dsacco

53 ms·

361.
by dsacco 9y ago
> "My company requires excellent communication and writing skills, so would you mind talking a 5h grade spelling and grammar test?" That's not comparable. A total whiteboard interview might take several hours, but it inc
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by dsacco 9y ago
> I suppose you mean that someone (out of a group G) can commit an instruction saying "the future decision is Y" into the blockchain, and at some time later everyone will be convinced this is the future decision. This is not r
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by dsacco 9y ago
> Payments are the perfect application found, so far, for the blockchain. That statement really needs to be tempered with context. For some relatively recent blockchains, and for particular tradeoffs that enhance transaction throug
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by dsacco 9y ago
> I think that the area where you want fault-tolerance the most is decentralized cash. ...Really? That's one application, sure, but I hardly think it compares to the generalizable usage of cryptographic fault-tolerance assurance i
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by dsacco 9y ago
> It's not really a solution to the Two Generals Problem. The Two Generals Problem, as stated, implies that a failure to reach consensus about a future decision would be catastrophic and ought to be considered as a failure of the p
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by dsacco 9y ago
> No, it was about finance right from the start, says so right there in the title of the paper ("cash"). I agree with you that Bitcoin was originally conceived to solve digital cash problems (like double spending). But I thin
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by dsacco 9y ago
Yes, I strongly agree with you. In my opinion, blockchains have a lot of legitimate utility, but their applications are mostly the purview of cryptography and traditional Byzantine fault-tolerance. Contrary to popular belief, blockchains (i
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by dsacco 9y ago
That really depends on how you define "blockchain researcher" and, in particular, how close the research must be to hard science (as opposed to engineering implementation) to satisfy your definition. The researchers I personally k
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by dsacco 9y ago
Discrete mathematics is basically a grab bag of topics selected from naive set theory, combinatorics, calculus, graph theory, linear algebra and probability theory. It also includes asymptotic algorithm analysis. You can look for resources
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by dsacco 9y ago
No, it’s not the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. See my response to the other commenter in this thread forwarding (essentially) the same argument. You cannot claim that some event is reducible to chance just because it’s in a small minority of
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by dsacco 9y ago
> If they're "outliers", their success can be explained by chance. With many people tossing coins, some will do very well by the laws of probability. No, they cannot be. I meant outlier in the sense of a probability dist
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by dsacco 9y ago
That’s not correct. The actual bet was always for a “portfolio of funds of hedge funds.”[1] If the bet had been for a single fund, Simons or Klarman or any other hedge fund manager who has been beating the market by a large margin for 20 -
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by dsacco 9y ago
I’ll repeat, I never made a claim that any percentage other than outliers beat the market. Let me restate my point succinctly for you: I consider it dogmatic to frame the conversation as the grandparent comment did, which is saying, “Don’t
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by dsacco 9y ago
My comment isn’t disingenuous. I’m neutrally presenting the reality that it is possible to beat the market. I’m not saying most people should try it, and in fact I specifically stated most people should stick to index funds. I also specific
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by dsacco 9y ago
The advice to use index funds is sound and most people should follow it. But that “bet” is a very weak argument for it. Buffett bet against a particular hedge fund manager who as far as I can tell was only in it for the publicity. There are
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by dsacco 9y ago
Your comment exhibits a lot of disdain. Sorry to hear about the interviewing trouble. > I'm trying to get hired at big 4 tech right now. Every person interviewing me is a rich kid. All of my competition is rich kids. Touring these
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by dsacco 9y ago
> Just because clever people win doesn't mean you will win because you're clever. No, there is no guarantee. But you can develop an edge that is statistically distinguishable from random outcomes, and less formally, that dist
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by dsacco 9y ago
> An honest take on the idea of a personal active trading should always mention the opportunity cost. Doing the necessary research is a job. One that takes significant time to learn, and one that will continue to take significant time o
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by dsacco 9y ago
> Step 0: Forget trading on the stock market. You will lose. This does not have to be the case. I don’t mean to encourage people not to invest in index funds (passive indexing is generally the best idea!), but if they’re going to try i
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by dsacco 9y ago
If you are a programmer with a good understanding of statistics, you can get access to legal data not reflected in market prices and profit on smaller capacities than hedge funds. In fact, you can achieve a Sharpe ratio comparable with the
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by dsacco 9y ago
It is not illegal to trade on material, non-public information if it is not acquired from an insider with a confidentiality agreement and you don’t have such an agreement either. I used to find, collect and analyze supply chain data to sell
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by dsacco 9y ago
> If you've done this earnings forecasting yourself, how much size can you trade before the market moves enough to make the risk/reward unfavorable? For a retail guy it's probably not an issue, but curious if major funds
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by dsacco 9y ago
If I recall correctly, I was the person talking about this, barely a week ago :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291194
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by dsacco 9y ago
> I have funds to invest but every time I look into getting into I cannot bring myself to do it because I cannot stop my brain thinking it's gambling. Without insider knowledge I don't understand how I could beat the market sh
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by dsacco 9y ago
> But do you want to invest or do you want to trade? This is a false dichotomy. First, just semantically speaking: investors "invest" in hedge funds that engage in speculation via trading strategies across a continuum of risk
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by dsacco 9y ago
> This goes double for long-term success. As the disclaimers say, past performance is no indication of future results. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance, but it should absolutely be an indicator. Unless you view
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by dsacco 9y ago
Right, I follow what you’re saying. My followup to that is that I think (personally, and what the commenter is saying) that ignorance in the modeling of human behavior both causes and is caused by egocentrism in a feedback loop. In any ca
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by dsacco 9y ago
Do you mind summarizing what that is a bit? I’d like to read about it, but either the link isn’t working for me (I’m on mobile) or it doesn’t contain much information aside from the homepage.
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by dsacco 9y ago
You hope that’s not what the commenter is saying, but what is your proposal instead? We can put significant effort into understanding criminals, for the purposes of both preemptive treatment and reactive rehabilitation, but this is not like
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by dsacco 9y ago
> The fact that what they knew was based on their own motivations seems incidental. I doubt if they had the perfect formula evidenced and understandable to them at the time, that they would have intentionally ignored it to still encode

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