jmh530

I woke up yesterday without an alarm at 5:40am and was like, damn I overslept.

The wealthy disproportionately have their money invested in equities. The ultra wealthy are also typically highly concentrated in specific companies, think Jeff Bezos and Amazon. They tend to lose more when the market crashes.

Malaria and other diseases are one of the main reasons Europeans kept their African ambitions relatively contained. What is the geopolitical implication of eliminating malaria?

I mean, it's kind of ridiculous to just make blanket statements like that. This is a hedge fund that has a long history of good performance. The whole point of a ponzi scheme is that you have to keep getting more money from outside investors to pay the original investors. Rentec does the exact opposite. They refuse outside money and keep their employees from investing too much in it.

With that out of the way, obviously no one except those who work for them knows what they actually do. What we do know for sure if that they are highly levered, use an entirely systematic/algorithmic investment process, and do a shit load of trading. So even if they don't earn a lot on each trade, they do so many that are just barely profitable and highly levered that it ends up being a lot of money.

Nuclear weapons are a good example of IP theft though. Russia stole plans from the US for nuclear weapons to get ahead. The US literally executed people for their role in it.

My english teacher in high school said that some guy from Apple came to talk to them and said that soon AI would be able to write stories. That was 15 years ago and as far as I can tell, they cant use bots to write anything like an original story that anyone would want to actually read. Good luck making "entire movies."

It's 10:57pm and NYC is just honking away...

This has been known for some time...

Upon graduation, these free tuition doctors will be taking jobs in a competitive market. Some doctors they compete against will have debt, some won't. But it really isn't like the amount they charge for services will decline. This just means that some doctors will get a little bit richer...

It runs awful on my work computer, but fine on home computer.

I was a relatively early adopter to Facebook, though not Harvard- or Ivy League-early. It didn't have a hot-or-not style rating at that time. Poking was a feature, but I'm not sure it was ever that popular.

My girlfriend thought it was for a Federal constitutional convention...

Bookmarked!

Honestly, I'm having all kinds of problems. I've had to force quit a bunch of times. Some sites are 100% fine, but others cause CPU to 100% and doesn't come down. Feedly was the first I noticed, but it happened again on Yahoo Finance when I clicked on a stock quote. It happened when I went to the new tab settings and tried to change those. Some things are just really off.

Feedly performs like garbage with the new Firefox. 100% of CPU when clicking on the feed and doesn't go down.

GDP is a measure of value-added. That's why they net out things like net trade.

"The economic output of an entire nation can be useful for such comparisons when you're attempting to relate to very large financial figures."

I repeat: It's comparing a stock and a flow. You cannot compare a stock and a flow because they are different units. 103bn per year vs. 103bn as a volume of wealth. You could compare 103bn to the wealth of a country. Or you could say that it is equal to N empire state buildings, or a number of dollars that goes around the world X times. But if you compare it to GDP, then you're not comparing apples to apples.

You're confusing a stock and a flow. GDP is a measure of value-added per period. That's a flow. The value of a company is a stock. More comparable to the wealth of a country than its GDP.

Sounds interesting. I'm a long-time RSS user and never made the jump to twitter. My gripe with twitter is that it seems like there is too much noise and too little signal. I suppose at this point my RSS has a lot of noise, but I'm perhaps more attuned at how to filter it out (but I do it heuristically).

There's a difference between pro-business and pro-market. There's nothing inconsistent with believing in free markets/rule of law and at the same time believing that a tax system should be fair. Scandinavian countries that people refer to as socialist are actually free market economies (in that they score just as well as the U.S. in the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom), but have more extensive tax and redistribution programs than the U.S.

It's called overfitting.

One cause (some say a or the major cause) of the agricultural revolution was a desire to make alcohol more efficiently. Can we count all the people who are alive because the agricultural revolution on the side of alcohol?

The subtitle is "Should they be considered an “epidemic”" and it says in the article "We don’t often call alcohol or tobacco “epidemics,” even as we regularly use that same language for opioids that are linked to a fraction of the deaths from alcohol or tobacco.".

They are basically proposing to re-define epidemic. Traditionally, an epidemic is the rapid spread of something, usually a disease but not necessarily. Alcohol and tobacco have already rapidly spread. There's nowhere else for them to spread.

We tried banning alcohol once already...

The whole thing doesn't even make sense. We used to have a monopoly that cost a whole bunch of money. If Elon Musk can do it for less, then he's breaking up the original monopoly.

You're under the mistaken impression that people in the U.S. care about what is happening in other countries. At most like 10% care in anything more than a cursory way.

I would be very interested in seeing how you implemented the hierarchical PPCA.

My problem was that I couldn't identify the coefficients. So for instance, the first principal component could be [x, x, x, ...] or [-x, -x, -x, ...] and the result would be some bimodal distribution. So if you placed restrictions on the first PC it would work (like only positive), but those restrictions may not make sense for the next PCs.

One thing that looks cool is the tutorial for probabalistic PCA. That is a b of a thing to do in Stan. It really only works under some very limited conditions. Edward has this ability to combine in a KL divergence minimization in there. Not exactly sure how it works. I should look into it more. I don't really have a good sense of it just from reading the paper and a tutorial or two.

I'll have to read the paper to see what makes it "deep"...

A cursory skim suggests that it is much faster than Stan, but I suppose the more significant question is if it provides the correct results. Stan might take longer, but I'm usually pretty confident that with some simple diagnostics I can see whether the results are what I really need.

D also has the -I flag. Still needed for libraries in other folders.