It looked interesting - is it really $400 a month for access to the course, or is there some other way to just take the course without some kind of certificate?
This letter gets posted time to time. Definitely one of my favorites for explaining the rationale on spending money pushing boundaries when there are plenty of things that money can do to help people in need now.
Investing in space exploration is necessary and all I don't disagree. But saying it adds to the economy as much as investing in people who need investment I can't necessarily equate. There's millions of children's not getting an adequate education, and there's millions of people hungry and starved. In our current society; investment only happens when there's a vacuum of opportunity that could be filled. Only governments seem to invest in people right now. In a space faring society education is necessary. We don't have enough highly trained workers as is without space ships. We need investment and radical change in education.
Another co-worker is the one who put together proto-repl for Atom so you'll see a lot of similar functionality in the two. I still use Atom and proto-repl just because I've been too lazy to get familiar with VSCode. But when James has demoed the debugger functionality in his VSCode plugin it looks great.
An excellent question. I tried looking up the current policies, but the "IT Policy Library" [1] is provided in an iframe that doesn't load for me ("The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.").
> There is noone who can decide to work one hour more at his workplace and get paid for it, then donate the money to charity.
There are plenty of people that can make this exact choice. I'll work extra hours on occasion when my job is willing to allow us overtime, but not requiring it. Admittedly it's generally my stove broke and I need X dollars to replace it, not me donating the money.
I just want to jump in and comment that 30x gains in a year are not really that crazy with out of the money close to expiration options. I've had 2 different years in the past with better than 30x gains (and years where my options account went to 0).
If you had bought out of the money puts with a near term expiration for an index like SPY and it dropped 10%, you could be talking 80-1000 times return depending on how far out of the money and how close to expiration.
Disclaimer: I do not recommend out of the money options trading for anything other than pure gambling on money you couldn't care less about losing.
Ok Hacker News, I think I am done for the day after this.
Just to be clear, we are talking about a 30x return in someone's entire net worth, in 12 months, from trading.
I didn't say you couldn't construct a perfect hypothetical trade that in hindsight would have earned someone a huge 30x or 100x return or whatever. Not sure how that's even relevant though (unless maybe you trade from home and buy those expensive mega-ultimate-dragon options trading online skype courses and still think such trades are even worth talking about).
I didn't even say a 30x return of his net worth was impossible, I said it's "hard to believe" and "very high'.
But apparently a 30x return "is easy" and this guy has done it twice...
OK. Well it's been fun. HAGW everyone
P.S. I appreciate chrisatumd's disclaimer, nice to see, and a good reminder that investing and trading is gambling and you can lose it all, whether you're an amateur or pro.
I agree with your second point. As to my wording on your first point, I should explain a bit more....
"Easy" means that it's not technically hard to do. For instance, anyone who's lucky enough can win 30 times their money in roulette. It's "easy", but rare - only 2-3% of people do it.
For contrast, "hard" to me would be something like trading gamma-delta option spreads.
Technically, just about any investor do the former (although they'd have to be lucky), while few can do the latter.
Final point - I consider being lucky consistently is damn near impossible (although statistically, I guess it happens to a few of the 8 billion people out there).
Not trying to upset you, just trying to help you see that the story is not crazy. I'm not sure if you've tried trading futures or options before.
I've never traded futures, but I've seen with the amount of leverage that options provide makes the story quite believable (easy was probably not what the prior commenter meant).
It's possible, but almost inevitably, the "strategy" employed backfires, and the trader loses everything. One that comes to mind is Brian Hunter[1], formerly of the now defunct Amaranth Advisors hedge fund. Hunter was viewed as a sort of wunderkind, but he had a natural gas position (I've heard the initial position was between $1B and $2B, but I don't know specifics) go south, and rather than sell off and accept the losses, he doubled down and sank the firm. Margin calls ensued (of up to $6B) that could not be met and assets ended up being sold off for pennies on the dollar. (I previously worked for a firm that bought a large chunk of Amaranth's assets).
Ya man I been in the industry a long time I remember Brian Hunter from even before Amaranth. Always interesting reading when his name pops up. Clearly, a brilliant trader on a different level than most guys, but ya that's not always enough on it's own. He should have gotten that DB bonus though, that story was fucked up.
I didn't even say a 30x return of his net worth was impossible, I said it's "hard to believe" and "very high'.
It's simple if you have the talent.
E.g. here's a person who deposited $1000 in cash into a trading account and wound up with $100,000 after just 10 months of trading. That's a 100x return.[1]
Think of how rich that person could have been had she decided to continue her trading!
I had no idea this was out there. I found a bunch of old projects out here from a program I work on in the realm of Earth Science. Things from 2002 and 2004 that have probably not been used in over 10 years (and some from the same time frame that are still in production).
It has been really hard for us to open source things lately - our last project took more than a year. I did find it on this page: https://github.com/nasa/earthdata-search. We are still working on open sourcing a couple more of our projects.
We've been told one of NASA's recent goals is to significantly improve the open source process so hopefully we'll see more of the current projects become open source.
Liability. Same thing with why it can be hard to use open source in a large company. Liability.
If something screws up they dont want to be sued. If you use open source you can't sue someone if it breaks...but if I use Oracle I can get support and in extreme case sue for damages.
> but if I use Oracle I can get support and in extreme case sue for damages.
That's not true. Most proprietary software licenses have the "not suitable for purpose" warranty clause that basically means that you can't sue them if their database crashes on you. Oh, and you can get support for free software from many different companies (SUSE and RedHat being two).
That sounds like the opposite problem from releasing open source code. I would imagine one of NASA's concerns is ensuring none of the code reveals classified information. Another risk (this one for anyone thinking about publishing their code) is that it turns out to infringe on some obscure patent - though I'm not sure if it would be easier or harder to get a settlement from NASA than a private business. (So yes, "Liability." is still a possible reason.)
But don't most open source licenses waive liability? MIT and other popular licenses state that the work is provided "as is" and that the author cannot be held liable.
> But don't most open source licenses waive liability?
Most open source licenses include a liability disclaimer. Many jurisdictions, OTOH, have laws which limit the effect of liability disclaimers, so whether the disclaimer means anything, and if so what it means, varies based on which jurisdictions law applies to the liability at issue.
The company I work for is scared to use open source often, much less let people release it. They care more about scoring patents on useless processes than on releasing useful code that could have been written by a competent intern at LITERALLY any company in the industry.
Decisions made by lawyers and bureaucrats.
(These opinions are mine and not necessarily those of my employer)
We've tested out DMS to migrate from a 3 node Oracle RAC to Oracle RDS, and I was incredibly impressed. They list a bunch of limitations in their documentation that you should look at first. It migrated our roughly 1 TB database in two hours and ten minutes and handled replication flawlessly - not a single record discrepancy between the two database systems over a week long test. We were not expecting it to work that well and doubted that it would work with RAC as the source.
