I saw it earlier on reddit, and when I noticed it on hn, I was about to flag it for being yet another trash story copied from reddit, but then I saw that it already got 15 votes. I must be too young for this, but I did't find it funny, insightful or engaging, thus I did't feel any inclination to read more than a couple pages.
Try read it again. It really is a classic - tells of an age before everybody and their dog became programmers. It's a bit more subtle than the current fare and mixes humour and wisdom well.
The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about Tao and laughs at it.
Which makes you sound like the average pseudo-science practitioner. They also keep telling others they "just don't get it", but perhaps someday, they will, of only the would 'embrace the teaching'. We scoff at that, but when someone uses the same approach with programming, while adding some Eastern sugar, we suddenly think it should be clear it's enlightening? Bollocks.
If you think the purpose of this is to be "enlightening", I suspect you may have missed the point. It's funny, in much the same way as the Principia Discordia is funny, and that's about it. It does rather a good job at it, too, imho.
I usually wouldn't care too much about karma for individual comments or posts but seeing the above comment being downvoted simply for not liking a book, I must say the voting patterns on HN are getting quite weird.
Unless a comment is offensive or distracting the conversation, take it easy with the downvotes people.
I recently thought that it might be an interesting experiment to not display any vote counts but instead order the posts based on them (as already done I guess).
The idea is really nice, but I'm not sure it would work on the OP's Joe, who probably wouldn't even care about the hypothetical language and would regard the whole concept hypothetical, only for those who have way too much free time. (With WoW on the table, you don't have that luxury.)
I would take the route of first order functions -> anonymous functions -> closures, but I think it is really a lost cause for the typical 9-5 programmers.
Roger Penrose is not merely saying that quantum mechanics is wrong. Instead it would be more fair to say that he views quantum mechanics as an incomplete theory, and one that should be continually challenged.
That's how every scientific theory should be approached, as that's what sets them apart from dogmas.
I haven't lost any money on investments in 3 years, and I'm nowhere near being an educated economist. With a diversified portfolio, I could always find an equity to sell above the buying price when I needed money, and this way I could ride out the bear markets without realizing losses.
Of course I'm nowhere near Goldman Sachs in volume (about 6 trades a month on average), just telling that it is actually possible to achieve a "perfect score".
I know Goldman Sachs is not really popular right now among the people, and I have absolutely no intention to defend them, but this seems a bit like a witch hunt.
* You are one individual that averages 6 trades in month . GS has hundreds of traders, many of which do average that amount in a week (if not a day). The law of averages applies to GS, while your experience is anecdotal evidence.
In fact, if after 3 years with an average of 6 monthly trades you haven't liquidated a single negative position I'd say that most probably are making a classic investment mistake - holding onto your losses too long.
* GS trades much more volatile investments than you - futures, derivatives, etc. Traders have a much shorter time-horizon than you as well. You sell when you need the money while they're trying to meet their quarterly numbers.
Wow, apparently I expressed my point poorly, as you guys seem to pick up that I'm advertising how awesome I am and how I kick GS' ass on the markets.
What I wanted to say is that it's hard to find an index that went down during Q3 so those hundreds of traders could actually manage to not lose money but only one day, so that post and the comments really seem to be... subjective and biased.
As your note of my "strategy" being a mistake, I'm actually fine with my results and I'll keep going long, thank you.
You make a good point about comparing their performance to the index. If the market as a whole is rising, and there are always other people willing to take the opposite position of you (or Goldman), it is conceivable that you could only have one negative day.
If this was during a negative quarter for the market as a whole, that'd be a different story. Like the other poster noted, the likelihood that Goldman would consistently be on the positive side of millions of trades for ninety days is probably pretty slim.
They're talking about daily P/L. They realize profit and loss every day. You can't simply ignore all the days when you had (unrealized) losses and still compare with situation described in the article.
Yeah, it's the same thing at very different time scales.
In other words, the standard deviation for 3-year returns is much lower than the daily standard deviation.
You can get a positive return in 3 years without being especially good or lucky. But getting a positive return every single day for 3 months is extremely unlikely.
It's not as bad as it sounds, basically great many of the http://git.kernel.org/ repos are actual forks of the kernel, regularly pulling changes from vanilla, resolving the occasional conflicts and maintaining/developing their own patches.
Actually it is as bad as it sounds. Although git makes it easier to merge with mainline, in the end it still requires an active maintainer who manually merges and tests stuff once in a while. Maintaining a fork requires one's constant attention and diverts one from doing other - maybe more useful - things.
Gnome and KDE has their own window managers, namely Metacity and KWin. These can be replaced by other window managers, like Xmonad, and you can still use the Gnome/KDE infrastructure and utilities just as nicely.
I have always had the habit of quickly editing the query if the top 5 results aren't what I was looking for, up to the point where I don't even really think about it, just adding some more keywords or sprinking a couple pluses, minuses or quotes. So I can't really tell if it has deteriorated in the past years.
However, I do think it could be possible that the pagerank algorithm does not scales good enough for the growth of Web pages, and especially with the "SEOs" out there always trying to come up with new ways to game the system.
