Stasis5001

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Oops, that's what I get for mathing before coffee-- mixed up the formula for \sum (1+r)^n vs. \sum r^n

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It may be "free money" as you frame it. But a cash stream that provides n dollars per year forever can be valued in today's dollars, assuming a discount rate of d, at n / (1-d). So it's reasonable to prefer cash now to revenue forever, at that exchange rate, depending on your corporate interests.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/present-value-annuity.a...

Stasis5001

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Tons of comments already in the direction of 'eat less' and 'exercise more'. Of course. One thing I've found extremely helpful is to cook more! WFH is amazing for this. If you can find 15 minutes of meeting time throughout the day where you aren't an active speaker, you can chop vegetables or do dishes for lunch and dinner.

Back to the primary topic: cooking your own meals makes 'eating less' a matter of dialing in the portion sizes over time. I eat ~110g of pasta, or 0.8 cups of rice, or similar, and about 0.3-0.5 lb of protein, and about 1-1.5 vegetables per meal. Overall, I eat two meals like this, black coffee, a breakfast bar, and a snack, which puts me at 2000-2500 cal.

Now, on to a weird tip: meal planning! What a fun mix of intuition and ideas from operations research.

Stasis5001

5 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

When you say tech industry pays more, I'm assuming the effective long-run hourly earnings of poker players is way less glamorous than it looks from an outsider seeing highlights? Doing a basic google search led me to https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/6737/, which seems to suggest that 81 players earned over 1mm USD in 2021. But presumably those players don't earn that YoY, and even if they did, plenty more software engineers earn > 1mm USD per annum, so this seems to support your conclusion. OTOH, I have no insight to the home games or whatever sources are not included in these rankings, so I'd love to hear a little more.

Stasis5001

5 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It's interesting to compare this to the physical-world analog. What if somebody shows up at the US-Canada border, start shooting rockets at Canada, and the US refuses to acknowledge this as a crime or extradite? What if the rockets are aimed at a critical piece of infrastructure near the border and can cause billions in damage? One could argue that if the US condones these attacks, they have effectively already declared war on Canada.

Stasis5001

5 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

See Matt Levine's 10 laws of insider trading. In particular, "5. Don’t do it by planting bombs at a company and shorting its stock." Somebody nicely put a non-paywall link here: https://github.com/0xNF/lawsofinsidertrading.com

Buying puts in this fashion will generally be a remarkable, traceable event. There's a reason ransoms typically go through cryptocurrency.

Stasis5001

5 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I started looking at the map in the article and realized I had just booked a flight where there was an existing rail line ! So I checked out the Amtrak site, and what's 1h20m by plane is 14h40m by train -- and 8h by car. Maybe by getting a sleeper cabin I could have had an enjoyable trip by train, but as the trip scales things get dramatically worse.

Of course, maybe this is exactly what the future of transportation should look like: more localized travel on modes that can be powered by renewable sources or nuclear.

Stasis5001

7 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

As an employee at a megacorp, sure, you can see a little bit about how things are going from the inside. That said, you probably spend less time looking at reports than professional analysts. Secondly, sure, maybe you can see how great your company is, but do you have a frame of reference to a million other companies and their projects and cultures? There's a strong bias towards thinking you know more than the market that I would be wary of.

Stasis5001

7 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

As somebody with some ML background but no expertise in crypto, is the following ELI~20 summary correct?

We take an ML model trained on unencrypted data, use a 'homomorphic evaluation' technique (let's just leave that as magic here) to convert the model operation-by-operation to a model that runs on encrypted data, do a little more crypto magic, and we've solved the business problem described at the beginning of the article.

(In particular, if you train a model on encrypted data you get a really bad model, right?)

Stasis5001

7 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Any good references on the art part, or is it just an intuition you develop over time? In my experience, all the ML education will teach you a ton of theory and basics but none of the practical details you're referring to.

Stasis5001

7 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Sure, Wiles obviously understands the main thrust of his proof. But one could argue that Wiles' result depends on lots of other results, which in turn depend on other results, and so on through decades and decades of work, ultimately going back to the foundations of mathematics. Neither Wiles nor anybody else can claim to rigorously understand all of it. You can imagine this as a tree, with Wiles' work as root, and his dependencies as ancestors, and so on. An error at a lower level of the tree could, in theory, invalidate the root node.

I do agree with Buzzard that it's hard to be sure. I've definitely read papers where a critical argument isn't well written or what is written seems wrong. However, if there are low-level errors, I suspect that with some work things could be patched up.

Stasis5001

7 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Tipping is a form of price discrimination, which generally makes things more efficient and has been a staple of capitalism since forever. A business actively wants to extract more money from customers who can afford more, and still sell to customers who are more price sensitive. Coupons are the more normal way to do this, but tipping serves this exact purpose. This is in theory good for customers (except in monopolies, where the business extracts all the value), but in practice, sure, I agree tipping is obnoxious as a customer and possibly even worse for those whose pay involves tips.

Stasis5001

7 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It does change something. DoorDash's old policy, weird as it is, reduces variability of daily pay for the Dashers. It literally put a derivative structure onto the Dasher pay that reduces volatility -- the pay was cash plus a call option on the tip. Now they will get cash plus the tip. Obviously DoorDash will tune their base pay, but they can't meet the prior model's mean and variance at the same time. How Dashers balance those two is unclear, but generally people need a higher mean to accept higher variance.

The problem is that the old policy only works if the customers don't understand it, and maybe even seems generally unethical.

Stasis5001

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I think you may be missing the point -- the one being named and maybe shamed in this post is actually Airbnb.

Stasis5001

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

A lot of academic papers actually aren't all that great, for a variety of reasons. Normally, you can use citations, journal, and author credentials to get a sense of whether a paper is even worth skimming. The only "paper" on the "journal" right now looks like it's just a watered-down, html-only version of https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07828!

Seems like more of a PR stunt than anything useful, but who knows.

Stasis5001

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

This comparison isn't so great because of the following:

    for product_id in unique_products:
        product_items = [x for x in dataset_python if x[0]==product_id ]

This is O(unique_products * observations), and it looks like O(unique_products) = O(observations). Thus we have a quadratic scan when a linear one would suffice. You'll get the best performance using whichever solution lets you code this to linear the fastest. E.g. pure python, make a dict from product_id to observations and iterate over that, or for pandas, use groupby.

Stasis5001

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

For reference, generally people learn all this over four years of undergrad and probably the first few years of grad school (I have a BS in physics, and a PhD in a different field, so not 100% sure on the grad school work). That's 6 years of more or less full-time work, surrounded by excellent peers and mentors, where every week you read 2-4 chapters and do 10 problems per chapter. If you're motivated and talented, you'll breeze through the first few years of problems, but anecdotally, everybody hits a wall where the problems start to get really hard. I have no doubt you can replicate the undergrad education through self-study, and maybe even save money and time, but after that point, why not just go to grad school? You won't save much time doing it on your own, and you get mentorship, exposure to the research aspect (not exactly trivial to learn), credibility, and funding.

I'm pretty sure the number of high-quality researchers in theoretical physics, or any major field, who are totally self-taught is really quite small. This website feels like it's in part to dissuade amateurs from sending their "awesome result" to professionals, which the author mentions in the intro.

Stasis5001

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Sure, and what about skittish Groupon employees?

Stasis5001

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Right. Airlines overbook because they make more money, and they are bound by laws like "If the substitute transportation is scheduled to get you to your destination more than two hours later (four hours internationally), or if the airline does not make any substitute travel arrangements for you, the compensation doubles (400% of your one-way fare, $1350 maximum)."

Thus, if expected revenue from overbooking > expected payouts, overbooking is worth it.

HOWEVER, the legal compensation required scales really weirdly - $1350 maximum for anything over a two hour delay? Why would being delayed three hours be equivalent to being delayed something like 12-18 hours? I'm also not sure that maximum number has scaled with inflation.

Anyway, some airlines already do auction off this. All airlines ask for volunteers because the compensation they offer is always less than the legal requirement for involuntary bumping.

This is just a mess because United had already let the passengers on the plane, and weren't even offering that maximum, much less over it. If somebody here actually knows contract of carriage laws, does this sort of 'required compensation' thing hold after boarding happened?

Stasis5001

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

This study is suspect. First, using self-identification as high-performance is already troublesome. Second, the author never defines what an HPE is, and the most concrete specification is from this article they backlink to:

  >For example, in a software or tech company they would be:
  > Software Engineers
  > Data Scientists
  > Visual Designers
  > Structural & 3-D Prototype Designers
  > Narrative Developers

This certainly doesn't agree with what almost anybody else uses to define high-performance employees.

Third, the question they use to resolve this is from their survey:

  >Are you motivated more by mastery of skill/craft, or motivated more by earning money?
  > Mastery of skill or craft
  > Money
  > Other

I don't think we can draw any conclusion from the fact that 76% of the people who answered this public google form chose 'mastery'.