JackFr

I have no love for Andreessen. I haven’t read his manifesto, but In interviews I’ve listened to he comes off as extremely self-serving and not particularly impressive.

That being said, this piece is terrible.

No, it's not a linear regression, but it is at its heart optimization.

And yes, that is indeed like saying a computer is just a bunch of zeroes and ones and logic gates. It's true and beautiful and profound but nearly useless from a practical perspective. And the wonder, like computers when you scale the numbers of transistors to the billions, is that when you scale the number of parameters to the billions, you end up with something amazing.

Actually more dangerous traveling downward on the inside, where a small misstep will have you miss 2-3 treads, as opposed to the outside where the same misstep won’t have you miss any.

You can trivially create that with a portfolio split between T-bills and the S&P.

Im pretty sure they exist to beat the market.

They are called “hedge funds” because, as opposed to other stock funds they were allowed to take short positions while mutual funds could not, and so they could hedge some of their risk.

Apologies. My response was too snarky and too clever by half.

My point was that it’s easy to miss our own hubris when measuring our present ideas against the past, and that a bit of circumspection is well taken.

Which is why they were able to assert that no planes were currently flying with them.

But have any of the fleet ever flown with them in the past? Much harder question which likely will take some time to correlate.

I am moderately skeptical of the story that it was the fingerprint alone which led them to the kidnapper, and I am curious for more details. I have a vague suspicion the police had a pretty good idea of who they were looking for already, and while the fingerprint confirmed it, eventually they would have picked the same guy up. The existence of the fingerprint allows them to keep other sources and methods discreet.

That being said I'm not implying that the cops did anything illegal or even untoward. And further if this goes to trial the defense is certainly entitled to the full story, but it seems likely this guy will plead guilty and we might not know for years why the cops came to look at this guy.

Please no more articles about RTO.

Actually read the article.

That is neither the point the author makes, nor the tone he takes.

I think you miss my point.

I try to earn a competitive salary, as I’m sure you do. Why shouldn’t she? You, she or I may be bad at our jobs. That makes our employers foolish - it doesn’t make you, she or me bad people for trying to make a lot of money.

You get offers for roles at 5x your pay. You tell your boss and she says "Fine I'll match it." (Assume for the sake of argument you are not lying. Further please ignore the fact that your boss might be foolish to make that offer, that may be true but it's beside the point I'm making here.)

Now go home and tell your spouse and children that "I could earn a salary five times higher than what I am currently making, but I've chosen not to."

But that doesn’t make it a universal basis for ethics.

But basing your ethics on suffering rather than say some other model of virtue is arbitrary.

“Pfft” - Ada Lovelace & Joseph Marie Jacquard

> Processors are inherently awesome at branching, adding, adding, shifting, etc. And shifting to get powers of 2 (i.e., KB vs. GB) is a superpower of its own. They're a little less awesome when it comes to math.pow(), math.log(), and math.log() / math.log().

And here's something to consider -- if you're converting a number to human readable format it's more likely than not your about to do I/O with the resulting string, which is probably going to be an order of magnitude more expensive than the little function here.

> On a sunny day, total solar energy hitting the top of the atmosphere

Aren't they all sunny at the top of the atmosphere?

> gives about 1360 watts per square meter

I assume that's very much latitude dependent

I mean I'd like to believe I'm some sort of one-percenter, but I don't believe I am. I paid full sticker price for two children and with my third there was some nonsense with institutional aid, but the hit was still way over $25000.

The problem with his central thesis though, I find is the reason behind jacking the price up. The reason isn't to make the school more prestigious, but rather to be able to soak all buyers at the proper price point. You can't state a lower tuition and then jack it up for the children of lawyers and hedge fund managers. You need to start high and then offer assistance to the children of mechanics and plumbers. (I know -- many plumbers are rich)

The funny bit is while airlines and car dealers have to resort to judgment and tricks to figure out your price point, colleges get the FAFSA handed to them.

They lied to no one. I don't believe anyone has questioned the financials.

I find it amusing that everyone has sympathy for the the shareholders (who were given an opportunity to get out), while no one seems to feel a bit of sympathy for the bond holders. If anyone was defrauded (and personally I don't believe anyone was) it was them.

You can't finance a stock buy back with more stock.

A firm has assets and operations and those are funded with either debt or equity. Borrowing money to buy back stock is simply changing the capital structure of the firm.

As long as corporate finance has existed, the fundamental question, indeed the only question is what is the optimal capital structure for the firm.

It’s changing the capital structure from equity based to debt based.

Effectively it’s a change in ownership from stock holders to bond holders. Indeed it’s a sensible move if you are in a non-growth industry with stable and predictable cashflows - this is often how utility companies were financed.

It’s arguable that that was the intent of Bust Out 1.

> But there's a cost - increasingly large numbers of people can't.

That’s simply not true.

A firm can be financed with debt or equity. Issuing bonds to buy back stock is simply changing the structure of how the firm is financed. It does not have a moral component.

Where is the fraud?

I’m skeptical of (3) as well, and yet I encourage students to study math through calculus, and to study Latin.

My feeling is that the utility of higher math, Latin, history and literature comes every minute of every day, as you experienced life as someone who has familiarity those things and your life will be richer and fuller.

This is decidedly not testable. And yet I still believe it.

Every starting quarterback in the NFL is over 200 lbs with the large majority over 220 lbs.

I guess they all could be in fat mens clubs. Wild.

Your kind of playing a little fast and loose with the term 'database'. You've implemented a naive persistent cache. (Don't get me wrong, I have too at times. they can be quite useful.)

There’s nothing new with content needed every day. The evening news isn’t an hour long everyday because there’s an hour’s worth of important happenings everyday. The networks will create news to fill the airtime or drop relatively important stuff to match the time.

Newspapers are a little but better in that in times of big news, they will expand. But on the slowest of news days the NYT will still publish enough articles to space out their advertising.

I feel the same way. It’s a term mostly devoid of meaning, useful as a signal telegraphing what’s to follow.

> He flew his family over to the US, rented an SUV, but it's these "other fools" that are the problem.

File under tired tropes of shallow European impressions of the US.

I'm just sad he didn't bring up the metric system. I could have had bingo.