Søren Fuglede Jørgensen @fuglede@mastodon.social

Danish investment bank Saxo Bank recently introduced minimum brokerage fees on a 1 month notice; as such, customers with small positions are now forced to either close immediately (paying a fee to Saxo Bank) or wait (paying an even larger fee to Saxo Bank); pest eller kolera, as we'd say.

If this is legal(?), what would keep a unscrupulous investor platform from introducing sky-high fees to force the hands of smaller customers?

PSA: Check out Mars right now (east-southeast from my corner of the world). It's that yellowy-orangey thing that's way brighter than it normally is: It's closer to us now than it's going to be for some 15 years.

How to solve a well-known open maths problem in 3 simple steps:

1. pip install burau

2. >>> from burau.curve import calculate_polynomial

3. Find four positive integers a, b, c, and d so that

calculate_polynomial(a, b, c, d)

produces the empty dictionary. Or show that that's impossible.

https://github.com/fuglede/burau

Version 1.2.0 of everyone's favorite .NET assignment problem solver is now available: https://github.com/fuglede/linearassignment/releases/tag/1.2.0

Have you ever had to assign opinionated stuff to other stuff, be it workers to jobs, players to teams, students to classes, or something else, then this sort of thing might be useful to you.

I'm starting to see where the general strategy to fight COVID around here is going:

- Restriction 1 (implemented): Stay at home and don't expose it to sunlight.
- Restriction 2 (implemented): Don't feed it after midnight.
- Restriction 3 (to be implemented): Do not let it come in contact with water.

Wait what.

As Danish Defence Intelligence Service is caught spying on Danes on behalf of the NSA, let's revisit our parliament's response from when the allegations first came up: https://information.dk/indland/2014/01/ingen-grund-antage

Sometimes all you can do is marvel in disgust at the utter incompetence on display.

You can even use it to cheat on your algebra exam!

Supposedly, GPT-3 is almost so good at generating text that we humans no longer have to. At first, I was curious why we didn't see much discussion around whether it was just plagiarizing training samples or not (and why doing so wouldn't be optimal as far as "generating human-like text" goes), but seeing this Q/A with itself on the topic of entropy, it seems like that's not going to be much of a concern. I think it's 1021, by the way, but I'm sure that's still a huge range!

If you did have a Danish corona test taken and have NemID, having the material destroyed is easy enough:

1. Go to your e-Boks at https://www.e-boks.dk, click "Ny besked", choose "Statens Serum Institut" and "Hovedpostkassen"

2. Write something like "Jeg vil med henvisning til databeskyttelsesforordningen samt sundhedsloven anmode om, at alle personoplysninger, herunder biologisk materiale, fra min COVID-19-test af {{DATO}}, destrueres."

With https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922733 comes another reminder that large scale DNA collection is never unproblematic. And a reminder to be wary when Danish State Serum Institute uses corona tests to gather and store biological material on a large portion of the Danish population, cf. https://www.version2.dk/artikel/statens-serum-institut-glemte-at-fortaelle-biologisk-materiale-med-dna-corona-test-gemmes/

Summer time is open source time. Warm-up: Make sure that Python graph library #NetworkX can calculate minimum weight matchings of bipartite graphs without assuming that the underlying graphs are complete. [0]

This is useful whenever "something" has to be "assigned" to "someone" where each "someone" has preferences about what they're being assigned. [1] This turns out to be a common subproblem in combinatorics and constraint satisfaction.

[0] https://github.com/networkx/networkx/pull/4057
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem

Did anyone ever build a feed that listens on Stack Overflow search queries (as opposed to e.g. tags)?

I often find myself searching for the same things over and over, so having something like that would be pretty useful for identifying questions and providing support on stuff (libraries, frameworks, ...) that you've built and which doesn't have its own tag.

Lessons learned from day 1 with Deno:

* When they say that it ships only a single executable, they mean Deno itself, and not whatever comes out of `deno bundle` (cf. Go/Rust). Which is a shame, as it would otherwise solve a common pain point with Python.

* The standard libraries I encountered have a long way to go before they'll feel mature.

* The (unofficial) Alpine Docker images worked off-the-shelf, which doesn't always happen.

Me, thinking I'm real clever: "If I use that one GPT-2 demo site [0] to make stories about Gurli Gris (Pegga Pig), I'll never have to worry about running out of goodnight stories!"

Thanks, internet, I guess ...

[0]: https://talktotransformer.com/

Peter Beier Chokolade spell out what we probably all knew deep down already: The best wine together with chocolate (or, well, most things really) is beer.

When I did math for money, I regularly had to explain to skeptical engineers the value of fundamental research with no immediate applications to society. And then there's this:

Fun little article (Danish) on how Zetland have minimized the CO2 emissions of their data transfer: https://www.zetland.dk/historie/sO0E9bnv-aekdaa3R-f69bc

The client-side version is that local caching of data can matter. Download your favorite podcast or playlist rather than stream it using mobile data on your commute, and you'll help reduce energy consumption a bit. We're talking "remember to turn off the lights" levels of savings, but easy enough to do.