Prediction markets are a way to cut through the fog and find truth. This isn't the equivalent of playing blackjack or roulette. In today's world, it's increasingly difficult to find people in the media who are telling the truth. Pundits everywhere can proffer predictions without being on the hook for anything if they're wrong.
Prediction markets let you more accurately know in advance pretty much anything: war, economic calamity, political outcomes like who will win an election, whether a drug will be approved, etc. and they are a genuine innovation over the current media landscape. Check out Metaculus for an example of the concept with imaginary points; it'd be more accurate if real money were allowed.
Gambling and addiction is a major problem, certainly, and I'm not arguing for zero regulation on gambling. (I could quibble on prediction markets being gambling, though they are closer to it than not.)
Regulators are so useless that they are perfectly willing to allow crypto, Las Vegas casinos and sports betting to exist and be advertised broadly (things with essentially 0 value to society), but an _actually_ useful form of dealing with probability and chance that can help people chart an uncertain world isn't allowed to exist.
Well, except in limited cases if you spend enough money greasing the right pockets and can take down a competitor too. :)
Prediction markets are a fantastic concept with a ton of value I think for everyone. So I wish companies in the field success and I hope they thrive despite regulators doing their best to destroy them, like PredictIt.
I think it's a shame Kalshi has managed to get their hooks into the CFTC and, rather than lobby to open the field to all prediction markets, instead lobbied for narrow permissions to operate only their stuff (in a limited, less useful way) while killing their competitors.
It's a terrible way to operate a business and it's a black stain on YC for funding a company using these kinds of underhanded methods.
I can only hope the regulatory environment improves and we get some improvements at the CFTC, but I think anyone familiar with US government institutions would bet against it. Perhaps someone could open a question about it on a prediction market.
China counts Covid deaths differently than most countries. Recent claims about them only having 3 deaths despite a surge in cases are, as far as I can tell, making the fundamental mistake that China has far more stringent requirements to call something a "Covid death". The true number of Chinese Covid deaths is likely higher - though I imagine still lower than in places like America.
Furthermore, the lockdowns have caused quite a few deaths on their own through things like delaying access to healthcare, and we don't have reliable stats here. One doctor is estimating 1000 diabetes patients will die from lack of healthcare access during the lockdowns (again, we do have to apply some skepticism to the numbers). Lockdowns aren't costless and merely keeping people locked in place for a short period.
I won't disagree that there's a tradeoff you can consider for China's approach, but we all need to be very wary when trying to compare numbers between Western nations and China.
You have to be careful: given a rallying cry of free speech and no censorship, the main appeal of the platform is going to be attracting those holding unpopular opinions.
This happened with the mass exodus from Reddit to Voat of r/the_donald and similar, and I absolutely can see it happening here. Voat became host to a ton of toxic communities.
And because of that, it's going to push more orthodox people people away from the site towards Twitter in a self-reinforcing loop.
The plan for the site to get a broad range of opinions (in this case, the bounty of $20k for a prominent liberal) seems doomed as a result.
Still - hopefully the founders have learned from Voat and have plans in action to stop it before it gets too stuck in the cycle. The bounty is an interesting idea, though I don't think it'll be strong enough to break the perverse social dynamics involved. More competition with Twitter is a good thing.
> My theory is that the FP folks would have seen more success had they figured out ways to bring their features to mainstream languages, rather than asking people to adopt wholesale their weird languages (from an average programmer's point of view).
I'd argue this has been happening for years and years now. If you want a pithy saying, you could say that over time languages become closer and closer to Haskell.
Option types, pattern matching, pure functions (see: Vue/React with computed properties, or any other frameworks doing things close to functional reactive programming), type inference (even Java is getting a var keyword!), more powerful type systems (things like the Typescripts of the world have) are now becoming trendy, but Haskell had them years and years ago.
The above is definitely oversimplifying (a short HN comment is no place to get into the fundamentals behind the various kinds of type systems), but I've found all the things I love in Haskell and other FP languages seem to slowly drift on over to other languages, albeit often a little suckier.
(I'm still waiting on software transactional memory to become mainstream, though. Of course, in languages that allow mutable state and without some way to specify a function has side effects, you're never gonna get quite as nice as Haskell. Oh well.)
It """works""" with it. React's story is much better on this front. I set up Typescript with Vue at work and:
1. Setting it up and getting it to compile was hell. The documentation was incredibly poor (often out of date on several options) and I often had to try several things just to get it to compile.
2. It was slow with Webpack - far, far too slow to start up (what was once 10 seconds to start up easily was taking 45+). tslint was a no on top of that. I looked into various ways to speed up Webpack, wasting hours trying to parallelize things with various plugins, and found almost everything would just refuse to work with .vue files.
I got this fixed, thanks to fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin - which didn't actually have .vue support at the time. I ended up having to use a fork by the amazing David Graham [0] which thankfully has been merged now.
3. Vue's "support" for TypeScript isn't there yet. It's maybe 80% there. Vuex isn't typed - which, at least for my company's SPA, kills half the benefits of type safety and requires a lot more type annotations than is pleasant. (Yes, I'm aware you can get Vuex working with some serious hacks... but this isn't documented, and I found out it was possible from GitHub comments. It did not look easy enough for me to do without an hour of pain, so I have yet to try it.)
Also, you can't strongly type props in both directions using the standard template language. In fact, I'm not sure you can strongly type the things you give to a component, only the things you take in... if you use a third party library [1], which modifies an official new way (ES6 class syntax) to declare Vue components.
You could use JSX - which Vue supports - but again, you're going off the beaten path and aren't really writing standard Vue components. Swapping to JSX was not possible at my company - requiring developers to learn an entirely new templating language when they already know Vue components is a no. It's a wonder we're okay with ES6 class syntax.
All this is to say, standard Vue components can't be fully typed. Not only do you have to use a new way to declare them, you have to use a third party library to get proper typing for props and more. And it's still not enough unless you swap to JSX too. (I'm not even sure if JSX would end up working for full type safety, either - Vue might have some stupid thing which screws it all up.)
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Compare this to React, where because of JSX you get strong typing on literally everything without special hacks. They're not the same here.
Vue is moving very nicely in the direction of more and more TypeScript support - I'm a huge fan of that. I'm glad we swapped over at work. But right now, claiming Vue supports TypeScript is misleading. It's a second class citizen. You're not getting the full benefits. This seems to be changing, but glacially.
(Am I allowed to say that something which might take less than a year is glacial? I guess this is just how web dev is.)
I think the idea is you keep the charger plugged in all the time (say, beside your bed) and when you go to sleep you just throw the phone on the charger. Seems kinda convenient to me.
While this used to be true (and mostly still is), the tide is shifting on this point. Games are using more and more cores. Overwatch, for example, uses 6. I believe DirectX 12 makes it easy/reasonable to use 4 cores, with some benefit to be gained with up to 6.
Not that it really helps with some games. Dota 2 is CPU bound for the moment, so if you play that a lot then maximizing single-threaded performance is probably the way to go.
Still, if I was buying a CPU today, I'd be cautious about going for less than quad core if I was interested in new AAA games.
The sunk cost fallacy is when you (irrationally) decide to stick with what you're doing purely because you've already spent a lot of resources on it. It doesn't apply when you've done an economic analysis and found out it doesn't make sense to swap.
There are plenty of cases where it just wouldn't make sense to switch after looking at the costs, opportunity costs, etc. For example, if his site makes him $10 a month, outages cost him $1 a month that could be mitigated by moving, and it would cost $1000 of labor to swap providers. (Depends on interest rates.)
Perhaps it was originally a failure to not have a plan to easily move from a provider, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that right now it may cost too many hours of work to justify the move.
Nothing about investing in stocks is speculation, at least in the theoretical sense. Businesses earn profits. If you buy shares in a business, you are entitled to a share of those profits. Obviously, this gains you money, and this money will (usually) not come at the cost of the business. So, you'll gain money due to dividends, and your investment won't lose money.
Investing in stocks is going to be, on average, a net gain for you. In theory. And mostly in practice, see for example the massive exponential gains in the S&P 500.
There's a lot more to things. For example, sometimes businesses fail and you'll have lost all your money. And on the flip side, maybe a business will grow enormously. But this just adds noise to the data, it doesn't change the fact that, on average, you should make money on stocks in the long-term.
If you just buy a total market index fund, you're making a bet with a high expected value. That's not "speculation" in the same sense of going to a casino and playing blackjack or buying an asset which has no fundamental reason to rise in value (like precious metals).
So, I think it's misleading to call investing "speculation". It gives off the wrong vibes, since the way most people understand the word it makes it sounds like investing is super risky. (And yes, there's some risk, don't get me wrong, but not in the sense that it's a coin flip like many people think.)
r/AskHistorians has some of the highest quality research you're going to find on the internet, at least if you're not a history major yourself. The mods there are amazing, and the posts usually have sources you can look into yourself.
If you haven't browsed it before, I highly recommend looking into it.
> But the president of the United States speaks with the executive authority for an entire nation. It's questionable enough when a company's stock falls because Trump lashes out at them, and means it [0].
The share prices of the companies Trump has bashed have rebounded within the same day, so this is incredibly misleading to say.
Not that I disagree with the core point of your post.
PredictWise is not a prediction market. It's an aggregate of them, with David Rothschild's own personal special sauce added on top - which, in this case, is why it was "wrong".
PredictWise's mistake was that it assumed polling errors would not be correlated[1]. (He actually had a fight with Nate Silver over this.)
Nate Silver had, in advance, stated that polling errors would be correlated[2] (rightfully, as it turned out), which is part of why 538's model turned out to be closer to reality than PredictWise's.
The actual betting markets, which PredictWise was pulling data from, were in the range of 20-30% Trump. Much more bullish.
Garbage for anything Earth-travel related. Gravity is 9.8N/kg, so to generate enough force to counter gravity you'll need to feed this thing 9.8MW per kg.
Your typical 100 HP car engine puts out 75.6kW, so you'd need 130 car engines' worth of power to lift a small 1 kg/~2 pound object. Not to mention that the machinery needed to channel/produce that kind of energy would be so heavy that it could not lift itself.
But it's still possibly useful for space travel. Not needing propellant is huge for long-distance space travel.
That said: they don't know why it works. (If it even works, which I strongly strongly strongly doubt.) If they figure out what produces the phenomenon, it's very possible they could get the drive to be way more efficient.
270 electoral college votes are required to win the election, which is why the graphs changes color. If no candidate wins at least 270, Congress chooses, I believe. 538 is currently giving the chances of no candidate hitting 270 at 1.4%[1].
The y-axis is the probability of that particular outcome (or range of outcomes?) occurring.
Fees come from the transaction costs of having to buy/sell shares (churn is low but non-zero), operate websites, paying salaries, running customer support, doing tax paperwork, etc. Not much magic there.
You're correct about what happens at the boundary, yes.
There's a well-known arbitrage opportunity for stocks that are known to be about to be brought into the S&P 500 (their prices DO tend to increase, I believe), if you want to research that. Like all publicly known arbitrages, I doubt you can make any money off it personally anymore though.
This is part of why the recommendation is not to use an S&P 500 fund, but something more like Vanguard's Total Stock Market fund, which includes medium/small-cap companies. Not that it's a huge deal, though - mutual fund companies are usually pretty clever about spreading large orders out over time.
Cap-weighted funds (like anything tracking the S&P 500) already hold the stocks in comparison to their market cap.
If a stock goes up, they don't need to buy more of it - the value of the shares they hold will increase to exactly the right proportion that they should have.
(There do exist other types of funds which try equally weight the stocks they hold, which means the fund has to rebalance when the stocks change price.)
Typically, cap-weighted funds only have to rebalance when individual members of the fund buy/sell - and they try to make it so people are buying/selling to those within the fund where possible to avoid having to do even that. The result is a very low churn, which is part of why index funds have lower fees.
Usually, the more assets an index fund has under management, the lower an index fund's fees get.
Yikes, Intel. Has to be a pretty low moment as a chipmaker to have to use your competitor's fabs for something like this.