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yellowstuffon The Hazards of Asset Allocation in a Late-Stage Major Bubble

> I expect once again for my bubble call to meet my modest definition of success: at some future date, whenever that may be, it will have paid for you to have ducked from midsummer of 2020.

Two can play at this game. I predict that at some future date the stock market will be higher than it is today.

yellowstuffon Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine

I'd assume they're optimizing for beginner developer UX, and assuming that anyone using mysql for something important will know to customize the error handling.

yellowstuffon It’s Time for Real Time Settlement

HFT trade with retail. Your comment doesn’t make much sense.

yellowstuffon Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation

Normally that's not really the case. There's a lot of academic and practical evidence that the most rational investors generally determine the prices of stocks, because even if there are a lot of irrational investors making random or systematic errors, a minority of rational investors all betting in the same direction ensure that prices are close to "correct", for some reasonable definition of correct.

In practice you just don't see examples of productive companies driven into insolvency by short sellers.

yellowstuffon WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

If you know the term LPs you should know the typically senior management at hedge funds have a significant portion of their net worth invested in their own funds.

yellowstuffon WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

"Hedge fund managers typically have a substantial amount of their own capital invested in the funds they manage, and a significant portion of their compensation is based upon the absolute, or positive, performance they achieve for their investors. As New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer observed recently, the interests of hedge fund managers and their investors tend to be "aligned", largely due to this combination of the managers' commitment of capital to their funds and the performance-based compensation structure."

https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/hedgefunds/hedge-mfa.htm

yellowstuffon Still alive

His concern was not that people familiar with his blog could deliberately find his real name, but that patients who searched for his real name would find his blog, which would make him unable to do his job. He justifies his concern pretty convincingly in the first post on the new blog.

yellowstuffon Scipy Lecture Notes

Think Stats is a very good book aimed at Python programmers who want a broad overview of practical statistical techniques: https://greenteapress.com/thinkstats/html/index.html

yellowstuffon Is Everything Securities Fraud?

> This may be a romantic notion that I misunderstand but isn't there a mechanism wherein I, an aggrieved (citizen/neighbor/bystander/victim) can buy a single share in a public company and then, as a shareholder, speak and/or protest at the annual meeting

Yes.

> and cause all manner of discomfort, public reckoning,

No.

The etiquette is to let people speak their piece while the board looks concerned, but as far as I know there have never been any actual consequences from this.

yellowstuffon Why are there so few children’s books set in the suburbs?

He also counts the Curious George books as being not suburban, which might be true of the original series, but there's a reboot by different authors that has a suburban feel. George drives around in a car, and goes to places like a pancake breakfast and a chocolate factory that don't seem to be in Brooklyn. These books aren't great, but my son likes them, as well as most of the other books that this article has committed to the flames.

yellowstuffon Interview advice that got me offers

I have over 10 years of experience and was recently on the job market. The highest paid job I was pitched by a recruiter paid more than double the lowest paid job I was pitched.

yellowstuffon The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

cvs, not svn.

yellowstuffon Noted A.I. Ethicist Timnit Gebru Let Go from Google Following Email Exchange

I'm not sure this is the best argument against these types of jobs. Food used to be completely unregulated and potentially unsafe, but there are still jobs regulating food safety. It's basically a solved problem, but it still requires lots of people in the public and private sectors who's jobs focus on food safety. Same story with cars, same with medicine. You could imagine a world where bias becomes a mostly solved problem but still requires a lot of people to work on it.

yellowstuffon I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

As I recall, the trick is that you can post a tweet, grab the URL, then if you edit it quickly enough it won't show up as edited.

yellowstuffon Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

A random blogger who no one's ever heard of explains this in excruciating detail and very persuasively:

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...

He agrees with the linked article that lifestyle factors are what drives the worse health outcomes in the US relative to other wealthy countries. They're not primarily driven by differences in access to or effectiveness in health care. He also makes the case for a few other very unintuitive points:

* Health care spending is a direct function of national wealth. If a country gets richer it spends more on health care, and every country at every time in modern history spends about the same amount on health care as a function of its wealth.

* The US looks like an outlier in health care spending because GDP is not a perfect measure of wealth. Actual Individual Consumption is a less well-known but much more relevant measure of national wealth. AIC shows the US is more of an outlier in wealth, which makes its high health care spending less remarkable.

* There's no magic bullet. Single payer nations pay less than the US mostly because they are less wealthy and health care spending is a function of wealth. Other countries have better health outcomes mostly because of demographics and culture, which can't be fixed by the health care system. And even though finding obvious waste and inefficiency in the US health care system is easy, at a macro level it doesn't look like the US is remarkably less efficient than other rich countries, and most spending goes towards things that patients want.

yellowstuffon The biology of dads

Every baby is different and every parent is different. Sleep training worked well for my family but that doesn't mean it's the right choice for yours.

yellowstuffon The biology of dads

I think you're right, "manipulative" has negative connotations that aren't appropriate in this context. When a baby is overcome with distress and cries instinctively I think it's important to always soothe them, when they cry as a mix of displeasure and communication then depending on the baby it may not be necessary to rush to them every time.

yellowstuffon The biology of dads

I don't see this as paradoxical. For babies past a couple months old a lot of cries are actually manipulative, and a more empathetic person can better distinguish them. I think my wife and I started sleeping training our son at around 12 weeks old, and quickly learned to tell the difference between a "complaining" cry that meant he was unhappy but he could probably soothe himself, and a "real" cry that meant he was really upset and needed our attention. Both of those were quite different from the sharp cries that indicated physical pain or something very distressing.

yellowstuffon Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]

Amazon had its ups and downs, but with them and Uber it was never a great intellectual leap to see how they could be very profitable. That's not at all the case for Google or Facebook. As late as 2002 Google itself wasn't convinced that it could succeed by selling ads, and their next best idea for making money was so uninspired that Silicon Valley spent several seasons mocking it:

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

yellowstuffon Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]

Joel said from the beginning that their goal was to kill Experts Exchange, which at the time was a scammy site that used dark patterns to lure people into paying for answers, but still popped up all the time on Google. And although I often found my question posted on other forums, I swear that half the time the only response was "Never mind I figured it out" or "Just Google it."

yellowstuffon Selling Data to Hedge Funds (2017)

> Is it fair to assume the most hedge funds are relatively good at tracking recent information and the value is in older archives that's hard to collect?

No, like he said the most valuable data has a signal that is independent from other data sets, which generally means something proprietary, and almost always without a long history. Having a cleaned archive of standard data with a long history is valuable but already pretty well served. It would be hard to compete with CRSP.

yellowstuffon Caste discrimination in some of Silicon Valley's richest tech companies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education

> "To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone."

> The Court supported this conclusion with citations—in a footnote, not the main text of the opinion—to a number of psychological studies that purported to show that segregating black children made them feel inferior and interfered with their learning.

I think that in general if a bunch of people say they're experiencing a problem than that's enough evidence that there is really a problem. But the Civil Rights movement did have objective factual support from the beginning.

yellowstuffon Falling five storeys from a New York rooftop changed my life

I don't have hard statistics, but there's a New Yorker article about survivors of Golden Gate Bridge suicide attempts that says many of them regret the attempt and don't try again. The people who survive jumping off a bridge is probably pretty close to a random sample.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:V_siZl...

yellowstuffon Founder Paydays at Exit (IPO)

M is 1000 in Roman numerals. While it is uncommon, M is used to mean 1000 in business contexts, such as CPM: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cpm.asp

Therefore "mm" is the most unambiguous way to denote millions, and is used in accounting.

yellowstuffon How to Interview Engineers

I don't totally agree with the article, but I think it's totally fine to give an ambiguous question in an interview, to see how the candidate handles it. Almost every real world project will involve ambiguous instructions.

Obviously you don't want to penalize the candidate for not reading your mind and guessing the definition you had in mind. But I do think it's fair to give extra credit to candidates who notice the ambiguity and ask for clarification. Done well, an ambiguous question can be an opportunity for a candidate to demonstrate a strength, rather than a trick to unfairly penalize someone.

yellowstuffon Startup Hiring 101: A Founder's Guide

Yes, and a lot of the best software writing I've ever seen was an advertisement for Fog Creek Software. Having an ulterior motive doesn't make this a bad article.

yellowstuffon Programming language notation is a barrier to entry

> Do you think that the "programming language" should sacrifice the usefulness of its syntax in order to appeal to beginners more?

No. This has been tried a lot and has mostly failed. The notation can be a barrier but it isn't the hardest part.

yellowstuffon Programming language notation is a barrier to entry

I don't like the term "programming language" and your comment illustrates why.

We would expect that an aspiring architect needs to learn a little bit of notation, and a lot about the tradeoffs and constraints of making a building. We should expect that programmers learn a little bit of notation, and a lot about the tradeoffs and constraints of making software.

Knowing your tools well is important, but not sufficient. Focusing on "programming languages" makes people think that the important part is the notation. It is not.

yellowstuffon JPMorgan to pay nearly $1B for metals market manipulation

I don't think that line of thinking will get you very far. You can pick up the ball and run with it in American football but not soccer. You can insider trade in US commodity markets but not US equity markets. Spoofing is illegal in US equity markets because that was the result of the rule-making process. I'd argue that banning spoofing is a good rule for equity markets, but it's not necessarily a good rule in other contexts.

yellowstuffon How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life

It's complicated. The short version is that a Nash equilibrium exists for multiplayer games, so there is a GTO strategy for multiplayer poker, but it is not as useful in theory or practice if pots are frequently multiway post flop.

This article explains it better than I could:

http://blog.gtorangebuilder.com/2014/03/gto-poker-outside-of...