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User: AuMatar

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  1. Re:The real question here on How One Tweet Wiped $8bn Off Twitter's Value · · Score: 1

    Your math is just wrong all over. You're using the wrong formulas and confusing yourself.

    If your monthly payment is 1000 and you pay an extra 50, you take 50 off the principle. That means next year you pay 50*rate less in interest for all years in the future. Assuming you don't change the payments (and assuming fixed rate loans), this means for the same amount of monthly money you pay off 50*rate more each year. That's a savings of rate compounded annually. That's all the return you get.

  2. Re:The real question here on How One Tweet Wiped $8bn Off Twitter's Value · · Score: 1

    No, its still only the interest rate percentage return. That's what compounding does. Of course compounding works on other investments too- you reinvest your profits, either there or elsewhere. So its not a magical advantage of paying off debt.

  3. Re:Cost of Programmers Cost of Engines on Should Developers Still Pay For Game Engines? · · Score: 2

    Of course there's trivial costs in a business. If you're worrying about the costs of pens and whether you can get them 10 cents cheaper, you're wasting your time. If you're worried about the cost savings of turning the thermostat from 70 to 71, you're wasting your time. If you're worried about the cost of something that is less than 1% of your budget, you're wasting your time- even if you reduce it to 0 you'd have saved more by focusing elsewhere. A good businessman realizes whats worth being concerned about and what you just have to live with. Nothing is 100% efficient in life.

  4. Re:They're not free on Should Developers Still Pay For Game Engines? · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    If you aren't in a position where you can gamble 120 dollars a year on your business, you shouldn't have a business. There's a reason why royalty deals are considered bad decisions for small businesses.

  5. Re:Poker is a lot more complex... on Humans Dominating Poker Super Computer · · Score: 1

    Card counting is keeping track of cards between hands in an effort to figure out altered odds on the current hand. For example, if you're playing single shoe blackjack and have seen 10 high cards out of 11 cards, you know low cards have a higher probability than normal.

    That doesn't exist in Holdem, because there's no carry over between hands. Each is an individual event, with no altered probability from previous hands. You can calculate odds, but that's easy even for a human at holdem- if there's X cards which you think will give you the winning hand (called outs), your odds are X/47 on the turn and X/46 on the river, or just under 2% per out. For seeing both cards on the flop its 1-(47-X)*(46-X)/(47*46), or about 4% per out. Generally you just use 2% and 4%, as the nature of holdem makes it unlikely that percent or two you'd be off will make a long term difference.

    So there are odds calculation. But there's no card counting. Also, card counting isn't the amazing thing some people think it is- if you don't play deep into a shoe, it isn't much of an advantage. In some games like baccarat its been mathematically proven to not give an advantage at all.

    There are 2 poker games where it does help- razz and 7 card stud. This is because each player has a unique hand, including individual up cards. When they fold their hands are mucked. Remembering all the cards which were showing at any time is an advantage, as it can effect the odds of drawing to a straight/flush/full house. I would suspect a computer may have a big edge over beginners on those games due to that. But a pro at those games knows how to remember the dead cards already, I'm not sure it would be much of an advantage at high end stud.

  6. Re:Poker is a lot more complex... on Humans Dominating Poker Super Computer · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's no card counting in Texas Holdem. The deck is reshuffled after each hand dealt. Only 7 cards are shown to a given player, and all of them can be read at any time. There's no advantage to card counting, because you don't need to count. They may have some other card game they beat, but it isn't holdem.

  7. Re:Poker is a lot more complex... on Humans Dominating Poker Super Computer · · Score: 2

    No, it isn't. Or at least, it isn't by looking for tells. You win money by analyzing their betting pattern on this hand, comparing it to what makes sense, and putting them on a range of possible hands. One of those possible hands is always a bluff. Then you see what you beat of those hands, what beats you, and what your drawing odds are to improve and make a choice off that information. That is definitely something a computer can do. But the question is never "is he bluffing" its "is my hand strong enough and with sufficient odds of winning to be worth paying at the pot and implied odds this gives me".

    Those are things a computer definitely can do.

  8. Re:The real question here on How One Tweet Wiped $8bn Off Twitter's Value · · Score: 1

    More or less right. There's a few other considerations though.

    1)Taxes. You aren't taxed on "returns" from lowering debt. You are on investments. You need to factor that in.

    2)Risk. The risk of investments are different. The risk of stock is on the company (and sector, and economy's) performance. The risk of bonds is the company or government going bankrupt. The risk of paying off debt is you personally being unable to make debt payments in the future and losing your collateral.

    3)Ability to cash out. If you pay off a car loan early, you can't cash that out (as the loan is likely more than the car is worth on the secondary market). If you pay off a mortgage, you have to sell the house to get the money back. With a stock, you can cash out at any time although possibly at a loss.

  9. Re:Agile - like everything else it is good and bad on IBM CIO Thinks Agile Development Might Save Company · · Score: 2

    Except Agile would be even worse, as there's no way to keep the amount of communication lines an Agile project needs over the years. If you have a team of 100 programmers are you going to have the customer representatives needed at each engineering subteam meeting to make the proper choices? Not a chance in hell.

    There's something in between the two that's better, but waterfall will do better in these cases than pure Agile.

  10. Re:Its really artificial value anyway on How One Tweet Wiped $8bn Off Twitter's Value · · Score: 1

    THere's actually metrics for this that many internet companies report- Monthly Active Users and Daily Active Users. The number of unique users that use the site on an average month/day. That's what smart advertisers (and investors) look at rather than number of signups.

  11. Re:It wasn't the tweet on How One Tweet Wiped $8bn Off Twitter's Value · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Its a good value to pick up if you have some long term faith in the company. But any company where the CEO is making 70 million to lose money sounds way too much like the management is running it for their own benefit to me. I won't be buying.

  12. Re:The real question here on How One Tweet Wiped $8bn Off Twitter's Value · · Score: 4, Informative

    The extra $20 is a broken window fallacy. Paying off 20 dollars of debt pays off 20 dollars of debt. They'd only be saving far more in the high interest case because they'd be paying far more. Either way they're losing money by paying higher interest rates.

    Same with your overall interest rates. In the end, people have $X per month to spend on housing. They can't exceed that. No matter what they pay $Y in principle per month and $Z in interest per month. All that changes is the relative ratio of Y and Z. High Z, low Y and the money goes to the banks. Low Z, high Y and the money goes to the property owners. Of the two I know which I prefer.

  13. Re:leave open a Skype channel on IBM CIO Thinks Agile Development Might Save Company · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No, no it doesn't. First off- why are you closing your IDEs, profilers, etc? Just leave them up. CHek out your source? Why would yours not be checked out already? Grabbing the latest updates takes about 2 minutes and can be done while doing other things. Getting mentally prepared for work may take a bit longer, but that should still be minutes, not 30.

    At the end of the day? 0. There's nothing to do. You walk away and pick it up in the morning. And if you have a daily status email you have to write- tell your boss to fuck off.

  14. Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. on Median Age At Google Is 29, Says Age Discrimination Lawsuit · · Score: 4, Informative

    Have you seen what the average lawyer makes? We do. The average lawyer doesn't even get a job out of law school these days.

  15. Re:So? on Futures Trader Arrested For Causing 2010 'Flash Crash' · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So lets say I have a standing order to buy FooBar stock at $50 a share. Its current price is $55. So basically I'm looking to buy on dips.

    Tonight it comes out that the CEO has been falsifying all financial reports, and instead of making money for the last 3 years they've lost millions. You don't think I should be able to cancel that buy order due to the new information?

  16. Re:You no longer own a car on Automakers To Gearheads: Stop Repairing Cars · · Score: 3, Informative

    We kind of do the pollution thing already- you need to take smog tests in most states to keep it registered. Older cars have more trouble than newer ones. There are exemptions for cars old enough to be classics, but it is effective at weeding out those in the 15-20 year old range.

  17. Re:How convenient for Apple... on John Gruber On Third-party Apple Watch Apps: They Suck and Are Really Slow · · Score: 1

    Hell, remember that Apple didn't originally allow native apps on the iPhone. SO they've done it to themselves before.

  18. Re:Language on Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout For Swype · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Its particularly bad in Korean, where the words tend to alternate consonant-vowel-consonant with the consonants on the left and vowels on the right. It just ends up being an exponential explosion of possibilities without much branch pruning. Its also harder in agglutative languages than non-agglutatives, because you can't have a simple dictionary of all words.

    But in the end it doesn't matter. If you actually use a keyboard, 2 features are must haves- the first is that you need to be able to type the occasional word. The second is that you need to know where the keys are, so you can type-swype efficiently. That precludes a new keyboard layout, as you know more or less where every key on a qwerty is- you don't on an "optimized" layout and you'll take months to learn. An alternate keyboard doesn't have that much time, it has a few hours max to get you to love it.

    Disclaimer: I worked at Swype from 2010-2012.

  19. Re:SwiftKey on Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout For Swype · · Score: 1

    Flow is Swiftkey's knock off of Swype. It probably has some differences in the algorithm that will make it better for some words and worse for others, but its just a knock off.

  20. Re:Huge red flag about the survey on Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats · · Score: 1

    It skews highly towards the websites users. Hardly surprising. But when you consider that googling almost any programming question will lead to an answer on SO in the top 3 or 4 hits, I'm not sure how you can avoid visiting the site at least once a day on average.

  21. Re:Tabs vs Spaces on Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats · · Score: 2

    You have to hit it once. That deletes the entire tab. Unless you have your editor set to do something weird, like turn tabs into spaces.

  22. Re:Tabs vs Spaces on Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats · · Score: 2

    Yet another reason not to use Python. Guido made a major fuck up there- if he was going to use whitespace as syntax, he should have made the type and amount part of the language spec. Not doing so has wasted more developer time than any other language issue I've ever seen.

  23. Re:What is possible vs. what is useful on Smartphone-Enabled Replicators Are 3-5 Years Away, Caltech Professor Says · · Score: 1

    It doesn't need to be built into the phone. If people find it useful, connecting via USB or Bluetooth would be sufficient. Then if people use that it can move into the phone in another 3-5 years.

  24. Re:Tabs vs Spaces on Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats · · Score: 3, Informative

    Tabs were more likely to cause problems in the old days, when editors did things that were ridiculous like expand them to 8 spaces. Nowdays with everything configurable, it isn't much of an issue. The reason why the older more experienced people prefer spaces is that they learned to dislike tabs in the bad old days. In 10 years that argument will be dead with tabs winning.

  25. Re:Offices. on Ask Slashdot: What Makes a Good Work Environment For Developers and IT? · · Score: 1

    Speak for yourself. I find the improved productivity of easily asking questions and overhearing your team's conversations blows away the loss due to occassional noise. And its a hell of a lot more fun to interact with coworkers than stare at the monitor unblinking.