jegutman

It's only kind of an arbitrage. There's also a huge onshore / offshore spread for Renminbi, but you can only move currency onshore for very specific purposes.

Their incentives are to burn the dead crops to maximize profit. There is not a system of property rights and a government willing to enforce them to prevent them from burning. I kind of doubt it's even a Coasean outcome given that it's causing quite a lot of damage to the air quality in Singapore and neighboring countries where they might be willing to pay them not to burn, but somehow that solution doesn't work (neutral enforcers of the agreement is obviously one difficult issue, and nobody is willing to go to war over it).

Worth noting based on a paper linked from the pypy 4.0 thread[0] that maybe the most fare would be a geometric mean of salaries instead of an arithmetic mean.

[0] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=5673

As a former Caltech undergrad it's hard to really disagree with the conclusions. I wouldn't be surprised given what I've seen / read if this changes dramatically over the next decade based on changes already taken place.

Median is also possibly not what an incoming Caltech (or MIT, or Harvard) student should optimize for though given that many of them will have relatively safe downsides. Mean for Caltech might be quite high (I don't know for sure). But given that I overlapped with multiple people who have certainly made large sums of money since graduation (about 10 years ago), I'm thinking it might look favorable for Caltech with a small student body.

The structure of the company gives you the right to future dividends at the same rate as other classes of stock. So as long as they think they're creating something of value and the marketplace does you own an equal equity share of that entity.

Google finally paid a dividend (although a one-time dividend) and also announced a stock buyback so these companies may start returning capital. As of right now facebook thinks that capital is best put to use inside the company. I think there's a pretty good chance they're right on that.

Bottom line, you have the same rights to payments per share as Zuckerberg. Also technically Zuckerberg will at some point (might be 30-50 years from now) start divesting his shares and at some point your stock might be valuable for someone who does want to change the structure of the company or take it private.

Another defense is "internal arbitrage". So the company has value, and a different owner might decide to sell off assets or pay dividends to realize that value. But even without the stock changing hands, let's say it started trading at $20 a share. This would encourage Zuckerberg to work with a PE firm to take the company private again.

When stocks trade near, at, or above fair value you wont' really see any of these things happen, but if they started trading way below fair value, you would.

Also I recently discovered that pypy supports non-ASCII characters pretty well which at least doesn't work with my version of python 2.7.6

Evolution doesn't have a direction, it's an explanation of a thing that happens. Diversity in the gene pool is almost certainly a plus for the long-term survival of the species, but it's marginal, must like everything that would determine the long-term survival of the species.

Almost all diseases that happen after a species' reproductive age is very difficult to select out either in a positive or negative way unless it happens to be strongly genetically linked (either through sharing genes or being very close on a chromosome) to a different positive or negative trait. Even then in the long run the survival of that trait will be dominated by its independent characteristics.

The way to flip this around is that you could also look at the "survival" of the disease, disorder, etc. Not that we WANT these to survive, but they either will or won't. If a disease causes death 100% of the time at age 2 and provides no other benefits in the carrier / recessive trait it tends not to last in the gene pool for very long.

That's completely silly. Yes tail events are important to consider. But major terrorist attack are already events on part of the tail.

All of the successful attacks around the world in the last 15 years probably could have been far more deadly if the terrorists only goal was death count. That's probably not what they're optimizing for, this is framing everything from the victim's point of view. Terrorists can be awful, but they still have motivations and are somewhat rational actors.

I'd be happy to change my view with evidence otherwise, but terrorists are still somewhat "rational actors" with goals that seem horribly irrational to most people. Killing 10 million people in a terrorist attack probably wouldn't serve their long-term goal (even terrorists worry about PR) and would be an incredibly difficult / expensive undertaking.

This does assume the form factor and visual re-enforcements don't contribute to the effect. You can call this "placebo" if you want, but the perception is real and might not have a clear "alternative placebo".

Yea, this was kind of giving an upper bound. Actually that's not very impressive given that people CAN burn more than 8000 calories in a single day.

Quick google search is about 100 wH per square foot of surface area. I'm just estimating about 8 square feet of surface area (one sided) for a human. Assuming 12 hours a day at that rate you get about 9.6 KwH or ~8000 kcal. With perfect efficiency and a storage system inside the body (which we do have, but not for light energy) that's probably doable.

Obviously our tissue is much well less adapted to so many hours of sunlight compared to plants. Also even plants only absorb a relatively small part of the light spectrum (none of the green light). Also even plants required compounds from the earth and the air to actually harvest the energy to store so it's a pretty complicated process to do in an actively moving human.

Really, so if your neighbor smokes pot in his home that's a safety issue for you? It's possible that as a result of policy changes we're arresting and keeping incarcerated more people who would have committed crimes, but at the same time we're likely keeping many people in prison who would likely not commit crimes. The aggregate loss of human freedom and productivity is pretty staggering for you to just wash your hands of the problem.

This is an important point that not that many prisoners are in for-profit prisons, but many of these groups are also lobbying to privatize existing public prisons so they're not an inconsequential influence. They also benefit at the margins a lot. (i.e. if one extra person is incarcerated they're likely to go to a private prisons since the construction of public prisons has slowed a lot).

I agree that the FGC deserves some credit, but it's weird to credit it with eSports much since they were the community most resistant to the term.

Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Kappa/comments/26llfc/why_is_the_fg...

There have always been partners you can get the entire suite of results from.[1] I don't know how they haven't been restricted, but my guess is the FDA can't ban telling you what a SNP does, but the FDA can ban 23 and me selling it as a service connected somehow? Anyways, you can find out everything you wanted to know and a million other things you probably will have trouble of fully understanding.

[1] https://promethease.com/ and athletigen are two I've used that were pretty cool

An airport security screen is about equivalent to eating 2.5 bananas, don't tell OP that bananas are so scary.

The scare people is bad, and immediately feels like worse reporting than the "makes you angry kind", but in the long run I'm much more concerned by the trend of news consumption heading towards the "makes me angry" kind. It can't be good for overall mental health.

I actually think NY is a pretty compelling case for driverless. A large number of people go from hubs into the city, travel around the city, and then leave the city.

Also there's an issue with balancing taxi load in the outer boroughs vs midtown / downtown manhattan. There's a reason uber has been so successful even in NY at increasing the total number of passenger trips and not just stealing customers away from traditional taxis.

You bring up a valid point, but it's worth considering that Taxi drivers have homes. Let's think about driving from SF to Palo Alto at 11pm. This is probably not great for a taxi driver who: a) might have wanted this to be his last shift b) lives closer to SF

There are other ways of selecting for this, but a self-driving taxi doesn't need to care and can just be managed as a fleet. Yes, some miles will need to be driven by an empty car, but for the most part demand for transportation has a balance, but this balance is very hard to reach in practice with actual drivers.

You make a totally fair point, but I think it's also a fair criticism of the state of proper computer security that plenty of people opt-out as a result of the inconveniences. Someone will solve this someday and make a lot of money, but I have no idea what the solution is.

It's a little bit of a mis-measurement of things though. I'm not sure quality software engineers make so much more on average, it's just that the percentage of the population that are quality software engineers is much higher. It's a pretty forced selection bias since if you're just mediocre you might self-select out (note: this is just one of many reasons you might self-select out).

It seems like the biggest issue here is the compensation structure of startups. People who have been working for a long time are those least likely to take a huge pay cut for upside even if they're the people who are often well-suited for that risk.

"They're a growth incubator that pushes companies to grow fast over growing well."

Any evidence for this comment? Any evidence that there's even a tradeoff you can make? Any evidence that your hypothesis (which seems to be that "growing well" is better) is supported at all?

The reason (just guessing, not affiliated with YC) that YC feels like growing fast is best is that "growing well" might involve a greater investment before you've reached product-market fit.

I will also add that age-diversity has almost nothing to do with founders. Founders are already slightly older on average. Plenty of companies founded by young founders have their average age go up quite a bit once they have found product-market fit and can hire more people.

Yea, normally in a fund with 10 investments you pay carry on the net performance of the fund. So let's say the fund is $100 and 10 investments of $10 each. One ends up being worth $110 and everything else goes broke. Normally the carry would be 20% of $10 (the profit), but on a deal by deal, the carry is 20% of the profit on each investment (there was only one) so you pay it on the $100 (110 - 10) for the one deal that made money.

This is obviously a particularly bad case, but I think if you looked at the "normal" distribution of fund returns, it's quite a bit worse as an investor (although unclear what the means since they're investing in different companies potentially).

I not sure this really creates a perverse incentive, the distribution already looked pretty close the the worst case from the investor's point of view. It's just generally going to be quite a bit more expensive than the quoted rate in practice.

I think they do. Only explanation: time travel

I agree with your general assessment. I think one sane area for regulation is tracking large losers and having mechanisms to help addicts create self-enforcement (banning themselves effectively).

However, I think the mobile gaming industry is probably just as responsible in this way. Clash of clans has people spending 50k+ per year (outliers of course) on the game and also tries to trigger a similar gambling-style positive feeling. They also are some of the most effective mobile advertisers tracking individual customers all over the internet. Do you think these "whales" get enough control on how they're targeted by companies?

Very cool. I remember back at Caltech when Adam D'Angelo wasn't a Quora founder and was just a hacker dude he made buddy zoo and it had these awesome social graphs. I think this was ported into the early version of facebook and didn't really end up doing that much because the graphs were very simple. Now that social networks have an older audience with a more complex social graph I think this type of stuff could be really useful (especially if you could create FB or other groups from it).

Here's the simplest explanation. Neither should be illegal, they made a law that explicitly banned one and not the other.

Also there's fundamentally a difference between playing against other players and playing against the house. If the professionals on draft kings / fan duels got to play the house in a similar setup it would be even worse for the people playing for fun.

Why are people allowed to go to the movies? In New York a movie ticket is $15 and 90% of the movies are, in my opinion, absolute crap. So that's $15 with a 10% chance of getting your moneys worth and a 90% chance of losing all of it and 2 hours your time!

I think the one reason why it's different for the leagues is that daily fantasy doesn't really create as large of incentives to throw games or rig games as much from the refs or players point of view (not that it's common, but it's definitely happened in the past).

For years the government has been encouraging _____ only for a news article never to be written because it dramatically helped the outcomes of real people.

Don't forget that the things that make the news have a huge selection bias.

Here's an experiment: Go enter some giant free-roll and a $10 tournament with a huge guaranteed prize pool. I would bet that the top score (not the average) in the free-roll will have higher score. Now take the points that each player scored and their original cost and you can use a variant of the knapsack problem[1] to figure out the optimal lineup. You'll see that quite often the optimal lineup wasn't picked by anybody (mostly because the player costs are pretty good and the optimal lineup sometimes doesn't use the full salary).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem