rokobobo

And the idea with stolen art is that "dirty art" should theoretically always trade at roughly the same discount to "clean art," and in fact, over time, as gaps in the provenance become easier to patch up through fabrication, the discount should reduce. In that sense, "dirty art" is an investment, so the immoral of the super-rich are fine holding it forever. Also, no need to pay estate taxes if it's already an undisclosed asset on a yacht somewhere.

My understanding is that dog-related food/medicine/nutritional supplements have a lot lower bar than human-grade equivalents, when it comes to regulatory clearance. On one hand, that makes me very skeptical that this would actually be more than a snake oil in its first 5 years of existence. On the other hand, I imagine that this could be an interesting "proving ground" for potential human-grade longevity solutions. I think that's the real moonshot.

If you are confident that these returns will continue, I’d happily loan you a couple of million at 50% interest rate, so you can buy even more crypto. (Of course, I’ll take your crypto as collateral).

I don't think you need to be inspired by a particular circle-shaped object to decide to design another circle-shaped object.

It honestly sounds like he was on a meme-making streak, and thought he'd throw one joke in there for people who understand that his statement means nothing

Seconded. If you aren't willing to go through school, why would you be willing to take up a job? Most entry-level jobs will generally be even more boring, require more discipline and jumping through the kind of hoops that you will not enjoy. Unless someone sees a sort of a raw genius in you, they will probably not take a gamble on you.

Great idea. I come from high-frequency trading and robotics, and I'm interested in a fairly broad range of B2B software and some B2C. I do have some deal flow through my friends, although I could always do more, and compare notes/share opportunities with others. My email is my profile. To the rest of you who posted, I'll try to reach out to you!

Did you mean "market share" (as in, notional share of all transactions) as opposed to "market cap" (as in, the sum of all bitcoin supply, multiplied by the current price)?

That's correct. The DTCC requires brokers to post collateral until settlement of the trades, and even fully funded customer accounts accounts with <100% leverage can not be touched, the customer money cannot be used as collateral.

On top of that, my opinion of the DTCC (I worked at a self-clearing firm for a while, so we had to interact with them) is that they are intentionally dumb and conservative when it comes to asking for collateral. And until now, this hasn't really drawn much attention, mostly because the rest of the firms out there are a lot better capitalized than RH. My guess for why they're better capitalized is just that they're larger (in AUM), older, and operate in more markets.

I don't like RH, but I wouldn't blame them for getting blindsided by the DTCC to the amount that they did. Props to them for being able to raise the cash, I hope it wasn't all equity, since they won't need that cash in a couple of months. I saw recently that they had $12B in AUM--it doesn't make sense to run with $3B in operating capital.

A share is a share is a share. You can’t tell which one was loaned out and which one wasn’t. And it’s not used as collateral, money is posted as collateral instead.

Just to be clear, there aren’t multiple clearinghouses for US equities. There’s one, the DTCC. They handle effectively all of the US equities trades’s settlement cycle. If there’s any kind of doubt that they don’t have enough collateral and they need to take losses, it could cause a lot of chaos. Initiating the kind of “stop all trading” you refer to, is a lot more complicated than it sounds. You would get a sort of a stock market equivalent of a bank run.

On the flip side, (1) they’re known to ask people to post more money than necessary, because they like to err on the side of caution, and (2) if they ask you for money, you just post it, or you risk being kicked off from trading US equities for a long time.

To be clear, RH (and others) blocked their users from trading those stocks. That’s separate from trading halts, which are initiated by the listing exchange based on algorithmic rules and apply for all trades in the US. The broker is in its right to give you a margin call anytime. It cannot liquidate your position if the stock is halted by the exchange, because all trades are halted during that time.

All that said, my personal opinion is that they couldn’t check in a code change to handle the increased collateral requirements, so the only feasible and somewhat legal way to save RH was to prevent its users from buying more. Pretty shitty, but then again, ever since RH crashed on 2020-02-29 because none of their devs thought of leap years, I can’t say I expect very much from them technology-wise.

Sorry, I was using YOLO in the narrow WSB sense of betting on low-likelihood, outsized gains. If you have the chance to risk 5k to get out of 100k student debt, why not do it, if you’re disillusioned by the system.

Except, if a whole generation YOLOs hard enough, maybe the government will actually choose to bail them out for once.

I believe that the managers of the company that sells/spins off a subsidiary have a fiduciary duty to get the best price for shareholders in such a transaction. This is even more so the case when a major stakeholder gets to benefit from such a transaction.

Have you thought about straight up reaching out to people in your network or their connections and asking nicely if they’d be up for mentoring you? I expect 90-95% of the responses would be lukewarm to nonexistent, and you shouldn’t take it personally—but every now and then you might find someone with some extra bandwidth and an altruistic attitude to give a shot at establishing such a relationship. It might help if the people you reach out to, are people you have something in common with: ideally, they would be able to see their past selves in you. (For me personally, that has been a big motivator to start such a relationship.)

That’s my take on mentors—and generally, I feel that mentors aren’t people who do this to get paid. Alternatively, if you’re looking for someone to take on the role of a tutor and willing to pay up, you could go on Stanford/MIT’s popular CS classes, find out who were the TAs last semester, and reach out to them offering 2x-3x the pay.

I come from a place that used Java as the main language for its strategies, and the developers' overall sentiment was very close to yours.

I saw people comment on the "fast<->smart" continuum, and in this context, I believe they mean smart=computationally intensive. (An extreme example is a stat arb shop running its portfolio optimizer.) But there's another way to gain an edge, which is to iterate quickly on your "fast" algorithms and develop them so they take advantage of opportunities that are only partially exploited by competitors. Java seemed pretty good for that purpose for about a decade. Things like JVM warmup, GC, individual ultra-low-latency responses whenever necessary, were all dealt with after the fact.

I really liked the default PDF viewer that came with Win10. But then they killed that.

It's been some time since I studied these things, but I believe the post was trying to illustrate that the geodesic lines in spacetime created by Earth's gravity field can be visualized as straight lines after a nonlinear change of the coordinates system. [1] To simplify, these are the lines along which particles move when no outside force is exerted on them--again, considering gravity to be a distortion of spacetime and not a force, very much like the well-known metaphor of steel ball on a rubber sheet, which would curve marbles towards the "well" it's created in the sheet. But you're right that once the marbles and the steel ball get to a point where one of the gravitational fields cannot be ignored, this framework becomes less useful.

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

I think it comes with a USB-C to lightning cable, just not the charger “brick”.

I don’t really understand how Blackrock “wins big” for their work with the Fed. If I’m reading the article correctly, they’d be making 3 mil a year and are giving fee rebates to the Fed for the shares bought by them. As for the increased investor demand in the ETFs, sure, it’s nice to hold the very thing the Fed is propping up, but that is also true for all investor-grade bonds and some who have lost their investor-grade rating since the pandemic.

For all I care, the article could have been “Fed props up economy, retail investors buy QQQ and its ETF manager wins big.”

I agree with you about PTUs having their place in planned and free market economies alike. I think you’re saying that if people have the option to go to a good “traditional” school and learn CS there (and meet a bunch of students and professors, etc), they shouldn’t throw away that option for something like this, is that right?

On the other hand, I feel like there are plenty of people who have either graduated with a humanities degree or simply do not have the ability to go to a good technical school: I would hope that this provides a new on-ramp for people like that, and it actually adds value to people’s lives. Even though as most people here have stipulated, this seems commercially motivated by Google’s interests.

I think back in the Soviet-influenced days of my country, people went to college knowing which job they'll be assigned at graduation. I guess this is the modern day PTUs? [1]

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

Sounds reasonable, thanks!

I think this is relevant. It's cool that you've mentioned a couple of "competitors" -- which are internal to large tech companies.

Would you guys be open to providing a self-hosted solution for large clients?

It gets a little complicated: do you want to continuously display market data and only clear trades once a second, effectively having a visible two-sided auction once a second? Or should it not be visible? (In which case you're no longer giving market data to all market participants, something they'd rather see)?

There are a couple of large firms that make 5-6 figures a day from arbitraging the closing cross. I'm sure they'd love to run their strategies all day; whether they would make more money than HFTs make now is anybody's guess.

That's generally a good way of thinking about whether to hold an investment, but don't forget about capital gains taxes and state taxes. For example, if you expect to move residency from CA to WA in a year, that alone could be a big bump in your expected cash proceeds and a reason to hold on.

A single data point, but a company I held equity in went public 4 months after a liquidity event in which shareholders were allowed to participate. The IPO went at ~50% above the price of the private transaction. If I were you, I wouldn't sell all of my shares now, especially if you think there's a good chance the company will go public very soon. Selling some fraction makes sense, as others have said--take some money off the table, depending on how much of your total net worth is in this equity stake.

As you might have noticed, the tech sector is in very high demand by investors right now; I wouldn't at all be surprised if VCs and anyone within the company is rushing to IPO, and it doesn't surprise me that investors would want to buy some extra shares at pre-IPO prices. This can all come crumbling down, as some stipulate on HN and elsewhere. Just to mention it as an option: you could partially reduce the risk of holding all or fraction of your shares by shorting a small amount QQQ. If the IPO gets postponed/canceled, it will probably be correlated with the tech sector dropping, so you'll make a modest amount of money on that.

If you're asking about the 3d printed part alone, you could find some stuff on Amazon [1] for a reasonable price and hoist the smartphone with any old phone stand you might have lying around and a couple of rubber bands.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/wheel-layer-Chassis-Encoder-Arduino/d...

In HFT firms algorithm developers are front office as much as traders. (And in some firms, traders don’t even exist as a role.)

I think at least part of the motivation to IPO is that if the US has a new president starting 2021, said person has stated his intent to vastly increase capital gains taxes, probably starting with tax year 2021. Add to that increased corporate tax (which probably affects VCs' math, although I'm not sure how), there's probably a lot of people who would prefer to accelerate their taxable events.