Path Dependent Blog Feed

Life, Love, Loss, and Time: A Cautionary Tale

Sun, 01 May 2011 15:58:00 +0000

When I saw the approaching storm, I started a new blog called PumpMyLemma and wrote, On Tennessee, or "Don't ever let life pass you by." Now, I'm in the eye of the storm. I'm wrecked, but I have a short period of calm seas with a brief window to some perspective. This post is being written while I have that brief window -- it is a tombstone on my old psyche -- the one who wrote, Mortality and Dating. So here are the relevant parts of my story for the unfamiliar. When I was 19, I was diagnosed with an, as of yet, incurable type of cancer. Chordoma is a very bizarre form of cancer. It's not aggressive with respect to time, but devastating in it's resilience. Compared to most people with Chordoma, I am extraordinarily lucky. I only had a transsphenoidal resection without any adjuvent therapies. I am still cancer free, after 7 years. After the diagnosis was confirmed -- and when I was recovered enough to focus at a computer -- I read up on Chordoma. For me, I saw it as an expiration date. Back then, the average time to recurrence was 12 - 18 months and the median survival was 6 or 7 years. I'm sure dealing with mortality is terrible for anyone, but at 19, it's not even on the radar. The shock from "anything is possible" and "I am invincible" to "everything is black" is devastating in ways I'm only beginning to recognize -- 7 years later, at age 26. To deal with Chordoma, I took the road less traveled. It had big warning signs but, being overconfident, I ignored them. I looked at mortality in the face -- or, more accurately, the expectation of a death at a young age -- screamed "fuck you," and invested every ounce of myself into furiously fighting a war at all costs against Chordoma. With my parents, I immediately started a foundation to begin the process of collecting donations from other Chordoma patients, in the hopes of paying for the cure.¹ Frustrated by the pace of donations, I started building program that would "find pockets of profitability in a cloud of probable randomness" from the stock market.² A few years ago, frustrated that I hadn't found my profitable algorithm, I began thinking about how and why people donate, and decided to set out building a non-profit fundraising tool called Fundify, that I never properly implemented. Frustrated by the lack of community cohesion, I started building an well-fitting community tool for rare disease groups, that I couldn't complete as I tried to work on too many simultaneous projects. Now, I realize this was all a desperate attempt to outrun reality. I reduced Chordoma to probabilities and expected outcomes. Intellectualizing it provided safety and put a unintimidating veneer over an frightful surface. As evidence of it's efficacy -- at obscuring reality, anyway -- I had never cried once about Chordoma or my situation until last summer -- 6 years later. It took a series of bizarre events which lead me to fall in love with a fantastic woman before I could start the process of waking up. Unfortunately, that didn't jive with the carefully controlled, damn it all, I must get this done approach that I installed in response to Chordoma. She tried so desperately to get me to open my eyes and see her for who she was, but I remained steadfast. After a few brief months that now seem painfully short, I pushed her away. I "knew" what I had to do. "She doesn't fit into the equation, damn it! I have to protect both her and I!" (See: Mortality and Dating.) She kicked and screamed and shoved me for a few more months, but my metaphorical blindness arrested her advance. When I eventually realized she wasn't trying to wake me up anymore, I timidly opened my eyes...just in time to see her happy with someone else, lost to me. It took me seeing her happy with someone else for me to recognize her for who and what she is and was -- and to realize what I had done. Just when I saw I needed her and recognized what I wanted, the opportunity was gone. I was so desperately bent on preventing death, that I forgot to live. It sounds cliche, but experience imbues certain cliches with great power. Now, I'm mostly shattered. Reality has caught up to me, the tortoise to my hare. It's finals week, and I can't work. I'm not sleeping and it takes so much effort to even eat. I'm probably going to flunk out of my graduate school program. I'm seeing that a lot of my dreams were the wrong dreams -- at best, they were made of paper-mache. I see how much time I have wasted, a terrible irony given time is the only resource I shouldn't be wasting. In a few months, I think I'll build fundify; it's a really elegant formulation and approach to fundraising and I know it's a clear path to changing things. For now though, I just have to lick my wounds and bear the fall. I'm only in the eye of the storm and the other wall has yet to hit me. (That wall being dealing with Chordoma; the first wall was recognizing what I did to that wonderful girl, and how I have wasted so much of my life.) I was running on empty for a while; now I'm not even running. So this is my cautionary tale. The second you recognize or hear an argument based on "at all costs" be skeptical. "At all costs" is an impressively ridiculous phrase. I definitely romanticized the fight. I thought, if I die from Chordoma but fought against it the whole time , I would be satisfied with my life. Now that seems like cheap martyrdom. Squandering life and love is nothing to be proud of -- it's just a weak coping mechanism. Don't keep thinking tomorrow is coming today. You'll be endlessly waiting in an idle state as life passes you by.³ Signing off for the last time on this blog, since it no longer accurately reflects me. John Bjorn Nelson

Footnotes...in a breakdown

Josh Summer did this after me, but he's much more sane than I am. See the Chordoma Foundation for impressive progress.
Actually, I started it in high school, but after diagnosis, I worked on it at a break-neck speed. I don't think there has been any day where I was near my computer that I haven't worked on it for at least a few hours. Ironically, a few weeks ago I finally identified an interesting phenomenon that I think will be profitable -- but now, I can't focus on it at all.
A not so subtle reference to some Counting Crows lyrics. They've been my favorite band for a long time, and have been my primary comfort the past few weeks.

Five Types of Students in Grad School

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:30:34 +0000

Presently, I will be completing my first semester of graduate school. (Considering my performance, it is probably more precise to say I am ‘concluding’ my first semester.) The following is an except of a longer essay I am working on regarding what I learned about grad school thanks to one particular class. The Blind Philosophers Academic ambitions and intellectual ambitions are usually coincident. Most people willing to plod towards a Ph.D desire to produce a Great Work – to discover something paradigm shifting. The Blind Philosopher’s ambition is not genuinely intellectual; they desire power and influence. The Blind Philosopher goes into school with the belief that their normative beliefs match reality perfectly and perceive academia as a tool for proving their prejudices; they want to wield a Ph.D as a megaphone. In their quest to prove their foregone conclusions, they absentmindedly brush aside all non-congruent information, building lopsided, stunted trees of knowledge. Such students are usually identifiable by the bias-soaked opinions they express, often using pot-shot jokes aimed at ideological adversaries as a tactic to bypass judgement and skepticism. The Wizard of OZ Scarecrows A Ph.D. is a well-defined path to intellectual high status. It confers such authority that, given an argument between a Ph.D. and a non-Ph.D, the Ph.D. wins by default almost irrespective of their argument. (Frustratingly, this is true even if they have a Ph.D. in a topically disparate field.) The Wizard of Oz Scarecrows are Blind Philosophers without bias. They want to capture Ph.D status, as it would demonstrate to the world that they are intelligent, deserve respect, and are authoritative. Such students are usually identifiable by their participatory habits in seminar. They inject tangential opinions into almost every discussion, much to the (usually) silent frustrations of their peers – and occasionally their professors. The Mental Archivists The Mental Archivists view higher education as a process of textbook consumption. They are driven by the belief that, if they have more facts than everyone else, then they will be the masters of their field. They don’t recognize that research is the practice of balancing a set of facts, not merely archiving them. (Hello, Hari Seldon!) The Mental Archivist is easily identifiable by their work preferences. When given an assignment requiring extensive regurgitation, they are elated; when given a loosely circumscribed project, they angrily vocalize frustrations to everyone who will listen, dismissing the exercise as a waste of time. The Genuinely Passionate but Overconfident The Genuinely Passionate but Overconfident student recognizes that unguided and loosely circumscribed exploration tethered to firm foundations – with an emphasis on critical analysis – is far more powerful than passive consumption. The colloquialism of quality over quantity is apropos. They want the status of a Ph.D. not as a bully pulpit but as a key to otherwise unlocked doors. They can guard their erudition from their ego, teasing out and correcting their own obfuscating biases. They are so passionate about what they study that they are usually or, at least previously, autodidactic. Unfortunately, they are often overconfident, especially when conflating what they are capable of doing given unlimited time and what they are capable of doing given time limitations. The Genuinely Passionate but Overconfident student wants to change their field NOW. To quote the great Philosopher Adam Duritz, “(they) keep thinking tomorrow is coming today, so (they) are endlessly waiting.” I am a member of this group, so I am perhaps not the best at identifying which characteristics are most visible. I think people recognize that there is a wide gulf – practically a chasm if I may be either arrogant or self-flagellating – between my capabilities and accomplishments. I set myself up to fail by perpetually extending my reach beyond my grasp. The Proper Apprentices The Proper Apprentices “get it.” They are capable of making and testing isolated inferences from information absorbed en masse while maintaining a skeptical position. They have desires to produce a Great Work but act with deliberation born of discipline, carefully reaching towards only what can be grasped. A Ph.D provides them with the opportunity to conduct research indefinitely; to them the influence and authority conferred is only incidental. Like the Wizard of Oz Scarecrow, the proper apprentice is identifiable by participatory habits. He asks questions out of genuine curiosity with deference to the time limitations of a seminar; he voices his opinion if he believes an mistake has been made, not to derive self-satisfaction, but only to make sure the discussion doesn’t take an infertile detour. I’ve only identified one person in my program thus far who is a Proper Apprentice; that’s a pretty limited sample.

Intellectual Circadian Rhythms

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 17:27:00 +0000

Recently, I've taken to writing at different times of the day. I've noticed my writing style changes considerably, without conscious effort. I think this is a case of biology, not learned behavior, and, as such, it's exploitable. When I write in the morning, my prose is tight. I dislike excess and trim a lot; I prune flowery language and consciously focus on precision; I judge each statement for its truthfulness and assign it a value; I try to be Orwell, relegating my desire to be Milton for less "serious" work. When I write at night, I'm more creative and "artsy." Nighttime writing isn't even about being correct. It's about exploring new ideas, with almost no care for whether or not even I believe them to be true. Somehow, judgement is suspended without effort -- I role play. Without judgement, I'd be groping in the dark; without role play, I'd adhere too much to my intellectual comfort zone. I don't think it's possible to engage in both modes of thinking simultaneously; to some degree, I think they are mutually exclusive. However, alternatively working in the day and working in the night could be valuable, as the combination is complementary and has emergent properties -- the whole is greater than the sum. The morning right-brain can do the concrete work; the nighttime left brain can do the heavy lifting of connecting previously disparate ideas. Balance is important. (P.S. This might partially explain paper writing in college, which was typically done the night before, with general frustration. While doing so 12 hours from the due date might have been procrastination, working at night might have been an unconscious optimization.)

On Fiction

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:07:36 +0000

Yesterday, in a leisurely scotch drinking session at my neighbors house, the conversation shifted to recent reads. Both husband and wife are avid readers, the former exclusively non-fiction, the latter mostly fiction. I asked him why he only read non-fiction, and he suggested that fiction was a waste of his time -- he read to learn, not for "mere" entertainment. I used to think this way; I no longer do. If anything, my time spent reading fiction now exceeds time spent reading non-fiction. (Although, admittedly, I read less non-fiction now because in certain areas, I have achieved a semblance of expertise. Consequently, experimentation dominates my learning method.) Obviously, fiction can inspire. Reading a good book with a plot that is relatable is not only entertaining, but often is motivating. Granting motivation, fiction can be a useful productivity tool. However, more importantly, fiction guides your personality. In the process of identifying with characters, fiction moves from a passive medium to an active one. You actively speculate as to what you would do in an identical situation and compare it against the character's actions. The comparison is a process of judgement; it's supervised learning, with a dead tree as the teacher. Fiction allows you to be part of situations that are unlikely to happen otherwise. You can experience thousands of years worth of events by reading fiction. Yes, it is true that what happens to you in real-life -- with it's finality and incompariably richer stimulation -- out-weighs that of a book. However, the course altering moments in life are infrequent. Fiction provides a means of accelerating your "personal growth." What follows is a list of characters that have become integrated as part of my self. I am not a summation of them; I have pieced together certain traits from them. Most of which were selected because I already had such a quality; many of which were selected because I found them admirable. (The later being more important.) Yes, my family, friends, and experiences have contributed more to who I am, but the following contributions were not negligible. I am Morpheus. I am Drago. I am Lord Finkle-McGraw. I am Hardin. I am Francisco; I am Galt; I am Rearden. I am Roark. I am Wynand. I am Will Parry; I am Lord Asreil. I am Ender. I am Gray. I am Guy Montag. I am Mustapha Mond. I am Simon. I am Winston Smith. I am Bruce Wayne. I am Adrian Veidt; I am the Comedian. I am the product of my parents, my friends, my life, my experiences...and my teachers.

My new blog

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:09:09 +0000

I just started a Chordoma blog with the first post titled, A Plea to the Chordoma Community. If you follow this blog because of my occasional Chordoma related posts, you will want to follow this new one instead.

I May Be A Complete Failure

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:00:22 +0000

I have spent the better part of my intellectually conscious life trying to algorithmically "beat the market." (To be precise, I started around age seventeen; I am now twenty-five.) According to some very well-tested academic theories regarding markets, I am persuing a fool's-dream. I have continued to labor this long under the assumption that there is a pretty obvious selection problem when it comes to publishing findings that contradict financial orthodoxy: if you were to find a method that earned out-sized returns, I don't believe academic prestige trumps monetary gains. It is my perception that people who end up as professors of finance are typically people who had the desire to study markets in order to profit from them, but who never found their holy grail. If they had found something spectacular, I don't think the incentive to publish is very high. (There are exceptions, but nothing ground-breaking.) After eight years, I have nothing concrete to show for my efforts. As a consequence of shifting needs, I have learned a lot of computer science (e.g. compiler design, algorithms, and some unnecessarily high number of languages). Obviously, this skill set is valuable, but I have no successful projects to use as credentials. Every few months, I find myself excited over the preliminary results of my increasingly sophisticated simulations, only to be disappointed a few short weeks later to find that I was simply wrong. This has happened so many times that I no longer grow excited when I see positive results -- I've grown into a hardened, semi-depersonalized skeptic. My latest iteration of development appears exceptionally promising, but I expect it to bear no fruits. I learn each time, and my understanding of markets (and complex systems in general) is approaching some level of refinement, but I have no way of estimating when I might cross the line into profitability; worse I may be approaching this level asymptotically, with my limitations acting as a ceiling just below my goal. I feel like a modern day Tantalus. I recognize that "beating the market" algorithmically may be either impossible or simply out of my reach, but I soldier on because I still find it fascinating. I believe that, had I switched course years ago, writing off the project as foolish, I would have probably, or at least possibly, been wealthy by other means by now. (Every time I started pursuing a product development project, I found myself shifting back towards market soon after the initial new project euphoria had faded.) If I could offer advise to my younger self, prior to perusing this path, I'd probably say don't make the attempt. I have neither ethical nor moral objections to profiting by speculation. I merely believe I could have acquired the satisfaction that comes from achievement a long time ago, instead of bearing the frustration that accompanies not achieving something in spite of my best efforts. Nonetheless, I will not stop trying. I'm not blind to the possibility that I am a smart fool, but I want this more than anything else. I'm not sure where I would draw the line, where I would finally say giving up is the proper thing to do. I hope I never have to make that decision. I hope success finally obliterates the need for that decision. I'm not sure why I wrote this. To some degree, it might be a warning notice to those who are considering following this path. As I said, I find markets fascinating, but most people (my earlier self included) enter the fray believing it to be a sure and short path to riches; it's not. There are far less risky paths to wealth, especially for entrepreneurial programmers.

Sending Binary Data with the Juno Framework

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 18:51:23 +0000

Juno is a small Python framework similar to the Ruby Sinatra Framework. I needed a very simple way to look at a large set of png files in a specific way across a number of computers, so I opted to use Juno. It took me about twenty minutes to figure out how to send binary data dynamically. (That is, how to send image data via decorated function, not through Juno's static directory convention.) The following works, although it might not be the Juno developers preferred method.

def your_request_handler(web):
    content_type('image/png')
    append(string_of_binary_data)

It's obviously simple but for me, it wasn't obvious.

Apple Owns Your Harddrive

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:21:57 +0000

My first generation MacBook Air has been performing progressively worse over the past year. I had assumed it was just a consequence of software cruft, so I thought nothing of it. Then, last week, git commits started taking several minutes for small Django apps. It was time to fix the problem. Not wanting to be bothered, I did a simple OSX reinstall. (Although, since the Air has no optical drive, it was a bit bothersome; for some reason, the Air refused to communicate with my Desktop.) Upon resinstall, I was quickly disappointed. The problem was not corrected. That annoying little beachball kept on spinning for practically every task. This suggested harddrive, so I took a look in the logs. S.M.A.R.T. was indicating imminent hard disk failure. (I really have no clue why no glaring alert was generated; I assume S.M.A.R.T. indicated the same thing a year ago -- when I was under warranty -- but I never checked the logs. Unfortunately, by reinstalling OSX, I lost access to historical logs.) After perusing a few articles online suggesting replacing a first gen Air drive is very unpleasant, I just decided to bite the bullet and go to the Apple Store. I went without an appointment, only because I was ignorant of their reservation policy. (Kudos to Apple on reservations; it's a smart idea.) I was forced to wait around at the mall for an hour until a slot opened up. After learning the mall had no bookstore -- a fact that made the snob in me feel angry -- I turned to skimming HackerNews. (HackerNews is to geeks what Facebook is to non-geeks -- somewhere to go when your bored and want stimulation.) Coincidentally, a blog post about hard drive replacements at Apple happened to be one of the front page stories for the day. This was fortunate, because it warned me that Apple would not allow me to keep my hard disk before having to deal with the genius bar "genius"; it spread my anger out over several quiet minutes instead of one loud minute. Thank you for making me appear like a decent person, HackerNews. So basically, after deleting all my files and writing a quick python script to fill the hard drive with random numbers, I finally got to talk with my genius. (When you have a failing drive, filling it with random garbage is a painful operation to watch.) I must admit, Apple hires or trains employees very well. He was calm, funny, and generally charismatic. After I told him I want to keep my drive, he clearly explained Apple's policy: they refurbish the drives and use "government standard encryption" to prevent data theft. By "government standard," I assume they mean they overwrite the drive about a bajillion times past the point (one overwrite) where data could reasonably be expected to be recovered. I assume his answer is considered satisfactory for most users, but I was unhappy. I'm not paranoid enough to think my single-pass overwrite was going to make me vulnerable, but it's still my drive. Furthermore, for drives that have not been overwritten, the eventual buyer is not the point of vulnerability -- the many hands the drive passes through before being fixed are the dangerous ones. If the user requests their drive, not giving it to them is a bad policy. Later on I realized that there is something more troubling about this policy. Apple, a consumer product company, is profiting on the failure of their own products. That's pretty uncool. The replacement cost on my invoice was listed at $139.06 with an additional $85.00 in labor (HARDWARE REPAIR-LEVEL 1). By comparison, a new Toshiba MK8009GAH 80GB internal 1.8" ATA-100 4200 rpm drive costs $114.85. Considering the cost of the very similar Toshiba drive, I don't believe they were replacing my bad drive with a refurbished drive. (If they were, that would be especially ugly.) I assume they sell the refurbished drives as part of a refurbished MacBook Air, not as an individual component. Regardless, if the cost of a new drive plus shipping and less the profit from selling my drive refurbished is less than $139.06, Apple is earning money off product failure (i.e. shipping < refurbished profit). I'm angry. Update: A commenter on HackerNews asked why I didn't just go to a non-apple service center. The truthful answer is because I am lazy. Nonetheless, it appears like the policy is set by apple and is universal amongst non-apple service centers. From MacService:

The old drive (working or not) is returned to Apple. If you wish to keep your original drive, Apple charges a significant core charge.

P.S. I'd be curious to see some hardware failure rate comparisons on Apple products. It's my opinion that they produce bad hardware, but no one cares because most Apple consumers buy the latest version of whatever product Job's slings out.

Email Yourself via HTTP-GET

Fri, 14 May 2010 13:57:56 +0000

I am hoping to use Google AppEngine on a non-profit open-source project. To help me get familiar with AppEngine, I made a very small, simple webapp that sends a short message to any signed up users when they make a HTTP-GET request to their assigned URL. It's useful if you have a very long running simulation or compilation that you would like to walk away from but be notified when it completes (or errs.) Assuming the email address used for your Google Account is also the one used on your smart phone, it basically mimics SMS without the headache. The message should be shorter than 78 characters. Anything longer will be truncated. The message will be the email subject. To (feebly) prevent a quota DoS attack, each account is limited to 100 messages a day. P.S. I learned only minutes ago that AppEngine apps cannot receive email from custom domain addresses, a feature I think my non-profit app will require. FAIL!

Hacker News Members' Workplaces

Wed, 05 May 2010 10:55:00 +0000

There are a few other forum websites I hang out at where there are occasional "you show me your's and I'll show you mine" threads for workplace environments.

Just post a url to an image of your workspace. Instead of clicking each image url, this page parses the HN thread and generates a cached (via one minute cron job) html page. I modified Tim Morgan's HackerNews ruby gem for the parsing.

I'm turning the cron Job off once the story becomes unpopular.

The source story post can be found at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1312998

chime said:

I'm definitely in the minority running Windows (x64). Here's a video of my rig: http://www.vimeo.com/9954310

Picture:

* LCD1: Communication (chat/im, email)

* LCD2: Test browsers (IE, FF, Opera, Safari), Photo Editor

* LCD3: Main browser (Chrome)

* LCD4: Text Editor (EmEditor), SFTP

* LCD5: Media (music, video, audio controls)

I'm about twice as more productive on this setup than on my laptop.

revorad said:

How do you deal with so many screens? Doesn't your neck hurt?

chime said:

Not really. I sit back about 3 feet and my chair's pretty comfortable.

revorad said:

I find it hard to imagine how you can comfortably type on the left-most screen with the keyboard in the center. To keep your arms parallel to your head you must have to move the keyboard and mouse according to the screen you are looking at.

It doesn't sound like the most ergonomic setup, but it must work for you since you say you're twice as productive!

chime said:

> To keep your arms parallel to your head

I don't do that. My arms/mouse/keyboard face the center LCD and I type/click without looking down. I turn my head slightly if needed but mostly it's enough to just turn my eyes. Like I said, sitting back helps.

SandB0x said:

You must be getting quite a tan!

Do you not feel the need for a marker board of some kind though? As in, what if you need to sketch something out?

chime said:

I use paper and pen. This is my home office so it's just me.

jrockway said:

There's a cheaper way to get a tiling window manager on Windows: bug.n

http://www.autohotkey.net./~joten/

chime said:

I've used WMs. It's not the same. Moving the mouse cursor is pain-free and fast. And the ability to compare the layout in different browsers visually is a big plus. I save the html/css, hit refresh and see the web-page in 4 different browsers. Now I can instantly see if any of them have weird CSS issues.

jrockway said:

But you don't need multiple monitors for that. Just switch to the desktop that has the 4 web browsers on it.

A 30" monitor is bigger than 4 1024x768 monitors, remember.

(Why don't I like multiple monitors? They take up too much space, and it's very hard to get one monitor adjusted to be comfortable... much less 5 of them. And, pressing a key to switch to a new display is not much slower than glancing in another direction, unless you aren't planning on interacting with what you are looking at.)

barrkel said:

There's no comparison between multiple desktops and multiple monitors, IMO. A 30" monitor is smaller than 2x 24" monitors (close to what I use, 24" and 22").

jrockway said:

I have two 24" monitors at work and one at home. At work, I use XP. At home I use Linux/Xmonad. Xmonad on one monitor is vastly preferable to Windows on two monitors.

Even a 9" monitor is good enough with Xmonad.

Maybe you need two monitors if you are not an Xmonad/keyboard power user... but otherwise, two monitors just gets you extra neck strain.

barrkel said:

I already have a system for arranging windows, but it's not based on tiling. My secondary monitor is for cascaded windows, such that the bottom-left corner of every window is aligned along a diagonal line. This makes window switching a spatial experience. As to keyboard power user, I generally exclusively use the keyboard when I'm using an IDE, terminal, email, Google reader, etc., but use mouse for documentation, web browsing, etc.

Two monitors comes into its own when you need to see more information on the screen at once. In my IDE as it is, when e.g. debugging, I have loads of tiled information displays, between the source, disassembly, CPU and FPU registers, CPU stack, memory, symbolic call stack, watches, locals, loaded modules, breakpoint list, thread list, log, project layout, etc. Fitting all that into 9" would be unreasonable; add in the actual running program in a terminal window, and scanning logs of previous runs in less, and it's hard to get by without two screens.

WesleyJohnson said:

When you first switched to a vertical orientation on your screens, did it take long to get used to? I loathe line-wrapping in my IDE, so I would imagine I'd prefer wider over taller, but then I loathe scrolling almost as much so maybe I'll have to try it someday. :)

chime said:

Yes, it took some time to get used to. And it changed the way I code. I try to keep my line-width to under 80 chars now. My code works the same way but it looks different and I think, better/cleaner.

nkh said:

What monitor stand/stands are you using for this?

chime said:

Samsung 22" (2243). No stands. The monitors can pivot. I got them from newegg for about $189 each. It's a pretty good deal for under $1k in cost. The resolution isn't bad, though if I had $2k to spare, I'd have bought 5 of 2443s (24") at 2560x1600.

chasingsparks said:

What graphics card are you using to drive this?

chime said:

Three dual-DVI ATIs. Nothing too expensive really. My PC is three years old but does have quad-core dual CPUs and mirrored C: drive. So even with 20 open apps, I've never had any speed issues.

CoachRufus87 said:

left handed mouse user? 0_o

revital9 said:

Wow.

kksm19820117 said:

Left handed?

chime said:

Indeed. And I write funny so pen on the right is actually more helpful than pen on the left. I can only write if the paper is orthogonal to my body i.e. parallel to the keyboard. I make my left-arm parallel to the keyboard, which puts my fingers on the right-side of the keyboard, making it easy to pick up the pen placed on the right side.

kksm19820117 said:

I ask because I am confused; the mouse is on the left side of the keyboard, but the pen is on the right.

megaduck said:

We're currently bootstrapping, so I do work wherever I can grab power and wi-fi. Today it's a teahouse in downtown Santa Cruz:

zephjc said:

That looks nice - which teahouse? (I'm in SC too)

megaduck said:

Asana. It's a little noisy, but otherwise fantastic.

necubi said:

I really like their tea, and the atmosphere is very nice. Definitely recommended to any tea-lovers visiting Santa Cruz.

mixmax said:

I work from my boat, currently at anchor off the coast of Copenhagen right here: http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll...

An old IBM R40, some Philips monitor I got for free and a great view.

Pic of workspace:

chasingsparks said:

I have to confess some strong jealously. Maybe I have romanticized sailing too much, but if I had the money I believe I would live on a boat and code.

mixmax said:

It's just like any other dream - it has upsides and downsides. I wouldn't trade it for anything else though, and I can't imagine moving back into a small box in the middle of a crammed city. If you're a bit of a handyman and know what to look for it doesn't have to be that expensive. I've written half an e-book on how to find, buy and live on a boat. Hopefully I'll get the rest done this summer.

sumeeta said:

What kind of boat? Pictures would be nice.

mlLK said:

pg post your current work-space pwease.

EDIT: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614454

elliottkember said:

This was mine while I was back home in New Zealand.

huhtenberg said:

Background is nice, but it's kind of distracting :)

Gibbon said:

Nice! I'm moving to New Zealand in about six months.

mwilcox said:

Is that Omaha? Can't tell

elliottkember said:

Yes it is! Good eye :)

cloudhead said:

Here's mine:

look_lookatme said:

Is this Xmonad under OSX?

cloudhead said:

It is indeed!

ciniglio said:

Does it only work for your terminal windows or can you tile any window? Any details on how you set it up, I can't seem to find a lot of info about it.

wwortiz said:

You won't be able to use xmonad to manage normal OS X apps. X11 will just be another OS X application sitting in your dock that you can switch to. However, it is pretty easy to install a decent set of X11 apps. If you have MacPorts installed you can install the packages firefox-x11, rxvt-unicode, unclutter, and 'vim +gtk2' (the +gtk2 variant for PRIMARY/CLIPBOARD support) to get started.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_on_Ap...

cloudhead said:

Only X/console apps. I primarily use it for vim + zsh.

The easiest way to set it up is to download the Haskell Platform, then cabal install xmonad, and get urxvt through homebrew.

I have my dotfiles up if you want to have a look: github.com/cloudhead/dotfiles.git

ApolloRising said:

Would love more details on how you did this

jazzychad said:

I renovated a corner of my uncle's garage into an office for my startup. Started off with just a custom built linux box and a desk for webdev.

Since then I've added a MacMini, MBP, and iPad for doing iP([oa]d|hone) development (oh and some mountain dew).

jrockway said:

Necessary accessory: waste basket.

jazzychad said:

Not pictured: two wastebaskets and a giant recycling bin :)

jrockway said:

Well, then you need to get a desk ;)

WesleyJohnson said:

Like Chime, it would seem I'm in the minority as well running Windows Vista 64 on my home setup. I don't follow any sort of pattern on what goes on what display, it just all depends on what I'm doing at the moment. Currently, however, I've got Chrome in the center, communications (TweetDeck, Digsby) on the left and Visual Studio on the right. Behind those are just a couple more windows such as Notepad++, another copy of VS running for an alternate project and I'll usually have SQL Management Studio up as well and maybe iTunes unless I'm listening to Pandora.

The laptop is rarely used, but I'm working on a Chrome Extension that requires syncing via a website across computers so I broke it out for testing.

The rig is a couple of years old now, nothing really note worthy aside from maybe my system drive and data drive's each being in a mirror raid. Screens are all Hanns-G. I had 2 - 19's and a 21, but one of the 19's fried and I managed to find a used 21 on eBay to match my existing one (it's an older model) so I picked that up.

(picasa web)

anon124 said:

Not really a workspace, more like a work arrangement :-)

etravers said:

See how long that arrangement works. Be prepared to watch many "Elmo" videos! Enjoy your little blessing.

solutionyogi said:

Wow.

anon124 said:

Oh, so you noticed my Arduino board ? :D

chasingsparks said:

Mine is not impressive.

mdolon said:

What is impressive is working while sitting on an exercise ball!

chasingsparks said:

It's actually amazingly comfortable. Moreover, balancing requires you to sit erect, helping fight the second scourge of computer dorks -- bad posture. (The first being Carpal tunnel.)

mdolon said:

That's interesting. I might buy one just to try it out then, I hurt my lower back a couple of years ago and it never fully healed, and slouching on a leather chair all day doesn't seem to be helping..

(thanks for the inspiration)

chasingsparks said:

Let me know how it works out. I did it initially for similar reasons. A surgery I had years ago leads disk degeneration. Mine is not bad, but my back did hurt at the end of the day sometimes. Now it does not.

zephjc said:

I work from home, on my couch with a MBP. Not very exciting.

One of my assistants working at my workstation

pasbesoin said:

My requirements:

1) Quiet (but not isolated; 'Net and phone are adequate in this regard).

2) Clean (allergies).

3) Some natural light.

4) Ability to make basic ergonomic adjustments. Also the ability to get up and move around immediately and at will (helps my health, concentration, and to settle restlessness).

And, probably more in line with the question's expected responses:

5) Adequate (doesn't have to be exceptional) equipment and screen real estate.

Pretty simple. Yet I've found them ridiculously difficult to come by. People seem to really appreciate my work, yet they cannot seem to grasp the concept of allowing me these basic controls over my environment.

This is a primary motivation for my shifting to self-employment. Wish me luck.

EDIT: Currently, the home office has an L-shaped desk composed of two 6 ft x 2.5 ft segments with the height and angle of each segment independently adjustable. This provides plenty of workspace; I still find physical writing, printouts, and layout/organization of items useful in organizing my work and thoughts.

Windows on both sides, but now with the blinds closed due to a recent burglary :-( . Laptop with a separate keyboard. There was a second laptop, but it was ripped off. I don't have a particular need for a desktop; laptops have enough processing power, have effectively a built in UPS, and can travel with me. Short term, I'm substituting an older desktop for the stolen laptop. Some backup drives, printer, whatnot.

CFL desk lamp (soft white) and torchiere (daylight). Also a high intensity full spectrum "light box" angled to bounce off the white ceiling (otherwise, the LCD screens get washed out). The daylight / full spectrum bulbs do make a difference in perception. But they do not match the quality of and circadian synchronization provided by natural lighting.

e1ven said:

My workspace- 2 Ubuntu Machines, 1 Win7 Box, 1 WinXP box. Using Synergy+ to share a KB/mouse between them.

I'm really enjoying the vertical monitors- Most monitors are wide enough these days, so having a maximized browser doesn't really help, but two stacked full-width windows is really useful.

I prefer the multiple monitors to divide up tasks- I can have email on one machine, Terminal windows on another, Browser on a third, etc.

I think the iPad/iPhone model actually makes a lot of sense. It's quicker for me to turn my head slightly to look at a new monitor, then to minimize/restore other applications that I use frequently.

e1ven said:

This is my home-office.

A Mohawk and snoutnose, from SQ7.

Jingle Networks plastic phone I received on my first anniversary.

The mascot of my favorite news site.

And the badguy from the first Videogame I worked on.

icco said:

I really like the wallpaper on the left most vertical monitor, do you have a link to it?

kylec said:

Wow, nearly everyone works on a Mac. Any Linux/BSD users out there?

e1ven said:

Two Ubuntu desktops, one running XFCE, the other Fluxbox.

crocowhile said:

I used to have a MBP. After a few months of testing it out I gave it to my wife and gladly got her $200 netbook instead, on which I immediately installed Arch and felt like I could do something again. Ah, the freedom of customizing my OS!

_pius said:

I used to have a MBP. After a few months of testing it out I gave it to my wife and gladly got her $200 netbook instead, on which I immediately installed Arch and felt like I could do something again.

I don't understand this.

Ah, the freedom of customizing my OS!

This, I understand.

crocowhile said:

>I don't understand this.

It's just that I really disliked OSX windows manager and the finder; also I never liked the shared menubar location. Working with multiple applications has always been a pain in the neck for me. I loved the size and feeling of the multitouch pad but found it frustrating that it was hardly customizable (you even need third party app to do things as basic as third click emulation)

I never was a Mac person and I bought a MBP to give it/me a try. After a few months I was convinced I'll never be one.

ivenkys said:

Arch Linux + OpenBSD. So yes.

there said:

openbsd user here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1315021

jamesbritt said:

Not BSD, but:

Kubuntu laptop and desktop, and a Mac Mini if I have to do some Apple stuff.

Assorted VMware images for Vista and XP. Can boot th PC into Vista if a I really have to.

Gibbon said:

13" MBP with Arch and FreeBSD for webdev in VMWare.

Gibbon said:

Here it is:

look_lookatme said:

Just switched back to Linux after 6 years with a Mac. Running on an MBP for now though.

astine said:

There are quite a few of us: Arch, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Solaris.

dimarco said:

linux-only thinkpad.

jrockway said:

Regular: http://phodroid.com/10/05/kvhpyw

Basement: http://phodroid.com/10/04/x3x2c9

solutionyogi said:

Mine is similar to Chime, I have a 4 LCD setup. [Can't do 5 LCD setup because my table can't fit another LCD + my workstation can not take another display card!]

LCD 1: Browser

LCD 2 and 3: VMs for Development [VMWare supports multi monitor for the guest OS!]

LCD 4: 24" Widescreen LCD in landscape mode for movies and stuff. (I don't own a TV)

LCD 1, 2, 3 are Dell 2005FPW. They have an IPS Panel and you can rotate them in portrait or landscape mode. I hate the cheap LCDs available in market right now because they don't have an IPS Panel. [Tip: Search for 2005FPW on craigslist, sometimes you may find an awesome deal and trust me, they are way better than anything you can find in current market right now.] LCD 4 is Dell 2405FPW which is not IPS but because I only use it for multimedia, I don't mind it that much.

I run Windows 7 x64 and love it!

jackdawjack said:

The desk of a physics grad student... (coffee induced blurrycam)

brent said:

It appears you likely have neighbors working nearby. How do they feel about the Grados?

machrider said:

Anyone running a desk at standing level (or adjustable height for part time standing)? I've been curious about this lately after reading all the articles about sitting being bad for you.

oscarduignan said:

Yes, here's my poor-man's standing workspace:

I've found it works really well, it affords me lots more storage space, and (after the first week of working with it) has eliminated my lower back pain.

I recommend it to everyone, and you don't need any fancy ergonomic equipment to get started, just a bit of ingenuity. However if you do give it a go, keep in mind that the first week of standing can be pretty... tiring! And if you're adventurous (and have one to hand) you could even try using it with a treadmill.

there said:

my ikea jerker is at standing height. i stand or use an architect's stool.

my home office:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/4575283296/in/ph...

thaumaturgy said:

I built a workbench in my shop with some 4x4s and good quality plywood. It's standing height, has our data recovery setup on one half and engine rebuilding area on the other half.

It's a really nice change of pace to go out there and stand for bit.

elcron said:

I've tried it a few times out of necessity in robotics pits ( http://usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/ ). I've always found it enjoyable (except for the noise) , but I was normally doing quick changes. I think my max time was an hour and I didn't feel any noticeable pain/discomfort.

jrockway said:

To the left is my actual machine (running Emacs, of course). On the right is my dumb-client for reading my work email.

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/0DaO9w41sNJw8FVMbzVPWL9...

The speaker stands are Kleenex boxes. I keep thinking I'm going to get new speakers, but this works well enough.

WesleyJohnson said:

I'm a fan of all these white desks I've been seeing. I like the shiny sheen on this one, it kind of reminds me of Milk (the desk, not the excretion).

jrockway said:

It's an Ikea Bestå Burs. The only disadvantage is that it is not height-adjustable, and it needs a mousepad. (Actually, I like the mousepad, but I did feel strange buying one from Amazon. I was worried that they would throw in some five-and-a-quarter inch floppies, too.)

But otherwise, the long and narrow form factor keeps my room nice and open, but gives me enough room to use 2 computers at once. This is also my first desk with drawers, which keeps all the clutter out of sight. Recommended.

pieter said:

This crappy pic shows my workspace until a few days ago. We had a break-in this Thursday so I'm not sure what state it is in now..

e1ven said:

Very simplistic, but in a positive way. Looks like very little privacy, but enough to get the job done.

No personalization, though?

ashleyw said:

Nothing special:

I also have a big whiteboard behind me.

rhl said:

I'm very surprised that no one is standing up while working. I tried a couple times in the past, but never stuck with it. Prompted by an article I read this morning, I tried again this afternoon: http://bit.ly/dyBXft (my live reactions on Twitter).

It is a bit tiring, but it has an amazing way of focusing your mind.

Anyone here has done this on an extended period of time? How was your workspace structured?

Hates_ said:

Desk at Home:

Desk at Office:

Dylanfm said:

Here's my current desk:

Made it look weird as an HDR to get both inside and outside showing well enough.

It's a beaut spot, especially since there's a great left-hander visible through the window

philjackson said:

Here's an old pic of my home desk, the one in my office isn't too dissimilar:

jazzychad said:

What are you using as your "window" manager on the left monitor... screen/tmux?

philjackson said:

Screen.

jazzychad said:

nice. how are you getting the vertical split with screen?

philjackson said:

XMonad is actually managing the split there with emacs on the left and screen the right. There are Screen patches[1] for vertical split floating about but I don't use them.

1. http://fungi.yuggoth.org/vsp4s/

jgg said:

I've been meaning to try the Kinesis Advantage, how is it?

philjackson said:

Opps, missed this. Yea, it's very good. It turned out my left hand traveled one column over to the right too far, so I had to learn to type again. Still, well worth it.

jseliger said:

Good: http://jseliger.com/2009/07/20/kinesis-advantage/ .

yanilkr said:

my work space

http://anil-bkdsb.posterous.com/my-work-station-1

kristiandupont said:

Are you still happy with it? How long do you sit like that at a time?

yanilkr said:

I am very satisfied. So far, I sat for a maximum of 3 hrs at a stretch and its still comfortable. After 2 hours, my legs start getting cold, probably because the blood is not flowing there, after that I adjust the recline and it feels better.

askar_yu said:

I wonder if you're still satisfied after having read "Your Office Chair Is Killing You"... (looks like much inclined towards back)

yanilkr said:

I still find this lot better than sitting. The pressure on the back is horizontal. I read about workstations online and most of these here are reclined workstations.

http://weburbanist.com/2010/04/28/geeky-temptation-16-slick-...

so I hacked together a cheaper one.

It is still too early, I can post how I feel after couple of months.

SandB0x said:

£28 worktop and legs. £12 glass marker board/whiteboard. Both from Ikea. The silver thing is just a mini stereo, not a computer. Fruit, because I'm always hungry.

It's night time in London, apologies for the terrible grainy photo. There is a nice door to the garden just to the left (so I get lots of light and fresh air.)

andrewljohnson said:

Kind of an old pic, need to clean the monitors (and still do today)

dchest said:

Mine is simple:

Later this year I hope it'll look like this:

alanthonyc said:

Nice. Where are you moving?

dchest said:

Thanks! Moving to Montenegro.

jasonlbaptiste said:

Idea: site that lets people show off things they own/ setups. Girls would love it for fashion, guys with cars, geeks with comp setups,etc. Also shoe collectors.

tortilla said:

For desktops/offices: http://www.deskography.org/ http://wherewedowhatwedo.com/

Emore said:

IKEA desk.

MacBook.

Airport Extreme.

Mighty Mouse.

Steelpad.

Alessandro headphones.

Necessary Moleskine + rollerball pen.

Iomega UltraMax 1GB RAID.

Window for inspiration.

pcestrada said:

Looks like an ad from Apple. Nice.

ivenkys said:

That's me, running ArchLinux. This is in London in a co-working space in Shoreditch.

EDIT: I find 2 or at the maximum 3 screens to be optimum but i do keep a separate laptop for communication, browsing activities. When i need isolation I simply close my communication machine, the main "work" machine does not have IM,Email and has a very strict firewall.

iamcalledrob said:

If you don't mind me asking, where?

I'm looking into finding a london co-working space in the next few months.

ivenkys said:

Sure , its this - http://thetrampery.com/

My requirements were silence, natural light, space to walk as and when, 24 hours access and plenty of eateries near by.

This place seems to do the trick.

sshumaker said:

This is my work setup:

* Macbook Pro

* 24" Monitor (primary)

* Macbook LCD (terminal, skype)

* iPad 3G

* Kinesis keyboard

* Aeron chair

Not pictured: mini-refrigerator stocked with sugarfree redbull. :)

My home setup is nearly identical, except I have a 30" Dell monitor instead (which is actually a huge improvement).

m_eiman said:

A reflection: you people need to get better cameras and/or learn to use it properly! I'd have guessed that the average HN:er would have a decent camera… Apparently not!

ahlatimer said:

Mine -

I really need a bigger desk. I had to add an extension to it to be able to fit both speakers, and the monitors have to be rotated towards each other more than I like, but it works for now.

e1ven said:

Those are big speakers for that close to your face ;)

ahlatimer said:

They're supposed to be used as studio monitors. I don't have them set up appropriately for that, but they're higher quality than most computer speakers. With them at about half volume, the volume level on my iMac controls them pretty well.

kbob said:

Commissioned an artist friend to design and build the desk of hardwood and concrete.

Locke1689 said:

Here was mine over the summer . My workspace now isn't as spacious. My dorm room is, uh, a little messy...

deltaqueue said:

I just recently installed some spotlights on my home office desk--much better lighting than using a lamp on the other side of the room...

WesleyJohnson said:

I'm envious of the mousepad (of all things). I'm still chained to using one (using the desk surface just doesn't feel right to me), so I'd love to get a cheap, but decent oversized one.

deltaqueue said:

I bought this at Fry's a few years ago--it's called a Razer "Mantis", and although it's supposed to be sold for gaming I find it great for daily usage.

tomjh said:

Those look like Focal's Chorus series of speakers. Needless to say, I'm jealous.

deltaqueue said:

Good eye--806v bookshelfs. I picked mine up on Craigslist for half off, and would highly recommend anyone else to do the same. Listening to music is an entirely new experience in hi-fi (I'm new to this).

machrider said:

Looks a little different today, but not much.

lenni said:

We sure love our Macbook Pros!

gurraman said:

http://www.deskography.org/people/gs/desks/1/photos/1/

(pretty old photo, changed computers twice since -- currently using imac 27")

Edit: Added some text and URL to the actual photo.

kilian said:

My home office from a year ago (wow), it's a bit messier now and the Fujitsu laptop has since been replaced with a Macbook pro. Both my main pc and my laptop are running Ubuntu.

stanley said:

Pic:

Had to switch back to Windows 7 after Ubuntu 10.4 decided it no longer wants to work with my video cards. I guess that's what I get for buying new hardware.

* Monitors: 30" Dell, 21" Samsung and a 20.1" Dell vertical

* Keyboard: Kinesis Advantage Pro

* Chair: Herman Miller Embody

Not featured is the Dell Latitude e4300, which was the perfect buy for mobile productivity.

PS: Moving to an apt with a view at the end of the month. The painting just doesn't cut it.

e1ven said:

Very nice monitor setup. The 30" Dells are wonderful.

stanley said:

Absolutely. One large monitor easily beats multiple smaller ones.

_pius said:

How do you like the Embody?

stanley said:

Highly adjustable. Shifts pressure away from your spine which makes long workdays a lot more bearable. I owned the Aeron before, I like the Embody better. If you have the money, I would recommend it. I bought mine new through eBay.

oneplusone said:

Mine is pretty minimalistic. My main Windows 7 computer is used for design work while my MacBook is for coding.

tfh said:

nice. I have the same mouse/keyboard combination :)

kapitti said:

Images of my old home office, it's relocated and had some additional hardware since:

But it still features the belt:

e1ven said:

I love the belt! You should find a way to mount it. It's a very cool trophy, but when it's just sitting around it's too easy to look like clutter, rather than being a nifty and unexpected gift.

jseliger said:

Here's my old setup:

and my new one:

carbocation said:

At 7CC in Kendall Square today:

Should I have gone to 5CC and pretended I was at the Google office?

jlees said:

At Startup Weekend Bay Area. Not visible in photo: donuts, pizza, empty coffee and red bull containers, iPad, 80 other hackers.

jraines said:

Here's current one, 3 days after reconstructive knee surgery:

http://jraines.posterous.com/current-workspace-3-days-after-...

dimarco said:

bootstrapping in Austin, TX from my apartment.

natrius said:

Nice view. S 1st St?

dimarco said:

Good call.

symptic said:

Can almost see my building from there!

motters said:

My current desktop

mdolon said:

I give in:

Desktop runs: XP (90% of the time), Ubuntu and OS X (hackintosh from my retail Leopard disc)

15" Macbook Pro for travel and for making music

Desk also has a slide-out tray for keyboard & mouse

qq66 said:

Check out decluttered.com

necubi said:

My dorm-based workspace: http://cl.ly/gd8.

JangoSteve said:

These pictures are a little old from right after I first moved into my new office back in January. It's much more moved into and setup now.

My office is in an old brewery in Ann Arbor that was built in the 1960s, shut down during prohibition and then turned into an iron foundry, then shut down for pollution in the 1960s, then renovated into an office building in the 1970s.

http://twitpic.com/1kfsu0/full

And these are my homemade whiteboards (less than $40 total with a few materials from Home Depot) and my office-guitar.

http://twitpic.com/1kft4u/full

And this is the atrium right outside of my office.

http://twitpic.com/1kft6r/full

icco said:

This is mine from a little while ago:

Windows XP on right two monitors and Debian Testing on left monitor.

chrisrhee said:

I split my time between...

Home office:

ENTP office in downtown Portland:

* You could be in this photo. We're hiring ROR developers: http://hoth.entp.com/2010/3/23/we-re-hiring-2

1,000,000 coffee shops & hotels:

* Not pictured.

Itvweb said:

I've been looking for work tables just like those in your office. Where did you find them? Or if you made them, can you give quick rundown of the materials used?

imagetic said:

might give some context to the desks here at ENTP.

chrisrhee said:

Which office (Home or ENTP)?

lazyhacker said:

I'm interested in the home office desks.

chrisrhee said:

Desk with monitors: http://www.offi.com/products/tablesanddesks/D23060.php?p2c=2...

Black desk with laptop: http://www.dwr.com/product/workspace/sale/dordoni-worktop-ta...

The ENTP desks are definitely homemade: Building your own desk used to be your initiation.

yan said:

blurry photo of my simple workspace:

sharpemt said:

Sorry in advance for horrible photo quality...

Nice and messy right now - was working on an GPS(RC)-Car Arduino project. Monitors not turned on due to the cluttered work-surface. (primary machine is a 15" santa rosa mbp)

Couch-surfing setup with dell mini 10 (yes win7 - dual booting 10.04):

Finally - my setup last year (not sure why mtvU was on.. used the TV for gaming every so often:

benologist said:

This is my space:

No macs. Not even a decent camera phone lol.

grosales said:

This is my little "bunker":

I have white boards on both sides of the room, and a mono laser printer that does not appear in the picture.

keefe said:

Almost all my stuff except the laptop is in there... sony reader, notebook, monitors, logitech keyboards, wrist rests it's even got the wowbot running and my weight lifting gloves.

revital9 said:

A simple XP machine with the coolest vintage IBM clicky keyboard (circa 1987)

samh said:

I'm pretty happy with the desk setup. The one thing I would add is a helper to come and tidy it every few hours :)

e1ven said:

Do you use both machines? What's up on the wall?

samh said:

Yes I use both machines. I often use the one on the left for recording screencasts and for testing different configurations.

The wall has a bunch of project notes and motivational stuff

"There is 0 value is fear and anxiety" "Differentiate every day"

and my favorite

"The thoughts of others were light and fleeting, of lovers meeting or luck or fame, mine were of trouble and mine were steady, and I was ready when trouble came - Houseman".

tcdent said:

Landlord is selling my house, so I'll take advantage of the unusual cleanliness:

warwick said:

Here's mine:

lovskogen said:

At home:

At work:

e1ven said:

Your home office is stunningly clean. Does that help get work done, without distraction, or is it dull?

The work office, at least, has a few accouterments ;)

lovskogen said:

It's good for the mind with a clutter free desk :) Trying to make it so everywhere I work.

chewbranca said:

My home office:

der_ketzer said:

Laptop: dualboot Ubuntu/XP, Netbook: Windows 7 (with synergy) This is my normal setup (1): This is the setup from the desk at the room where I sleep (2):

I prefer the setup (1), I find everything is in harmony =) I use the netbook for school, mail, im, tweetdeck, and the laptop for coding, etc.

sharpemt said:

What is the background on that CRT in Full.jpg? :)

robryan said:

Thankfully I cleaned out the cans last night hiding my current lit survey due soon crazy caffeine addiction. Still running windows xp, nothing special.

thunk said:

nathanieljones said:

Office/Bedroom crossover:

I absolutely love the workspace, but I'm in great need of a larger monitor or three.

CoachRufus87 said:

the desk of a college student:

techsupporter said:

I love these sorts of threads. Without cleaning up, here's my desk at home while doing homework:

Need some sort of entertainment:

The helpful assistant, on break:

peteforde said:

If you're curious about what you're seeing, I've added Flickr notes on everything here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leftist/3413712214/

rah said:

http://twitter.com/hettinga/status/13275902872

Inside, outside, and the, heh... view.

Actually, my passport stamp says "employment prohibited", and I'm certainly not earning any money, so "workspace" may not be the proper word to use...

whereareyou said:

I saw this desk at a pottery barn and had a local guy in san diego build one for me in the green color - the one at pottery barn was brown. It turned about to be a lot cheaper too :)

The_Fox said:

Tools in this photo:

Homebrew PC with Windows 7, 20" and 17" Dell Ultrasharps

Lenovo R61

TI 83+

Leatherman

foenix said:

Working on a friend's website in Quebec. I also had to work dishes when things got really busy. The free food and free beer more than made up for it, though.

jasonneal said:

This is my home setup. Has everything I need.

revital9 said:

Ooooh, Pizza.

seanstickle said:

Books and a computer on a desk. All I need.

blahpro said:

Here’s mine from about 5 months ago:

bwr said:

Tihauan said:

lap desk plus lap top plus lap dog

vmmenon said:

Here's mine:

Fetishizing Programming Languages

Sat, 01 May 2010 17:16:19 +0000

Learning a new programming language is fun. Different languages take different approaches to solving problems -- they follow different paradigms. Learning a new language feels a lot like exploring, and I like exploring. Exposure to more than one language is a good thing. However, once you are familiar with the broad paradigms, there exists a danger of conflating learning new languages with learning new ways to solve problems. In my case I forgot that programming languages are tools. Learning new languages can be seen as acquiring new tools. Learning a set of very similar languages is of limited utility because your not actually gaining anything new. There is almost no marginal benefit. To make things less abstract, compare the promisculous language learner with a carpenter. Carpenters don't seem to suffer from the same error of judgement. There might be several brands of hammers offering slightly different features, but they all pound nails into wood. I still enjoy learning new languages, but I don't do so with such fervent desperation anymore. I've ceased my semi-conscious search for the best one. Instead, I finally realized my time is best spent studying algorithms, learning new programming techniques, and contributing to existing projects. This is much more rewarding than implementing the same software in twenty-three languages. P.S. This post is a follow up to Consumerism and Programming Polyglots. I wrote Consumerism and Programming Polyglots a while ago. When I reread it today, I was very dissatisfied. It hinted at what I wanted to say, but it was inarticulate -- mostly because I didn't understand what mistake I was making by learning languages promiscuously. I think I get it now. Six month from now, I'm sure I'll identify an entirely new aspect of my miseducation. P.P.S. I wrote the title down, remembering someone had said it to me once when critiquing another post, Back to PHP. I searched my email before publishing this post and discovered it was Zed Shaw. This was disheartening. It took me several months since my original post to come to a conclusion that was accurately summed up by his flippant response: "All this fetishizing of technology is kind of pointless."

An Insight into the mind of a former deviant

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:33:00 +0000

The title is scraped from the link text I used to describe an article I wrote in 2004, during my first semester of college. I think I did it to satisfy a creative writing class assignment, only it wasn't particularly creative since it was true. Reading it now, I take particular pleasure in the bits about "violently opposing" government intrusions into the internet. (I miss youthful indignation, self-righteousness, and the joys of masquerading as a rebel.) It is also poetic in a semi-tragic way that, within a few weeks after writing this and resolving to "make a lot of money while doing something truly worthwhile," I was diagnosed with cancer. It 's been nearly six years, but it looks like I might soon start making good on that promise. The following is copied verbatim from the internet archives of that article.

Understanding the spammer

By A Former Spammer As a spammer, I never gave much thought as to what I was actually doing. My world was filled with statistics describing my latest spam campaign and the zeros to be inscribed on my check. I did not consider the work I was doing to be damaging to anyone because as a spammer you do not see the human aspect of things. My average day would begin around 1:00pm. I would lazily wake up and stumble to my computer to determine what I had earned overnight. This startling effort on my part was followed by breakfast while watching the afternoon presentation of Law and Order and the occasional shower. Eventually, after my lethargy subsided, I would get to work. Contrary to the popular perception, spammers do work hard. My goal was to make money by deceiving internet service providers who have a bigger bankroll than I did. I had do be both clever and unethical. Luckily, I had every advantage. Receiving a few messages about enlarging your respective body parts is considered a far lesser evil than not delivering that message from your stockbroker about shorting AOL Time Warner. After coding for a few hours and trying a few minor changes on my messages, the message would eventually get through and I would exploit it until my computers would groan from exhaustion. After that, it would be time to reboot, load another mailing list, and spam some more. While the computers continued to churn out my utterly misleading messages, I had the delight of dealing with other spammers so I can keep propagating my unsolicited and generally useless product. At first glance, spammers seem to have an innate friendliness towards each other but it is completely superficial. You have to manage to get the resource you are seeking from someone who perceives you as a further source of cash. Spammers will mislead spammers just as the mislead the Send To recipient. There is no honor among thieves. Eventually, I would get my new mailing or proxy list and the whole process would start again. I had a routine and my bank account went up in cartoonist intervals. If it is not already apparent, this is quite a job of a seventeen year old to have. My friends were all slaving away at the local McDonalds while I was sitting in my air-conditioned bedroom eating grapes in my boxer shorts. They were making minimum wage, I was making thousands a week. Also something to keep in mind, I was a mediocre spammer. Understand, the majority of spammers enter the industry because it is so simple and for a decent programmer the entry cost is near zero. One of my first spam exploits utilized a popular web-based messaging service and twenty free http proxies resulting in $7,000 profit in a mere two weeks. What incentive did I have to stop? Well, I am nineteen now and I no longer spam but I can tell you I still had no real incentive to stop other than my maturation. I no longer want to make money; instead, I want to make a lot of money while doing something truly worthwhile. Something ethical. This is by no means a message of hope to the internet community. No one should be so ignorant to state the spam problem will just work its way out or reach some type of equilibrium. Spam will not go away until one important criterion is reached; reduce the profit margin made by spam. Government regulation is not the answer. The internet started as a great democracy and I will violently oppose any attempt to remove this system. This is important to keep in mind considering the recent legislations passed by the United States government. The internet community coupled with good programmers and willing consumers can prevail in the war on spam. Ironically, I am now fighting on the side of the white hats. Signing my name to something for the first time, John B Nelson

Getting Konqueror to Work with Facebook

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:28:00 +0000

Facebook redirects Konqueror to Facebook mobile; I assume it sees WebKit and thinks IPhone. Until facebook corrects the identification error, you can use Konqueror 's settings to fix the mistake. Navigate to http://www.facebook.com/facebook?ref=pf.¹ Go to Tools > Change Browser Identification > Safari > and click the highest non-IPhone version you see. (On my computer, this was 3.2.) Enjoy lightweight browsing.

The setting we are changing will be applied to a domain. Since you cant get to facebook.com otherwise, you visit this page so that the modification is applied correctly.

Why I Blog

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:12:48 +0000

Sometime last year, I had started maintaining email correspondence with a number of people from a diverse set of professions. Whenever I had an idea or a question that I was unable to fully flesh out or answer myself, I would find someone who was an "expert" on the topic and email them. Initially, I received replies, but they were terse. Courtesy dictated that they answer -- especially those at academic institutions -- but they felt no obligation to continue the conversation.¹ As time progressed, my messages became more finely crafted. My questions were more specific and the background material was assembled with more clarity. I learned to write better.² The act of writing diligently was in and of itself helpful, and writing with a critical reader in mind imposed diligence. I now offered value to the recipient, whereas before I was at best a nuisance. My ideas and alleged insights were at least well-formed, albeit not always novel. The recipients began to answer out of interest instead of obligation. The correspondence ceased to be one-sided -- now, I had conversations and debates. At the point when I started BCC'ing people, I realized it would simply be easier to continue in blog format. Instead of updating a few people with a follow up email, they could just revisit the post and look for edits or comments; instead of emailing the same group of people every time I had a new idea, they could just add me to their Google Reader. Like many nerds, I have attempted to create many blogs. (A small set, limited only by those I can recall instantly, includes: JustLikeJesse, ChasingSparks, jbn, and JohnBNelson.) Previously, I started blogging motivated by either AdSense or vanity -- I wanted either money or attention or both. My interest in blogging waned shortly after the ubiquitous "Hello, World!" post and immediately before I found anything interesting to say. This blog, PathDependent, is the only blog of mine that has not floundered after one week -- and it's the only one where money and fame were never motivators. Assuming I write reasonably well, my blog posts get attention. Attention by itself is useless at best while attention with comments is very valuable. There are limits to what I see in my own writing and thought processes. An idea may have such appeal to me that I completely ignore very relevant, seemingly tangential details -- or major mistakes. Commenters -- especially those that I do not know and thus have no requirement of politeness given anonymous commenting -- have become unit testers for my ideas. Without commenters -- private or public -- I would not maintain this blog. I blog because it helps me learn. Notes:

Looking back, many of the emails resembled a parent handling a child who persisted in recursive "but why?" conversations. I'm almost embarrased by some of the messages.
HackerNews is probably more responsible for improving my writing than anything else. Conversation threads with karma acts like a unit test framework for ideas expressed in English.
I am defining success in terms of how it helps me explore ideas. The metric I use to judge success is the number of email messages elicited by each post. I usually get a handful per-post now. While my traffic stats are beyond my expectations, traffic is valuable only insofar as it improves the odds of good feedback.

Who is missing from this disease?

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 20:05:15 +0000

Edit: Josh Sommer directed my attention toHow a Healthcare Company Can Accelerate Translation of Scientific Knowledge to Practice, which was mostly what I had in mind.

The mainstay of drug discovery is automated molecular screening, dose-escalating response curves, and clinical trials. It works, but it's painfully slow and expensive. Meanwhile, patients with both chronic and acute diseases are continually given drugs with known efficacy. This has been going on for a very long time. Certain cost conscious elements of the health care system -- health insurance companies -- keep detailed records of this information on a per-person basis. I called up my prescription benefits provider last week and they provided me a copy of my historical prescriptions without a problem. I assume this is true of most, if not all, providers. I think these data could be very valuable.

For instance, I have (although there is no evidence yet of recurrence) a rare disease called Chordoma. If a sample of the Chordoma population's drug histories were collected, certain inferences could potentially be drawn. Given known incidence rates for diseases, you have certain expectations. If you know 1:100 people taken should have had rheumatoid arthritis¹ but they are under-represented or missing, two things are possible²: people with Chordoma do not get rheumatoid arthritis, or people with rheumatoid arthritis take drugs that might incidentally treat Chordoma.

Does the sample of patients' drug histories conform with expectations? If not, why? Considering the cost of clinical trials, this seems like it might be a low-hanging fruit, especially for patient-led non-profit research/advocacy organizations. I recognize that a straight-forward pre-existing drugs regiments are unlikely to be curative, but they may hint at promising avenues of exploration. (For example, does the group taking a drug for RA seem to have slower disease progression.) Such hints might not be possible to derive from in vitro and animal models.

Note: I am neither a medical researcher nor a medical doctor. I am just a guy whose reach exceeds his grasp. I took a cursory glance at PubMed and asked around to a few researcher friends of mine to see if they knew of anyone who tried what I suggested. So far, I found no evidence that this has been attempted. If someone wants to correct me, please leave a comment. If you know someone who might be able to correct me, please forward them this blog post. Thanks.

1. Adjusted for Age, Ethnicity, Sex, etc.
2. Well, several things, but two relevant to my argument.

Intelligence is NOT Normally Distributed

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:11:05 +0000

At first glance, it seems as though a person's IQ would be a reasonable proxy for intelligence. The faculties tested – pattern matching, logic, spatial recognition, etc – are strong tools for grasping truths, relationships, facts, and meanings. However, viewing them as tools illuminates an important caveat: tools must be used, properly wielded, and maintained. Now, assume that the genes and biologically relevant environmental factors that are responsible for innate intellectual capacity are effectively independent. I am neither an expert in biology nor genetics, but this seems like a reasonable assumption (see note below). Elementary statistic will show that the distribution of the product (or sum) of n normally distributed variables is normally distributed. Hello, bell curve. However, it is one thing to assume the biological factors responsible for innate intellectual capacity are independent. It is an entirely different matter to assume that the non-biological factors of intelligence are dependent on neither the biological factors nor time, effort and accumulated knowledge! Employing reductio ad absurdum and the Einstein as the poster-child cliché: what would Einstein have been if he was isolated at birth with no social interactions or mental exercise offered? Again, I am not an expert psychologist, but I think it is reasonable to think that he would not have amounted to much -- and would probably have been insane. Without stimulation, your mind will atrophy. With a predominance of erroneous information feeding your mind, it becomes diseased (in the abstract sense.) Having strong biological machinery may be a necessary precondition for being “very smart," but it is certainly not a sufficient condition. I do not think I am conflating knowledge with intelligence. The ability to learn -- to grasp truths, relationships, facts, and meanings -- is conditioned upon an individuals existing knowledge. If things that are taken as given are erroneous, errors ensue. Errors have a tendency not only to accumulate unculled, but given intellectual path dependency, results in a higher probability of accepting more falsehoods as truths. As intelligence is conditional upon many factors chained together, it is more gamma than Gaussian. There are far more dumb people than polite company cares to admit; there are also very few very intelligent people. Conversely, intellectual giants do exist at the intersection of favorable enviroment, genetics, motivations, and opportunities. Feynman was not only smarter than I am now; he was smarter than I could potentially ever be. Note: Some prominent geneticists have suggested that intelligence may be geographically and racially dependent. These people are usually lambasted -- promptly. Even if this was found to be true, I don’t think the deviation between means would be large enough to matter. P.S. This post was not me saying IQ tests are useless. My IQ is big. Ladies, you’ll love it. P.P.S. I started writing this a while ago in response to a friends politically charged assertion, "Democrats are Smarter than Republicans." Initially, this was a private email response to him. However, I became more interested in the non-political part of my response (i.e. IQ is not normally distributed.) I made my politically-oriented part -- Democrats are Smarter Than Republicans --- into a seperate post in an attempt to maintain the integrity of my central thesis while lessing the probabilty of Goodwin's law asserting itself.

Hacking Women and the Delusion of the Ethical Pickup Artist

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:37:38 +0000

The self-declared 'Mystery' treats courtship as an interaction between a man and a finite automata, the woman. His eponymous method -- the Mystery Method in promotional materials and MM to its adherents -- essentially instructs adopters on how to crack a woman's instinctual suitable-mate, pattern matching machinery to elicit (false-) positives. The ad copy proclaims it to be a brilliant self-help book and it is often billed as a way for shy, nice guys to get girlfriends. Ostensibly it is -- in practice it's not. This book is not about getting girlfriends. It's about substituting sexual frustrations caused by lack of sex with sexual gluttony. If you are, or at least believe yourself to be, a good man, acquiring the tools to overcome your own social phobias and a woman's strong, evolutionarily-endowed defences is both self-improvement and mutually advantageous. Unfortunately, I doubt that this group dominates his readers. Instead, I assume the majority of his customers are men lured into reading his books because doing so offers the promise of getting laid by any attractive woman that falls under their gaze. (Even in Neil Strause's best-seller, The Game, some of the PUAs seemed border-line sociopathic.) The subtitle of the book is devoid the ethical girlfriend pretence: "How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed." The language used between the covers is more telling: women are (Hot Babe) HB7's, HB8's, HB9's, and HB10's. People buy it because they want to turn the fantasy world of pornography into their reality. I am not saying this book is without value. On the contrary, I find no fault in the efficacy of his methods in the context of cracking women nor do I think his ideas on "social dynamics" are erroneous. From an evolutionary perspective, his narrative is plausible, even probable. After years of what appears to be meticulous study, he impressively reverse-engineered women. Unfortunately, the few good, albeit shy, men admitted into his realm, if they are astute readers, are probably perverted by their education. The original goal of finding a girlfriend turns to an addiction of cracking women -- to "The Game." Mystery might counter that this is justified because it is natural. It is merely the product of evolution. If it wasn't his readers, it would be the guy who is naturally manipulative or happened to accidentally posses or learn social procedures that get him laid. However, something viewed as natural or an artifact of evolution (or history) is neither moral nor beyond morality. Society enforces certain protocols to correct some of our biological quirks and inadequacies. As Mystery says, "the human being is an out-dated model." Thankfully, our ability to share knowledge and socialize has supplemented our operating systems. Cracking our biological systems violates our socially constructed protocols. It is blatant manipulation. He admits his theories are based on a woman's evolutionary drive to find a man that ensures her survival, while in the next breath he explains how this can help you get between her legs. "Hacking" (i.e. in the colloquial sense that pisses off proper hackers) was cool at age 13; hacking is not cool at age 25 -- it's criminal. I find no fault in youthful promiscuity. Oscar Wilde could have written a novel about my college years. It was part of my development as a person and I have (almost) no regrets. However, I always had some recognition as to the vapid nature of what I was doing. Mystery and his pickup hucksters want to nullify that socialized feeling, feeling themselves justified by our selfish genes and tribal heritage. Do there techniques work? Sure, but at a heavy cost. Years later, you might finding yourself watching The Blue Lagoon on Starz at 3:00am, realizing that you haven't felt the feelings that the movie depicted -- intimacy with consequence -- since before "correcting" yourself. ...And you'll realize you made a mistake. P.S. I suppose it seems hypocritical of me to lambast Mystery and his cohorts. I have obviously read their material. However, I consider myself to be a hacker: I enjoy learning for the sake of learning. Whether it be an exposition on syntax-directed translation or pre-Raphaelite painters, I am curious. It could be correctly observed that understanding leads to, or is tangled with, exploration and exploration can lead to exploitation and corruption. I offer no counter-argument. In my case, I only hope that the temptation is attenuated due to previous experiences (i.e. college promiscuity) and increasing maturity. P.P.S. I should also point out that I think Mystery -- the media superstar of the pick-up artists -- actually seems like a good guy. Sadly, I think he may be condemning himself to the second circle of hell, figuratively speaking. I think he genuinely believes that he is helping shy but good men in his workshops. I just think his readers -- and best students -- are probably predominately horny assholes turned oversexed assholes. Adverse selection is a bitch.

Mortality and Dating

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:50:00 +0000

Warning: This is fantastically bad advice. I no longer agree with anything I wrote. You should pretty much not listen to me.

For most of my life, I have avoided dating and relationships. In high school, this was a consequence of my inability to play the necessary games. (Although, I attributed it to hopeless romanticism, the justification of choice for most awkward teenagers.) In college, I learned to play the games -- very well. However, I continued to not date. The adage, "why buy the cow if the milk is for free" applied. I enjoyed college. Towards the end of college, I started to think differently. I wanted to form relationships of the non-causual variety. Many people I know date merely to be in a relationship. They are not necessarily wild about their partner, they just prefer not to be alone. This doesn't interest me. In my case, I would date only if I found someone great. I think (very) highly of myself; I would have to think highly of the girl I would date as well. And that is just the beginning of the criteria. Physical attraction and emotional compatibility are not minor issues. Such girls are rare, but they have graced my path before. As mentioned previously on my blog, I had a rare type of cancer for which there is still no cure. I was treated surgically to remove the macro-tumor, but microscopic remnants undoubtedly remain and, after enough doubling, it will reassert a claim on my health. Things are not likely to end well. Given this, I arrived at my dating conundrum. If I was to find a girl that I respected; a girl that I was attracted to; a girl whose company I enjoyed; a girl that I wanted to invest my time and emotions in...what happens when I get sick again? I initiated steps to nullify the Chordoma threat, and others subsequently (greatly) exceeded my efforts, but as of right now, I think the probability of tragedy exceeds that of happily ever after. This introduces my paradox, my Catch-22. The purpose of dating such a girl as the one sketched above is to allow myself to be swept along the currents, hoping to arrive at a place of deep love. (I wasn't trying to be poetic; the preceding statement was as precise a summary on the progression of relationships as I could give.) If this point came -- if I grew to love her deeply -- I would want to protect her from harm and suffering. However, given Chordoma, her suffering would likely be a result of my sickness and death. Her suffering would be deeply emotional. Furthermore, as it is in a woman's best interest to find a man in her youth -- for obvious reasons -- it would continue to weigh on her for a long time. Ergo, the best way to protect my as of yet unidentified and pursued love, is to never pursue her. I realized this years ago but it is growing more difficult to maintain my restraint. For one, it's easy to not pursue women romantically when you are young, dumb, and...in college. I might have justified my Dorian Gray phase as a consequence of this realization, but truthfully it wasn't. I was enjoying myself in the way that a geek turned college man-whore would. Now, however, I am less interested in the simple pleasures (in isolation, at least.) Over the past year or so, I've started dating a few women, only to realize I was being selfish. I think I wanted the intimacy of a relationship, without the woman's investment. This was stupid because it's not a possibility. To a small degree, I'm writing this hoping that someone will point out an obvious flaw. I've thought of some, but they are weak. I assume people smarter than myself have offered similar arguments; I'd like to read them. However, for the most part, I wrote it to solidify my resolve and understanding. That's why I write most of my blog posts and accounts for my readership of about six people. In the meantime, I'll continue to do what I consider the rational course of action: try to fund a cure. P.S. I have previously discussed my dating catch-22 with other people who had/have Chordoma; it was not pleasant. Most are deeply offended so I no longer bring it up with them. If someone from that world happens to read this post and is offended or saddened, I'm sorry. It's not my intention.

Lessons Learned from Hot Girls

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:44:00 +0000

In high school, I managed to score a date with the lovely Jess Gore. She was far above me on the adolescent social ladder. I was the excessively introspective, semi-nerdy guy with hair that resembled hedgehog spikes (I wasn’t trying to be rebellious; I genuinely thought it looked good); She was the elegant (to the extent that you can be elegant as a teenager anyway), quietly rebellious girl without physical flaw (except for her ears which were perpetually red, but I found that oddly charming.) Being that I had very little "game" (that's being kind) back in high school, the entire matter was simply a consequence of a favorable situation. I was placed into a project group where she was one of the members. While working on the project, I got bored (as I am prone to do given a forced faux-intellectual venture) and suggested that we (the group) go grab food. Our other group partner was of the anal-retentive variety and opted to stay in the library to find other sources. (She deemed the suggested number of sources inadequate for our advanced 11th grade abilities.) Jess, who was apparently bored as well, chose to leave with me. Back then, I never thought about social situations; As I said, I was excessively introspective. So when she had me bring her home first so that she could change out of her group study attire and emerged wearing something that I would describe as datish (yes — I did just say datish), I was confused. As a consequence of my confusion, I grew progressively awkward as we moved through what I began to view as a date. (In retrospect, it definitely was a date. Or at least, I'd prefer to pretend it was.) This opportunity was unprecedented in my testosterone-dominated mind and I did not want to risk making a mistake. To prevent such a loss, I added (too many) judgemental filters to my behavior and my mind was not able to effectively cope with the stress. (It still is incapable of doing this but, thankfully, I have very few behavioral filters anymore.) Censoring your actions and behavior makes you look filled with self-doubt. Confidence is ridiculously sexy; Self-doubt is not. She clearly could see that I was not acting like myself. The social instincts of women are superior to men; We are insects by comparison. She grew visibly less interested. Thus, I missed what would have been a very large opportunity at the time. What is the point of this story? My mind has irrational artifacts. To this day, I am incredibly awkward around Jess, even though she does not in any way intimidate me. (I am for the most part socially arrogant; Almost no one intimidates me anymore.) This pattern also holds — albeit to a lesser degree — for other girls that I idolized in high school. It seems that my perceptions are layered; The old socially jittery version of myself still exists and somehow has pre-emptive rights to my actions. I can recognize when I am acting this way but, ironically, it requires effort to be myself! If this is true, than the layers bellow high school horny also play a role in my decisions. This is probably a convoluted way to think about fear and greed, but it helps me. I still cannot hold a five-minute conversation with Jess Gore because of some old irrational mental fragments. Therefore, I try to recognize that the attractiveness of a trade may be due a lot more to irrational (in the context of trading) mental processes than the brilliance (har har) of my analysis. ...I suppose I am still a bit excessively introspective.

About Me, by Me

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:13:00 +0000

I enjoy listening to Guster when riding the Amtrak; loud, quasi-obnoxious techno music while coding; and Counting Crows during bouts of causeless nostalgia. I think the political spectrum can be best understood as deviations from reasonability with the aggregate decisions of (American) liberals and conservatives -- considered separately -- being errors nearly equal in magnitude but opposite in direction. I sometimes label myself a libertarian because the other options are more offensive; I am not a libertarian. I enjoy reading compulsively because of an agreement with Sir Francis Bacon. There is no medium with higher bandwidth than a book for fiction or non-fiction. I get angry at people who get angry at people who say "the book was better than the movie." Movies are to written word what masturbation is to sex. In 2004, I was diagnosed with and treated for a very rare form of cancer called Chordoma. It was not pleasant. Shortly after my surgery, I established a non-profit entity — the Chordoma Research Foundation — with the sole purpose of finding a cure. This organization was eventually superseded by the subsequently formed Chordoma Foundation. I will soon (late January 2011) be releasing a web application that helps them and other rare disease organizations function better. There is currently no cure although there is finally active research. I have been a computer hacker since fifth grade. I bought my first stock around the same time. I have been doing financial research and modeling since tenth grade. I suppose this was inevitable given my two passions: toying with complex systems and programming. My research has yielded some interesting results and I am currently trading based on the outcome of one specific experiment I am a graduate (2007) of the University of Maryland, Robert H. Smith School of Business. Although I enjoyed the college experience, I think an undergraduate education is less than useless. I am currently in grad school, enrolled in George Mason University's Computational Social Sciences program. It is far from useless. I rock. I would rock more if I was dating ~~Milla Jovovich~~ ~~Natalie Portman~~ Summer Glau. Someone please get on that; long live River Tam!

Nigerian Scam with a Haitian Context and a Dash of Medical Sympathy

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:27:29 +0000

I just read the following from my gmail inbox. It's probably one of the most offensive scam messages I have seen in a while. --- Dear Beloved, Please treat this mail with utmost sympathy and the fear of God. i write this mail with tears and sorrow; I am not asking for self pity, but love to my only surviving son. This mail may seem very painful and sorrowful, but there is more you can do in my request than to pity me, which is to show LOVE to my son. I am the only issue of my dead parents, i am 54 years of age. My name is Mrs. Cynthia Rice, married to the late James Rice, who died with our two daughters in Haiti on 13th of January 2010 during the Haiti Earthquake, Please go to website:http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/13/haiti.updates/index.html,Since after this painful and sorrowful incident, my illness, Pericaditis (inflammation of the tissue layers surrounding the heart) and Uremia (kidney failure) aggravated which resulted to heart failure.I was ignored by my friends due to my present health predicament. Presently, my only means of communicating with people around me is through body language and writing as instructed by the medical specialist. I, my husband and our children have been in United Kingdom for a long time due to my medical treatment. My husband and 2 kids decided to travel to Haiti on 29th December 2009 for a 2 weeks end of year vacation, but my doctor did not permit me to travel with them, which made I and my son to stay behind while my husband and our two daughters traveled. If not, all of us would have perished in the disaster. The reason i write this mail is due to my deteriorating ill health. After my last diagnosis result, it was reported by the doctors that I may not live for more than one month ahead, due to the damage this ill health have caused in my system unless I undergo an urgent surgical heart and kidney transplant which my chance of survival is less than 10% according to the medical experts. As it stands, I have given to fate and have found God on my sick bed. But I have a more pressing problem, which is why I have to Contact you. Please, this is about my son, his name is Jeffrey. Since it is now obvious that I will die, my son's future have been the greatest problem I have. I want you to take care of my son please. He is only 10years old and we have no one here to take care of him if I die today.My friends deserted me a long time due to my health condition . My Husband left some money (About US$8.5Million) in a deposit house at United Kingdom at Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which we have been using for my medical treatment. I am the next of kin / Beneficiary but according to the prediction of the doctors, if i pass on, I will want you to use the balance of this money to take very good care of my son as i would have done if i am alive and build a business empire which my son Jeffrey will inherit 50% of the investment on his 25th birthday. I will like you to take Jeffrey as your own son, give him the love we the parents would have given him. Do not let him feel the pains of being an orphan, give him good education, bring him up into a responsible man. Make him have the fear of God. Please do not refuse this task for I have no one else to help me out on this issue. As soon as I receive your reply and personal details, that is: (1) YOUR FULL NAME (2) RESIDENTIAL ADDRESS (3) AGE (4) SEX Consenting to my proposition, I will authorize my bank to transfer the money to your account directly and I will also draw up my WILL in your favor indicating that 50% of the dividends and profits made from the future investment with this money will be handed over to my only son Jeffrey on his 25th birthday. This will be made with the assistance of my late husband's attorney. You do not have to pay any fees to the Attorney for that I will take care of. Also, I will give the bank all the documents that are covering the deposit with the bank, I will transfer every power and right of ownership to you stating at my Will to enable you claim the deposit from the bank. It will be also included in the Will that you are the only person my son should be released to, if i die. All I need is your acceptance and assurance that you will not treat my son badly. I am writing you this mail with great tears and I pray you will be kind & honest with the fear of God concerning this mail to you today. Please reply this mail immediately if you have the love and care of God to: mrscynthia.rice@hotmail.com Thank you. Mrs. Cynthia Rice All about my only son Jeffrey

Caffeine is a drug

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:22:34 +0000

Coffee is delicious and caffeine is a wonder drug. On a mild day, I drink three cups. (Mild days are not a consequence of self-control. Like myself, my roommate works from home and he is also a voracious consumer of caffeinated substances. Mild days are the product of him consuming caffeine faster than me and me being to lazy to put on a new pot.) On a typical day, I drink five cups. On a severe day, I drink an unknown amount; after seven or eight I'm not a good beverage accountant. I like coffee. However, I am currently in the middle of a peak in coffee consumption and a valley in productivity. It is not a new relationship to me nor to most people. Caffeine is a boon to my productivity during boring aspects of a project. Without caffeine, the boring elements induce stress, frustration, and a desire to watch Big Bang Theory. With caffeine and a bit of Di.FM, I can glide through boring jobs that would typically be filled with much friction. Unfortunately, once safely outside of the badlands, I continue to drink coffee -- I need my mana. Even though the new focus of my attention is interesting -- or, at least, challenging -- I instinctually cling to caffeine. My brain, with it's absurd insistence of linearity and cause and effect, thinks that caffeine acts not only as a floor to my productivity but is a multiplier. Sadly, this process spirals out of control. Positive feedback without a dampening force is not great. After using caffeine to pleasantly power through a dull zone, then play in an interesting zone, I eventually land back in a dull zone...only this time the caffeine is functionally useless. At this point, my tolerance has been elevated by unnecessarily prolonged exposure and that pumped up feeling associated with short bouts of high-usage is not their to save me. Taking more doesn't provide this feeling. In fact, at higher levels it just gets me more flustered and, ironically, causes me to be tired. I watch Big Bang Theory. The solution is very obvious: keep caffeine consumption low during the interesting bits and raise it when my interest is flagging. The goal is to maintain a steady-state of productivity; the goal is to reduce volatility; the goal is to avoid the crash. Productivity crashes are not paid for by productivity booms. Note: I write things down and make them public to solidify my ideas and enforce a modicum of quality. This post will probably not be read. It merely states the obvious in an non-novel way. (Then again, things that state things that are both obvious and non-original have been getting attention lately.) Regardless, it's a lesson that needs to be reinforced in my mind. So what if most people who can dress themselves never needed to be taught something they considered obvious. P.S. I not only misspelled every occurance of the word caffeine in this article, but I did so with no less than four variations. Stellar.

John Gast, American Progress

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:23:20 +0000

While shopping for Christmas gifts, I came accross a book that had John Gast's, American Progress, on the cover. It's a brilliant painting of Manifest Destiny. I enjoy propaganda. [caption id="attachment_412" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="John Gast - American Progress"][/caption]

JSON as a Universal DB Model DSL

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:21:36 +0000

I write web applications rarely and reluctantly. I am not the most qualified to initiate a project based on the following ideas. If I did, it would likely fall into a state of disrepair once my ephemeral attention has shifted back to playing with stock prices. However, I think it is a good idea. I am hoping someone who has both the time and interest codes it up. This is a new level of lazy.

var user_model = [
    // column name , generalized type,   , validation rule,   hidden?
    ['first_name'  , 'text'              , 'name_regex'              ],
    ['last_name'   , 'text'              , 'name_regex'              ],
    ['middle_name' , 'text'              , 'name_regex'              ],
    ['birth_date'  , 'date'              , 'over_18'                 ],
    ['location'    , ['double','double'] , undefined,        ,   true],
    ['addresses',  , 'has_many'          ,                           ]
];

Basically, from a Rails perspective, replace your ruby database migration DSL with code that parses the above JSON (e.g. user_model.json) and creates the appropriate schema. Replace your ActiveRecord validations with the validations from the json model. (Depending on your language, there may be differences in REGEX syntax. Having some well defined common REGEX definitions, such as EMAIL_VALIDATION, might be appropriate.) On the client side, you can display most forms automagically, based on the order defined in the json model (if it is in fact an array.) Furthermore, you can also run client side validations before submission. (If your validations are so weak that sharing them remotely represents a security risk, you are probably doing something wrong.) It might also remove the need for many controllers. A lot of CRUD is simply operations on some very simple tables. Having a single /:model/:action/* controller is DRY if the all do the same thing. Scaffolding is not DRY. Finally, as the lingua franca, sharing model definitions outside your project's language is simplified.

Any takers?

A Math Lesson for Nancy Pelosi

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:16:44 +0000

Nancy Pelosi is now an vocal exponent of H.R. 4191, the “Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Act of 2009." (This makes me pine for Orwellian naming templates. If they titled this bill, "The Freedom and Security for the American Financial System Act," at least I could delude myself into thinking that its true purpose was obfuscated to the average nightly news watcher, rather than being an unmistakable deference to mob opinion.) The following is a reasonably accurate summary of the bill:

The U.S. Government's fiscal situation is FUBAR. For foreseeable and unforeseeable reasons, the deficit is now a leviathan. For the sake of expediency, it is best to go with the tried-and-true Democratic narrative that places all of the blame squarely on the shoulders of the evil Wall Street fat cats. (This narrative is mostly a pastiche of Scrooge McDuck. The government has an odd tendency to use cartoon ducks to sway popular opinion.) Since Main Street's unemployment has persisted while Wall Street's profits have returned, the best course of action is to use fervid populist opinion, to take money from the ostensibly stable and wealthy Wall Street firms and redistribute it to the unstable industries that would obviously be irreparably damaged if not for the infusion of money.

Since the political actors are perennial fans of war analogies, I'll make one of my own: H.R. 4191 is similar to a situation in which there are 5 wounded soldiers and one unharmed soldier left on a battlefield. Upon reviewing the situation, the feckless medic who has just entered the fray realizes that these soldiers will need blood transfusions. The medic proceeds to shoot the unharmed shoulder in the thigh, allowing the blood to messily drain into a pan to be given to his comrades. This is hyperbole; it is also not far from the truth. Irrespective of the fact that the Wall Street firms are far from healthy -- they may be making large profits but they are still exposed to some terrific risks -- a cursory glance at the numbers using basic arithmetic, would suggest that Wall Street is not likely to be the one bearing the costs of such a tax raise. (Basic arithmetic is probably above the botox battered brain of Nancy Pelosi.) I am not talking about the pedestrian argument that suggests the tax would be passed on to consumers. I am referring to a more damning flaw: no market maker could pay this tax. Take, for example, the 25 basis point tax on plain old stock transactions. Looking at Yahoo Finance right now, I see the bid-ask on SPY is 111.20/111.21. Market makers looking to make a few pennies on every transaction might have difficulty staying in the black with a 25 basis point tax per transaction. (I was unable to ascertain whether the tax is levied once per side or once per round-trip; For a conservative estimate, I'll assume it is only levied once per round-trip). This would mean the market maker could only profit on swings of at least 28 cents if he was hoping to avoid bankruptcy. (Ironically, some of the proponents of this bill were touting it as a structural method of reducing volatility! They argue that with a tax, there are incentives to hold positions longer. That may be true for marginal day traders. However, market makers would have to significantly widen spreads in order to survive. Wide spreads translate into higher volatility.) Since market makers are integral elements of markets, it seems likely that they would be exempt from this tax. While the tea-party crowd loves to shout that the "Progressives" are socialist wolves in sheep's garb who are looking for any and every way to demolish capitalism, I'm not so conspiracy-minded. Progressive Congressmen and Congresswomen would be forced to exempt market makers in order to maintain market integrity. At which point the absurdity of the bill comes into sharp focus: the bill that would force Wall Street to "contribute" to the economic recovery would...EXEMPT WALL STREET?! P.S. I appologize for the discordant feel to this post. I am a bit peeved by this bill and could not proceed stoically. I have spent the past 9 years of my life learning about markets so that I could be a competitive trader. This bill would render 9 years of sacrifice (lower grades in college; no traditional forms of employment to build my credentials; less time with friends and family) wasted for arbitrary reasons. I suppose this is true for most congressional edicts.

Fund-raising is done wrong

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:44:48 +0000

Soliciting small donations is called fund-raising. It involves straight-forward requests, bake sales, pay-per-mile jogs, and beef-steak dinners. It is not glamorous. Soliciting large donations is called development¹. It is glamorous. It involves managing relationships (see: SalesForce, Convio, Kintera.) People who work in development are ostensibly paid a premium because they either have or are capable of building a network of high net-worth contacts from which funding can be extracted. The more general the cause they advocate for, the more important they become. Most not-for-profits favor development over the solicitation of small donations. This preference was probably justified in the past but now exists as a historical artifact -- a philanthropic appendix.² The cost of building and maintaining a motivated army of constituents was much higher twenty years ago than it is now. However, with the advent of internet-based communications, it can now be practically free in terms of time and money. This preference may now persist due to certain cognitive biases. It may appear as though finding one large donation is more likely than finding N small donations of equal aggregate value. For small highly-focused organizations, I believe this nearly ubiquitous preference is sub-optimal. The constituent beneficiaries also have networks of contacts: their friends and family. The relationships between the constituents and their friends and family are likely to be far stronger than anything a development professional could build. I have been impressed by the generosity of my own family and friends in supporting my cause. I was also impressed by the initial strong push made by the Chordoma community in general after I offered them a fund-raising tool. Unfortunately, the initial success of community fund-raising was soon marred by swift appearance of fund-raising fatigue. Ignoring the poor quality of the first implementation, I completely missed a very important feature set: feedback. I believe that novelty combined the promise of proactivity resulted in a strong drive at first. However, after funds had been collected, there was a post-endeavor funk. Money had been raised, but there was no obvious coincident progress made on the non-monetary front. (Such an expectation is not rational nor was it encouraged, but I assume it was a quietly held assumption nonetheless.) I believe feedback mechanisms could alleviate this problem in the same way that repetition in marketing leads to consumer interest. Early on it was decided that coaching mechanisms -- nagging reminders, occasional notifications of non-monetary progress, and reports on historical donors that have not given recently -- would be beneficial. Unfortunately, life intervened and I never implemented those features. This is unfortunate as I subsequently concluded that such mechanisms are crucial. (I think MoveOn.org's email campaigns are a paragon of good feedback mechanisms in fund-raising. Ignoring the accompanying inane commentary, they are brutally effective.) I should also note that in favoring beneficiary empowerment, the organization does not preclude the possibility of receiving large donations. Again, exploiting the social connections of your constituents gives you a far deeper social reach than that offered by development professionals. For causes that affect people randomly across socio-economic parameters, you're going to find some potentially wealthy individuals. The constituents are engaging in the search for wealthy donors at no expense, in time or money, to the organization. If they tease out a potential large donor, why should they then be referred to a development professional? The potential donors interest is already piqued. Now they need to be convinced that their money will not be given in vain. They need to be sold on the efficacy of the organization. The development professional could (and basically does) play this role. However, since it has already been established that the donor is a strong lead, this role could also be played by someone intimately involved in the actual decision making of the organization. Obviously, I have made a lot of assumptions in asserting the superiority to community-style fund-raising over top-down development work. Some of these assumptions are known to me, but I am probably ignorant of others. I encourage the reader to leave comments to help guide me while building Fundify, which will act as a test of my fund-raising hypothesis.³ Expect to see an alpha with active deployment sometime in late December / early January. Notes:

I strongly dislike the term development in this context, but it's part of the industry nomenclature. In the non-profit world, development means a combination of marketing and one-on-one salesmanship.
Medical g33ks: I understand this might not be strictly true. Please refrain from commenting that this not a perfect analogy.
Actually, Fundify is being built to raise money for Chordoma research, a rare type of cancer. I have Chordoma. I would like to not have to worry about Chordoma. That being said, focusing on testing my hypothesis is a better motivational tactic. Intellectual curiosity is a robust motivator; Terror inspired by mortality is a persistent drain.

Chase Giving Challange

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:35:09 +0000

Please visit my page, share it on facebook and twitter and your blog, and vote for my org. Chordoma Sucks

John William Waterhouse Makes Stellar Art

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:29:48 +0000

I was not productive today. I spent most of my day Google Imaging paintings. I started realizing that most of my time was spent tracking down painting of beautiful, mythological women. Apparently, this guy John William Waterhouse made that his niche. There is a website that deals exclusively in John Waterhouse prints. I cant afford that, so I just printed out about 40 paintings that I found via Google Images. [caption id="attachment_335" align="alignnone" width="341" caption="Pandora and her Box"][/caption]

Google Unobscures Munged Email Addresses

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:25:41 +0000

I was trying to find an email address of someone so I did a Google search for [his name] + email. A page in in the SERPs showed his email address naked. I clicked it to confirm the context of the address. The actual content was a munged email address. This is a test to see if/how Google unmunges email addresses. spam at gmail spam at gmail dot com spam [at] gmail [dot] com Edit: Nope. Apparently, this translation does not happen. They just must have changed the page.

CUDA for Financial Modeling

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:46:20 +0000

Kudos to NVidia for CUDA; It’s fast — really fast. CUDA allows you to harness the parrellel power of a CUDA capable GPU for (semi-) general computation. The result? Hundreds of cores running your binomial option pricing models, Monte-Carlo simulations, or Black-Scholes computations. I started learning CUDA yesterday; I wrote my first simple CUDA program today. The library does have a non-negligible learning curve, but it is not steep. It largely is a matter of learning the most efficient ways to work with CUDA (e.g. shared, local, or constant memory). Happily, this is an incremental process; You can learn to write bad yet working CUDA applications while slowly learn to write them better; And, as a bonus, even your bad code is likely to run laps around your CPU (for finance apps anyway). I am currently writing a Poker hand simulator (to compare to the OpenHoldem’s speed) but, once I am comfortable with the library, I will be porting my c++ option pricing algorithm. With CUDA, my algorithm will now be (closer to) real-time! P.S. I bought the GForce 9600GSO which was only $99 at Best Buy; This low-end NVidia card achieved the following results for the binomialOptions.exe sample included in the SDK:

Using single precision...
Using device 0: GeForce 9600 GSO
Generating input data...
Running GPU binomial tree...
Options count            : 512
Time steps               : 2048
binomialOptionsGPU() time: 92.526009 msec
Options per second       : 5533.579236
Running CPU binomial tree...
Comparing the results...
GPU binomial vs. Black-Scholes
L1 norm: 1.484960E-004
CPU binomial vs. Black-Scholes
L1 norm: 1.045247E-004
CPU binomial vs. GPU binomial
L1 norm: 4.464579E-005
TEST PASSED
Shutting down...

Not bad, Eh?

Money Isn't Everything

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:16:00 +0000

Notice: I am a die-hard capitalist and a quasi-libertarian. This is not a post from some "proto-typical non-conformist with a vaguely leftist doctrine of beliefs." This was written by a guy who enjoys Ayn Rand. In freshman year of high school, I made a lot of money spamming. Some of this success can be attributed to being lucky and being a teenage boy. Teenage boys basically have an option on life. If they do something really risky and it pays off, they get the rewards. If they do something really risky and it ends very badly -- well, boys will be boys. It's a pleasant asymmetry (for the teenage boy.) However, a significant portion of my success as a spammer can be attributed to a simple fact: writing a spammer was very interesting. It was challenging. It was a perpetual game of cat and mouse. Money was more of a collateral benefit than a primary motivation. Majorska vodka is not expensive. Immediately after college, I had a minor existential crisis. This is not uncommon. College was great. College afforded me a ridiculous amount of free time to pursue my intellectual interests. This is not because college was rigorous; this was because college was not rigorous. I learn best independently. Going to college on my parent’s dime allowed me to spend practically all my time playing in areas that I found fascinating. The conclusion of my undergraduate career brought with it the termination of my favored learning style. I was not happy. In order to reacquire my intellectual freedom, I did what any irrational, over-confident fool would do: I tried starting an online dating website. I wanted enough money so that I could sit in front of my computer and in my reading chair for a few years. I wanted to continue exploring. Writing an online dating website was not interesting. It was not challenging. It was not a game. My motivations were purely monetary. It was a project for cash -- a means to an end. The result? It did not solve any of my problems. When I finally realized that the project was a bad idea, I sold it for about $35,000 on nine months of work. Considering the project's purpose: FAIL! Presently, I will be undertaking yet another web development project titled Fundify. My motivations for Fundify are not financial (at least, not in the typical sense.) This project must be done and I am capable of doing it. The reward for me: it may help save my life. This is a (perhaps too) strong motivation. Since I have not yet left my job (another week probably), I have not been coding it yet; I dislike the after 9-5 job context switching. Instead, I have been planning the project to a degree that is unusual for me. Running a project Monte-Carlo simulator in my head for two weeks is a new experience. My initial instinct was to release Fundify as an open-source application. It is a product for empowering the fund-raising arm of small-medium size non-profit organizations -- specifically a small non-profit that has the potential to greatly benefit me. (I really like me.) An open-source project seemed like a particularly good fit. However, the simulator that is my brain was quick to point out that charging a nominal fee for hosting and maintaining this product would be just as beneficial to the non-profit organizations as an open-source product...while making me money. Finding a developer to install the software, set up an SSL certificate, and create a merchant account all take time. The goal of Fundify is to minimize time spent fund-raising by non-profit organizations. They have better things to do. Paying, say, $50 a month might actually be cheaper than spending time finding a volunteer developer. Given this conclusion, I started to enumerate all of the responsibilities associated with running a business around this product. My motivation depleted -- quickly. This is roughly the time I finally learned my lesson: money isn't everything. If I were to build a business around Fundify, the set of mundane tasks would (significantly) overwhelm the set of interesting problems to solve. For me, costs({Legal Issues, Client Obligations, Heightened Security Concerns, Banking Issues}) > benefits({Money Earned, Testing my Fund-raising Hypothesis, Raising Funds for My Cause}). I'd rather burn through my savings building Fundify while dealing with the interesting bits than earn money for my labors while adding mundane responsibilities. Money isn't everything. (I wonder what else my mother was right about.) To be clear, I still want a bank-vault sized pile of money but I have accurately recognized why I want it. I don’t really care about a big house and a fancy car. I might someday; I don’t right now. My cramped apartment is sufficient. What I really want is the financial freedom to sit in a quiet room by myself and explore my ideas. Money provides this opportunity more than an academic career. The latter still imposes constraints that I am unwilling to bear. Maybe it’s a symptom of Peter Pan syndrome. (Although, if it is, I am sure it is very common amongst g33ks.) I prefer to think that being unconstrained can allow for long jumps versus incremental improvements while searching for novel solutions to problems I find interesting. An equally plausible explanation: I just would prefer having no responsibility. That does sound like Peter Pan syndrome.

Perpetual Motion, Hacking, and the Contemporary Philospher's Stone

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:38:42 +0000

Perpetual Motion At age thirteen, I invented a perpetual motion device. Obviously, I was a genius. Recognizing the magnitude of my discovery, I decided to patent the machine in order to capture the associated rewards. Years of groping through Popular Science magazine -- it was my pre-pubescent version of pornography -- meant I knew where to find patent lawyers: pages -1 through page -5. Excitedly, I called the patent attorney that seemed to be the most affordable. I confidently declared that I had invented a perpetual motion machine and required a patent. The attorney did not seem impressed. Apparently, I was not the first person to try and patent a perpetual motion device. In hindsight, I am willing to bet that patent attorneys who advertise with Popular Science magazine are continuously flooded with similar claims. After signaling irritation that was detectable even to a thirteen year old, she informed me that she would send the requisite forms but could not proceed without a fully functional prototype to submit as evidence. Apparently, this guy named Newton did not think perpetual motion was possible, so the patent office was not very liberal in awarding patents for such inventions (anymore). I proceeded immediately. First, I spent my accumulated birthday money on magnets from Edmund's Scientific. Next, I used K'NEX to build the scaffolding for a ring of magnets that would surround the central magnetic rotor. When the magnets arrived, I hastily lashed them to my plastic toys and and let 'er rip. The magnet slowly swung around before settling in at the weakest point of the rings magnetic field. Frustrated, I retrenched and thought about what had gone wrong. I was able to deduce that the magnetic fields of the independent magnets become part of a system when joined with the other magnets. They would not independently push the rotor -- it didn't work like that. However, committed to my brilliance, I thought of various ways to work around the problem such as using the momentum of half-filled water canisters to overcome the "humps". Obviously, I did not overturn the laws of the universe. My idea may have been naive, but I learned a lot about systems while enjoying the exhilaration of experimentation. This experience may have had a major impact on my life. Hacking When I was young (before my attempt at overturning the laws of the universe), I asked my father to help me learn how to program. Since these were the days of DOS and Norton Commander, QBasic was to be my playground. Although I learned basic programming logic, I did not progress far enough to be capable of implementing a Gorrillas clone. Sadly, given my age, I enjoyed the instantaneous rewards associated with sports more than the personal satisfaction offered by solving problems with computers. My growth as a programmer was arrested. Then came the movie Hacker's. Hacker's resurrected my interest in programming. Hacker's -- with the help of a young Angelina Jolie -- gave programming sex appeal. It became my ambition to become 'Cereal Killer' (seriously, Zero Cool/Crash Override was boring). This happened to be the same era of AOL 'proggies' and ICQ. For about six months, a friend and I ran a site called The Digital Underground that was a AOL themed repository while also releasing our own 133t apps. We were cool. We knew it. That lasted for at most nine months. That is roughly the intellectual half-life of VB, even to a young programmer. I left that world behind and ventured out to C, C++, and Python. Using better tools, I made applications that were reasonably complex and much more rewarding: spam-bots. Now, I was a h4x0r. Around freshman year of high school, I was making 1-2k a week working after school. This was when I started hating school. Partially because my after-school work was much more intellectually challenging and mostly because I was making "bank". Fortunately, my career in spam was not to be. After a little more than a year, my parents had caught on -- they did not approve. This shifted my efforts to a more worthwhile and exponentially more challenging arena: markets. The Contemporary Philosopher's Stone I think reading Matt Ridley's, The Origins of Virtue, in 9th grade seeded my intellectual development (thanks, Mr. Ridley). I became fasinated with complex systems like Conway's Game of Life, Rule 30, ants, and Axelrod. Nothing was more interesting to me than Cellular Automata, ANN's, PSO, and genetic algorithms. Soon, I realized there was a potentially practical application. With spamming out of the way, I now combined all my interests: programming, complex systems, and trying to do the supposedly impossible. I set out to beat the market. This is not a huge leap from my past projects. There are strong parallels between perpetual motion and trying to overcome the efficient market hypothesis. And, just like with past projects, my efforts led to procuring new tools. At various stages in the past eight years (I am still pursuing this path), I have become proficient or better in ASM x86, C, C++, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Erlang, PHP (front-end), Pascal, and Haskell. I have reproduced many popular financial models while trying to understand and improve them. This was all far more rigorous than that I was being exposed to in school (undergrad) at the time. This brings me to now. I have spent the past 8 years trying to come up with an algorithm that finds pockets of profitability in a cloud of probable randomness. This has given me what I believe is a powerful understanding of complex systems. Complex systems modeled on computers have become my contemporary Legos -- and, I want to play all day long. In all likelihood, I will not make a breakthrough discovery. The fog that is my ambition may be obscuring reality. I am exploring an alternate area of the landscape of solutions. I may be hill-climbing a local unexplored minima -- but hold out because of the potential for maxima. However, f*ck it. I want to spend my time doing what I enjoy most.

Obama Can Sell Anything!

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:15:19 +0000

[caption id="attachment_277" align="alignnone" width="266" caption="Obama is Marketable"][/caption] I saw this ad while browsing Facebook. I am both very

Preface to Fundify, or F*ck Chordoma

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:02:30 +0000

In 2004, I was diagnosed with a very rare type of cancer. Following my surgery and an extended period of reading the academic literature on the disease, it became obvious that I was not cured. Worse than that, there was little active research that had the potential to cure, or at least manage, Chordoma. Being an insufferable libertarian, I opted to start a 501(c)(3) organization, The Chordoma Research Foundation, with the sole purpose of aggregating funds and awarding grants to researchers. At the time, (as a result of well-hidden bug,) I believed I would soon have access to a lot of money. Consequently, I formed the Chordoma Research Foundation as a funnel through which I could increase my donor potential (i.e. receive tax deductions.) I was largely uninterested in developing a proper full-fledged not-for-profit effort. I understood how research worked; the need for interdisciplinary facilitation; and the importance of starting projects sooner rather than later. I just wasn’t motivated. If my big payday came, I could buy research. Money opens doors. If I could spend my time doing what I had a passion for while being able to pay for research myself, it would have been ideal. My big payday did not come (and has not come – yet.) Happily, pure dumb luck intervened. My parents, fueled by desperation coupled with a bit of good old fashioned common sense, decided to send a letter to our family and friends explaining our compelling need for research. The concise version: please give us money so our son has a chance of not dying before his thirtieth birthday. It raised tens of thousands of dollars – quickly. Inspired by the success of this campaign, I envisioned a web-app that could replicate this success across many people affected by Chordoma. Unfortunately, it was a pretty uninteresting project. Web development is not intellectually stimulating. My potential big payday project was (enjoyably) intellectually exhausting. The brief inspiration and motivation I experienced after my parent’s campaign was insufficient. Instead of building my web application, I only designed a simple website explaining the cause to other people with Chordoma. Serendipity intervened -- again. By this point, my small website for a very rare disease was receiving about three phone calls per day – a not insignificant amount. Initially, this produced mostly friendships (shout out to Bill Dorland, Michael Torrey, and a collection of other friends who do not have URL end-points.) Soon, it yielded more tangible rewards. One day in August, while stuck in traffic heading to a Counting Crows concert, Simone Sommer called me. Her son, Josh, had gone through roughly the same experience as me and she also found the current state of research to be unacceptable. She wanted to be involved. To be precise Dr. Simone Sommer – a credential that, shockingly, opens doors in the medical community – wanted to be very involved. Over the next few months and after many extended phone calls with both Josh and Simone, it became clear that they were willing to do all the things I knew had to be done but was uninterested in doing. More than that, Simone’s M.D. and Josh’s proximity to Duke – which housed one of the few researchers who was making headway into Chodoma research – meant they could do it better than I could. I (happily) passed the torch to them while I pursued my big payday (which is still, as of 2009, yet to arrive). They established the Chordoma Foundation. I dissolved my foundation and folded my assets into theirs. For a while, I played a minimal ongoing role in Chordoma community. I continued to speak with a lot of patients, but only because I had already established relationships with them. I continued to follow papers on Chordoma – and discuss them at length with Josh – but that was mostly to satisfy my perpetual curiosity. (I am a if the plane is about to crash, I want to be in the cockpit type guy.) My father sits on the Chordoma Foundation’s board. I do not. My mother coordinates community outreach. I do not. However, late last fall, it became clear that they had reached the point at which money was the primary bottleneck. Earlier, the Chordoma Foundation had hosted a fantastically successful international, inter-disciplinary research conference. Cross-pollination of ideas occurred. Research was proposed…and, undertaken. Interest was piqued. Now, the low hanging fruits were gone. Now, there were calls for money. I was compelled to develop a prototype. Initially, it worked well, although I am not convinced it raised money above what would have been raised anyway. It did help by connecting many people to each other, acting as an ad-hoc, emergent support group. This might not have translated directly into money, but it obviously was beneficial to the community. Why didn’t it work as well as I expected? It was a sh*tty implementation! I hacked it together in four weeks in anticipation of the Thanksgiving fundraising season. We even launched it two days prior to Thanksgiving. It’s not really shocking that an idea only half-conceived was not fully-successful. Fundraising was not attributed in real-time; was not always accurate; and the feedback mechanisms employed were noisy. Additionally, one of the most important features, coaching (i.e. nudging) was never included. Unfortunately, disinterest asserted itself…again. I halted further development and took an internship in DC. Fundify was not yet to be. Fast forward one year – present day. I just quit my job in order to properly build Fundify. This time, I am motivated. The project has not become interesting. It merely ceased to be something I can push off any longer. All paths are now dependent on larger grants being awarded. Larger grants require money. Enter, Fundify. Stay tuned.

Starting an online dating website

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:03:17 +0000

(My experience with Tryst.com) Dollar Bills Ya’ll Markus Frind's free online dating website, Plenty Of Fish, earns around five million dollars a year in advertising revenue. Andrew Conru's FriendFinder Inc was recently bought by Penthouse for $500,000,000. SparkNetworks, of JDate and American Singles fame, is on the market in the $100,000,000 area. Obviously, I was attracted to the online dating industry because of the proven profit potential. People are willing to pay for online dating. Metcalf’s Law Unfortunately, I learned through failure that this profit is hard earned. Let's pretend that you have created an algorithm that is 100% efficient at matching people. In other words, if the algorithm matches you, it has mathematically found your soul mate. This is all well and good but you are still bound by geography. Clearly, if the algorithm matches a person in Guam to a person in Brooklyn it is of no value. Even the person who is completely dedicated to finding their supposed soul mate is not likely to travel more than 50 miles. On the other hand, let's say you don't claim to match users but only offer the ability to search by whatever criteria you find important. This is roughly what Markus Frind does. His website might not be flashy or use unnecessarily complicated math, but it has claim to a tremendous set of users. Additionally, with the exception of age, gender, sexuality, education, and appearance, most factors are going to be garbage in, garbage out. The important thing to note is that in both cases, match making and browsable profiles, the websites value is derived from the size of its user base. Metcalfe's Law is a bitch. While I, like many people, was attracted to online dating because of its proven profit potential, I misread the costs of entry. Programming, hosting, and bandwidth are all so negligible that they are not really relevant. The advertising dollars needed to reach a minimum level of geographical saturation are extremely high and often overlooked. In the beginning, given the low conversion rate resulting from a low saturation, you are not going to feed AdWords and earn a profit. In other words, my mistake was the oft repeated one of under-capitalization. Unless you have a brilliant idea combined with a bit of luck or say, a couple hundred thousand dollars in burnable cash, an online dating venture is unlikely to succeed. A History of My Projects (learn from my mistakes) Version 1 The first version of Tryst was targeted to American users with no part of the site externally visible – as in viewable without login – except for the tour and signup page. The concept was to have a Craigslist style dating network where users posted “Trysts” (dates they want to go on). There was no free tour. The website converted terribly (read: no users). Clearly, if the user is going to pay for an online dating website, they expect a free tour because nearly every website offers one. No matter how good an offer may appear, there should be a free tour. Version 2 Realizing that the advertising costs needed to reach a decent saturation of users was going to be well beyond my budget, I set out on creating a free, advertising supported network that could be fed by search engine hits. Again, I was interested in creating an “I want to go on this date” oriented network, as it was at least, an underdeveloped area in the online dating industry. The search results did slowly advance but after two months I was only earning around $10.00 a day in advertising. Version 3 Discouraged by the slow growth of Tryst Version 2 and apprehensive about the possibility of a bubble in PPC advertising, I set out to create Tryst version 3. This version was also tried to create real world dates, but in a different way. Users would login and be presented with only online users that matched the gender, sexuality, and age group they were interested in. They could then send messages back and forth in an instant message / conversational way. This version was not free but did have a form of baiting. You could see the profiles of other members, but you could not message them unless you had a paying account. Free members could respond to messages sent by paying members, but they could not initiate the conversation. This version actually had a high visitor to free member rate (between 20 – 35%). Unfortunately, my estimates of the CPC costs for Google’s geographically targeted visitors were erroneous. I was assuming (using Google's estimator tool) a PPC rate of between 40 cents and 1 dollar. At this rate, I also assumed I could expect several hundred visitors per day, per city (also from the traffic estimator tool). In reality, targeting NYC costs a minimum of around $1 CPC and, more alarmingly, generated only a couple clicks a day. Tryst version 3, like versions 1 and two, could not work. Advice borne of failure

The barriers to entry in the only dating industry are, in fact, very high. You are in a race to acquire new users before your old users are discouraged. Until you reach a certain point of saturation, you are going to be burning advertising bucks.

Do not base your costs on one set of estimations. I used only AdWords's Traffic Estimator tool which severely underestimated the CPC and available traffic leaving no chance of success with my chosen business model.

Do you really want to make an online dating website? I really had no interest but was attracted by the low entry cost and proven profitability. I found both assumptions to be false and more importantly, because I wasn’t interested in solving any problems in online dating, had little continuing motivation.

If you do decide to start Yet Another Online Dating Website, be original! PlentyOfFish created a free network for online dating when the industry had none. EHarmony was one of the first networks to offer comprehensive matching (aka voodoo but still). I believe the future in online dating is going to be more real world date centric. Find ways (and funding) to get people out and dating with people they could potentially enjoy.

Going Back to PHP

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:34:38 +0000

I consider myself a programming polyglot. I am proficient in five to seven languages and am competent in many more. Consequently, like many programming polyglots, I am a bit of a snob. PHP programmers tend to be unilingual or bilingual (Javascript). They are unenlightened. If you asked the average PHP programmer to explain a closure, they would probably express bewilderment. Brutes! Like I said, I am a bit of a snob (and the preceding text was satirical...mostly). As is the case with much snobbery, this is ill-advised. Prior to PHP, I remember writing applications through CGI, mod_perl, or full-blow C extensions to Apache httpd. It was not very productive. Enter, PHP. From the beginning, PHP was designed as a template language to make web development easy. As such, additions to the language and its tool set were evaluated against a fitness function that emphasized ease of use and productivity for web development. At the time, it was the strongest solution to a problem of increasing prevalence. Fast forward a few years. I had been out of the web development scene completely when a bout of temporary insanity inspired me to attempt building an online dating site (thanks, Markus Frind). Since I used Ruby extensively for non-webdev, Rails was my obvious framework choice. Does Rails have advantages that cannot be replicated in PHP? Of course! The most glaring advantage of Rails over PHP is the fact that PHP is not Ruby. Ruby is lovely language. Seriously. Ruby allows you to think in code. It is incredibly productive. You can take very complex abstractions and implement them in Ruby with ease. However, web development is not very complex. Most web development is CRUD. Sure, Ruby might be slow (although 1.9 is looking nice) but most applications really do not require high performance. And when scalability does become an issue, Rails is rarely the bottleneck. Do I miss ruby gems? Sure, but Pear works. Moreover, integration with PHP is often easier than it is with rails. When was the last time you noticed that popular api or library lacked a PHP interface? Most sites release official PHP libraries (s3, ec2, facebook, gdata, ...) Conversely, PHP has one several advantages over Rails. Most notably, immediacy. Deployment via SCP is very satisfying. Moreover, PHP now has many rapid-development frameworks that employ MVC and active record patterns (e.g. CakePHP). While you don't have the elegant sexiness of Ruby, you have almost everything else. Do PHP programmers tend to be weak programmers who produce mediocre code? Maybe. If so, it can probably be attributed to the law of large numbers. There is a virtual army of PHP programmers; there are very few DHHs. For large-scale, very complex problems it may be better to use a language that naturally excludes poor to mediocre programmers, but this is not true for web development. Besides, there is no shortage of criticisms of the rails community. Finally, there is nothing to stop you from using PHP for the CRUD front-end and Ruby or some other language to do more complex heavy lifting (e.g. spidering, categorization, etc). It seems to have worked well for facebook.

echo "Hello, Old Friend";

UPDATE(OCT-27-2009 @ 1:39)

I mentioned below and repeated in the comments section that I have used Capistrano (a site which, given the current context, ironically uses PHP) and Passenger, but, for reasons I could not qualify, I thought PHP was simpler. Mark just helped finalize the thought for me: PHP is usually preinstalled and ready for rapid deployment -- i.e. immediate initial deployment. Heroku is wonderful, but not every hosting service is Heroku. If you want an application with diverse end-users, PHP is more likely to be eligible for simplistic initial deployment. It may seem like a minor issue, but in my experience, it is not.

END_UPDATE This post was motivated by an open-source project I am currently coding. It is not yet released but for the purposes of this footnote, pretend it will have a deployment pattern similar to Wordpress. I started writing it in Rails. However, after speaking with several people who will be end-users, I realized that the most important factor would be ease of deployment. While Phusion is a game-changer for deploying Rails applications, I think PHP is still easier for most web developers. Also, for the sake of disclosure, I should make it clear that I am not an expert web developer. As you might notice from this blog, most of my work is in complex systems. Most of my time is spent writing code in C or C++ with Ruby acting as glue.

Momentum is Instinctual

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:45:20 +0000

One of the earliest trading programs I wrote (circa sophomore year of high school), traded on momentum. It acted quiet naively which is a proper reflection of my mind at the time. If the slope of the price for an asset was greater than and less than some prespecified values the asset was bought until it was lower or greater than a terminal slope value; The inverse applied for shorting. My program then searched for the best combinations of entry and exit slopes over a range of different historic windows. I was quite excited at first when I found some bots that did extremely well. Then I had the insight to try testing the bot on a different time period to confirm they did just as well; They did not. I am actually proud that I recognized the need for out of sample testing. I think at the time the math taught in my connections class (read: dorky kids) was trig/precalculus. I had no knowledge of statistics outside of averages. The point to take away from this experience was my sixteen year old brain’s expectation of herding behaviour; It is instinctual. Behavior finance expounds on this concept. At my young age I believed that if a stock was moving up, people would pile on; If a stock was moving down, people would abandon ship. Eventually, the fundamentalists would correct very large errors, but in the short term, I thought the technical traders set movements. Currently, I believe that momentum is a huge factor for a certain class of trader; This class is not sophisticated. It may be possible to exploit their actions, or their likely actions, but since they probably dominate only over the short term, their is too much noise relative to signal. Some people (in this case momentum traders) behave in a predictable way. This capacity for prediction does not mean profit. Predicting the movement of one fish in a school does not mean you know the school’s trajectory — although it might give a hint that is occasionally correct.

Hello, Unemployment. Goodbye, Savings.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:50:43 +0000

I just sent the following letter of resignation. I did not want to quit now, nor is it an opportune time. I have approximately 4-5 months of savings. Considering the project I must implement will take 3-5 months -- and will provide me with no income even after it is finished -- I am pretty much parachuting without a net. Weeeeeeeee. Dear Redacted, Unfortunately, fundraising at the derivative of the non-profit organization that I started has been declining sharply. In the past few months, the amount raised is far lower than we require. This stagnation may be a reflection of some progress made or cyclical constituent fatigue. In either case, given the general state of funding for rare diseases right now, it threatens to arrest research progress that I am hoping will translate into improved clinical outcomes…soon. While I happily shifted responsibility onto the willing members of the Chordoma Foundation and folded my established organization into their nascent one a few years ago, I believe I have to shoulder some of the burden again. Last year, I wrote an application that would serve small organizations with highly-motivated potential beneficiaries. It worked very well initially. However, due to mistakes in the design that were entirely my own, it has soured some of the fund-raisers and needs to be corrected. I have been trying to do a rewrite after work each day, but the context switching is proving to be an obstacle. Half of my time is spent recalling work I have already done. Consequently, I have been sacrificing good-practices in order to churn something out. I produced a mediocre product last year; I cannot afford to do so again. A high-quality, distributable product will require a full-time effort for 3-4 months. While it was my intention to remain at Redacted in my current capacity while pursuing a PH.D in experimental economics hopefully starting next fall (more precisely, experimental economics with a strong focus on agent-based simulations), this does not seem to be an option anymore. I thoroughly enjoy Redacted, but I reluctantly must resign. I will stay on until a suitable replacement can be found. Sincerely, John B Nelson

Consumerism and Programming Polyglots

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:38:29 +0000

This is a follow up to Monday’s blog post, Back to PHP. In the scope of the project I need to develop, PHP is the best choice. My conclusion was correct. The reasoning I used to reach that conclusion was (mostly) incorrect. The post was basically a list of justifications that were a product of “Programming Polyglot Syndrome.” This post is a half-hearted retraction Monday’s post. I dislike shopping for clothes. Unfortunately for me, social and professional conventions dictate that I must spend some time and energy dressing myself in something other than grey sweatpants and Birkenstocks. Shopping is a necessity and I shop hastily. For example, I recently noticed my black dress shoes had a hole worn through the sole (oh, Aerosmith) last week. I headed to DSW. For me, the costs imposed by wearing cheap shoes are negligible. For most men, shoes are shoes. If they don’t look dirty, are properly shined, and are not 95% creased they look fine. Moreover, I care more about my checkbook than my feet (the later are mostly self-repairing, the former is not). Once I find a pair of shoes that are not pink, are not expensive, and are not four sizes too large, I am done. I am satisficing. People who enjoy shopping are not satisficing. That frustrated me until this morning. An introspective friend of mine was describing why she enjoyed shopping so much. She was able to recognize that, for her, shopping is about buying possibilities. She doesn’t shop for new tops. She shops for the experiences she believes – rationally or irrationally – the top will elicit: the attention of some man she finds attractive or the jealousy of some woman she dislikes.* She is buying hope. Now, because this conversation was taking place via GChat, I was doing other things at the time. At one point, I checked the traffic stats for the unexpectedly popular post I wrote on Monday, Back to PHP. In the Back to PHP post, I tried to justify switching back to PHP, a language with a lot of warts. Thinking about it in the context of my friend’s consumerism, I noticed that it’s roughly the same thing. I have a project that I have no strong interest in but I must write. By switching to PHP I was trying to optimize away most uninteresting parts of development – mainly deployment. Cognitive quirks lead me to half-conclude that PHP would make the development go swimmingly well, with no bugs, deployment issues, or mental energy required. Magic! This is not the first time I have learned or relearned a language because I fostered the delusion that it would {motivate me; dissolve all complexity; …, cure cancer; bring about world peace}. Actually, for me, this is often the primary impetus. In most cases, given the context of the problem I actually set out to solve, this turns out to poor investment of my time. That is not to say that learning many programming languages is a bad thing. Different languages have different conventions, paradigms, common practices, etc. Learning many languages and paradigms pays a dividend. You become a better programmer and you carry new ideas across language lines. There is nothing wrong with learning for the sake of learning. However, if you are learning something new to avoid doing something you don’t want to do, you are probably not going to make any gains in productivity for that project. You are just procrastinating. In the case of my project, PHP is the best choice because initial deployment in environments that I do not control is one of the most important considerations. PHP is very simple to deploy initially and is very common. However, most of the justifications I provided were not related to this issue. I just wanted to (re)learn a language. Although, to be fair, Factor might be my best bet. Forget all this introspection! * This is actually pretty interesting if you think about it. “Peacockery” in fashion is more apropos than realized. Not only do people wear things that are ostentatious to attract attention, but doing so becomes a requirement for those who otherwise would be happy in sweat pants. Adopting fashion trends is less about conformity than it is about leveling the playing field for attention. It may be less about showing fitness with clothing acting as a proxy for wealth and more about Fisherian runaway. F*cking, peacocks. P.S. “Programming Polyglot Syndrome” is almost an extension of NIH. Coding something from scratch can be more interesting than learning to properly deploy and use someone else’s code.

The Every Pattern Ever Engine

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:04:44 +0000

Around my sophomore year of college, I wrote an application to analyze technical analysis trading patterns. I read a few books on technical analysis and thought they were horribly unsophisticated. For the most part I found that technical analysis books were basically if [INSERT VISUAL APPEARANCE HERE] then [TAKE THIS ACTION]. I had not yet reached any mathematical sophistication, so I did not liken chart pattern trading to tea leaf reading. I did, however, wonder why they relied on this one set of chart patterns if others, especially those not published, might exist. To satisfy my curiosity, I built an application that constructed every pattern that ever occurred in the listed SP500 stocks since 1980. It was actually fun to write and remarkably fast after all the graph indexes were created. I could choose to set how many days would define a pattern, how close the movements would need to be to considered a match, the importance of relative volumes, and countless other measure that I have long since forgotten. Returns were based on either holding for a static period length; holding until history suggested deviation from the past pattern and all newly matching patterns suggested movement against my position; and other plays that I can no longer remember. After all matches had been assembled and all returns were generated, I could browse the resulting return distributions for each unique pattern. The result: many appeared to be very profitable but the overall return out of sample was close enough to zero to be discouraging (I am purposely ignoring my current knowledge of statistics for this presentation). I then went a bit further and looked up trading patterns mentioned in all the fantastic technical analysis books. It was clear that they were no more likely to be included in the strong, in-sample returns set than any random pattern. My intuition was correct; Technical analysis was unsophisticated and, simply, tea leaf reading. Granted, the experience was incredibly useful and worthwhile. I would not discourage anyone from repeating my experiment; You will learn A LOT. It helps build an intuition for statistical inference prior to studying statistical inference — although studying statistical inference first is not a bad idea. Many of my subsequent experiments were heavily shaded by this early experiment; Many posts will echo lessons learned.

I Am Relatively Unintelligent

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:51:32 +0000

Compared to the average quantitative analyst, I am unintelligent. To be more accurate, I should say I am less experienced and educated; I believe myself to be of equal innate intelligence and discipline but several years to the left of their capabilities on a time line. The confidence I have in my intellectual faculties might be hubris, but for now I am concluding that it is not unfounded. Given my current stage in intellectual maturity (intellectual adolescence?), I must admit to myself that, in all likelihood, my efforts at trading will presently be unfruitful (as they have been in the past). I am developing my mathematical skills, but they still lag behind; I read much on history (not only economic), but it is likely to be insufficient at this point. Furthermore, the vast majority of academics — who are also more educated and experienced than I am — assert that trading is a ill-advised adventure; You can not beat the market, you can only take on more risk. Some traders may appear successful, but they are just the lucky ones who happen to land on the far right tail. So where does this leave me? I respect (highly) the elegance of modern portfolio theory. A sizable part of my mind has already concluded that it is far more rational to build long term portfolios than to pursue the path of active trading. This is the same part of my mind that gets angry when people buy $29.00 in lottery tickets as I wait to buy my pack of Tear ‘n Share Peanut M&M’s. On the other hand, I am wary of the conclusions drawn by the academic field concerning the efficient market hypothesis. The majority of studies make heavy use of long term historical price sets; I do not believe that valid inferences can be drawn on these data. Given my own experience, I believe this type of study suffers from, at the same time, too much and too little information. Furthermore, the reptilian side of me that not only is overconfident but also craves the stimulation that trading provides, still harbors the illusion that I can be a successful trader. I have been interested in investing err, speculation) since I was very young — around five to be precise. There is nothing I enjoy more. So, probably foreshadowing failure, I choose to stay the course because I believe in my own abilities and am skeptical of the conclusions of the EMH; I am relatively unintelligent but I believe myself to be more capable then those above me. This does sound like hubris, no?

What Do You Say, Mickey Avalon?

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:28:56 +0000

Remember the scene in the Hangover, where the boys were poolside trying to piece together their night? The song that was playing in the transistion was damn catchy. Finally, it is on YouTube. Also, I thought the following clip was really funny. Most people disagree.

I Am a Gluttonous Trader

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:15:28 +0000

I n addition to being a promiscuous trader, I am a glutton; Not only do I trade too often, but I risk too much of my equity on each individual trade. Perusing my trades from last year, I noticed that eighty-percent of my losses came from about 10% of my trades. It was not that these trades were placed in volatile periods or held for longer than my typical trade but that they represented huge chunks of my equity; Two trades were actually my entire stake! I believe I do this — stake too much — because I often believe opportunities to be ephemeral; I want to take advantage before my edge disappears. Sometimes, the opportunity may truly be fleeting and should be quickly seized, but the associated mental sloppiness comes at too high a price; It makes me act impulsively. Furthermore, I sometimes think “well…this could go to point X for Y% return and that would be Z dollars”; This is the antithesis of rationality and discipline. Yes, the asset could move to point X; It could also move to point -X; It could also move to point -2X. I get risk blind when the profit potential is glaring and risk blind people are craps players. Eventually, I will use more sophisticated methods to quantify risk and lower it appropriately but for now, I am going to intellectually cop out and choose to implement yet another simple rule: Assume each trade is going to result in a 100% loss and limit each trade to 5% of my capital.

I Am A Promiscuous Trader

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:14:09 +0000

I spent the morning looking through my trading history for the past year; It was glaringly obvious that I traded too much. As this is one of the most abused platitudes in trading circles, I will expound upon my particular offense. Obviously, you cannot say from frequency of trade alone that you are “over-trading”. What is too much for one person or team is not necessarily the same for another. People have different capabilities. However, you can state unequivocally, that if action is taken on nearly every asset reviewed, you are a promiscuous trader. The reptilian part of my brain seems to chase every spark. The problem with promiscuous trading is not the quantity of trades, but the resulting quality of the aggregate. I have noticed that occasionally, I have come across trades that seemed too good to be true — but were proved correct. You can argue that I am revising my history, but I should point out that I keep notebooks of all my trades and, looking back at them, the major successes almost always had something along the lines of “VERY GOOD PLAY” scribbled at the conclusion of my analysis. However, these trades make up the minority of my history. The majority of my fills were stocks I looked at, chose a direction, and placed my order. This is promiscuous trading; Taking any action because it is available. At this point in my education, I am not convinced that I have the emotional iron to prevent promiscuity without a set of established rules. Therefore, I am setting the following hard rule: At most I can make one trade every two weeks. Obviously the potential for promiscuous trading still exists (e.g. if I only look at my options once every two weeks) but at least it is somewhat mitigated by my unrelenting interest in the market. I will still take a side on every asset I review, but only take action on those I feel very strongly about. I will be half paper-trading (for promiscuities sake) and half real-trading (for my reptilian brains sake).

My First Investment

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:06:08 +0000

I bought ITC this morning at $56.04 per share; The number of shares purchased was embarrassingly low, however, it was in compliance with my no gluttony rule (see I Am A Gluttonous Trader). I did not purchase this stock for short-term speculation in price movements; I bought into the company, ITC Holdings, because of my views on the importance of electricity for the future energy needs of the United States. Clearly, I am not the only person who is interested in ITC for this reason as evidenced by ITC’s price-to-earnings ratio being nearly twice as high as the industry average; ITC is a growth stock in the utilities industry. The ITC Great Plains segment is well positioned to take advantage of the influx of investment in the Kansas wind corridor — thank you T. Boone Pickens (joke). Furthermore, I think the feasibility of alternative liquid fuels is a long way off; Electric cars are going to be a dominant theme for a while. My fears are vastly diminishing income due to reduced projects as the U.S. economy continues its decent. Reduced demand coupled with increased fuel costs and regulatory price caps could cripple utilities and their need for growth — which is their need for ITC. Furthermore, with both political parties asserting their obvious genius (sarcasm — I am of the politicians are leeches school of thought), the number of risks are large and not all obvious. Summing the possibilities — qualitatively anyway — I believe ITC has more favorable futures than unfavorable ones. I believe there are some parallels with the spectacular rise of commodities and the future rise of utilities. There is likely to be a lull (or crash) in electrical demand as the economy sinks but there is enough foresight to keep transmission investments rolling if possible as electrical demand will continue to rise sharply in the intermediate-term (5-10 years). Construction of new transmission lines cannot happen overnight; If you want it for future demand you need to being new projects soon. Conservation of energy is rational but the path less traveled; Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. I’d rather pump my air conditioning then use the electric ceiling fan. People are not going to inflate their tires.

To Iterate is Human, to Recurse, Divine

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:55:10 +0000

[caption id="attachment_73" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Escher's Hands"][/caption] I have a fancy for functional programming languages; I find recursion intuitively elegant. However, in my mental processes, recursion seems to be a dangerous flaw.

This trade may return 5% if event A occurs-> This trade could return 10% if event A & B occur -> This trade could return 20% if event A & B & C occur -> Well, this trade has returned 20% and now people are going to pile one and it could return 30% -> … -> This trade could return 1,000,000%.

My mind selectively traverses the path on the recursive tree that is most favorable while ignoring the (huge) selection of paths that do not lead to the favorable end-node. Even worse, I forget the necessary conditions that lead to the selected outcome! A favorable outcome is pleasurable and I am a pleasure-seeking animal; It seems that this also applies abstractions. Furthermore, the recursive thought seems to lack a terminal condition. Instead of building a balanced tree of possibilities, the favorable path gets many more steps, leading to a gross asymmetry. My mind stops traveling only after it has exhausted mental resources. Mental recursion is dangerous without continuous checks. * Note to the non-programmer: The title of this entry is actually an oft-repeated L. Peter Deutsch quote.

Black Swan Trading Pattern

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:45:43 +0000

A friend sent me this link today. Pretty funny stuff. Scary chart pattern P.S. I’m not sure this link will be permanent. If you’re reading this in 2009+n and you see nothing, sorry.

Warning: NVIDIA CUDA memset bug

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:42:44 +0000

Calling cudaMemset() on some platforms does nothing. It took me two hours to figure out why the result of my computation was so bizarre. My experience was similar to many people who posted on this informative thread. In emulator mode, the function performs as expected; When running on the device, the memory is not set.

Romance and XKCD

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:41:00 +0000

It is my belief that the same mental processes are involved in trading and romance. Along those lines, here are some of my favorite XKCD comics dealing with romance. (This is kinda a fluff post.)

Evil Pharma and The Cure for Cancer

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:13:00 +0000

Cancer was cured decades ago. It is only because of the insidious activities of Big Pharma that these wonder drugs are not publicly available. Or at least, this is what a significant portion of people actually believe. In truth, cancer is remarkably complex. The human body is both incredibly fault tolerant and very diligent when it comes to eradicating badly functioning cells. In order for a major cellular mistake to form and continue to multiply unchecked, the genetic aberration has to be extremely well-positioned. While modern medicine is impressive, it is still largely groping in the dark. It is not by greed's hand that we have no cure for cancer; it is by the hand of complexity. Furthermore, as is the case with most addle-minded conspiracies theories that pin the world's ills on the activities of capitalism, this argument falls apart for a simpler reason: science is a team effort. It is highly unlikely that only one person would know of such a silver bullet. The set of people who make a career of medical research only to make money is dwarfed by the set of people who make a career of medical research to help the sick. In order for curative treatments to be mothballed in the name of profit, both the unbelievably greedy and the commonly compassionate would have to be convinced to keep quiet. What compensation would be required to silence both sets of people? Many of these researchers have dedicated their lives to demolishing specific diseases. It is highly unlikely that once doing so, they would take a massive payoff while sacrificing those whose lives they were hoping to save. One common and valid argument in favor of non-profit research projects and against Big Pharma concerns profit incentives. Pharmaceutical companies do have a greater incentive to find treatments that require long-term (or permanent) reliance on their products than they do in finding curative drugs. It takes a monumental amount of money to search, select, develop, and bring a new drug to market. In order for a drug to be viable from an economic perspective, there must be a sizable market to offset these costs. It follows that treatments that are more likely to be approved while showing some efficacy — such as chemotherapeutic agents — would represent their more rational choice when allocating research and development budgets. Most Chemotherapeutic agents exploit small differences in the tolerance for damage between healthy and unhealthy cells. This requires the relative simplicity of observing rates of cell death after exposure to chemicals. Highly targeted molecular agents require a far greater understanding of the cell, accounting for pathways rife with feedback and cascading signals. It is far easier to design a carpet bomb than it is to design a cruise missile. However, this does not mean that large government research efforts are the solution to the problem of this incentive structure. For one, they too have a similar incentive to pluck the apparently low hanging fruits represented by crude but simpler treatments. While their funding is not tethered to the democracy of market mechanisms, they are (almost as) accountable for results or lack-there-of. A highly-risky, speculative research project — one that has the potential to greatly advance the field of medicine — is judged only by its outcome. If a risky project fails to yield any usable knowledge or therapies, those who worked, approved, and funded the project will be judged harshly. Consequently, it often makes sense for decision makers to fund less risky projects (under the banner of "good science"). They can claim that were not expecting a miracle, only incremental advances. They fail to recognize (or state explicitly) that these minor incremental advances may be climbing a local minimum in the search space for therapies -- the payoff may never come. Assuming that both the for-profit and government inspired research projects are biased towards projects that, from the perspective of those afflicted with a disease, are sub-optimal, a third source of research endeavors emerges — the non-profit sector. Researchers who want funding for projects that lie outside the comfort region of traditional sources of project funding would likely find the non-profit sector to be a strong ally. There is a general willingness — if not insistence — of cancer survivors to be part of any movement that marches towards cures and more humane treatments. If presented with projects that promise the possibility — however remote — of significant advances most cancer survivors are willing to contribute financially. While there is a risk of exploitation by quackish actors soliciting funds for poorly formed or entirely fraudulent projects, lightweight organizations acting as intermediaries between the researchers and donors would greatly reduce this threat. These organizations, being numerous, would increase the diversity of the portfolio for medical research. While methodical, incremental research represents the bedrock of science, it is important to recognize that it is the large leaps resulting from the exploration of entirely new areas that often causes true progress. Large pharmaceutical companies and government research initiatives underweight the value of riskier projects for organizational reasons that are unlikely to change. Consequently, the burden of funding these projects falls to those more willing to take on risk — those affected by the diseases.

Re: The Two Flaws of Libertarian Economics

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:11:00 +0000

Zed Shaw wrote a blog post titled The Two Flaws of Libertarian Economics (since then removed from his website) that made me angry (mostly because I like Zed Shaw). This was my rebuttal. Zed did answer my email and we had a conversation that went back and forth a few times. In the end, neither of us had changed our opinions.

Zed: I almost always respect your opinion; I especially enjoy it when you are being appropriately flippant (an ironic statement, yes). Therefore, I wanted to take a few minutes to disagree with your post: The Two Flaws of Libertarian Economics. The problem with self-described libertarians is that they are often very smart but only talk to other very smart libertarians. Their arguments become ridiculously path dependent until the point where they lose sight of the applications of their debates. Can a system of free-market local defense services exist and work better than the currently provided government ones? I don’t know; I doubt it; and I don’t really care. It’s simply not relevant and is merely the product of incestuous ideas. Any libertarian who states that large corporations are more efficient than large government bureaucracies is simply dogmatic. The problems that plague the executives in government bureaus are largely the same as those that plague executives in both for and non-profit corporations: They answer to a stakeholders; They must show good results; If they don’t show good results they get booted; Therefore, the rational course of action is to take the least risky path to ensure their own positions. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy. However, the libertarian doctrine (or I suppose I should say the facet of libertarianism that I subscribe to) does not require, or even encourage, large for-profit corporations as a means of solving all problems both social and technological. It does make the assertion that any system that maximizes the diversity of investment is preferable to one that does not. Capitalist systems are not superior because the profit motive forces capitalist actors to work harder, better, faster, stronger; Capitalists systems are superior because they take on more risk and often enough it pays off well. Libertarians who fail to recognize this do their own cause a great disservice. They are the same libertarians who dogmatically oppose all and any regulatory efforts. Now, while the willingness to take on risks is responsible for capitalism's excess gains relative to state dominated economies, it is also potentially dangerous. To state that the current economic crisis proves the inefficiency of corporations, as you did, is very misleading — everything was distorted. Contrary to what you intimated, capitalism is an evolutionary system. And, just like any evolutionary system, it is not necessarily the best that survive in the short-run; It is only those that were, by accident or merit, the best suited for exploiting the current environment that survive. Corporations that were long-term blind and took on insane risks to capture the high short-term returns offered by sub-prime lending got big and got big fast. They were the most fit for that particular environmental aberration – an aberration created by the political fetish of advocating that every American, regardless of credit worthiness, own a home. Removing the government’s encouragement and creation of the sub-prime industry would likely have prevented the sub-prime crisis. I am not stating that the government causes all economic crises (it does not) but in this case it was the central mover. I am also not saying that prevention of the sub-prime crisis would have prevented the current economic debacle. The appetite for risk was grotesque in recent years; If it wasn’t sub-prime, it would have been something else. This leads me to my final point: A crisis is not necessarily a net-negative event. I realize this might be too controversial or offensive and I risk overshadowing my previous argument, but I believe it is an important point. Times of crisis, regardless of cause, result in a general refocusing of all efforts and a rethinking of everything. Certain deficiencies come sharply into focus. Oil may have reached $150 per barrel for fundamental or speculative reasons, but it doesn’t matter. No one can debate the utility of an alternative energy system and nothing could have provided a greater impetus for one than $150 per barrel oil. We do not yet know what positive impact the economic crisis will yield, but I will state (blindly) that I will be substantial. Right now efforts are still focused on sorting out the economic crisis and the field is very murky. Your contribution was to state that policies that are libertarian in nature were fully or partly to blame. A libertarian who says zero-regulation is the only acceptable policy is completely wrong but, luckily, has no influence on policy anyway. However, the most valued elements of the libertarian doctrine – choice and personal responsibility – are, almost inarguably, worth defending. This is the true core of libertarianism. Sincerely, John Nelson

My First Perfect Trade

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

By perfect trade I mean executed well and taken for the valid reasons. In yesterday's post, Liquidity Black Holes, I stated that I bought NOV SPY 83 Puts for $2.20. I sold them at the end of the today for $6.46. This was a lot of fun.

Liquidity Black Hole

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:39:00 +0000

On November 13th, the SPY dropped bellow $840, and then catapulted to $900 for a monstrous gain by the days end. I believe that catapult could have been caused by, in unison, investors covering margin calls for leveraged long positions and short sellers covering, as the rise progressed. I have very little empirical evidence of this and it is sufficiently weak to prohibit me, out of embarrassment, from posting it. I bought NOV 83 put options on SPY earlier today at $2.20. This time around, I believe their will be A LOT of sellers and no buyers. Alternatively, if it does not fall into a liquidity black hole, I see very little upside between now and Friday close. I used 1% of my capital on this play.