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Can we stop quoting the underlying notional size when comparing size to equity markets? If you know how a derivative works, it's well understood that quoting the notional to represent size just doesn't make sense.

To put it simpler, a terminated CDS contract does not mean there is a loss of wealth equal to its notional, whereas a stock price going to zero in the equities market literally means you just lost the complete amount you invested.

Not to sound offensive, but I've heard this comparison way to many times and it just doesn't add up in terms of prices - most swaps, for instance, have their fixed leg in the single digits in relation to their notional.


That's certainly true for interest rate swaps, but credit default swaps are actually quite similar to stocks. For example when Lehman filed and the stock went to 0, the CDS settled at 91.375 [1] meaning that the protection seller had to send 91.375% of the notional value to the protection buyer. Yes, in most cases there is no credit event and even in many credit events the impairment to the debt is much less than 90%, but also most stocks don't go to 0. This case is a good example because the maximum market cap of Lehman stock was 60 bln [2], but the CDS market moved 270 bln in the credit event (see [1]).

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

[2] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/lehman-bro...


Anyone notice how the main video on that page is almost exclusively women using the app? Guess that's linking in to the idea others have quoted here about the attractiveness factor of the photos in question.


classic double irish setup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish


It's interesting to think about how underutilized some of that knowledge actually is in the broad scheme of things - for instance, how popular is reading the classics of literature, versus the latest novella of the day?

Changes in technology have a fundamental impact on the way humans interacting with the world (for better or worse), an interesting book called The Shallows [1] highlights some of these points. Is the technology we're utilizing moving us in a direction that is long-term beneficial or harmful? People can access information more easily, but at the expense of what - lack of focus? Problems with deep thought and long-term planning?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp...


The biggest issue I see is that information has become cheap and hence just less valuable. How much more would I get out of reading Shakespeare if I didn't have hundred's of blogs analyzing everything he's written? Before, I might join a discussion class or really read the stories and take the time to find meaning in them. The fact that its right there lends itself to just almost not caring.


According to the page, it's neither a framework, nor a library - isn't that a bit counterintuitive? That makes it sounds as if it is beyond any of the existing styles of code reuse in software development, which is not the case.

I'm sure many would identify it as a library in the classical sense, since it is a bundle of code you include in your application and make calls to.


We were struggling with this problem for months.

What would you suggest to bundle into this library?


It's probably a design pattern, or a flavor of AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming).


Like the UI of your product alot - I take it there isn't a way to get the frontend without hooking up to your backend (e.g. simple IMAP setup?)

What is your business model for it? Since it's free, are you parsing all the mail and providing data services to interested companies looking to mine information?


Thanks!

I'm not sure what you mean about using the front-end without the back-end, but Inky's an IMAP/POP client like any other; it just stores your settings in the cloud. (If you mean "can I use it without storing my settings in the cloud", the answer is currently no... at least, not yet.)

We are not parsing the mail and mining data from it, nor do we plan to. We're looking at various non-privacy-invading ways to make money but we need more real-world data to see what makes the most sense.


Yep that's what I was getting at - still not comfortable relying on an external service for email.


Well, you can point Inky at your own mail servers; your mail never enters our network.


I don't mean to speak for the OP, but I'm not particularly comfortable with that idea.

I don't necessarily know how well you are protecting them, or if your admins are able to copy my password. Even if you encrypt it, who's to say how well? What if you DB leaks, and my credentials are in the hands of the "bad guys".

It's not fundamentally terrible, but it increases the attack vector..


Actually, you do know -- but only if you read my posts and related discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4971002

We're going to add this as a FAQ on the site with the next rev.


How can one say: And not a single one of these game is using that "Component Entity System".

That seems like an impossible statement without deep knowledge of the inner workings of the popular games you are referring to, which you certainly don't have access to.

Also, CES is a fairly longstanding design pattern for game development (at least 10+ years) - I refer you to this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4907998


If you were planning to write a high performance game using python, most likely you wouldn't be using the vanilla cpython interpreter, but instead using cython (http://cython.org/) to write extensions in essentially C for all your high performance code.

I think it's important to remember one of the core tenants of python is to first write in python, then optimize the bits where necessary in C by moving those calls into an extension - by using cython you get to move to C like speeds by just annotating your existing python code.

Also - I think a fairly more common approach to using python in game development is to write the core in C++, then call out to python for scriptability purposes (e.g. configuring characters/levels) - rarely would one write a full game in python unless extensions were heavily used, for the reasons quoted above.


I agree with everything you say but continually find cases where things have to be rewritten in Cython / using the CPython C-api or moving core logic to numpy. Knowing that you cant be interactive if your solution requires

a) allocating more than 160k objects

b) creating more than 22k numpy arrays

c) entering a with context more than 3700 times

d) doing a single for loop of over a million elements

can save you time from the get go. I am not suggesting that you cant write fast interactive code in Python, I am saying you wont write fast code by accident.


"Bigness" matters because only a few of the large banks are primary dealers [1] - they directly play a role in US treasury auctions. All the other investment banks that aren't primary dealers only play a part in the secondary market. Part of this relationship is also the agreement that large banks are always making markets [2] and providing liquidity for highly-traded Fixed Income products - without someone to make the markets, no one would be able to trade. A large part of the global finance system is based on the ability to easily buy or sell these products, from the huge institutional clients like Fidelity, to the individual investor using their Schwab account (albeit even that is done through a much larger entity to access the market). The move towards computerization in the financial industry over the past 30 years has directly impacted the bottom line of these large banks (via smaller bid/ask spreads [3]), but has also directly lead to increased liquidity due to trading volume.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_dealer [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_maker [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bid-offer_spread


It's funny how this ended up on here - this article about "nail houses" was recently posted today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4915398

The magic roundabout is mentioned in another posting on that same site: http://www.theworldgeography.com/2011/08/top-10-strange-stre...


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