A year or so ago I felt that the discourse on HN was so expert, I was afraid to join in. If a topic such as this came up, I would wonder, "Christ, is everyone on this board an economist too?" Time was, the pathos, the me-toos, and the ad-homs were unwritten.
I think that a lot of less qualified people recognized the quality of HN and began browsing here. When a general interest topic comes up, it's their opportunity to have an opinion.
With that comes upvotes and comments. I really don't care about your passionate, unnuanced assessment of American politics, or the articles you want me to read because they echo your beliefs. I want the stuff that doesn't make sense to me so I can make it make sense. I want to follow the economic and professional climate of this engine of innovation.
I found HN by following a link in a comment on reddit, to which someone had directed the admonishment, "Please don't ruin that." I won't say that HN has been ruined since I came here but it has undeniably changed.
I think that the issue of customer contact is a red-herring. What caused the issue was not that Sam contacted the customers, but that he cc'ed his threatening e-mail to the vendor to the vendor's customers.
Any reasonable person would expect the vendor to take umbrage to being threatened with press coverage in front of his customers. Sam would have had the best chance getting the problem fixed by sending a separate e-mail to the vendor that did not include a presumption of bad faith.
You might working with an oversimplified model of the market. If you have 1% of all bitcoins, you're not going to be able to sell them all at the highest standing offer-to-buy (OTB).
If the highest standing offer to buy is at $700, it's not going to be an offer to buy all 120,000 of your BTC. It might be an offer to buy 100BTC. So you sell 30BTC at $700 and then move on to the next lowest OTB, which might be 20BTC@$699.95. You walk down a line of highest OTBs and the new market price is the highest OTB that you didn't manage to exhaust. The price is lowering as you sell out.
Similarly, you're not going to be able to buy in with your entire pot at the lowest standing offer-to-sell (market price). You'll exhaust the lowest offer-to-sell, then move on to the next highest offer-to-sell, etc. The price is rising as you buy in.
Assuming that the market is efficient, the decrease in price as you sell out and the increase in price as you buy in will be perfectly balanced against each other, and any extraneous gain or loss will reflect changes in market information that occurred while you were executing. Of course the market is not in practice perfectly efficient, but that applies to any other traded commodity.
Right, there are several people arguing here against the entire project of naive modeling. The author's response is that you can criticise, but only in the form of providing a competing naive model.
From the post:
> If you disagree with these numbers or this distribution, there is no need for you to stop reading. Just download the code and change the numbers. Your change in these assumptions might completely invalidate my conclusions, or they might not matter at all. The best way to find out is to actually run the model.
Varying parameters and producing different predictions would not invalidate the model. What validates or invalidates a model is whether or not it actually predicts the behavior you're trying to model. Without a validity test, modeling is pure sophistry.
So instead of suggesting another naive model, let me suggest a way to augment the whole project: construct a model that successfully predicts actual, ongoing, real world behavior. Test your model against actual, real world policy changes. If it has verified predictive power, then you have some base to claim that it can predict novel policy changes.
Any given person's opinion may condense decades of personal experience. I disagree with the author's claim that (even naive) mathematical modeling is better than personal opinion. Given any rigorous definition of better, that is frankly an empirical claim that the author has left unsupported.
I think that a lot of less qualified people recognized the quality of HN and began browsing here. When a general interest topic comes up, it's their opportunity to have an opinion.
With that comes upvotes and comments. I really don't care about your passionate, unnuanced assessment of American politics, or the articles you want me to read because they echo your beliefs. I want the stuff that doesn't make sense to me so I can make it make sense. I want to follow the economic and professional climate of this engine of innovation.
I found HN by following a link in a comment on reddit, to which someone had directed the admonishment, "Please don't ruin that." I won't say that HN has been ruined since I came here but it has undeniably changed.