Having wasted 6 years of my life intensively working to create an algorithmic trading system (and failing to make it consistently profitable), what they have here is the easy part. You need a system for discovering strategies. That's were almost all your effort will go. The simulator for backtesting, integrating with a broker, etc. is such a small part of it, if you're serious about it, you're probably better off writing your own.
I don't know what I'm missing, but I've tried to use Time Machine many times over the past decade and every time it's the same thing. After a few weeks, it forgets what it's doing and has to rebuild the backup from scratch.
As a former TSA agent, it's most definitely theater. We used to practice by trying to hide something and see if we could get through. The xray operator didn't stand a chance even when they knew it was coming. This was over 10 years ago so maybe it's improved? I doubt it.
In 2015, agents with Department of Homeland Security posing as passengers snuck fake explosives through the security lines of several of the nation’s busiest airports. During the test, TSA officers missed 67 of the 70 fake weapons that went through the checks – a failure rate of 95%.
I wonder if the TSA has some signaling effect though apart from the actual efficacy of the security theatre. Even if it catches things rarely, the fact that it exists makes people more aware and potentially look out more for abnormal behavior in airports (and catching some things some times still probably acts as a deterrent - at least more so than not having the security theatre around)
Well sure, if you're writing a generic CSV parser, it's very complicated. But if you know what your input looks like, CSV can be one of the simplest format to parse.
I think the analogy to energy is pretty good. Like the FizzBuzz thing, you can also build a machine that has a lot of energy but doesn't accomplish anything useful.
The conservation of energy, specifically, is a misleading analogy. If you want an energy-related analogy, I think you will find a better one in entropy (especially given its close relationship to information.)
Agree, I love the idea and wanted to make this work for my home, but from personal experience I'd say most people would find this more trouble than it's worth.
I wrote something very similar to this a couple years ago for our household. It runs on a raspberry pi and uses a barcode scanner and when we go shopping we scan everything in and then scan things out as we use them. We live far away from town and shopping trips are rare, big all day events. It's easy to forget to scan things out and then things that don't have barcodes like vegetables are hard to track so we don't bother. Manually entering it all in and then remembering to remove it while cooking is too much trouble (we tried).
