hendzen

Until the AI starts generating business-speak...

You have to buy the feed, the market data isn’t free. Depending on your usage the fees can get fairly steep [0]. And that’s just the market data, you need to pay for colocation, cross connects, and order entry sessions. Of course Nasdaq is only one US equity market - there are 14+ with more coming online in recent years.

[0] - http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DPUSdata

Why implement the halving as a step function every 210k blocks instead of continuously reducing the block subsidy each block? An infrequent halving event that poses a bit of a shock to the cashflow of miners seems more risky, in that it will suddenly bankrupt a chunk of the miners with insufficient marginal profitability, rather than blurring out those bankruptcies over a larger window of time.

More concretely, rather than having the block subsidy = 50 >>= floor(height / halvings), it could simply be 50 / 2^(height / 610k).

From what I've heard Jane Street's bread and butter isn't latency sensitive market making on public equities, but creation/redemption arbitrage on ETFs, especially ones that hold a lot of relatively illiquid stuff like various fixed income ETFs. Creating and redeeming those ETFs might involve pricing an emerging market sovereign or corporate bond that might have only traded a few times in the last year. So their expertise is more around smartly trading really weird stuff as opposed to the pure speed players like Jump, Citadel or Virtu Financial.

That said JS is probably in a lot of different products, some more latency sensitive than others, but speed isn't what they are known for.

At a time when the entire system of capitalism is under existential strain, you’d think its prime beneficiaries would be able to temper their worst excesses. Alas, of course they won’t.

The effective cost of borrowing is going to be considerably higher than 6% if a regular person is trying to pay for their living expenses with the principal of a loan denominated in cryptocurrency. Think about exchange fees, taxes for any appreciation/depreciation upon sale, the cost of tracking/filing the taxes etc.

As I said it seems like most of the DAI borrowing is being done by people taking out margin loans to speculate on crypto. Perhaps this might make sense for the limited use case of people trading cryptocurrency (which is its most popular yet pointless application), but I don't see it being useful or economically viable for general purpose loans.

EDIT: upon further thought since the loan has to be secured with crypto assets, its not comparable to a personal loan. The equivalent regular finance product would be for a portfolio line of credit. Those have much lower interest rates, fed funds + 1-3% depending on the source.

Why would someone agree to take out a loan with a 6% interest rate when the fed funds rate (not incl spread for various retail products etc) is 400+ bps lower. Even with the spread you are going to be paying less than that for a regular margin loan for trading, which is what I assume these loans are used for.

- AI based systems will start to replace humans in the more mechanical parts of the legal system. Judging traffic court cases could be one example.

- One country will invade another country using computer/information attacks as the deciding strike, perhaps Russia invading one of the Eastern Bloc countries. People's mobile phones will simply tell them that there is some kind of natural disaster happening and that they should go home and seek shelter, while the invading country's forces quickly seize all key infrastructure. This will be a wakeup call to the world that if you can control the screens, you can control society.

- No real political progress will be made on solving/mitigating climate change. The worlds political systems will simply not be equipped to make the necessary decisions to reduce carbon emissions by enough to matter. People will become numb to the unfolding disaster and as such it won't lead to clicks/pageviews, so the media will stop covering it. The major disasters (large fires, storms, etc) that happen will receive coverage but be quickly forgotten, much like mass shootings today.

- New York and California will diminish in influence & power in the US. Wealthy people moving to other states will cause a fiscal death spiral as the state governments have to raise taxes to fund widening deficits. Austin will be regarded as a tier 1 city. Other inland states like Colorado & Arizona will also gain population and power.

- Another major hurricane will hit the northeastern US, it will be far worse than Hurricane Sandy.

- Steady improvements will be made in technological mitigations to climate change like carbon capture, and more efficient manufacturing and farming processes. It won't be enough to solve the problem but will provide some hope to eventually stop making the problem worse in the 2030s.

- Extremist political factions on the left and right in the US will continue to gain influence and power.

- Either SpaceX or Blue Origin will conduct a private, manned mission to the moon.

no disagreement that there is a huge long tail of small successful quant groups out there.

However, specifically in the realm of sourcing and processing novel raw unstructured datasets and creating signals that other firms don't have, as far as I know the big firms (some others in addition to the 2 I mentioned) dominate this area, as its too expensive and time consuming for smaller groups to do.

of course it’s more complicated than that - the end product is more features that can go in to all kinds of different trading strategies. For example as you said they are a big market maker - if they can more accurately predict earnings surprises with this data then they can price options more accurately in their MM strategies. Used properly it’s a lift to everything they do.

The two funds I mentioned can afford exclusivity deals. When they expire the rest of the street catches on, by then they are already on to new ones. At any given time they have multiple in the pipeline.

Citadel and Two Sigma both have had large teams working on this for years. They are making a lot of money doing it but barriers to entry are very high. You need to collect all the data in a way such that you can reconstruct how it looked at any point in time. The vendors can’t be trusted to not make retroactive corrections, so you have to collect it for years before it becomes useful. Doing that takes a lot of time and money.

There are no private beaches in CA. It's just the road that is private, the beach is public land.

There are no private beaches in CA by law. He owns the only road leading to it, which the previous owner allowed people to drive through for a small fee for many years.

I guess he has more time now to focus on his campaign for president of the world.

Individual VC investments are a high-risk, high reward play, but for an LP, investments in large baskets of VC investments via VC funds are ideally intended to collect an uncorrelated risk premium. The idea isn't to simply to beat the SP500, its to diversify, and thus improve risk adjusted returns, of their broader investment portfolio.

For large institutional LP's like pension funds, endowments, charities, etc, they need steady smooth returns that they can draw upon year after year to fund their beneficiaries. In particular a down year really hurts them since they will have to draw down on their principal. This is a very different risk calculus to an individual saving for retirement who can stomach 30-40 years of stock market volatility with a good probability of having enough money at the end of their career.

So rather than chucking the bulk of their fund in to the asset with the highest expected returns as an individual might, these institutional investors buy a big basket of very different return streams (i.e. as uncorrelated as possible) to smooth out the bumps in each one.

RIP Softbank Vision Fund 2.0

uber, lyft, to a lesser extent slack

I wonder how history will look back on Reid Hoffman's book, "Blitzscaling". The premise seems bit ridiculous now in light of recent problems at WeWork and Uber.

even if you take the string as `const std::string &` you will still end up with implicit string construction if someone passes a char* . Sure you can use std::string_view as an argument type to prevent this simple case, but it doesn't work in all cases.

Consider a std::map<std::string, Blah> for example, if you have a char* and you want to index in to the map you are going to also end up with an intermediate string construction b/c STL associative containers don't have heterogenous lookup. Note that this was fixed in std::map::find in C++14 [0], but still is there for operator[].

[0] - https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/map/find

Not really at the early stages from what I can tell. There is definitely a correction happening in late stage pre-IPO and recent-IPO companies. In part because everyone is realizing that SoftBank are actually the dumb guys in the room, when the prior common view was that they were the smart money. A lot of these crazy valuations (Uber, WeWork, Slack, etc) that are getting cut were set by them.

This strategy works very well if you have a gigantic money printing machine, which Google does. Uber has a gigantic money incinerating machine. They don't have the ability to just have engineers spinning their wheels on non-business critical projects like Google does.

I'm sure Adam Neumann and his cronies on the WeWork board would have loved to be able to list on the LTSE. Would make it much harder for non-colluding market participants to call them out on their self dealing!

Yet another recent display of aggressive, excessive financial engineering. This is notable in WeWork’s case for being done in a pre-IPO startup, but is inflicted every day upon lesser known companies by legions of PE firms. This is late cycle business tactics - the relentless, desperate pull of any future value - real, imagined or invented - in to the present. The result of greed, hubris, and a decade of overly loose monetary policy. That this shameful IPO is coming to market is a sign the music is coming to a stop. Batten down the hatches.

Wealthfront isn't a very large company so if you are telling the truth you have potentially given enough information about your friend for people there to identify him/her.

I started going bald at a relatively young age. I fretted about it for a while, tried different hair cuts etc, and was pretty unhappy about it. After looking in to a few different treatments, procedures and dismissing them all due to side effects and/or cost I bought a pair of clippers and started shaving my own head regularly. The first day I did it was totally liberating, now I wouldn’t go back to having hair even if I had the option. The entire idea that losing your hair is bad is socially constructed by the mass media and advertising industry to sell you these expensive crap treatments. Balding is an entirely healthy and natural human process. Embrace your baldness, stop trying to “fix” it and focus on solving the real problems in the world.

I have found myself often ordering from Target.com recently. They also have 2 day shipping on most items and unlike Amazon when I order a brand name item from them I actually can expect to get a genuine product. Their supply chain seems to be much more reliable in that regard.

Mongodb already used AGPL prior to switching to the SSPL...

Fair point, though as far as I know they didn’t intentionally troll soviet fighter jets.