It's everyone's right to shoot themselves in the foot with dumb financial decisions. Robinhood isn't doing anything egregious here, they're only reducing friction and fees.
I've used the app sparingly in the past with "fun money" but haven't done serious investing with it.
> It's everyone's right to shoot themselves in the foot with dumb financial decisions.
The industry regulations would indicate otherwise. Generally, the “dumber” the money, the more regulatory protections that will apply. At their core, financial regulators are consumer protection entities.
Not really - the regulations are more or less in place to try to soften the impact of the dumb decisions (when they do happen), not to remove the freedom to make said dumb decisions.
Nothing is stopping anyone from putting their life savings into a legal dumb investment. Regulators and the government sure won't stop you from liquidating your 401k early. At some point common sense comes into play and you need to be smart with your money.
>US SEC has accredited investor requirements specifically to keep people from being fooled into making "dumb" investments
What stops me from liquidating my 401k and investing all of my money into a company that misses their earning goals this week? Where does the US SEC come into play here?
Huh? That's just not how this works. There's always a spread between the cash interest that the custodial firm gets on the balances it holds and the interest it pays to the customers.
Good for you. (Not sarcasm —- this is what individual stock investing should be for retail. For fun, to have a tiny bit of skin in the game.) But many people let it get out of control, either because they lack this self discpline, or because they randomly see positive results and then think they’re good traders.
Those people can freely lose all of their money through a lack of self-control with any other brokers as well. Just because Robinhood has a good UI/UX that makes it easy to navigate doesn’t really qualify it as “predatory” or puts it at fault more than any other brokerage service.
> Amateur investors are best off buying indexes and holding forever.
And you can do so on robinhood by buying ETFs while potentially saving money on transaction fees if you were to use a traditional brokerage (I say potentially because vanguard lets me buy their etfs without a transaction fee when I use their brokerage account).
I was ready to crap on this post for calling your own work "semi-convincing" but this writing does actually resemble most of the random blogs I find when trying to research something like nutrition or fitness.
Not a compliment to the quality of the writing. But definitely not unconvincing. Add some ads that make it impossible to scroll without freezing Chrome and you're good to go.
I don't have the research handy, but Adderall has been proven very safe for long-term use when taken at "normal" dosages and with oversight by a doctor.
I've been on it for 20 years and with the oversight of responsible doctors, and I have never had to increase my dosage (in fact I've reduced it 25% in the last 5 years). All my heart/blood/* tests come back good and I'm not a particularly health-conscious person. I regularly take week-long breaks to assess if it's still the right regimen for me. (Like the parent post says, the days off of it can be brutal but avoiding tolerance and assessing its true impact are invaluable.) I don't "like" Adderall but it is the only way I feel sane.
My point: don't be afraid to seek meds that help just because you may fear some long-term effects. A doctor can help you decide if the long-term effects are worth the gain, and there may not in fact even be the long-term effects you're worried about, especially if you talk about those worries with your doctor.
I disagree with his list of upsides -- there is no upside to ADHD. It is a disability. I've been able to manage it without using stimulants, through very careful planning and trial and error (step #1 is avoiding useless wastes of time such as reading HN). But it just sucks.
I don't know. I can't write a CRUD app anymore to save my life, but I can dive into the middle of a foreign code base and quickly understand it and solve issues that stump the primary developers. I struggle with normal daily activities like paying bills or putting away laundry, but in an emergency or high stress situation when others are freaking out I feel comfortable and in control. I struggle with conventional learning, but can pick up things which align with my interests (which are wide and diverse) extremely quickly. The negatives are there, and they can be severe... but I do still see some upsides. I'm currently unmedicated, but have been on Adderall in the past. I've been able to manage it mostly by changing jobs when they become stable and boring or taking on roles where I'm constantly working on new projects for short amounts of time. I suspect at some point this will stop working and I'll have to change careers entirely and end up as a chef, or woodworker or something else completely different than what I do now. Maybe by that time I'll agree with your position, but I feel like I'm able to use ADHD to my advantage for the time being.
I feel the same way. I've never been diagnosed with ADHD but can relate to all the descriptions of it here.
In the past I jokingly said I need the stress and I think it holds true. In high pressure/thight deadline situations I can work with a high focus for hours but struggle working on projects which are going smooth.
I am diagnosed, and ADHD sucks of course, but I feel there are many upsides. Immunity to the “existential terror” is one (due to inability to comprehend life time as a whole). When hyperfocus turns on on something relevant (which rarely happens of course), magic things could happen.
Maybe because no body had commented as such until now? I am rather practical about this: I don't really like Java because it forces things that make more sense as functions to be under an object. What if I just want a simple global utility function, and don't want to make every single class inherit from a class containing only that? It's a lot of unnecessary hassle for something like that. I'm not saying OO is bad, I said it was too pedantic. I like languages which allow you to do what makes sense.
> You could also make a class of global functions and use that
I'm not sure I understand your issue with doing this. You need to put your global (i.e. public static) functions in classes not because Java is forcing OO practices into everything, but because classes effectively serve as Java's translation units. I think they serve this purpose pretty well in practice.
Classes being Java's only translation units are one of the downsides that I'm mentioning. Really my objection is more that it doesn't allow use of the right tool for the job (which is not always an object).
I'm not sure I see where objects enter into this. I mean, you seem to be asking for something like this,
public unit Util {
public void foo() {
// do things
}
}
which would compile down into a bytecode-containing artifact which we could call a unit file, which the JVM would load at runtime using some sort of unit loader. Callers could import the Util unit and then invoke foo with the statement
Util.foo();
But then, I don't see the diffence between the above and the following,
public class Util {
public static void foo() {
// do things
}
// If we're really pedantic, we can ban construction of Util instances
private Util() {}
}
which compiles down into a bytecode-containing artifact called a class file, which the JVM loads at runtime using a class loader. Callers can import the Util class and then invoke foo with the statement
Util.foo();
What's this downside you speak of? Is there something a different kind of translation unit would do that a class currently doesn't?
There's no 'object' involved here. First you said this requires subclassing, which it doesn't. Now you're handwaving about a feature that's specifically there to allow for things like plain global functions - a static method has no instance, there's no dynamic dispatch and it can't be overridden. People often point out the facility's utter un-OO-ness. The OO equivalent would be a class method which Java doesn't support at all.
I agree that DL/ML is destined to fail in domains like this but can you expand on this reasoning? What exactly do you mean by "quantitative math" (I haven't heard this phrase used in this way before)? And what were the equivalents of DL/ML for physics before calculus?
Quantitative math might be the wrong word, maybe applied math? In quantitative finance, you make quantitative models about the world, and build math that realize those assumptions and understanding. A simple example: options are a great financial trading instrument that you can model mathematically, the simplest being the Black-Scholes model. You can imply things like volatility of the stock price based on the price of the option to get a better understanding of what a risk neutral market is thinking, and compare that to the actual market distribution.
>And what were the equivalents of DL/ML for physics before calculus?
This is a good question. Before Newtonian calculus, and the laws of gravitation, people were building very complicated conic models (ie. eclipses, parabolas etc.) to get better and better prediction of planetary motion. A lot of parametric math came out of this, with many sophisticated models getting better and better, giving these astronomers an illusion of progress. However, Newton's insight was that motion is connected to mass, and this insight was the basis of how to derive the laws of motion, which gave us the laws of gravitation (F = (Gm1m2/r^2)). This insight eliminated the previous Keplarian models of motion, because you were now able to predict the motion of arbitrary rigid bodies using very simple math (we teach this in highschool). Ofcourse, Newtonian motion has its limitations that's why we have quantum physics and Einstien's relativity theory. But for practical technological applications, Newtonian physics on its own gets you incredibly far.
Where is ML/DL? It would be akin to Keplarian elliptical motion. More realistically however, it's closer to aether theory of light, and will go the way of GOFAI. This stuff isn't grounded in modelling any scientific observation. Moreover, they are mathematically useless. Back propagation doesn't converge, and why should you fit your data to an arbitrary mathematical structure? In practise, DL/ML doesn't work at all, you will be much more successful by modelling your problem mathematically. For example, consider an automobile manufacturer, which has all kinds of moving parts in their planes. They typically model each part mathematically (ie. gear x under goes exponential time decay), and imply their parameters using rigours test data. Then you use some sort of an empirical statistical model to predict the failure.
I've seen deep learning companies come and fall flat on their face trying to beat the accuracy of these deterministic systems. Those guys needed a lot of data, and GPUs. I'm not even criticizing the fact that DL is a black box. It's worse, it's inferior to everything out there on every metric imaginable. These mathematical models in contrast have been in production for decades, with yearly updates, and they run in real time with little historical data, they are fully understandable and they beat every method we know of.
This isn't the first time multi layer perceptrons gained hype. They didn't work in the 80s, or 90s or the 2000s, they don't work now. The math behind DL is the same that we had in the 80s, they just called it multi layer perceptron. None of the ideas in modern ML/DL are new, all these ideas like reinforcement learning, GANs etc.
1. Black-Scholes works in a lot of cases but is an approximation: it has edge cases where it does not fare well...
2. Likewise Newtonian physics is also an approximation: it does not fare well near relativistic speeds or high gravity. But at least we have models which seem to be accurate to many decimal places today. Who knows what the future may hold.
3. Not all useful problems can be represented by simple equations, but they can be computed analytically (e.g. N-body problem).
4. Ultimately DL is popular because it works better than anything else in some very specific domains like speech recognition and image recognition. It is overapplied I'll admit, but if you can do better then feel free to publish a paper.
The outrage isn't because the incident happened. It's because DataCamp didn't do anything to reprimand the executive, and because they issued a completely tone deaf response, and because they tried to hide it.
I'm against bogus sexual assault claims as much as anyone but if you're DataCamp you really have no choice but to just fire this guy and move on (and it's obviously too late now to even do that).
Couldn't the victim simply call the police or notify the prosecutor (or whatever is the proper procedure to report a crime)? If DataCamp executive committed a crime, then this will be investigated and a person will be punished according to the rules of law.
Why the victim and other people who were witnessing what happened count on executives's partners and colleagues to "take proper action". In the civilized society courts should be engaged in such situation, we don't need to relay on some ad hoc, possibly bias committees to punish people. If this executive did something wrong, let him rot in prison or whatever is the proper punishment.
There’s a grey area between what is (should be?) unacceptable in a professional setting, and what constitutes a crime. Even in particularly egregious cases of sexual misconduct, it’s difficult to think of how many victims chose to go to trial. Civil settlements are much more common. Think Roger Ailes at Fox.
The local prosecutor in whatever jurisdiction this incident occurred in is likely to decline prosecuting the case. Prosecuting instances of sexual harassment (assault in this case?) Is not typically a prosecutor’s first choice for how to use their office’s limited time and resources.
Maybe she could’ve filed a claim with the EEOC? But, that’s a long drawn out process as well. Most victims of harassment may just choose to try a company’s internal HR processes, since an EEOC claim may require spending inordinate amounts of time, and maybe money if you hire professional help.
From the dozens of Twitter and personal blog testimonials of DataCamp instructors (contractors), it seems that but for collective pressure and organizing from the instructors, DataCamp would’ve just swept this whole incident under the rug.
There is no grey area here. There are things that are classified as crime and there are things classified as inappropriate behaviour. The "grey area" happens when people on purpose try to mix the two and manufacture outrage.
