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domdip

447 karma · joined June 20, 2013

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domdip··on Michael Dell Bought His Company Too Cheaply
If you look at this as a one-shot game, sure, but it's not. If everyone votes no the buyout would be rejected and the prospective buyers would have to offer a higher price to get it approved.

The tricky thing is that shareholder voters exhibit very weird and irrational behavior (due to proxies, lobbying, the T Rowe Price craziness, etc.), so I'm not sure game theory is terribly useful to begin with here.

domdip··on An Exact Value for the Planck Constant: Why Reaching It Took 100 Years
This is unreadable.
domdip··on Open Source Project – View 689 Salaries Posted on Hacker News, Share Yours
Did you consider simply skipping estimated payments and paying the interest? It's only 3% above the federal funds rate. (Historical real return on equities is usually computed to be higher.)

Or a hybrid (pay a reasonable amount in estimated taxes but don't put any serious effort into getting it exact).

domdip··on Paper review: TensorFlow, Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems
The stated reason for extending this to phones was so that they could reuse these models for inference purposes. I'm not sure what this post adds to that (the author seems to miss that point).
domdip··on Alien life could thrive in ancient star clusters
To be sure, all of science could reorient itself around your mystical drug experiences, but that could take a really long time. Wouldn't it be easier for you to ask those beings the two prime factors of a really big number? That would settle the question quickly enough.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the...

domdip··on Should You Be Allowed to Invest in a Lawsuit?
And most of them have loopholes big enough to drive a truck through. (See payday loans, title loans, hard money loans, merchant cash advance, etc., etc.)
domdip··on Marijuana tax take nearly double expected in Colorado
Earmarking is PR, it has little to no effect on actual education budgets (beyond setting an irrelevant floor). Money is fungible and budgets for education are never actually indexed to revenue from a particular tax.
domdip··on A court ruling that could blow up Uber's business model
You might start by following the "Independent contractor vs employee" guidelines. Of, say, California and the IRS.

http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_independentcontractor.htm

http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ...

domdip··on The Terrible Teens
How about opening an incognito window? (No charge.)
domdip··on Financial Misstatements
There's no hypocrisy there. He's probably had to personally be super-cautious about opening his mouth about things like this.
domdip··on Wealthfront: Silicon Valley Tech at Wall Street Prices
Maybe. More asset classes shouldn't hurt, although at some point they may not help much (new ones may be highly correlated to some combination of the previous ones) and lower fees are nice. For bigger portfolios WF's single-stock approach may add enough value to compensate for these. I'm sure both companies have simulations proving they're better...
domdip··on Wealthfront: Silicon Valley Tech at Wall Street Prices
Can't upvote enough.

The legit disagreement seems to be between WF's approach and the Bogleheads argument that you only need three funds. I lean toward the former but haven't been satisfied with any of the analysis around this honestly.

domdip··on Wealthfront: Silicon Valley Tech at Wall Street Prices
Because to some extent the asset classes are uncorrelated. This is the basis of Modern Portfolio Theory, and the reason you don't just dump everything into the highest-return class (e.g., stocks).

For a simplified model, check out Kelly gambling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

domdip··on Google Play Music – free, ad-supported radio
Yeah "Google Play Music All Access Unlimited" is a truly horrible product name (not to mention un-Googleable if you mix up even one of the words).
domdip··on How I Became U.S. Chief Data Scientist
Interestingly, he was Chief Product Officer of Color Labs, one of the more buzzy failures of the last few years.

Not knocking his other accomplishments. I'm just surprised I haven't seen it mentioned in any of the recent press he's been getting (even the tech press).

domdip··on The Golden Ratio: Design's Biggest Myth
It's one of the 'curiosity gap' patterns. Hopefully we'll be immune to this sort of thing soon.
domdip··on Leaked TPP Investment Chapter Reveals Serious Threat to User Safeguards
Krugman has a less dense explanation of some of these issues here:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/tpp-at-the-nabe/...

domdip··on One Professional Russian Troll Tells All
No, you're not right; everything here is totally correct.
domdip··on The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians (1997)
You say Bayesian inference, I say bigotry.
domdip··on Why GM Hired 8,000 Programmers
Probably preferable to layoffs (cheaper, no bad press) if a major project is shutting down and they have nowhere to put them.

Also, could have been wrapped up in all sorts of other agreements about termination of contract. This was probably a major deal for both companies.

domdip··on Uber Expectations as We Grow
To address one of your points, the driver can't start the ride until you're in the car. So you're costing them money by making them wait a minute or two.

Was this always the case? Sure. But when ETAs were longer and drivers generally had more downtime, they were paid more per minute of actual driving. So this wasn't as painful.

If you want, you could try texting the driver saying "Hi, I'll be down in a minute, feel free to start the meter!" They might appreciate that, but it might also be against policy.

domdip··on Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
What a weird strawman article. Did the author really think Netflix produced television shows in the same way that Siri suggests gas stations? Any blockbuster-finding algorithm (or any other component of this decision) is going to have false positives and require human intervention.
domdip··on My experiment with smart drugs (2008)
It's the same author. There's a pretty big overlap between plagiarists and fabulists, so it's hard to put much stock into a subjective article like this.
domdip··on What Heroin Addiction Tells Us About Changing Bad Habits
The relationship between drugs and environment is so strong that (in mice, at least) you can trigger an "overdose" simply by changing the latter.

http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/390/Siegel.pdf

domdip··on Kyoto taxi drivers reduce robberies by 50 percent by doing nothing
The increase in robberies at non-participating stores is a bit concerning. This might deter in a similar manner to The Club, which did a good job of preventing your car from being stolen but didn't drop the overall crime rate.
domdip··on Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
Is there anything stopping a standby passenger from being given a seat on the second leg?
domdip··on Want to get rich? Don't pay off your student loans
I don't know of any competent financial planner that would seriously advise hanging onto debt at 6% and investing that money in equities. Even if this turns out to be a good idea in retrospect, it's terribly risky.
domdip··on First number not in Google? (2008)
There's a similar game in which you ask "what is the smallest positive integer that doesn't have a dedicated Wikipedia page?"

And then you can ask what happens when that number gets its own Wikipedia page...

domdip··on The mind-bending effects of feeling two hearts
I found this really fluffy. Not even sure how I'd tl;dr it. Some people are more aware of their heartbeat than others, and that correlates with a few arbitrary things that seem to line up with our sentimental understanding of 'heart'?
domdip··on QVC Sues Shopping App for Web Scraping That Allegedly Triggered Site Outage
IANAL. The linked cases are probably more relevant than yours, courts will have different standards if the other party is a (presumably unsophisticated) consumer vs. a corporation. Also unclear if there was other communication b/w QVC and Resultly, which may be important.

Also, "clearest source of a remedy" refers to ability to actually get compensation, which may be limited or difficult to argue for under DMCA/CFAA.

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