tdees40

I put together a Haskell proof of concept Monte Carlo pricing tool loosely based on SPJ's work:

https://github.com/boundedvariation/quantfin

Still needs some love, but it was a pretty cool experience.

Maybe this wasn't clear in my earlier comment, but he has been a mechanic for lots of other types of cars, and he stated that the reliability was materially worse than other cars.

I had a conversation with a (recently-departed) Tesla mechanic the other day (who has had experience working with every other type of car), and he said, "I knew every Tesla owner in the tri-state area on a first-name basis. Everything breaks." He did say that it's getting better with the newer models.

Tesla' market cap is $30B. GM is $53B. Ford is $61B. If you're buying Tesla, you have to believe that they will become a huge player, and soon. They can't just be bigger, they have to be huge or else you're radically overpaying for a niche producer.

I'm unique in that I've never done any web development whatsoever (all my work is in finance and HPC), so I know zero Javascript, no CSS, and only the most rudimentary HTML. This article reminds me why I stay away from the web dev space.

This was said a little obnoxiously, but he has a point. Making pants in China takes about three labor hours[1]. Given that about 50% of the cost of pants is the retail/wholesale markup, that leaves $15 to pay for materials, shipping, and labor. It's hard to squeeze a living wage out of that.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=unXGqA4st54C&pg=RA2-PT56&l...

Nothing to see here, the FAA is doing exactly what it ought to.

Mecca seems like a pretty fascinating place. It's a terrible shame non-Muslims are banned.

That sound you're hearing is DOJ lawyers clearing their calendars for the rest of the year. They're going to have some work to do.

Never, ever, ever go to a financial adviser paid on commissions. I mean never.

I work at an insurance company. There are products that we sell all the time to commission-based advisers that we almost never sell to fee-based advisers. Why? Because those products aren't right for the customer, but with 5%+ commissions they sell like hotcakes.

People buy lottery tickets as a way to launder money. This really isn't so bad by comparison.

Do you mean the duration is infinite in the bond-market sense of the word (i.e. sensitivity of cash flows to interest rates)? In that case, a perpetuity still has finite duration.

The maturity, of course, is infinite.

Uh, she's four.

I feel sorry for New Zealanders, where the internet is typically metered...

So your position is "separate schools should make themselves more equal"?

Desegregating Newark schools means integrating the schools in the surrounding suburbs, and the parents will fight it. They simply don't want their children educated alongside minorities.

Money is irrelevant to the problems of Newark schools. The problem that plagues Newark's schools is old-fashioned segregation [1]. The whole district is segregated, but individual schools are worse. Here's a school I literally just randomly chose: it's 2% non-Hispanic white [2]. If Brown v. Board disappeared tomorrow, no one in Newark would notice.

[1] http://www.nps.k12.nj.us/district/info/ [2] http://www.zillow.com/newark-nj/schools/louise-a-spencer-ele...

I've been through this multiple times. We had one employee who has had three kids over the last five years, and each time has taken 3-6 months maternity leave. We have bent over backwards to ensure that she is not denied any opportunities and that we cover for her. She's great, and the last thing we want to do is lose her because she feels she has to make the choice between the company and her family.

It's really not the same everywhere. I work for a big financial corp. Things aren't perfect, but we do everything in our power to support women on maternity leave, and that kind of behavior would get the manager fired.

It's unimaginable for me to do most of this stuff without a REPL. That's the show-stopper for me with C++.

It's not at all clear that the Model S has high margins. They are burning cash on operating activities [1] (i.e. not including CapEx).

[1] http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ATSLA&fstype=ii&ei=j...

Let me tighten up my argument a bit. Assume two businesses with an 80% chance of success, where success is worth $1000, and a 20% chance of failure, where failure is worth -$2000. But of course these are stocks, so they can't be worth less than zero, so the expected value of each is $800.

But the expected value of the combined company (where all outcomes are floored at zero) is only $1280 (not $1600), because there's a real chance that one business blows through the profits of the other.

So here's a thought. If I have lots of businesses with a high chance of failure, and I bring them under one roof, any one business is more likely to destroy my entire company. So if I have two high-risk businesses (electric cars and energy storage) having both in the same company greatly increase the total company's chance of insolvency and failure.

On a higher level, I LOVE Elon Musk, but what made Steve Jobs so great is that he could innovate like crazy and make gobs of cash. Right now, Elon is innovating, but his companies are really struggling to even sniff profitability.

Uh, I work in finance. I know zero. And by "do quite well" do you mean outperform an S&P 500 index fund? Or at least perform similarly with lower risk?

Why would playing the market result in higher returns? Why would you think day trading would outperform buying-and-holding? The research all shows the opposite.

Search "trading algorithms" on Amazon. They're not secret.

Whenever people tell me they're going to go into day trading, I usually say, "How many people do you know who've become wealthy day trading?" They say, "Zero." I also know zero people who got rich doing at-home algorithmic trading. But hey, there are probably some! That's the nature of randomness.

Stack is great, but the public beta only started on June 9th. Stick with it, and I think it will solve many of the package management problems.

My prescription was approximately -8 in both eyes. I was a pretty fringe-y candidate for the surgery and had to do the most expensive one (laser flap, wavefront) to get it done.