rlucas

41 ms·

211.
by rlucas 10y ago
The white/black money thing is not in vc land but is super common in "strategy" focused hedge and even mutual funds. You "incubate" 10 funds with very small assets and then after a few years pick the best one and tr
212.
by rlucas 10y ago
The insanity in your comment is the idea that urban density is the statist / authoritarian / corrupt central planning piece. Try reading Louis Hyman's "Debtor Nation," particularly the bits on FHA and the creation o
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by rlucas 10y ago
I'd like to chime in for future readers of this thread, a passive observation. In 2016 Seattle tech, I hear the "dots not feathers" formulation (or rarely the reverse), at least monthly, always in professional settings and ne
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by rlucas 10y ago
Watch your doctor doing his own "data entry" next time. First, he'll spin away from you on his stool. Then touch a keyboard with his boogerhooks to re-log-in. (A shared KEYBOARD in a room of transient often-sick people ...
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by rlucas 10y ago
For the record, see Braess' paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox "Normal" and intuitive behavior is not what you can expect from a busy traffics system.
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by rlucas 10y ago
Don't think of it as a new standalone line of business; think of it as an "upsell" that your reps can incrementally sell, since you need them there to sell the occasional big ticket items.
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by rlucas 10y ago
Interesting anecdote, but 1. It's quite possible (though it's a huge rabbit hole we shouldn't plumb here) that they were taxing the wrong macronutrient entirely, that is to say, that fat on the body is more a factor of sugar
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by rlucas 10y ago
The main problem with this bit is that is reveals that the authors (and editors, if they bothered) are completely financially illiterate. We do not tax "wealth" in the US; we tax net income. This fundamental flub -- in an article
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by rlucas 10y ago
> 2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains Interestingly in the northwestern u.s. (and I suspect throughout the western u.s.) the main rail corridors prioritize freight. Discovered this while, as a regular Seattle
220.
by rlucas 11y ago
Well, I'd object to the idea that even a careful human team in production can hit 100%. In domains where the human "gold standard" is somehow falsifiable (that is, not tautologically correct as in some judgment call situatio
221.
by rlucas 11y ago
The main gist of the article is that you can use ML to catch "slam dunk" categories and give people the harder tasks. Ten years ago or more, lumber mills started using computer techniques to suggest optimal cuts (which dimensions
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by rlucas 11y ago
Not necessarily. If the 2B in sales is highly volatile, and/or requires a lot of equity investment, you might rationally prefer the 1T in sales if the latter is highly stable (utility) and highly leveraged (tiny amount of equity). Othe
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by rlucas 11y ago
Not weighing in on whether the 1B in profit is "a lot" but a financial analyst would also want to look at return on equity, because a business like VZ likely "should" be highly leveraged (financing its long lived assets
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by rlucas 11y ago
Why, oh why, didn't they study this kind of stuff when I very nearly managed to drop out of the History of Science program in college?
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by rlucas 11y ago
Wanted to give the same critical emphasis to the economic theory explanation as you had given to the socioeconomic class interest bit. The statement articulated two "parts" of the explanation. The second "part" was phras
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by rlucas 11y ago
Except that Congress specifically created a regulatory regime for these businesses, and included a wide array of strictures on their practices and a very specific set of remedies for those who are harmed. That system (FCRA, FDCPA etc.) is
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by rlucas 11y ago
You are lumping together a number of players under "they." The number itself typically comes from Fair Issac -- who traditionally sold a black box algorithm to project a multidimensional vector onto a single scalar. The data itsel
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by rlucas 11y ago
Credit is, at its core, trust. Trust, well-placed, makes everything about humanity better. Seen that way it feels warm and fuzzy. But, "credit," meaning the business of telling you whom you can trust (like a bureau), is very ver
229.
by rlucas 11y ago
Please don't forget the economic theorizers, and the subtle and not-so-subtle pressures that keep them in line. (Put another way: in "[1] economic theories about the use of [2] capital in a [3] market economy" there's a
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by rlucas 11y ago
When does a difference in degree become a difference in kind? (Not arguing the specific point -- but differences of degree do matter in the messy empirical real world.)
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by rlucas 11y ago
Your 1) above, indicating that a "lot" of programmers can funnel work through "private consulting companies" and get "15% effective tax rate" can be highly misleading to those (inside or outside the US) unfamil
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by rlucas 11y ago
And in turn, if you think that is true, then clearly you've never tried investing serious money. It doesn't get taxed when sold at a gain (because it's exchanged per 1031 or similar tax code provisions). If it does, it&#
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by rlucas 11y ago
Once an application has been alive for more than a few months, I find it often is subject to self-joins and other query approaches which pretty much beg for aliases in the name of legibility.
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by rlucas 11y ago
No, GP is saying that the value (societal or individual) of higher education may be orthogonal to the change in job pay of the person educated. The framing of the conversation as being around job pay rates has consequences. There are real e
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by rlucas 11y ago
This. Although I am a believer in and a onetime recipient of federal student aid, there's no denying that there exists an educational-financial-industrial complex which needs to churn through new student borrowers as the substrate for
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by rlucas 11y ago
GP was emphatically not saying that Perl 6 is the abstract and simple one. GP was saying those qualities apply to Go and are what make some personalities like Go more than P6. You like the Go qualities and not the P6 ones; QED.
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by rlucas 11y ago
I think you're right that it would be considered , but from inside the VC world, I can also say it would be very very strange (to the point of almost unthinkable) for a fund to make a meaningful hedge against a particular portfolio co
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by rlucas 11y ago
This is one example of a pervasive problem of the 1-bit social ecosystem or what I call the "like-only problem" It's partly a technological problem and I really like this approach to that side. (one missing item would be null
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by rlucas 11y ago
Should we call it "base a"?
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by rlucas 11y ago
More importantly: creating a scalar metric of "merit" is always an exercise in power, because it simplifies a hugely multidimensional space to a scale, and in collapsing all those dimensions expresses in a hidden way the preferenc

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