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A comment on I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA. Parent comment

Re:I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA by danieltillett on Saturday March 19, 2016 @03:14AM (#11317664)
I am firmly on your side in regards ideas, but I think the problem is we are not all meaning the same thing by what is an idea. If your idea is crap (uber for x) then the only thing that matters is execution. If your idea is good then it is very valuable independent of execution.

My favourite pure good idea with enormous value has to be the Kelly criterion [1].

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

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Re:I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA by JabavuAdams on Sunday March 20, 2016 @01:58AM (#11321979)
Ok, I didn't know about this. Thanks! How did you learn about it?

I'm trying to figure out why I didn't know this.

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Re:I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA by danieltillett on Sunday March 20, 2016 @05:30AM (#11322352)
I lost money (luckly not too much) in the stock market on a position where I was right and I didn't know why. I decided to find out and I learned that the size of my trade was larger than the Kelly criterion.

The Kelly criterion seems to not be well known - why I can't say other than there are a lot of groups that benefit from people being ignorant of it.

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