blue11

It's quite a stretch to portrait Leicester as a "moneyball" club. If you actually looked at the statistical data, they should be losing. A lot. Cherry-picking a few statistics and building a narrative around them is just silly. Leicester's season has been the most amazing Cinderella story in football that I can remember (Greece winning EURO 2004 is the closest, but I did not enjoy their style that much). And that's why we watch football, no matter what the statistics tell you, at the end it's 11 vs 11 and the game must be played.

I must be missing something, but how exactly would this simplify tax filing?

Presumably this bill would break the grip that TurboTax has on the market by, say, enabling cheaper and/or free solutions. But using the alternatives would not be in any way simpler than using TurboTax. And TurboTax is not that expensive (<$100 for federal+state).

I often hear people talking about IVF as if it's some sort of a luxury service that anyone who can afford will choose voluntarily. Clearly anyone who thinks like that hasn't actually had to go through it themselves. The physical and emotional toll is quite high. The path to conception can take many months, often years. Hormone therapy is not pleasant at all. And waiting in uncertainty for months could be quite trying for many people.

Now, it is true that IVF is currently being used when everything else has failed, so it's possible that it would be much less painful for perfectly healthy mothers/couples, especially if the technology improves a lot in the future. My advice: don't count on IVF as a family planning tool.

I really enjoyed the article until he got to the audition process. That would shrink the pool of candidates so much that all the previous advice about widening and diversifying the pool becomes irrelevant. Almost no one with significant experience would agree to that. Almost no one with a family would do it either. And let's face it, it's a buyer's market, not just for "the best", but even for the "just OK".

After unfollowing 90% of the people, I had a different problem. Facebook kept filling my news feed with "X liked this" or "X commented on this" from the remaining 10%. It seems that one of the goals of the news feed algorithm is to make sure that you are always seeing new content. This became really annoying really fast. So I ended up unfollowing 100% of my friends, than created a group containing the ones that I really cared about. Now my news feed is practically empty. It takes me one extra click/touch to get to the new "feed". The benefit of doing this is that in the group feed there are no "X liked this" items, only posts by my friends or posts in which they were tagged. Of course, at any time FB can decide to change the group feeds to make them similar to the news feed, but for now this setup kind of works for me.

Google and startups are two extreme ends of the spectrum, and neither is that great in terms of risk-reward balance. Personally, I'd recommend joining an established, but still growing, medium-sized company. That means shortly before, or a year or two after IPO, somewhere between 100-500 employees. That kind of a place still has momentum and is still relatively generous with equity. You won't get as rich as your pre-IPO coworkers, but you'll do OK and with less sacrifice. If the company is still growing, there will be opportunities for promotion and for learning and doing a lot of cool things. Think of joining Google or Facebook when they had 500 employees. In hindsight, it seems obvious that that was a good time to join, but I'm sure that lot's of people passed on the opportunity, thinking that it was too late. So recognizing that a company still has momentum can be a bit tricky. If you are coming out of college, one easy way to test if an established company is still a good place or if it has stagnated is to do an internship there.

I don't get it either. The story is very short and barely funny. And, frankly, the whole thing feels like a PR stunt of some sort. Whatever the motivation, they seem to be succeeding though, it's definitely going viral.

Personally, I've always found Redfin so much better than Zillow in the areas that are covered by Redfin (better data, better UI, overall better user experience). Having lived only in such areas for more than 10 years, I was surprised a few years ago to discover that Zillow was the industry leader.

I am not sure about Europe, but that's the law in the US too (there are a few exceptions).

My idea of a percolator has always been this: http://www.amazon.com/Bialetti-Express-6-Cup-Stovetop-Espres...

The water doesn't cycle, it goes through the ground coffee exactly once.

I think that the difference with drip coffee is the temperature / pressure of the water.

Even if RT removed their limits, there are still government imposed ones (supposedly to protect unsophisticated investors from risk): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor#United_Sta...

RT's limits are much higher though, and that probably is done with the goal of limiting the number of individual investors. Dealing with investors is a distraction for the fund managers. But the main issue is proprietary information. The more investors you have the higher the risk of information leakage to your competitors.

Option #1 is actually fairly easy. But it often means taking a less exciting job than, say, an early stage startup. I have to agree with you that the author didn't have his priorities straight.

The GC application should follow the H1B immediately. Don't accept an offer from an employer that cannot promise you that they will do that. Either they don't know what they are doing or they can't imagine you still working there several years later.

Basically, the rule is that your first job after college should be with an employer that will sponsor your green card application. I knew that when I graduated and it was my number one criterion when looking for a job. Most of my foreign-born friends knew it too and they did the same. Most, but not all. The ones who didn't due to naivete, carelessness, or limited job opportunities ran into problems later. You have only 6 years on an H1B and time flies quickly. US society is in general very welcoming to immigrants, especially highly-skilled ones, so it's easy to forget that you are just a guest here subject to the vagaries of the system. Getting the green card should be the absolute priority when selecting an employer, no compromise.

I found the article very interesting, but it seems to me that the metrics are the wrong ones. You cannot treat hire and no hire outcomes equally. Let's not forget that the goal of the interview process is to actually hire people. A successful hire is worth millions, a correct no-hire decision is just avoiding further losses of time and money. On the other hand, in terms of efficiency, a candidate that wasn't rejected early is the most expensive error. Well, not as expensive as actually hiring the wrong person, but it usually takes months to figure that out. Whereas the fact that a whole man-day was spent interviewing the wrong person on site becomes obvious in a few hours.

Here are the important metrics in my opinion, in order of decreasing importance:

- How many people were hired? Or what percentage of positions were filled? How long does it take to fill a position? Nothing in the article mentioned how many people were actually hired.

- False positives (people making it to the most expensive stage of the interview, typically a day-long on site interview, and being rejected there). What percentage of people that went to on site interviews got offers? Personally, I have always advocated processes that eliminate as many false positives as possible, even if it comes at the cost of some false negatives. Of course, you have to be careful not to filter out people too aggressively, because then you're just not going to hire anyone.

- False negatives (incorrectly rejecting good candidates early). By definition that's impossible to measure exactly. However, if you are not hiring fast enough, then maybe you have a problem with your screening process. At this point you could do an experiment and relax the screening process for half of the candidates and see what happens. But it could be just a sourcing problem, that is, you are not getting good candidates in the pipeline to begin with. It's very hard to tell whether you are being too harsh and not believing enough in people's abilities (or not willing to develop talent), or you are just not attractive to the kind of people that you want to hire.

Of course, all of the above is from the employer's point of view. If you are also trying to provide job seekers with a good service, then you can devise other metrics for success and for efficiency from their perspective.

(edited for formatting)

I believe that it's mostly a question of incentives.

IMO/IOI are very prestigious competitions for high school students. Doing well there can help you get into the college of your choice. This is true for US students as well as for students in other countries.

ICPC is a college students competition, but if you are a student in a good US college there isn't a lot to gain from it. You have plenty of real world opportunities already: tech industry, startups, academic research. In contrast, if you are a student in Russia or China and your goal is to get into a US Ph.D. program or to work in a place like Google or Facebook, ICPC is a great opportunity to make yourself stand out.

Keep in mind that a large fraction of the top IMO/IOI students from around the world move to the US for college, so there's plenty of talent in the top US colleges. There is just no motivation.

One other factor is support from the university. Places like MIT/Stanford don't care much about ICPC. The coaches are usually other students that are former contestants, working on a volunteer basis. On the other hand, a place like St.Petersburg ITMO cares a lot about ICPC, because it gives them bragging rights.

(Source: I've studied both abroad and in the US and I've been a contestant.)

Technically, most US medical schools don't require an undergraduate degree. However, the amount of coursework required is so large (about 3 years) that it makes sense to do a little bit extra work and get the BS anyway. It's good to have a BS degree in case you don't get into medical school.

No, you can't. Some Shanghai-listed stocks you can buy through the recently opened Hong Kong-Shanghai Connect. But those are mostly well established companies that are listed in Shanghai. You can read more about it here: http://www.hkex.com.hk/eng/csm/chinaConnect.asp?LangCode=en

I am curious why they are launching the rocket from an area so up north, especially in the middle of winter.

> Taxation in the States is at an all time low

Not true in 2014.

Obama raised a number of taxes for the top bracket: Ordinary income: 35% -> 39.6% Capital gains: 15% -> 20% Medicare tax: 1.45% -> 2.35%

Meanwhile in California: 10.3% -> 13.3%

Marginal taxes and the top for residents of California are: 39.6+2.35+13.3 = 55.25% The number is similar for New York City.

You have to go back to the Reagan's first term to find higher tax rates.

Now all we have to do is wait for the growth.

All of that is just marketing talk.

IEX is currently not an exchange. What they offer is a dark pool connected in series with a Smart Order Router. That's what all the big brokers (e.g., JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Goldman, Deutsche Bank, etc.) have been offering to their customers for years and their dark pools usually offer a lot more liquidity. The big brokers have become better and better and smart order router technology to protect their customers as much as possible from HFTs. IEX is at least 5 years late to the party.

Perhaps they are planning on becoming an exchange one day, but I am not sure how they can do that while slowing down order executions. It seems to me that that would be a serious violation of Regulation NMS.

The salaries aren't low. The data capture mostly the lower end of the distribution. Keep in mind that the data are from H1-B visa applications, so these are relatively low level positions. There are lots of recent graduates (foreign students who studied in US universities) starting in their first full time jobs. There are also more experienced engineers hired directly from abroad, but they are somewhat of an unknown quantity and there is a higher risk premium, so their salaries are also a little on the lower side.

After a few of years on the job their salaries will be higher, but by that time they will also get green cards, so they won't show up in these statistics anymore.

Also, stock is not included in the data.

The ratio of attending physicians to residents must be relatively low, something like 1:4, so a hospital cannot get more residency spots approved unless it also hires more attending physicians.

The monospace version of the font has too much vertical spacing to be used for programming. Everything looks double spaced.

Buying a home is not an investment, it's a quality of life improvement. Something that I usually don't see mentioned in rent-vs-buy arguments is that the housing stock that's available for sale can be very different from what's available on the rental market. The two markets are similar only at the low end. If you want something nicer, the chance that you are going to find exactly what you want is very slim. Even "luxury" apartments for example typically have beige carpet, cheap appliances, cheap bathroom fixtures, etc. For a private landlord it doesn't make sense to upgrade the property above the bare minimum either. It's just not cost effective. And if you are looking to rent a single family house your choice will be even more limited. Now, if you buy your home, with some reasonably priced improvements you can improve your level of comfort significantly. Of course, not everybody cares about these things. If you don't care too much about where you live then renting makes perfect sense.

This was probably the best critique of Crossfit that I've read so far. Personally, I've been doing Crossfit for 2+ years and I've got a lot out of it. In fact, I have been in the best shape of my life because of it. At the same time I've always had issues with some things. For one, the nutrition principles that they advocate, basically the Paleo diet, is quite questionable in my opinion (although not really harmful , since it's basically a low carbm, high protein diet). And, yes, there are lot of practices that predispose to injuries. In fact, I'm currently recovering from an injury that I am pretty sure I got at CF, although it wasn't the type of injury that you can pinpoint to a particular moment. Even though I believe that it was mostly my fault, because of bad form, and because of underestimating the damage for months and making it worse, at the same time it is true that the CF environment is such that it increases the chance of people injuring themselves.

However, this and other articles criticizing CF don't really understand the appeal of CF to most of the people that go there. The criticism is usually coming from serious athletes (and I use the word broadly to include professional athletes, semi-professional, and people that have always been just good at sports). Guess what, most people are not athletes, they do not have the knowledge or the motivation to come up with a proper training program and execute it on their own, and they are easily discouraged when sports do not come naturally easy to them. Most people are like me, they want to show up 3 times a week, do whatever workout has been prepared for them, and have an instructor advise them on what their doing. There is not much out there that comes close to CF. There are two big strengths of CF: Variety and Accessibility. Variety: CF is an all around training program, which might be bad for professional athletes, but it's great for people who just want to be fit. Where else would you go if you wanted to "properly" train on your own? Regular gyms like 24-hour Fitness don't have some of equipment like climbing ropes, GHD sit ups, pull-up bars (they might have one for the whole gym), and they have limited areas for doing things like barbell squats. (There was recent story about a popular gym eliminating the squat frame because it was "intimidating".) Accessibility: CF welcomes _everyone_. The complaint that the WOD is one-size-fits-all is not quite valid. Any exercise can be scaled down appropriately for each member. That means reducing the weight, reducing the reps, exercise substitution (e.g, doing inclined push-ups for beginners, or doing 3 pull-ups & 3 dips instead of 1 muscle-up, etc.), reducing the workout length and so on. That's how everyone gets to do the WOD. This is a big deal when you are a beginner! Even if you can't do a hand-stand or a musle-up, there are other things you can do and actually make progress. An finally one other thing: price. Yes, CF membership is expensive, but it is also several times cheaper than a personal trainer, and if you go to classes that are 5-12 people you basically have a trainer when you need one.

I've tried different things before, but nothing was as easy to follow or as effective as CF. Right now I'm kind of worried about going back to CF after I recover, as I realize that the chance of getting another serious injury is significant. But at the same time I don't see anything else that has all the benefits. I'd be kind of curious to hear if other people have found alternatives. Most of the suggestions so far are a long of the lines what a motivated athlete would do, but they don't work for people who just want to exercise casually for 5 hours a week and get a balanced workout.

The contest is for the best predictive model for ... an undefined objective function! Unless I missed it, I didn't see a formula of how the models will be scored. For example, you can have an objective function where predicting the winner gives you a lot more points than predicting which team will not make it out of the group stage. Or you can have one where all the different stages are equally important.

Depending on the scoring method, it might be advantageous to generate solutions that are not mathematically correct, that is, solutions where each row sums to 1, but the columns don't sum to 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, and 1, respectively.

You really need to define what the objective function is here.

I'm not saying that it's mostly wrong. I am saying that it's a biased perspective, but most of the contents is factual. You can learn interesting things about the markets, and about the individuals and the companies involved. However, this is one side of the story. Michael Lewis' facts were gathered from people that were close to him and the people that he could get to speak to him. It's one circle of people with their own agenda. But there are many other views out there. So he is presenting the facts that he knows about and that he thinks are important. But there are things that he is perhaps omitting on purpose, and things that perhaps he just doesn't know or understand. The book is not the whole truth. As with any good book or article, you can learn a lot without having to agree with the author's conclusions or his personal views.

You don't have to agree with Michael Lewis' views or buy into the story line 100% in order to enjoy the book. The fact is that this is a well-written book that is full of mini-stories and anecdotes that present very realistic descriptions of how electronic markets and Wall Street in general work. Statements like "the market is rigged" are obviously over the top but that doesn't mean that the book on average is not true to reality. Most books about electronic trading suffer from extreme sensationalism, poor writing, and the inability of the authors to understand the subject matter that they are writing about. Michael Lewis does a better job than everyone else. He is a great writer and he is a smart guy who has some financial background and has a pretty good understanding of financial markets. Yes, there is some sensationalism here (he has to sell a good story after all) and there are many errors in the book, and, yes, the author's biases are quite evident, he's picked a side and he's sticking to his story. On aggregate, though, this is probably the best book about the world of electronic trading that I've read.

(Some people mentioned "Dark Pools" by Scott Patterson. Although also interesting, that books was often quite painful to read because it was quite clear that the author did not understand basic financial and programming concepts. "Flash Boys" is much better, in my opinion. Although if you are really interested in the subject, you should read both.)

Many points have already been covered, but there's one really important one: the data.

It's not just about implementing a niftier interface to look at financial information. You must have the information itself first. Bloomberg has been aggregating so many different sources (hundreds, if not thousands) and they have been doing it for many years now. There aren't that many companies out there that are good at this. Only Reuters comes close to Bloomberg, as far as I know, and they aren't really that close. For individual data sources there are alternatives, but nobody else has such a comprehensive offering. There are all kinds of issues related to each data source that you would have to tackle one by one. Of course, anyone can subscribe to the different data sources, the costs are not going to be prohibitive for a well-funded startup. But regular licences would not allow you to display the data to your customers for free. You'd have to strike deals to be able to resell subscriptions to your customers and make the process easy for them. All of the data providers will want to get paid, data is not free. Once you start processing the data, you have to start archiving it because history is important. Bloomberg has been collecting data for decades. In some cases, they have data that the data providers themselves don't have because they were not so good at archiving in the past and many of them are still focused on providing real-time data only. So, if you wanted to buy historical data, it's going to be hard to get it. Often your only choice is to buy it from Reuters or Bloomberg and they are not going to give you licences for reselling the data. Note that even if you archived a lot of data from real time feeds over time, you still might have problems with the original data providers not letting you use the data for commercial purposes. And last but not least, even you got your hands on all the data that your customers would expect you to have, you still need to process it. Every data source has it's idiosyncracies that you'd have to master (not to mention that data formats have been changing over the years and documentation is often non-existing). This is very tedious and time consuming work, not the kind of stuff that excites most young startup founders. Bloomberg has been very good at processing, normalizing, and storing financial data from a multitude of heterogeneous data sources and they have decades of know-how.

Off the top of my head I can imagine only a couple of possible lines of attack that might have a chance: - Start with a niche solution, then expand slowly year after year, market after market, data source by data source. Your product will have to be relatively cheap though, so that customers would be willing to buy it in addition to Bloomberg. - Buy the data from Bloomberg. Develop your own UI. Get acquired by Bloomberg.