ctkrohn

Funny to see this after all these years. I read this paper just before starting college in 2003 and it inspired me to spend most of the summer writing a rudimentary Lisp interpreter in rudimentary C++. That was my first piece of my code that actually worked, and was more than a dozen or so lines. Good memories.

He's actually done a few of those, for example this recent interview with Agnes Callard

https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/agnes-callard-ty...

Does anyone know what the apparently pocket-sized notebook computer is? The one in the picture about halfway through the post, with the watches draped over it.

Right, those anomalies could simply exist unexploited until the market is better understood. For example, you used to be able to earn money buy buying the 501st largest company in the US: if it happened to become the 500th largest, all the S&P 500 index funds would be forced to buy its stock, and it would outperform the other stocks that had already been in the index. Similarly, the 500th largest stock would be a good sale candidate: if it becomes the 501st largest company, the index funds will become forced sellers. Now this effect is very well known, and there's no more money to be made by exploiting it.

Here's perhaps a better way to say what I'm getting at: identifying and investing with a manager that predictably outperforms a benchmark is just as difficult an intellectual challenge as constructing a portfolio that outperforms that same benchmark. Both of these tasks are so difficult as to be essentially impossible for an unsophisticated retail investor.

If the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (in its stronger forms) is false, there should be managers who are able to identify the cheapest stocks within the S&P 500 and thereby outperform the index. A disbeliever in EMH should look to identify these managers and pay them some fee, rather than simply investing in the index and trying to minimize fees.

I think it's plausible that these managers exist, but they're impossible to identify ex ante. Furthermore, a smart manager will charge fees that are equal to the alpha they generate. So even if the EMH is false in some broad sense, individual investors should act as if it were true and simply invest in low-cost diversified funds.

Are you running vim within tmux? Which terminal emulator are you using? Were you able to get full color support? I tried doing this a few months ago but was never able to get Vim set up to my satisfaction.

HP still makes RPN financial calculators. I recently switched to using an HP 12C at work, after holding out for a long time. It's amazing how quick it is once you get used to RPN, and I love the solid feel of the hardware. You can pick one up for around $50.

Very common, to the point of being nearly universal except in relatively recent construction. Many (perhaps most) NYC apartments don't have thermostats. Don't like the heat the landlord has chosen? Open the window or buy a space heater. Want to be cool in the summer? Buy a window air conditioner.

Not to be confused with Slang, the in-house language at Goldman: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3392636/slang-goldman-sac...

Terence Tao, one of the preeminent mathematicians working today, had a pretty good post on this exact question:

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-...

What's the name of the short story? Sounds like it could be interesting.

Check your link? That URL returns a server error.

Another thumbs up for "An Engine, Not A Camera." A great book on the philosophy of financial modeling and how models influence the markets (the "engine"), rather than providing static snapshots of information (the "camera").

Yeah, he skipped over what might have been the most interesting part of the talk! I have a very cursory understanding of how the GIL works, so it would be nice to understand what's going on here.

Believe it or not, there's a novel that combines pretty much all these things: Charles Stross's "The Atrocity Archives." If you're into sci-fi, you need to check this out. It's a bizarre but hilarious mashup of James Bond, Slashdot, Office Space, and H. P. Lovecraft.

SPJ actually discusses this a bit in his talk. He says that Haskell has tried to achieve the ease and intuitiveness of imperative programming through things like the "do" syntax sugar for monads. He agrees that there's still plenty of improvement to be made; on several occasions he jokes about how Haskell programmers envy other programmers' ability to get things done quickly.

Duke's name comes from a tobacco businessman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Buchanan_Duke

For a few minutes, there was only a line of text at the top of the NYT home page. It took them some time to put up an article.

Along similar lines, Scott Aaronson recently wrote a long essay entitled "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity." http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=735

That's already very common practice, and unfortunately it's not very effective. Bear Stearns was 30% employee owned [1], and Lehman was 25% employee owned [2]. All that stock became worthless when the firms blew up.

[1] http://www.nceo.org/main/column.php/id/282 [2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122117966831526067.html

They answer a few of these questions on their FAQ: https://banksimple.com/faq/

* They are not a bank. They are essentially a web frontend for wholesale banks. Thus they are regulated differently.

* You do have the benefit of FDIC insurance, but it's unclear what ability you have to access your funds directly from the wholesale bank, or whether you are limited to BankSimple.

Here's the Python equivalent, for what it's worth: http://www.trinhhaianh.com/stream.py/

I've been playing around with this in my current project, yet I'm not convinced this is always such a great model. It requires a lot of mental work to remember what types you are operating on at each state in the pipeline. That being said, I'm a big fan of LINQ, and I'd like to see this model applied more frequently to DB queries.

Vanity Fair is a bizarre magazine. One day they'll publish a penetrating article by Michael Lewis on the Irish financial crisis. The next day they'll have a great article about a team of English mountaineers, two of whom died on Mont Blanc. Then they'll turn around and do a huge cover story on Justin Bieber. If they publish something I care about, I'll find it extremely interesting and well written, but the other half I find completely inane.

I'm really not sure how this is different from Last.fm. I use Last.fm for all the purposes mentioned in the article: keeping track of what I listen to, finding new artists, following friends, etc. Am I missing something?

Actually, Chicago is the font on the original iPods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_(typeface)

I work with Brian at the Cambridge Coworking Center. His work ethic is absolutely absurd, and he deserves every bit of this success. It's an awesome and inspiring story.

Ah, good point on why we should look at employment vs. unemployment. Makes sense.

I was tempted to argue that the decline in construction doesn't support the "obsolete jobs" hypothesis, because the jobs were created by an overheated housing market and shouldn't have been there in the first place. But regardless of whether the jobs were justified in the first place, they're not coming back. A technological shift isn't the only thing that can make a job obsolete; a one-time speculative bubble can do the same thing.

This article is unpersuasive. Each of the supposedly anti-IPO changes had a very good reason behind it. These should be seriously considered before reverting to the old way of doing things:

#1: This is really a consequence of the other factors he cites.

#2: Decimalization made stock trading massively cheaper. When prices were quoted in eighths, the price at which you could sell was 12.5 cents lower than the price at which you could buy. This difference went straight into the pockets of brokers, not investors. It was basically free money.

#3: Internet brokerages. What, you'd rather get on the phone and call someone to make a trade? I love the convenience of E*TRADE and similar platforms.

#4: The growth of prop trading, in and of itself, didn't push out IPOs. It merely filled the void in profits left when IPOs stopped making as much money for the banks.

#5: Keep in mind how research used to be done: banks would effectively promise to write good research on stocks they brought to market. I think it's absurd and insulting to new companies to suggest that no one would buy their stocks unless accompanied by heavily biased "research."

#6: Guess what, shareholders are the owners of the companies. They should have a say in how companies are run. There's a balance between their interests and management's interests, but the author merely asserts that things went to far without providing evidence.

#7: While there's plenty of wealth outside the US, international investors are still able to invest in the US. I don't see why this is a negative for IPOs.

#8: Larger funds: I'll admit that I'm unsure about this criticism. I don't know enough about this area of the market.

#9: Keep in mind that Sarbox was passed to prevent Enron and Worldcom. Its requirements may be onerous, but they're designed to help prevent specific types of fraud that were extremely damaging to the economy. While Sarbox may have reduced IPOs, it also may have reduced the risk of fraud. It's difficult to say.

Which jobs were made obsolete? If unemployment were technologically driven, you would expect IT to have less unemployment relative to other industries. But that's not the case. Paul Krugman had a pretty good post on the topic:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/whos-unemployed/