robnagler

People have been saying Buffet is a lucky outlier for decades. Is his success in the following decades survivorship bias or a valid ex post facto test of success? If you believed in Buffett's investment philosophy in the 1980s based on decades of results, and had a thousand bucks to buy a Berkshire A share, would it have been a lucky pick?

I didn't believe you could beat the market until about 2000, and I'm happy I started investing in Berkshire then. If I had bought Apple instead, it would have been a lucky pick imho. I think of investing in Berkshire to be based on ex post facto results, not survivorship bias.

A decade ago I did an analysis of the top 25 on the Forbes list[1], and the TL;DR is that they 1) inherited their wealth, 2) had bet on a single company, or 3) been a value investor. Nobody in the top 25 is a "trader" or "quant" (e.g. Paulson or Soros). That analysis is still true, btw.

[1] https://www.robnagler.com/2009/06/13/Objectively-Rich.html

It's interesting that the 20y compound return are pretty close. I don't understand the STDev value in the tables, and it is not explained. Is that the the standard deviation of the annual returns?

This Freakonomics-style argument doesn't work. The only price that matters is the market clearing price. Appraisers don't know that more than anybody else. The only thing an independent appraiser would do is use (well-known) comps to anchor the price, which is not something a seller wants. Rather, a seller wants competition among buyers.

I used to think that real estate agents were a waste of time until I lived through several difficult transactions. Each real estate transaction involves negotiations for loans, inspection objections, and various legal details. For example, a good real estate agent will make sure the title commitment documents are in hand early enough that you have time to review them, because they often have a lot of mistakes. This can kill a closing and/or require post-transaction work to correct.

I bought a house in the middle of a flood (Boulder 2013). The inspection objection had already been negotiated before the flood occurred. Getting the deal done was a huge task, because the seller was lying about the house being affected by the flood. I still wanted the house, but I needed proper compensation for the remediation. My real estate agent did an amazing job of bringing the deal together by tossing in some money and getting the other broker and seller to contribute a bit.

I'm now living with the above real estate agent, and she's on the phone right now at 7:45p working on a deal. I have watched her pull together deals, and the important thing is that all her clients are happy. I have met many of them, and they are very grateful for her work. I know there are many other agents out there like her (maybe not quite as good :-).

More bikeshedding for the new year:

  #!/bin/bash
  for n in {1..100}; do
    f=
    ((n % 3)) || f=Fizz
    ((n % 5)) || f+=Buzz
    echo ${f:-$n}
  done

I disagree there are no consequences. Broken ribs have been known to occur.[0]

[0] https://www.viarob.com/my/page/Snowtorturing

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Desired skills and experience

The successful applicant will have a BS or higher in computer science or physics or a closely related field, strong programming skills, and significant experience with Javascript and/or Python. Other desirable skills and experience include: parallel computing, CAD, and devops.

About the employer

RadiaSoft conducts contract R&D for academic, corporate and federal customers, specializing in the use and development of parallel scientific software. We have particular expertise in modeling relativistic charged particle beams, intense radiation pulses, and the interaction of both with plasmas and dielectric structures. We are developing open source browser-based interfaces for cloud-based scientific computing.

RadiaSoft offers a challenging, team-oriented work environment, competitive salaries and an excellent benefit package, including health insurance and a 401k with employer matching. Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the United States. RadiaSoft is an equal opportunity employer.

goalkicker.com is related to codeday.top afaict. They are the only two sites on Google that match some of the snippets. CodeDay is a machine translation blog which is very sophisticated. The PDFs appear to be a reorganization of those blog entries.

Very interesting. Well-written by machines.

Technology and Development (T&D) is directly related to computing, not content acquisition or sales. Computing costs are significant in this category, since they point them out explicitly in the notes. 64% savings would show up, since we know that 3rd party cloud costs increased by $50M over the last two years. For the number of instances they must be using, the costs must be running well over $100M.

I would think it would be a significant shareholder event to save 64% of their total computing budget. Their 2016 10K

https://ir.netflix.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1628280-17-496...

says their 3rd party cloud computing costs increased by $23M in 2015 and increased a further $27M in 2016. More importantly, their total technology and development cost increased from $650M in 2015 to $850M in 2016. That includes engineers so it's a bit tricky to figure out what their costs really are, but they didn't go down appreciably in 2016 so this effect had to be in 2017. Looking at their first three 10Q's shows their Technology and Development budget keeps going up. I don't see how a streaming service could save 64% of its total computing needs, and it not show up on any of its SEC filings.

In 2016 they completed a seven year move of all their computing infrastructure to AWS. When they sized the system, they bought reserved instances (probably at a significant discount). From the math in this article, they bought 64% more than they needed if they just discovered they could save 64% of their EC2 budget. That seems like a big math error.

Something is wrong with the math:

* Video encoding is 70% of Netflix's computing needs

* Stated cost savings on encoding is 92%

This equals a 64% savings on "Netflix's computing needs", which must be a good chunk of their budget.

In the HPC world, there are many of these: SLURM, Torque, PBS.

Excellent article, thanks.

I work in IT, because I fell in love with computers when I was nine. I get paid the same as you. My skill at being able to "juggle seven clubs" has no value. You know how to google as well as I do.

Today's Internet sensations make much more money than both of us. Their skill is in their audacity, with which I am genuinely impressed. Juggling fire is audacious. Juggling seven clubs is like being able to program well in Arc: an interesting skill with little or no commercial value.

You would not get money from YC just because your app was written in Arc. You almost certainly wouldn't get money if your site looked as bad as HN (unless it was already a runaway success like Reddit was when YC invested in it :).

It's interesting to me that PG puts any time in Arc. It's a bit like juggling clubs in his driveway. PG is probably his most brilliant at being a hacker, but that skill doesn't have the same ROI as being a VC.

More power to PG and Gatto for finding ways to make money while doing something valuable for society. Long live YC and Big Top Concrete!