It's baffling to me that Apple doesn't get get more attention from regulators. They're very blatant in behavior which is explicitly illegal in current antitrust law. They 1) formed a cartel with book publishers to increase ebook prices, 2) formed a cartel with multiple other tech companies to suppress software engineer wages, and now they're 3) using a dominant position in one market to enter into another.
The other tech companies do things which one could argue should be illegal... Apple does things which already are illegal.
The UK equivalent of the NSA invented both RSA encryption and DH key exchange years before any of Diffie, Hellman, Rivest, Shamir, or Adleman did their work. No Fields medal per se, but two Turing awards...
I think the odds that the largest employer of mathematicians in the world is secretly sitting on ground breaking fundamental math is pretty high.
Tldr- commodities trader accidentally specified physical delivery for several thousand tons of coal; very surprised when the barges show up at their waterfront office.
I think the story is fiction. I don't think commodities are sent wherever your office is. Isn't the location of delivery set as a part of the futures contract?
Thedailywtf stories are generally some mix of fiction and fact. They take a presumably first-hand account from an insider and change a bunch of details to anonymize it and enhance it for dramatic effect.
I'd guess, for this particular story, that at least the misparsing of XML for a futures contract actually happened, and maybe that some producer consequently had to ask about the feasibility of delivering to a corporate office that happened to be in former docklands. It's entirely possible that the commodity involved was not coal, and it's extremely unlikely that a guy showed up one day at the front desk with a clipboard and barges outside.
Yes (e.g., if you buy CL futures, delivery is in Oklahoma).
QL coal doesn't trade anymore (all the active coal futures I can find now are cash-settled) but delivery seems to have historically been at the discretion of the parties, so the story is at least plausible.
Everything I’ve read seems to say it’s very, very difficult to accidentally take delivery, but it’s not quite impossible.
In related news, there is a Planet Money Podcast (episode called the Eddie Murphy Rule) where they interview the trader who took possession of a bunch of cattle by mistake IIRC.
The UI is good wrt readability; but the statistics, not so much.
2 concrete improvements would be 1) to change the color coding to cases per population (right now it seems to simply be a hard cutoff of 100 for orange, 1000 for red--which makes comparisons between unequal-sized geographies misleading), and 2) show a smoothed version of the curves (e.g an exponential moving average or somesuch) to handle noisiness in the day to day data.
But, yeah, much easier to read when it isn't overlapping blood red circles.
Thanks for the feedback! We did have a lot of discussion about whether we should be showing per capita numbers and throughout the process the numbers have grown quickly and we kept changing it, first from cumulative case numbers, having to change the thresholds, then changing to deaths as a more reliable signal of how bad things are generally, so this is just where we landed as of a couple weeks ago in terms of how to color the markers.
I do agree that it can be misleading to suggest that 1k cumulative deaths in somewhere like Michigan is the "same" (color-wise) as somewhere like Brazil and normalizing by population would address that. OTOH, I do think it's a valid use case to draw the attention to where the absolute death numbers are highest as well regardless of population at least based on our own curiosity, but perhaps that's more appropriately done in a simple ranking table.
We were actually thinking of repurposing the marker colors altogether to reflect on the "flatness" of a geography's death curve, but not sure if we want to trade off on quickly answering the question "who has it worse off, right now?"
a preliminary submission has not passed a peer review with the rigor of scientific defense.
these sorts of things may be passed among researchers for extended periods of time [years] until all the kinks are worked out of the thesis and a working theory with no known exceptions and independently confirmed agreement of results occurs.
What exactly is the standard of peer review you're expecting? Unless you have reason to think they flat out fabricated the data, the analysis is probably no better or worse than your garden variety nature or science or cell paper.
My previous employer and my current one (both Fortune-50 tech companies) each had quiet policies that prospective job candidates who had Huawei on their resume needed extra clearing before they could even interview. Reading through the indictment makes the policies seem less paranoid or perhaps even not paranoid enough.
While I hear your reasoning, and parts of it make total sense, it is explicitly illegal to discriminate against someone due to their citizenship (yes, citizenship as well, not just national origin or anything like that) during the recruitment process (exceptions apply, i.e., if they are in the US illegally or if the position requires some sort of security clearance).
Imo the only way it would work is if there was a separate law passed that addresses hiring workers who have Chinese citizenship specifically (with no US citizenship at the same time, obviously, as dual nationals are a thing), but that would never happen unless the situation escalated dramatically way beyond what it is now.
The other tech companies do things which one could argue should be illegal... Apple does things which already are illegal.