jotakami

In the modern financial system, risk-free debt is basically as good as cash on a balance sheet. If you need to turn it into cash, you just dip into the repo (“repurchase agreement”) market.

Over the past few decades the global financial system has steadily become completely unrecognizable from the standpoint of classical economics. Debt is not debt, savings is not savings, and printing money is no big deal (or so they say).

I was a consultant at one of the giant outsourcers and nod my head vigorously at this comment. The least sexy projects were MDM (master data management) but they were absolutely essential to the success of any other fancy analytics/BI/ML project.

> Better user interfaces are sorely underappreciated.

This is why I’m much more excited by AR and VR than AI. Human brains are fucking amazing at certain kinds of data processing and inference and pretty mediocre at others. We should be focusing more on creating interfaces and data visualizations that unlock that superpower for wider applications.

Tried to start a local in-person meeting for CGAA (Computer Gaming Addicts Anonymous). Posted flyers all over my university campus, which has like 30k undergrads. Nobody showed up, week after week. Not sure how to let people know and I’m not a “growth hacker” type so I gave up.

Judging by my own side projects, there seem to be two varieties: scratching your own itch, or scratching someone else’s. In the former case, marketing really does come later because you already have a perfect user to consult on product design (yourself) and just need to find other people with the same problem you have.

The latter case is when marketing is a lot more integrated with building the product. If you’ve made it all the way to a public release but don’t really know how to market, then there is a dangerously high probability that you built something nobody really asked for.

Not exactly. The BIS is owned by 55 central banks... which implies that it is subordinate to them, not the other way around. It is a way for banks to lend reserves to one another, basically. So it is a ledger, for sure, but a debt-based on that exists only for easy transaction settlement and not as the “scorecard” of wealth that a true ledger would imply.

Right, Bitcoin will never have a competitive advantage as a payment method (“medium of exchange”) but as long as there are healthy, liquid markets to convert between Bitcoin and fiat currencies it doesn’t really matter.

Missing the forest for the trees. Those three functions of money are the “cliff notes” description of money, but there is a deeper abstraction that all of those properties can be derived from: money is a ledger. In the case of cash or bitcoin, the ledger has a constraint that negative balances are not allowed.

I’m talking about the ledger between sovereign governments, you’re talking about the ledger within a single sovereign country. Two completely different things.

Sorry I didn’t cite the list of peer-reviewed economics research that forms the basis of my intuition on this subject, I’ve only got a limited time budget for HN commenting.

Or if you doubt that you will ever meet that trading partner again, or if you just don’t trust them and there is no legal framework for recourse if they screw you over...

Oh man, my current project is to automate accounting for my cryptocurrency trades in GnuCash. I trade very high volume, futures and options, so being able to run a cron job to automatically pull the data from APIs, calculate gains, and load it into the GnuCash schema will literally save me hundreds of hours per year in accounting overhead. Once it’s done I bet I could easily sell it for $100s to other crypto traders.

Yeah I bailed on Quicken about 5 years ago and never looked back. Using GnuCash now, and it’s awesome because I can store the data in a local Postgres database and do whatever I want with it.

In a nutshell, Austrian economics. Central banks have made money ridiculously cheap for over a decade, and this leads to malinvestment: investors pour this cheap money into projects that probably yield negative real returns, because there is way more money floating around than viable projects to spend it on. Spend capital on negative-yielding projects for long enough and you erode the productive capacity of the economy until a crisis hits.

That’s the story; hard to say how well it describes reality but there’s surely a modicum of truth in there at least.

SpaceX is not publicly traded, so there’s no stock price to use for such an analysis

Short selling, by definition, means you don’t own the stock when you sell it. Investors with huge stakes in Tesla would just sell, not short sell.

Buying a put option would be how big investors manage downside risk, or possibly selling covered calls.

Yeah I’m not 100% on it, but I seriously doubt that selling your Bitcoin in small chunks to keep the capital gains under $200 in each transaction would fly.

The intention of the original law is exactly like the example I provided; we don’t want people to have to account for trivial gains and losses every time they travel overseas and spend in a foreign currency. The law is not intended to provide a loophole to recognize tax-free gains in currency trading, and if you tried that you would probably lose in court.

Because there is a reporting burden to keep track of income, and the more nit picky you get about reporting all income the more deadweight loss you impose upon society as they waste time on accounting for trivial transactions.

Nope

This provision already applies to transactions in foreign currency; that is, if I take a trip to Japan and exchange $1000 for yen, I don’t have to report gains every time I buy something as the exchange rate has fluctuated since the time I made the initial conversion.

This bill would include digital currency under that rule, so buying a cup of coffee with Bitcoin would no longer trigger recognition of capital gains income.

I think the headline should be modified to make it clear that 95% of purchases of goods and services using digital currency would be exempt from gains, but that most crypto transactions are for trading and investing purposes anyway so gains would still be recognized.

Something about this article doesn’t sit right with me... it’s not wrong, just... misguided? For one, he talks about these huge crossroads, all of which take place early in life, and starts making suggestions as if young people facing these decisions have everything figured out already and just need to optimize. It just comes off as very... inauthentic.

Reminds me of a line from Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: “There exist the kind of people for whom life is some kind of project. After talking to them, you stop feeling good for a few hours; life starts tasting like food cooked without salt.”

Nope. Last-mile, on-demand delivery will never be economically viable if humans have to be paid to do it. There’s just not enough economic value there to compensate a human for their time.

Sorry I should qualify that statement. Obviously for certain niches it has been viable for a long time (e.g. pizza delivery) but it seems like delivery is already baked into (pun intended) that business model. Perhaps it only works with the “ghost kitchen” model which gets rid of the overhead of an eating area and waitstaff.

I don’t think there’s anything special or unique about ERP screws ups:

(1) ERP projects are typically large by their very nature

(2) SAP projects are always built in waterfall fashion

Seems like Fred Brooks’ original diagnosis would suffice here.

Not only for the initial implementation, but also to reduce the gnashing of teeth when it’s time to upgrade

I just read The Phoenix Project so I feel like they just need more DevOps lol. But seriously, banking is a sales-and-marketing-driven industry and those are the least likely to understand and embrace the process improvement revolution that transformed manufacturing and is currently transforming IT. I think the author’s comment about the lack of technical expertise in management explains it most succinctly.

My own anecdotal experience says that not all the dropouts are, by typical definitions, unskilled. It’s a lot more complicated than that, and I believe it is closely connected to psychological factors such as susceptibility to anxiety and depression.

15 years ago I failed out of computer science at UIUC because I skipped class, got high and played video games all day. Once my parents cut me off, the depression of working dead-end jobs after having such high prospects before led me to enlist in the Navy to try and start over.

Today I’m married with a child, I support my family as the primary breadwinner, I have a BS and MBA and am pursuing a PhD in computer science. All of that education was paid for by the GI Bill.

Sample size of one, but I can confirm your hypothesis.

> And marriage does not cause entry into the workforce

You going to cite some evidence of this, or is it just a hot take? My hot take is that after getting married and having a child, the thought of losing my income was terrifying. Obviously we can theorize about causation in both directions, but I would put forth the argument that being married and/or having a family is the single most powerful inducement to maintain gainful employment for anyone, male or female. It might not cause entry into the workforce, but it sure as hell reduces exit from the workforce, which would have the same effect on statistics.

Not the OP, but my own experience was that I finally started learning Japanese for real when I stumbled upon AJATT and started using some of the techniques he recommends. In short: learning a language is more like learning a martial art than learning mathematics. Repetition, mimicry and passive exposure are keys to mastery. Textbooks and pedagogical methods can provide interesting cognitive exercise but are very inefficient and ineffective at developing native-level language skill.

The original article mentions something that I wish I had known when I began learning Japanese ~20 years ago: there aren’t really adjectives in Japanese, just nouns and verbs which have a few different inflection rules. Generally, any noun or verb (phrase) can modify another so there’s no need to create a separate category called adjective.