verdatel
www.technologyreview.com
For a more in depth treatment of anti-fragility. Read anti-fragility a couple of times. One of the one most important ideas of our time (IMO). Btw, your intuitive linking of "age degradation" is also pointed out by Taleb albeit in a different manner. His premise is that ideas that have persisted for a long time are anti-fragile. This is because they have been subjected to shocks, to ridicule, to experimentation and these ideas have become better. Age of existence is one of many indicators of anti-fragility.
If you invest in ETF's which are traded like stocks then you have to contend with trading fees. The rule of thumb (I've garnered from reading blogs/ literature) is that if your portfolio is < $50,000, then set up automatic payments for all index funds.. however if you have a larger portfolio then it would be worth getting a discount brokerage account and using that to invest in ETFs. This is because having a larger portfolio means that your brokerage house will offer you a discounted trading fee. The advantage of ETFs is generally a lower management-expense ratio than index funds and more importantly you get access to things like REITs and other non-standard financial vehicles.
Ask HN: Social aspect to financial markets and stocks
I know there's been some thrusts into using sentiment and a social aspect to financial markets. Can somebody point me to these. I'd also love to see what people think can be done with crowd-sourced stock opinions or social feed sentiment based stock recommendations. I was thinking it is perhaps more useful to give negative recommendations or options rather than just buy/sell type output.
A more accessible book is "Approximate Dynamic Programming" by Warren Powell.
I'm not sure if you know what a Markov chain is? Very roughly, any kind of data which changes its value (sometimes referred to as "state") and jumps to a new value is a Markov chain. The value that the chain jumps to is determined probabilistically using some distribution over all the states. When there are several Markov chains in parallel and each of them contribute to a certain reward and we are faced with the problem of which Markov chain to "control" or influence.. then it becomes a multi-armed bandit problem. They are not very easy to solve, except when certain simplifying assumptions are made. You can get a good start by looking at some MATLAB code from Prof. Kevin Murphy at UBC : http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Software/MDP/mdp.html
Ask HN: What is a reasonable salary for an image processing engineer?
I've been interviewing for jobs in image processing as a researcher/developer and I'm always asked what are my salary expectations. Now I've been interviewing for entry-level jobs for people with a Master's or a Ph.D (I have a Ph.D in CS) and I'm not sure what a reasonable estimate is. I live in British Columbia, Canada and the cost of living is pretty high here. I estimate a reasonable range...