choffstein

"Kelly maximizes utility of money modeled as a logarithmic function."

Absolutely true, but consider what log utility also creates a decision rule that leads to growth-rate optimization under multiplicative bets.

You may find these notes from Ole Peters interesting https://ergodicityeconomics.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/ergo...

This is a great answer.

To answer the question about the 3-sided die: the question is flawed for 2 reasons.

First, the way you phrased it, you know the information a priori. It's like me learning that the car isn't behind door #1 before I choose. In that case, I have a 50/50 chance on the other doors.

But what if you didn't tell me before? This introduces our second problem. Let's say I roll the die and you hide it under a cup. I tell you I chose side A and you tell me A is physically impossible and ask me if I want to switch. Well of course I want to switch ... but I didn't learn any more information about sides B and C. It's a 50/50 toss-up. In terms of the game show, you basically just opened the constant's door.

A critical element of the original problem is when the information is learned and knowing that the contestant's door will not be opened. It is what allows the phrasing from zaksoup above.

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey had an episode (#5) called "Hiding in the Light"[1] that contained a fair bit about Joseph Fraunhofer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiding_in_the_Light

"Mr. Moy’s past work, however, that makes his presence among us interesting."

I don't know why. He was Director of the US Mint: he printed coins. It's a manufacturing business. It has nothing to do with monetary policy, fiscal policy or law as far as I know.

If the Secretary of the Treasury said something ... well, then we'd have a story.

You can grab her by e-mail: [email protected] or twitter: @LittleWorldsInt

My sister just released a game early access on Steam[1] called "The Counting Kingdom"[2]. It targets the U.S. core math curriculum for 6-8 year olds.

The idea is that by embedding mathematics into the core mechanics of the gameplay – instead of having it simply be a hurdle players have to get by before they get to further gaming (e.g. a popup quiz) – will allow players to consistently reinforce, grow, and retain their learning without necessarily consciously thinking about learning. It's learning through play.

I think the notion has legs, but I think it will really take a strong effort between game developers and educators alike.

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/302750/ [2] http://www.countingkingdomgame.com/

I suppose if your estimator is biased and not consistent -- due to some sort of omitted variable -- you can end up with "significant" estimates that are completely removed from reality. Great explanation at http://eranraviv.com/blog/bias-vs-consistency/.

Is it possible to set this up so that you can point it to a remote URL to fetch the CSV? For example, I'd love it if I could point it towards a Yahoo! Finance API call that returns a CSV file and have my dashboard auto-update. Or Dropbox URL. Or any remote URL. That would be awesome.

It never really says it is an acqui-anything. Maybe they are just winding down and getting jobs?

Robert Martin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cecil_Martin) once tweeted (@unclebobmartin):

"When designs are cheaper than builds, e.g. a skyscraper or a bridge, big up front design makes good sense. But when builds are cheaper than designs, e.g. software or oil painting, short and iterative design and build steps are best."

I couldn't agree with that more.

I work in an industry where builds are not cheap and iteration after launch is nearly impossible. You better believe we have a very, very long design cycle.

You might want to check out the "AI Game Programming Wisdom" series. I think at this point, there are four of them. "Game Programming Gems" is another series worth checking out (I think there are 8 at this point); each book normally has a section on game AI.

The books are a series of articles written by industry practitioners solving a problem they have run across. Normally the articles contain inline code, and the books come with a CD with executable examples and code to accompany the articles.

As I said below, it's likely that I am hyper-sensitive to these issues. I urge you to continue sharing your journey and your stories!

Be careful not to take away credit from yourself, though; in finance, your father may have been able to "open" a door for you, but you would still have to walk through it.

Keep on walkin'.

As I said, I am likely over-sensitive to these issues; finance isn't exactly the most well-respected industry at the moment.

I am a 20-ish year old and despite "what I do" has been done before, the "way I do it" never has -- and that is plenty "exciting." There is nothing safe or low-risk about starting a hedge fund.

I get your point about "having more meaning" -- but I'd argue that is true for any business endeavor, not just tech startups. If what I was doing didn't have truly personal meaning for me, there is no way I could stomach the stress.

Maybe I'm overly sensitive because the article seemed to compare the easy hedge fund life to the tough tech start-up life, which I think is a gross over exaggeration in the divergent profile: I believe that they are tremendously similar.

As someone who has started a business in the finance space trying to leverage technology, I take some offense to this. My business partners and I have worked our asses off over the last several years to get to where we are today: billions of dollars in assets powered by our investment models. Trust me: asking someone to give you money to put in your strategies is not easy. Unlike the start-up space, there is no "minimum viable product," "traction" metric, or even "asset" that has some intrinsic value (like a unique algorithm or brand). You either have a track record, or you don't. New strategies don't, so it's all "trust." Sure, I can show a "back-test" or "stress-test" -- but everyone knows those are bullshit anyway.

You think you know stress? Imagine knowing that every day, your models are making investment decisions for billions of dollars. Sure, it's a drop in the overall pool of assets in markets, but it is enough to keep you up at night, worried about someone's retirement or someone's college fund. Drop a few more percentage points than the market? Goodbye hundreds of millions of dollars. Yep, that's going to happen at 50 when you start your "easy life" as a hedge-fund manager.

I'm not saying my stress is greater. I'm just trying to make the point that every business has its own share of problems, and to say that being a tech entrepreneur takes any more balls than being any other kind of entrepreneur is naive.

Can we please stop, as a community, with the "woe is us, the tech entrepreneur?" It's embarrassing. Starting a business is starting a business, no matter the industry. In fact, I'd argue that we live in a golden age for tech entrepreneurship that has never existed in another industry. Imagine trying to start a bio-tech business or a manufacturing business (well, arguably "outsourcing" could be the manufacturing entrepreneur's "scale"...). There are no "seed" rounds. The assets you have to raise are probably 100x what a tech entrepreneur has to initially raise. On top of trying to build a product, you probably have to manage building and factory development, understand legal regulations for your industry, and manage tons of labor.

We live in a time where you can roll the dice and start a business in the tech space with a handful of smart people, some elbow-grease and maybe $50k in a seed round. This is a golden era.

I respect the hell out of what you are doing -- starting a business is NOT easy -- but please don't say it takes any more balls than starting a business in any other industry. It doesn't.

http://namesake.com/ might be what you want

I completely agree with this.

It's the same issue with comparing MBA programs to accelerator programs. A Masters in Business Administration is NOT a Masters in Entrepreneurship, which I would argue is a more apt juxtaposition to the "school of hard knocks". Sure, an MBA and accelerator experience may overlap in many places -- but they sure diverge in many others.

That doesn't stop people from asking the question "Harvard MBA or Y Combinator?" though...

Basically, pandas, numpy, and matplotlib give me everything I could have wanted out of matlab from a numerical capabilities and graphing perspective.

In my opinion, matlab's excellent object inspection and debugging capabilities can be replaced with strict testing standards in your code-base.

On top of that, I get to use a whole slew of libraries that are non mathematically related -- frameworks for web services, accessing ftp servers, sending e-mails -- a lot of automated "utility" stuff.

And it is all "free". Fantastic.

It was my personal site that I recently "scrubbed" off the web. I updated my profile for my business site. Thanks for the reminder.

Well, a new accelerator Acceleprise (acceleprise.vc) just started up to tackle the space. At the very least, it might be worthing reaching out and talking to some of their mentors.

Note: I have no affiliation with Acceleprise

wesm, I can't thank you enough for this library.

I own and operate a quantitative finance business. Pandas (+ numpy) has been a godsend. Not only do I not have to pay for matlab licenses, but even the less experience programmers on my team have been insanely productive.

Thank you.

It's not just having the dry powder -- it's knowing which companies are worth spending it on. You're either "defending your position" or "doubling down on a loss." Great way to lose money fast unless you can find some real signal in the noise of going from Seed to Series A.

And this is another brilliant part of Dave's model. He can rapidly apply lessons from the last 50-100 startups he funded to the next 50. He can rapidly collect metrics that will allow him to determine which companies are worth following on with.

His "sample size" is much bigger and therefore allows him to mine out statistically significant data about where to follow on.

I met Dave when I was interviewed as part of his "Shadow Dave McClure" contest last summer (http://www.internmatch.com/dave-mcclure-job-shadow). Getting to sit down and talk to him for 15 minutes and see how 500Startups operates was ...enlightening.

Dave definitely sees the world a little differently. I sincerely hope this business model works out well for him. On the one hand, it is a "diversify and capture the broad market" approach, but he has also done well in creating a brand for himself and 500Startups, making it an "exclusive" club to join (remember, you can't apply!), which means he ideally only gets incredibly qualified leads from his "mentors."

If markets are fairly efficient, in the long run he shouldn't make any extra money over just investing in a broad market index. But if they aren't efficient (and there is no reason to believe in the Angel space they are), creating a huge diversified portfolio of incredibly well qualified leads that he can incubate and nurture is a great portfolio strategy.

My worry is only the exit strategy and how he can prevent himself from getting diluted in the Series A; being only a minority share-holder, there is nothing that stops him from finding great companies, seeding them, and ultimately not being able to turn as great a profit as he would like because he can't liquidate and gets diluted.

Zen? This is madness!

In my mind, Matlab's (Octave's) array based programming makes sense. This? This does nothing that I expected it to do!

replicate seems to pretty randomly takes a function. Is that an R thing? I think what confuses me most is that there is nothing about this syntax that tells me that "cumprod (rnorm (1000, 1, 0.03))" hasn't already been evaluated! I could not, for the life of me, figure out why replicate didn't just create 100 exact copies. For example, why does replicate(...) evaluate, but the internals don't? This is driving me crazy!

This is probably the best overview out there: http://brehaut.net/blog/2011/ring_introduction, though it doesn't mention the new kid on the block, Noir (http://www.webnoir.org/)

Repost: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464213

I could not agree more. It's an irresponsible statement and should only be qualified by those entrepreneurs talking about how much money they started with.

Though, having been to 500Startups and seeing the amount of 20-somethings there, I can't imagine they had much to lose in the first place.

I don't see why this lie of having to put everything on the line is consistently perpetuated within the start-up ecosystem. Yes, start-ups are hard -- but I am getting tired of what seems like a consistently perpetuated lie so that start-ups can feed their own ego -- or worse, justify their failure.

I am sort of dumb-founded that this is on the front-page of HackerNews. I know this isn't a constructive comment in any way, but this link is to a basic post that is going over the different between a list, a set, and a map?

Really?

This is the second or third time I've seen a service like this created (getexceptional.com and airbrake.io are two that come to mind quickly).

I can only hope this trend continues and in an open-architecture style. The ability to basically develop a skeleton monitoring UI that I can plug my own software into is fantastic.

My only thought is: why is this local to the machine I put it on? I'd rather have a central repository that I send me data to, like getexceptional. I don't mind having to set-up the process for each server I spin up, but I would prefer it if the information all aggregated to one source that I could browse through.

What I sort of imagine is registering for an Amon account and getting a unique key and identifier. Whenever I install Amon on a machine or want to call it from my code, I use that unique key and give the hardware a unique name and register my software service (pulling the hardware name from some config file automatically). Then, when I log into my central Amon account, I can browse through my exceptions and hardware details by machine name or software service.

Give me the ability to have multiple logging levels and I am in heaven.

Take it one step further: let fall-back be to either a local db or file-system and have a cron-job go through to try to fulfill the upload tasks.

That is definitely something I would pay $25-$50 a month for.