tvladeck

I would really love to use Julia, and for my team to as well. But we are too locked into R to even begin. If I were these folks, I would focus on the flow, not stock, of data analysts. Get the next generation locked in to Julia. Turn R into SPSS

Hello, author here. I found this the analogy between voting and machine learning to be an interesting one, as voting is essentially a classification task. Popular votes are bagging, representative democracy is stacking -- it's pretty cool!

I always hate these comparisons because they always compare market capitalization and not enterprise value. On the latter metric, which is independent of how a company is financed, Intel is still more valuable. Intel is still "worth more" than Nvidia.

I'm not even a software engineer. Lowly MBA that writes R code. even I understood the gist. But the part that I understood well is that _this was a HackerOne managed program_, meaning that it's HackerOne's job to take a raw submission and turn it into a well designed report that can be triaged and fixed.

Seems like a classic case of market unraveling:

http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2009/06/unraveling.html

This article really, _really_ needs to cite Getting to Yes, or at least their authors, William Ury and Robert Fisher, who developed these ideas, and even this terminology.

This logic falls into a cul de sac when you realize that many open problems can only be solved by new technology.

Like when an individual drives to a store to get groceries?

+1, I still can't access it.

My guess (and this is just a guess, as I too can't read the article), is that the investment was a convertible note, and they actually paid back the debt instead of allowing it to convert into equity. But I am no expert and I don't know the facts — I was just wondering the same thing and this was the scenario I landed on as a plausible hypothesis.

FWIW I still hit the paywall when I click on that link (and the other one referenced as bypassing the paywall)

Came here to agree with you. Tons of great wings spots here.

Also, The Infatuation is great for NYC restaurant reviews.

it doesn't make internal investment impossible. it just changes the pockets it comes out of. well, actually it doesn't even do that, because either way it would be coming out of the cash owned by the PE shops, whether it sits on the books of the company or has been paid out to its owners. they can always decide to invest more into initiatives that show a promising return. the issue here is not the structure, it's rather that the owners of these shops made mistakes, which will happen. but the incentives are not misaligned.

yes, in the sense that everything that's on the cap table (including special dividends, etc.) won't affect the P&L, except for the interest payments. but investors in the company treat interest payments separately, because it's just part of apportioning who on the cap table gets what. that's why investors often look at EBIT (earnings before interest and tax) and enterprise value as opposed to market cap, as enterprise value includes the value of the debt.

> if PE didn't burden them by taking out loans against the company's assets

if this were the true problem, i.e. if there were a profitable business that just wasn't making enough income to service its debt, then the enterprise would continue to exist after restructuring the cap table.

adding debt to the company just changes the cap table, it doesn't change the profitability of the underlying company.

> a lot of redundant df assignments

either that or a profusion of variables going into your global environment, which is a massive pain to track!

there is no such thing as a "fair price"

Next step: hide follower counts.

Care to share your query string? I can't find it

Not enough to be the _main_ mode of communication, but definitely an important part of my team’s remote communications. I run www.gradientmetrics.com, and we’re a (very small) distributed team. We often do screencasts with voiceovers to show how we’re thinking of implementing something, what we think the outline of the deliverable should be, etc., etc. This can be _a lot_ easier to do with a video screencast than it is to type out. We typically do this either with a QuickTime screencast or with the person recording a solo Zoom conference with screen share, and uploading to Vimeo. If there was something that cut that workflow down and had some other features, we’d consider it.

> In a recent article (and subsequent blog post), I argued that Amazon’s negative cash flow might ...

I stopped reading and started researching there. Amazon has positive cash flow, both overall and from operations specifically, which is what would would matter to this argument.

In the linked-to post, the author states

> In fact, if a careful observer overlooks the GAAP loopholes that allow Amazon to dress up its numbers, during 2017 the firm experienced a negative cash flow of $1.461 billion

This is very wrong. That calculation stems from the section of their 10-K titled _Free Cash Flow Less Finance Lease Principal Repayments and Assets Acquired Under Capital Leases_. As the section says "Free cash flow less finance lease principal repayments and assets acquired under capital leases is free cash flow reduced by “Principal repayments of finance lease obligations,” which is included in cash flow from financing activities, and property and equipment acquired under capital leases. In this measure, property and equipment acquired under capital leases is reflected as if these assets had been purchased with cash, which is not the case as these assets have been leased.", which is to say, it's including both a remix of items that already exist on the cash flow statement, and things that weren't paid in cash but are being treated as if they were.

If Amazon were truly selling below average cost, their operating cash flow would be negative. It's not; it's positive. As is their cash flow from across operating, investing, and financing activities.

The Selfish Gene & The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins

Evolution is the reason we exist! Understanding how it happens and why it can lead to counterintuitive outcomes is very important. He also narrates his own audiobooks and is excellent at it.

The Blank Slate & The Better Angels of our Nature by Pinker

Both books counter much accepted wisdom. The second book, in particular, will make you think of humanity in a fundamentally different light.

The Black Swan & Fooled by Randomness by Taleb

The role of chance in everyday life! It plays a big role!

The Quest for Cosmic Justice is another great book by Sowell that challenges the utopian mindset that underlies many modern policy discussions. It contrasts utopian "cosmic" justice with the much more prosaic (but achievable) "human" justice

Plus one for this idea.

In fact, I love everything about products that use semantic email addresses as the UI. followup.cc is great at this for their email reminder service. If I could forward an email to unsubscribe@leavemealone.xyz that would be amazing...

Turnover typically refers to revenue, not equity raised.

The capital one link did not work. I got an error saying "Not acceptable"

i can't wait for the final results of this analysis.

for a long time i've wondered why i was so sleepy. i often work out of my apartment (a new building), and NYC being NYC, my windows and doors are often closed to allow for air conditioning.

i bought an awair sensor, and when i plugged it in, i was getting readings of 1000-1500ppm on CO2. immediately started ventilating the apartment, outside weather be damned. impossible to tell, but i feel more awake and healthier in general now. i also make it a point to get outside more and work more from my office (which is very big and airy and lightly attended).

One thing Phil Knight wrote in Shoe Dog that has stuck with me is something similar:

"If all you see are problems, you're not seeing clearly"

There are often times when I feel like "every way is up" and that there are only bad outcomes; this quote leads me to re-think whether or not I'm seeing the issue clearly or not.

This is essentially repeating your quote, but an "aha moment" clicked for me when I read that what successful neural networks are basically doing is such good feature learning that the problem can be solved by a simple linear model in the end.

E.g. if you have an N-layer neural network, N-1 layers are doing feature learning, and the Nth layer is a simple {logistic, multinomial/softmax, gaussian, poisson, ...} model

“It’s a necessary evil”

Company motto: “Don’t be evil”

Do you notice the hypocrisy here?