much nonsense, and have said as much.

Completely awesome. Good work! I signed the petition (of course) and encouraged others to do so, but I have to admit that I am delighted that it actually happened.

Relational databases really are for doing relational operations. If you're using them for doing bits of arithmetic then you're going to come up against all sorts of limitations. Trivially, if you use this computed value in a where clause the query optimiser will have no choice but to do a full table scan. It can't index by all possible computed values.

Horses for courses. Do the query in whatever programming language, then just multiply the numbers together. I don't try to do left outer joins on my HP12-C calculator either.

Yeah, I read that. As a matter of fact I think he's a very smart guy but somewhat wrong about this. Marketmaking is of positive value to society so they get paid for that. The marketmaker is being paid to take some risk and when you hit the offer to buy a share you're paying a little bit to the MM for taking some market risk for you.

Any other trading functions can be thought of as picking up alpha that other, less nimble, market participants are leaving on the table. That's the redistributionist part he's talking about there, but actually this is positive for society also because it increases liquidity also and makes the market more efficient. I also think that in general it's positive for society for the smartest and best people in a particular endeavour to be well-rewarded, because that gives a strong incentive to other smart people to step into the field.

Most of the carping about HFT comes from people who are losing business because they can't compete. Instead of moaning they should hire a roomful of brilliant programmers and write their own winning algos.

A lot of the bank-bashing you see in the press is purely based on misconceptions of what banks do. The truth is that for small person-to-person loans of this type credit unions (and that's pretty much all Zopa really is by the way-a fancy-pants credit union with a website) have always been able to lend on lower margins than banks.

Now come to me when your credit union can give you a $50mm letter of credit to cover a shipment of goods from Brazil to China. In Portuguese and Mandarin, please, because the supplier and customer both want to see it. See, banks do all kinds of things that most people don't know or think about.

They get paid for doing something people want.

Well perhaps. So let's think about it. Black swans are not rare, they were thought to be completely impossible, and then people found them not to be impossible. So far maybe not so correct.

Secondly, regarding insight. This idea which everyone credits to Taleb is of course described all over the place. For example, as "the impossibility of inductive reasoning in the natural sciences" in The Mathematical Experience. As far as fat tails are concerned, every textbook on financial maths I own talks about fat tails the corrections that must be made to account for them, and they were all published before either of Taleb's books.