mdkess

8 ms·

31.
by mdkess 13y ago
While I think The Intelligent Investor is a worthwhile book, I think it got it wrong for the very reasons I mentioned above. Anyway, I'm not making any argument here for how the market works, other than pointing out that saying that ha
32.
by mdkess 13y ago
What is the market? A bunch of fund managers. So your critique about not beating the median like saying half of all hockey players are worse than the median and so hockey is just a game of chance. You have to fix your prior. Track performan
33.
by mdkess 13y ago
MORE programmers work for big companies, so you get a full normal distribution, and I would imagine there's a bias toward interviewing more of the ones who got fired or poor performance reviews. You only see the tail.
34.
by mdkess 13y ago
For pharma patents - is there a requirement of trying to bring a patented chemical to market (at the very least, doing clinical trials, etc)?
35.
by mdkess 13y ago
What a remarkable life!
36.
by mdkess 13y ago
When people vote to not raise taxes to fund these schools, what do they expect is going to happen to subsidized tuition? We saw this happen a few years ago in Washington after voters voted against raising taxes to fund schools, and schools
37.
by mdkess 13y ago
The other side of risk adverse isn't apathy. At a big company, if you're smart, work hard, and do what tasks are assigned to you, chances are you'll have a long and profitable career. Fresh out of school, a smart and motivated engineer coul
38.
by mdkess 13y ago
I apologize, I believe I misread your original post as being risk adverse. Absolutely agree with you here though - striving to fail fast is perhaps the one bit of startup advice that is nearly universally applicable.
39.
by mdkess 13y ago
If you AREN'T making large amounts of sacrifice toward high risk problems, I'd say you're doing something wrong. Startups are a perfect example of this. We see serial entrepreneurs fail spectacularly (see Color), we read about entrepreneurs
40.
by mdkess 13y ago
Really like the idea of this, and especially enjoyed that you took the time to make the 2 minute video walkthrough (it made it easy for me to say "ok, I'll give you 2 minutes, let's hear your pitch"). I think the idea of having a focused co
41.
by mdkess 13y ago
What I meant by interesting is that they tell me more about the health of the system, not that they're more interesting to write. Suppose there's a race condition in some library that you're using. No unit test in the world is going to catc
42.
by mdkess 13y ago
So the question is, what if bar = 12 means "retrieve foo with ID 12 from the FooService", and we want to make sure that get_foo does something sensible when the server returns an error code. So what do you do? Typically one writes a mocked
43.
by mdkess 13y ago
In my admittedly limited experience, unit tests are way overhyped, especially when things like mocking are brought into the mix. It's easy to end up with a test that is not about correctness, but "did line 1 get called, did line 2 get calle
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by mdkess 14y ago
Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
45.
by mdkess 14y ago
That's why I think independent reviews are better than public shaming. The untrained eye might not notice a surgeon improperly clean an instrument before surgery, but that may be the most dangerous mistake that they make - one which the tra
46.
by mdkess 14y ago
Why not require video cameras be installed in factory farms, and have footage independently reviewed? I feel like a lot of this abuse is due to poorly educated workers in a stressful environment and no observation.
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by mdkess 14y ago
I guess at the heart, the problem with firing is the emotional and social stigma associated with it. Someone is under-performing, and you don't think that it can be corrected. By firing them, they have to go home to their wife and kids and
48.
by mdkess 14y ago
Another question: What do you do when you hire people worse than you? It's hard being around people smarter than you though, even if we all know it's a good thing and important. It's easy to say that we want to be the dumbest person in the
49.
by mdkess 14y ago
Well, strictly yes, of course you are correct. I'm talking about boring investing though - slow, boring returns from boring companies. So when Forbes runs a headlines saying that AAPL will hit $1000, the stock ceases to be boring, and so in
50.
by mdkess 14y ago
I think the strategy of buying a diversified portfolio of large, boring companies doing core things that everyone needs is a pretty safe bet. If you're investing, I think that you should have a gambling account too, because it's fun and kee
51.
by mdkess 14y ago
When newspapers are running headlines about how some stock is going to double in value, it's time to get as far away as possible. Besides, if you're in technology, you shouldn't be investing in tech companies. Since most of us are technolog
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by mdkess 14y ago
Unless you're Dijkstra.
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by mdkess 14y ago
For me it's reading. This is why I think that things like the Samsung ATIV and the Asus Transformer Book are so neat. For most things I do - writing code, writing emails, posting my inane thoughts on Hacker News, the laptop form factor is p
54.
by mdkess 14y ago
I think what you'll see in the future is battery swapping stations, where they'll take your uncharged battery and replace it with a charged one. Certainly some logistic issues, but I still think this would be more efficient than driving gia
55.
by mdkess 14y ago
Can't we meet in the middle somehow? I think that there is merit to rote learning. When I practice piano, most of the time I practice scales. Not creative at all - mind numbing, really, but fundamentally important. When I play a piece, it i
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by mdkess 14y ago
I am Canadian. Can I do this?
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by mdkess 14y ago
Cool! Idea: What if every page load, you displayed an app prominently, weighted by the cost paid for that tile? For example, if you sold 3 tiles for $1, $2, $3 respectively, with 1/6 probability you display a prominent ad for the first, 2/6
58.
by mdkess 14y ago
That is not at all how any of this works. First, expected growth is built in to the value of a stock at any time. If the market expected Apple's sales to double, for example, and it happens, the stock will not skyrocket when Apple announces
59.
by mdkess 14y ago
I think it's about being totally comfortable with yourself and your existence, and being able to define your goals and ambitions, and separate them from the distractions. We're all vain creatures, selfish, we have vices, we get offended, we
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by mdkess 14y ago
Haven't used 2012, but I think that IntelliJ IDEA is much better than VS 2010, anyway. Not to knock on 2010, but IDEA is pretty amazing.

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