Best posts made by Placeholder
-
RE: 'Clean your desk' -- Interviews at Amazon
@dcon said in 'Clean your desk' -- Interviews at Amazon:
Jesus. Installing software where the proctor then goes in and messes with system settings? Oh FUCK NO. NO ONE gets remote access to my machine.
Seriously, if I started an interview like that, I'd be "I'm sorry. If this is how you do interviews, I can't work for you. Thank you. Click."
update: finished reading, saw he finally gave the
I interviewed with a different company last year that had an interview process similar to this. After discovering that said company had showed up on the front page several times, I decided that I was never going to work for them. However, I kept going just to get some practice...
... until I got to right before this stage of the interview. There was absolutely no chance that I was going to give somebody that much access to my computer. I gave them the polite equivalent of the and ran away screaming.
-
RE: ⏱ You know you've been spending too much time on TDWTF when...
That moment when you realize that you started calling the plastic creeper sitting on your desk @Keith.
-
RE: Programming Confessions Thread
I've managed to write the following (incorrect) formula for calculating the average of two numbers multiple different times now without noticing the typo until much later:
var averageX = (x2 - x1) / 2;
A big part of the problem is that
x1
is quite frequently a small number close to zero. Half the time, the results are close enough to correct that I don't notice. Half the time, the results are very, very wrong. Both times this has happened, it has taken an embarrassing amount of time to track the issue down to this little typo. -
RE: Another popular author caught plagiarizing
In a more surprising twist, it is revealed that George North is a time traveler who went back in time to meet Shakespeare. However, he found out that Shakespeare did not exist and had to spend the rest of his life creating the figure that we know today, because he couldn't stand the thought of a world without Shakespeare.
This unpublished manuscript is just a practice work that he failed to dispose of properly.
-
RE: WTF Bites
It took me several reset attempts to figure out what the real problem was. Switched to a dumb, lower quality password and was able to log in right away. -
RE: Whom should I write in?
@boomzilla said in Whom should I write in?:
Let's put the TDWTF trolling brain to work for something that won't actually mean something but might amuse someone who could not even conceive of TDWTF!
Are you still waiting for your perfect candidate?
Don't want somebody else to screw things up before you can vote that person into office?
Vote for the only candidate who would dare leave things the way they are until someone more qualified for the job comes around
Vote @Placeholder 2016
As your congressman, I promise to not let your constituency slide further into the hands of the other guys. My Prevent Bad Change By Preventing All Change policies will keep your lands safe until you can finally locate the candidate of your dreams and convince them they have what it takes to run for office. Sleep soundly at night knowing that, hey, at the very least things won't be getting any worse.
Vote for sanity. Vote for a more qualified candidate for tomorrow. Vote for @Placeholder.
-
RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
A fitting companion to the previous post, a looooong list of coins that have already flamed out:
Displaying 1 - 50 of 830
It's 843 now. That's 13 dead cryptocurrencies in about 5 days, or one dead every 9 hours, 14 minutes, approximately.
-
RE: The nerdy jokes thread (bonus original title mode!)
@Onyx said in The nerdy jokes thread (bonus original title mode!):
INB4: Should've told the examiner I used a font that supports ligatures.
They'll allow it for you, then alter the curriculum to explicitly ban ligatures on all future exams. I used C99 syntax in a C programming exam once, got marked down, fought back, got my points back, and accidentally got all standards newer than ANSI C explicitly banned from the curriculum as a result.
-
RE: How apple is giving design a bad name (article)
My most recent Apple experience:
: @Placeholder, my company finally got me a Mac so I can test my software on it.
: It's about time! What do you think about it so far?
: It's alright, but the text is small enough that I'm having a hard time reading it. I can't find the setting to change it.
: *Glances at settings*. Hmm. I can't find any settings for font size either.
: Maybe they are just hidden somewhere obscure. Google it, maybe?
: *Googles*.
: Anything?
: No. Apple doesn't let you change the font size. You have to get a third party application to change it.:
-
RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@status clearly doesn't work. Have you tried @by-joining-this-group-you-agree-to-be-mentioned-randomly-for-no-reason-is-that-okay-yes-no?
-
RE: In other news today...
@izzion said in In other news today...:
Put Options are contracts, so that up until X date you have the option to sell the stock at the specified price
@izzion said in In other news today...:
If the value of the stock drops below the strike price (the contracted price you can sell at by exercising the contract), you can make the difference between the market price of the stock and the strike price of the option
@izzion said in In other news today...:
Or you’re using the options to hedge a position (you own the stock at $100 and you buy a put option at $80 to make sure you can’t lose more than $20 per share, but you pay a small price for that insurance)
Here's a example of how put options work:
- A while back, I bought 1000 shares of a stock with some fun money, for fun, because I thought I might be able to turn a decent profit off of it. I paid a price of $2.86 per share, meaning I spent $2860 dollars.
The price of the stock went up to around $3.30. Meaning, if I sold everything I would have turned a profit of $440, or a gain of about 15%. Not a bad gain, right? No, that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted more. However, at this point I was concerned that maybe something would happen that would cause the value of the stock to drop a lot. At this point, I decided to take some steps to protect myself in the event that the stock price dropped.
- I bought 10 put option contracts for a strike price of $3.00 that expire on May 17, 2024. Each contract cost me $0.55 per share, which comes out to $55 per contract (because contracts are typically for 100 shares). Since I bought 10 of them, I paid $550.
This purchase gave me the right, but not the obligation, to sell my shares for a price of $3.00 per share at any point up until May 17. Because these are American-style put options, I can call up my broker at any time and "exercise" my right to sell my shares for that price. In theory, I could do this even if the price of the stock was higher but that would be a phenomenally stupid thing to do. The value here is that even if the price of the stock is lower than $3 I can still do this.
If you crunch the numbers, that means I spent $2,860 on shares and $550 on put options. I have now spent $3,410 on shares that at the time were only worth $3300. In the event that the stock fell below $3, I would be able to use my put options to sell my shares for a total of $3000, meaning the worst that could ever happen is that I lose a total of $410. If the stock is less than $3.41 per share I am guaranteed to lose money, even though I only spent $2.86 per share.
That's a really expensive insurance policy, even for fun money. Should I have sold the shares right then and there for a decent profit? No, I'm a greedy bastard, dammit. I thought this stock could go even higher and I didn't want to miss out on all the potential profits. Buy put options at a higher strike price, meaning I could sell the shares for more? No, puts at a higher strike price cost even more money. Buy put options at a lower strike price instead? No, because the insurance is cheaper for a reason. I would lose even more money if the price of the stock tanked. Instead, I did this:
- Sold 10 call option contracts for a strike price of $4.50 also expiring May 17, 2024. Received a credit of $0.41 per share, meaning I gained $410 dollars.
When I buy a call option I gain the right, but not the obligation, to purchase 100 shares of a stock at the strike price of the contract. This is a great deal for me if the stock goes up above the strike price of the contract. I could make a metric ton of money if I'm correct. This is why people love to gamble with options contracts.
You'll note that I sold the contracts, instead of buying them. That means I gave somebody else the right, but not the obligation, to buy my shares from me at a price of $4.50 per share. If the price of the stock were below $4.50 then they would have to be incredibly stupid to exercise those call options. I'd happily sell them the shares if they did that though. If the price is above $4.50 then they get to be the ones making all the profit while I miss out because I sold my shares to them at $4.50 instead of at a higher price.
Let's crunch the numbers again. I spent $2860 on shares, $550 on put options and I got paid $410 for selling some call options on my shares. In total, I'm out $3000. My put options let me sell my shares for a total of $3000 if I want, meaning I can get all my money back no matter what the stock does. However, if the price of the stock goes above $4.50 I will have somebody else call my shares away from me at $4.50, no matter how high the price of the stock goes. In other words, I traded away any profit above $1,500 in order to not lose any money no matter what.
Here's a pretty graph describing my profits and losses, as it would look like in May when all the options contracts expire:
I posted about this strategy not too long ago in another thread, as a way of illustrating how you can use options contracts to do things other than high-risk gambling. Since then, news came out that caused the price of the stock to go down. A lot. It's trading at $1.77 now.
- If I had sold all my shares instead of engaging in this financial nonsense, I would have profited by $440.
- If I had not made my options contracts trades, I would have shares worth $1,770 now. I would have lost
$1,090. - If I had only bought put options, my shares would still be only worth $1,770 but my puts would be worth $1,340. I spent $550 on those puts, so my net is $2,560. I lost
$300. - What I did was sell those call options on top of everything else. I sold them for $410 and they are currently worth $40 meaning I would have to spend that much to buy them back to close my position. My net is positive $70.
If the stock stays the same price all the way until May I will exercise my put options and keep all the credit I got from selling call options, and still lose money in net because my brokerage charged commissions for my options contract trades. In other words, I played with options contracts in a "semi-intelligent" way and still managed to lose most of my profits. However, I was able to use options contracts to define and control my risk. The risk management was worth the cost. That's why options contracts are useful.
TL:DR: Don't even bother thinking about trading options if you skipped over this wall of text. Just don't. There are several more topics I didn't even hint at in this post that affected my decision making process.
-
RE: The nerdy jokes thread (bonus original title mode!)
@PJH I used
for(int i = 0; i < something; i++) { //Do something with i, the slightly more modern way }
instead of
int i; //ANSI C requires you to define the for loop variable outside of the loop declaration for(i = 0; i < something; i++) { //Do something with i, the antiquated way }
I always used the C99 form of the for loop because that's what I used when I taught myself how to program in C long before the class. I even went as far as making a note that it was C99 syntax. I still got marked down. For the rest of that semester, the class got taught C like it was still 1990.
-
RE: TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML)
TIL that the Curiosity Rover calculated the best focus position for one of its cameras by taking an image, converting the image into a JPEG, and measuring the size of the resulting file. The bigger the JPEG file, the better the focus of the camera.
-
RE: Solar Roadways?
So, we've all agreed that the solar part of the walkway wasn't a very good idea. What about the walkway part of it? Let's go check...
-
RE: Another AI based art generator, DALL-E Mini
@boomzilla this is the best result I've been able to get out of it. I would keep trying, but, you know...
-
RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@error Right click them, copy them, and paste them into this thread so we can explain them to you
-
RE: Not sure if good idea, bad idea or evil idea
An onboard computer, powered by AI, identifies weeds, and the robot's carbon dioxide lasers then zap and kill the plants.
The supercomputer enables precise targeting to avoid crops
Somebody is going to figure out how to trick their neural network and turn the robot into an automated crop circle builder.
-
RE: Spot the difference: Chickens.
@magus said in Spot the difference: Chickens.:
@xaade If you can find one between 1 and 4, I definitely want to know it.
Besides the number and compression artifacts there are no differences
Edit: This is what a difference looks like
-
RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: A pin on the control board for my electric tea kettle needed to be re-soldered. I am now able to make tea again. All of the effort I put into my electrical engineering studies has been justified and validated in this one moment.
-
RE: 🔗 Quick links thread
what makes the difference between a guitar playing a middle C and a piano playing a middle C and a singer singing "a" at middle C sound different when underneath it's all frequencies and vibration.
If you look at this link, specifically the first few pairs of graphs, it should give you an idea of why instruments playing the same pitch sound different.
Alternatively, imagine that I have an instrument tuner and I have it set to play a tone of 440 Hz, a very common pitch for tuning. That corresponds to this note:
Assuming the tuner is playing a perfect sine wave, you are only hearing a 440 Hz sound. Nothing else. Nothing is perfect though, so you end up hearing something more like this:
The vast majority of what you are hearing is that 440 Hz pitch. There are some other pitches buried in there, but they are very quiet compared to the main one.
What frequencies do a vocalist or instrumentalist output when they are singing or playing a note? Something closer to this:
The loudest sound is still that 440 Hz pitch. However, you can see that it is joined by a lot of other pitches. Those additional pitches are what give your voice, or a guitar, or a saxophone, or an ocarina, or any other instrument it's distinct sound.Now how do all of these pitches blend together and produce that voice or instrument that you hear? That's exactly what the original question was asking!
I do live sound mixing as a hobby, so I think about sound in terms of frequencies all of the time. I hope I did a good enough job explaining this, it's not a topic I explain to people regularly.
-
RE: [Event over, go home]Google event today
I took the title a little bit too literally.
Not enough caffeine, I guess. This is what happens when you turn company names into verbs.
-
RE: TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML)
@Gąska said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
I'd love to hear the reasoning behind it.
It's a grandfather clause
-
RE: In other news today...
@topspin said in In other news today...:
I need to learn how Put Options work ASAP.
Here's how put options work:
- You get seriously offended that a stock's price is continuously going up, or could possibly go up when you don't want it to.
- You throw some money at a mysterious third party in the hopes that the stock goes down and they sell you put options in return for your money
- The stock doesn't go down and your puts lose all of their value. Alternatively, you paid such a high premium for your put options that you still lose money even if the stock goes down a lot.
More seriously, IPOs don't typically get options chains right away, so the only safe way to profit off of them is to be one of the lucky few that gets issued shares ahead of the IPO, selling the stock immediately when you get the option to (many times there are restrictions on this). Otherwise, you have to short sell the stock which carries its own risks (especially since you can't buy call options to hedge your short position). If options are available then you should seriously consider using options spreads instead to control more precisely how much risk you're taking on.
In contrast, if you spend your money on instead you can stay on the sidelines, watch everybody else lose their money, and then you at least still have your . For a little while. The theta decay on popped popcorn kernels is vicious.
-
RE: Care to explain your avatar?
is the "killpocalypse" medal that you get from killing enough enemies in a short enough period of time in the Halo games, but with the Discourse project logo photoshopped in front of it. In other words, it's the discopocalypse
-
RE: The Cat Status Thread
.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close
FatalExecutionEngineError was detected. The CLR has been corrupted to the point where it is better to just shut the whole process down. That happens tomorrow. I just called .GiveAttention() for the last time.
-
RE: Another AI based art generator, DALL-E Mini
Stable Diffusion prompt: "a photo of a kneeling warthog watching a bus garage burn"
-
RE: Bad block on SSD
@CarrieVS said in Bad block on SSD:
I should probably confess ... that I don't have proper backups
Most people don't. It's like a really expensive insurance policy. Most people can get by with a less robust "policy" because all they care about is a few documents and photos and those are relatively easy to store in a cloud service somewhere. The probability that a really bad event would occur where you need the "full" coverage is very low.
Losing a few paragraphs out of a document because you forgot to save it is a much more urgent issue than worrying about having your computer's drive die on you. Yet even that sense of urgency is not nearly as strong as it used to be due to cloud storage and automatic document recovery. How many people go about their business without even thinking about the possibility that something could happen that would cause them to lose their data? The fact that you even had the notion to set up a backup system puts you way ahead of most people.
-
RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: Searching for something and a meta.d link came up as one of the results.
click
<It didn't take an hour, but it still took much longer than expected>
Catches self navigating to servercooties to see what went wrong this time
Congratulations , you have trained me to automatically check servercooties even if the terribly performing discosite isn't WTDWTF.
-
RE: WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else
I spent a significant amount of time thinking that I had enabled the "automatically hide the taskbar" setting, mainly because that's what I normally do and because the taskbar seemed to be hiding itself properly.
One day, the taskbar showed up again and refused to hide itself. I assumed for a while it was because a program was keeping it activated. After some investigation, that turned out not to be the case. The auto-hide setting was in fact turned off. I opted not to turn the setting on because it I don't really care about the taskbar.
Today, the taskbar has disappeared again. Moving the mouse down to the bottom of the screen doesn't make the taskbar appear. Pressing the Windows key does make it appear though. Checking my settings again while writing this post, I can see that the auto-hide setting is turned on. In addition, using the mouse to make the taskbar visible works again.
Either I'm crazy, Windows 11 is crazy, Microsoft is gaslighting me, or Windows 11 is just a with a dubious veneer painted over it. Or it's all four things at once.
-
RE: Need tips for trolling
@accalia said in Need tips for trolling:
in short, online you need to be nothing less than borderline telepathic
You get bonus points for insisting that you are, in fact, not telepathic.
-
RE: In other news today...
@cvi said in In other news today...:
others are sticking "AIs" into fighter planes:
In the article, this is referring to the AI dogfighting tournament that happened back in 2020. If you dug even a little bit into it, you would see that although it was a very impressive demonstration of machine learning techniques it is very, very far removed from the real world.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lTzyfhvTXoQ
TL;DW: Take a trained fighter pilot, deprive them of all of the physical feedback they would get in a real jet, give them a simplified weapon system that has no resemblance to the real world, give them no time to practice with these constraints, and pit them against an AI with perfect sensors and information that has been trained with nothing but this unrealistic approximation of the real world and they will probably lose.
Give even an amateur gamer some time to practice and the AI can be beaten:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Isig_RRRqY
Again, this is some really good work for advancing the development of machine learning but we don't have to worry about rogue AI pilots any time soon
-
RE: WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
Microsoft, being a small company and all, barely has the budget to translate their blatant advertising so I can see why they would want to get their money's worth by sending it to my work PC. Said blatant advertising also doubles as a throat clearing exercise . How considerate of them
-
RE: Even More DiscoMD5 Nonsense
1d41e6f55521cdba4fc73febd09d2eb4 This is just an ordinary list.
3e35563210f995ee79a073fa882e1fd6 Nothing to see here.
a85803f14639bef7f4539bad631d088c No backslashes required
4363b12ae39947f045a4fb5fad740dc8 We were just 6f641d63321c2a1607b4a62e674000ff the whole time! -
RE: U.S. Cassette Album Sales Rose 35% in 2017
@masonwheeler said in U.S. Cassette Album Sales Rose 35% in 2017:
@pie_flavor said in U.S. Cassette Album Sales Rose 35% in 2017:
I have an audiophile for a roommate, and he did this for a bunch of albums. Apparently the difference is audible when you have a gigantic speaker like his, since it's analog sound instead of digital.
If your digital sampling rate is at least 2x the upper bound of the range of human hearing, this is not true; any soundwave we are capable of hearing can be reconstructed with fidelity indistinguishable from the original waveform. I don't remember what the theorem is called that demonstrates this, but I recall that it's been scientifically proven. Audiophiles may claim otherwise, but they would not be able to tell the difference in a properly-administered blind test.
That doesn't stop people from buying 192 KHz sampled audio that might actually sound worse than your run of the mill 44.1 KHz audio. While we're at it, why not make TVs that deliberately emit accurate amounts of UV radiation? If I can't get sunburn from my LCD panel then the picture quality isn't nearly high enough.
-
RE: If "real" water isn't for you, try some hydrogen water
I remember seeing an advertisement for a machine that could "process" water to supposedly change the bond angles of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Different bond angles had different medicinal properties.
I hope they choose a particularly beneficial bond angle for all that extra hydrogen they added to the water...