KonaB
Hacking the Mother Code (1995)
Re:Goldman Sachs Has First Perfect Quarter With Zero Trading Loss
on Monday May 10, 2010 @01:47PM (#1335308)
Not quite. Populist and pavlovian attacks are baseless. But intelligent ones are not. Personally, I not only distrust the SEC, but I also believe that "should" is a word to be left out of the discussion. What matters is what can be implemented, not what is morally right. It's like realpolitik applied to the context of Wall Street.
Re:Goldman Sachs Has First Perfect Quarter With Zero Trading Loss
on Monday May 10, 2010 @12:14PM (#1334861)
I can't. The trademark is already registered ;-)
Re:Goldman Sachs Has First Perfect Quarter With Zero Trading Loss
on Monday May 10, 2010 @11:29AM (#1334695)
Thanks for the intelligent comment. Finally!
I am not against intelligent critique of GS, the government, whatever. In fact, such critique is required to ensure the proper functioning of the system, closing the feedback loop and providing the required checks. What I am against is Pavlovian unintelligent critique, and one sees a lot of that when the topic is Wall Street. And even though a lot of HN'ers are deeply knowledgeable about Finance, the majority is clearly clueless. This is HN, after all, not NucPhyn.
I am no GS'er, nor am I their useful idiot. They are merely maximizing their utility through whatever means necessary. The one difference between me and you guys is that I don't claim that I am a saint who would be uncapable of doing what GS is doing if I were on their shoes. It's easy to be full of virtue when one does not have the chance to do any evil. Business is hard, but the players in the financial market are voluntary participants. If GS has an information edge and rapes everyone else on a regular basis, maybe the prey should leave the market. It's a winner-take-all scenario, whether we like it or not.
Change the regulation, they will find a new way of gaming the system. Increase taxes, and they will find a loophole. The only way of taming these hyper-motivated people is by eliminating all economic freedom, and I oppose that on ideological grounds. So, I am happier to have a market where GS pillages their counterparties than to have the alternative scenarios. No one said that the best of all worlds was ever attainable. It sucks. One could try to change human nature, but we all know how that worked in the past...
Re:Goldman Sachs Has First Perfect Quarter With Zero Trading Loss
on Monday May 10, 2010 @10:44AM (#1334547)
The joke is no longer amusing. Everyone is attacking GS, from utterly clueless uneducated morons to utterly devious dumb politicians with a private agenda. By attacking GS in such a gratuitous manner, one reminds others of such tragicomedy.
Re:Goldman Sachs Has First Perfect Quarter With Zero Trading Loss
on Monday May 10, 2010 @10:22AM (#1334470)
Pavlovian anti-GS hysteria at its best...
Getting Started with Processing and Data Visualization
Re:Super-High Alcohol Beer Heads to the U.S.
on Sunday April 11, 2010 @05:20PM (#1257623)
If you were going to burn $60, you could instead have gotten a 50 euro BJ in the Red Light District and then had an Heineken with your buddies. You probably would have sweeter memories of Amsterdam...
Xtranormal - Text-to-Movie
Re:Math is not linear, so why do we teach it like that?
on Wednesday April 07, 2010 @01:48PM (#1247909)
Artistic freedom. I am the lizard king, I can do anything.
Re:Math is not linear, so why do we teach it like that?
on Wednesday April 07, 2010 @01:28PM (#1247852)
Well, when I learned Latin, the plural of -um was -a. Just like the plural of -us was -i. People say campuses, but they also say alumni (not alumnuses). One should be consistent, imho...
Re:Math is not linear, so why do we teach it like that?
on Tuesday April 06, 2010 @11:04PM (#1246340)
Curricula, not curriculums...
The New Diamond Age (2003)
Re:Pancreatic Cancer Linked to Sodas?
on Monday February 08, 2010 @05:45PM (#1110918)
"This doesn't make sense to me. If sugar in soda leads to cancer, then why doesn't sugar in juice?"
Maybe because there are various types of sugars (e.g., glucose and fructose), and these are metabolized differently? That could explain it. Just speculating...
Strogatz on the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school
Re:MIT develops algorithms to "solve" non-linear systems as sum of squ...
on Friday January 29, 2010 @08:29PM (#1088046)
I suppose the article is referring to the SOSTOOLS (where SOS = Sum of Squares) free MATLAB toolbox:
http://www.cds.caltech.edu/sostools
http://www.mit.edu/~parrilo/sostools
The article could have mentioned that more people have worked on this. The whole thing started while Parrilo and Prajna were Prof. John Doyle's grad students at Caltech / CDS. Yet once again, MIT's shameless self-promotion fails to give credit where credit is due...
Re:The Quants: Formula for a Meltdown
on Sunday January 24, 2010 @03:04PM (#1073714)
Yet another article blaming the poor quants. Anyone with nonzero experience in finance knows that quants have no power and earn no respect. Of course quants know that models have limitations, but if you tell your boss that one should be conservative, the only thing you will attain is to get yourself fired. The ones to be blamed are the ones with decision-making power, and everybody knows that quants have as much decision-making power as the IT guys.
At least they talk about Aaron Brown. In any case, I was expecting more from the WSJ. They used to be better than this...
Re:The Quants: Formula for a Meltdown
on Sunday January 24, 2010 @02:55PM (#1073700)
Interestingly, when Markowitz invested his own money, he invested 50% in stocks, and 50% in bonds. If the creator did not believe in his own creation, I don't think anyone should. BTW, Engle's work is kind of useless in the real-world...
Re:Build your own laser microphone
on Friday January 22, 2010 @07:26AM (#1069545)
Re:Why there's no real startup culture in New York
on Thursday January 21, 2010 @11:52PM (#1069147)
So do pension funds. The word directly is there for a reason.
Re:Singular Value Decomposition Tutorial
on Thursday January 21, 2010 @10:38PM (#1069050)
SVD solves most problems I need to solve. But then, I conjecture we are in different fields.
Re:Singular Value Decomposition Tutorial
on Thursday January 21, 2010 @02:28AM (#1066821)
Rarely used in practice??? Dude, are you being facetious?? SVD is the sledgehammer that cracks any problem you come up against...
Re:Why there's no real startup culture in New York
on Thursday January 21, 2010 @02:23AM (#1066816)
Having worked at a startup in London, I would claim that Zed's post applies to London, too.
Life is too short to swim against the current. Whoever wants to start a company should go where like-minded people exist in large numbers, and neither NYC or London are such places. Starting a company is already hard, the least one could do is to be immersed in the right culture, where the right values are cherished.
Re:Why there's no real startup culture in New York
on Thursday January 21, 2010 @02:19AM (#1066811)
Please define financial startup.
Re:Why there's no real startup culture in New York
on Wednesday January 20, 2010 @11:34PM (#1066636)
"Finance companies get government bailouts and are more likely to succeed."
You are painting things with a very broad brush. How many hedge funds are there? Thousands. How many of them got bailout funding? Virtually none. How many top tier investment banks are there that got bailed out by the government? 5 or 6? I rest my case...
Besides, Finance is a very vast field. Hence, the words Finance companies means nothing. A hedge fund is, essentially, a startup... and the likelihood of failure is high. By contrast, a bank is anything but a startup. A boutique investment bank and a boutique HFT hedge fund are both "finance companies", but their cultures are more distant from one another than what you can imagine.
You are thinking of GS, MS, City, ML and the like, and generalizing that all finance companies are like that... which is utterly absurd.
Re:Why there's no real startup culture in New York
on Wednesday January 20, 2010 @09:47PM (#1066468)
"...tell you they have a "tiny" hedge fund already worth 500 million and they can give you a return on your investment within one year, and in 5 they’ll be worth a few hundred BILLION. Oh, and if they fail the Fed will bail them out so there’s no risk."
As far as I know, the Fed did not directly bail out any hedge funds, except those internal to big banks. The last 2 years were a blood bath in the hedge fund world, with hundreds of shops closing down. Zed's text is amusing, but it does not reflect reality all that accurately.
Last but not least, I have never heard of a hedge fund worth hundreds of billions. A 1-billion fund is common, but hundreds of billions? When Jim Simons of RenTec started talking of a 100-billion hedge fund in 2006, everyone was so excited...
Re:Why Poor Countries Are Poor
on Wednesday January 20, 2010 @11:40AM (#1065097)
Would you care to elaborate on that?
If Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Markov, Kolmogorov, Gelfand, Arnold, Gromov, Perelman have / had spoiled genes, then I wish such "spoiled genes" were more common in the West.