Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails by Nassim Taleb.
Readit Newskarlmcguire commented on What are the most important statistical ideas of the past 50 years? [pdf] stat.columbia.edu/~gelman... · Posted by u/luu
karlmcguire commented on Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store play.google.com/store/app... · Posted by u/sschueller
Anti-trust law is a far cleaner way to approach that, with far fewer unintended consequences.
Yea, because that's been working great thus far.
Ah cool so does this mean that all the other stocks are safe and will only make me money? Very cool of Robin Hood to protect me from ever being exposed to any risk like this. It’s just really cool to know that they remove the ones that can lose me money.
Nice, Robinhood is a publisher now!
karlmcguire commented on Lua and Python (2020) lwn.net/Articles/812122/... · Posted by u/huachimingo
Have I got a treat for you!
Thanks for the pallene link! Terra was fun to play with but I've always wanted a simple compiled Lua.
karlmcguire commented on Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering? · Posted by u/abdabab
I don't think there is mastery in this work. I've been doing this for decades, and I still think my code from 6 months ago is crap, no matter how much I learn and improve.
Mastery would imply that you can do it all, and do it right, on any project, and there is just too much change and evolution for that to ever be true.
My goal is simply that I continue to improve.
I think most "master" software engineers are a bit more idealistic than that... Not saying I am a master but I occasionally write something and consider it genuinely beautiful.
karlmcguire commented on The Nashville bombing and threats to critical infrastructure warontherocks.com/2020/12... · Posted by u/longdefeat
> Honestly, the top responses almost read like neural network generated proto-english
That’s not specific to questions about 5G. Most of what I read on Quora would fit that description.
It seems like with Quora you either get very bad or very good answers. The good ones tend to be significantly older, i.e. before it got big and people started to gamify the system.
This also means that it's much easier to spy on someone on Telegram: just create a fake device with telegram, then login the user into it using a phone with fake identity. Easy-peasy for a (Russian) government.
Any time someone logs into your account you immediately get a notification on all devices with the IP address the attempt originated from.
I don't understand how Telegram has managed to stay free for 8 (?) years until now. Was there ever a catch? Since the start it has continuously improved to become a feature-packed product that's easy to use, with a pleasant UI.
The most interesting thing about Telegram to me is the development team: about 10 very good engineers who travel with Pavel and work from hotels.
I believe Signal did create their own crypto (which is also used now by apps like WhatsApp). The difference is that Signal's crypto was created by a trained cryptographer and seems to be generally respected in the cryptography community while Telegrams is not.
It's not clear who made Telegram's crypto but it was probably Nikolai Durov who is a genius mathematician and engineer, so it's not like it's some guy in a garage.
Telegram keeps talking about how private and secure it is, but all group and private chats are not encrypted by default. Its end to end encrypted chats are very limited (only direct messages and only on one device) and rely on self-baked crypto. Their voice chat is also almost definitely not end to end encrypted, as I'm not aware of a way to do e2ee voice chat with many participants without linearly increasing bandwidth requirements for users
I found it interesting that direct calls (just calling one of your contacts) can be peer-to-peer if you enable it in the settings. They even have a unique code at the top of the screen (like 5 emojis) that you can verify match on the other participant's phone.