aothman

7 ms·

1.
by aothman 6y ago
TS does not fight the math of venture capital the same way Indie.VC did. My understanding from Einar (and the reason I made an LP commitment) is that the same extreme power law of returns that characterizes traditional early-stage venture i
2.
by aothman 7y ago
Of course there is a way to broadly index among all non-negative seed investments: by broadly indexing among all seed investments. The fraction of money-losing investments in a population will affect, for instance, whether we would expect t
3.
by aothman 7y ago
Your last paragraph is a misinterpretation of this paper. You are interpreting the result as saying "Investors would benefit from broadly indexing at seed". The paper instead says "Seed investors would benefit from broadly in
4.
by aothman 7y ago
Study author here. You can think of the AngelList investment data as being split into three roughly equal-sized groups: markdowns, markups, and no valuation updates. The reported IRRs are actually relatively high and the return multiples (w
5.
On Bezzles(thebathrobeeconomist.com)
1 points by aothman 10y ago|0 comments
6.
Allocating Courses Fairly to MBA Students by Finding Approximate Equilibria(papers.ssrn.com)
1 points by aothman 11y ago|0 comments
7.
by aothman 12y ago
HiScore author here. HiScore allows domain experts to easily create and maintain scores. It is currently being used by a major environmental non-profit and by IES, a startup that assesses the safety and sustainability of fracking wells. The
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Turning a bunch of numeric attributes into a single score(stackoverflow.com)
5 points by aothman 12y ago|2 comments
9.
HiScore: Create sophisticated scoring functions(github.com)
14 points by aothman 12y ago|0 comments
10.
Technology brings choice to MBA students(ft.com)
2 points by aothman 12y ago|0 comments
11.
by aothman 15y ago
Seems strange to write an article complaining about the Harvard bubble when the only reason it's getting printed in the Paris fucking Review is that it's about Harvard in the first place. People have weird/terrible/difficult college experie
12.
by aothman 15y ago
Uncle Tom's Cabin is an awful book. First off, it's boring and damn near unreadable (it was one of the only assigned books I never made it through in college). But in a larger sense, the slaves are "heroic" and "emotionally nuanced" only in
13.
by aothman 15y ago
My favorite Friedman-ism is this one: "I had lunch with a group of professors at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, or HKUST, who told me that this year they will be offering some 50 full scholarships for graduate students
14.
by aothman 15y ago
As an AI researcher, I think obstacles like "not having your robot fall over all the damn time" are a little more immediate than robots having a nuanced understanding of ethics. I can understand why this stuff is fun to think about and deba
15.
by aothman 15y ago
"Proverbial Stanford" coincides a great deal with "Proverbial Harvard" - both are wealthy private schools that admit the very best students and have society's bias towards the well-to-do sons of well-to-do fathers. If you're looking for a s
16.
by aothman 15y ago
As an elitist alum, I don't like these programs one bit. I can't help but feel that they are, in a small but meaningful way, watering down the value of my degree. And even though it's petty, I'm chagrined that my diploma features English ra
17.
by aothman 16y ago
If you're interested in this kind of stuff, Ken Pomeroy (kenpom.com) runs a fantastic basketball analytics site. He's a big proponent of what are called "tempo-free stats", which aim to filter out issues of playing speed from scoring (a tea
18.
Our obsession with the word "random"(theawl.com)
2 points by aothman 16y ago|0 comments
19.
by aothman 16y ago
Pittsburgh's 1985 win (in the middle of the steel industry collapse) prompted a lengthy screed about how cumulative ratings are assembled from a UW psychology prof: http://www.briem.com/files/Loftus1985.pdf Pittsburgh keeps winning most l
20.
by aothman 16y ago
As an AI grad student, this kind of sensationalism is somewhere between a minor irritation and a serious threat. AI always has had a severe problem with over-promising and under-delivering, and I'm of the humble opinion that until you're ac
21.
by aothman 16y ago
"Your time to break even is quite a while on a per-article basis" - and that's the crux of the matter entirely. As per this WSJ article http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/08/12/where-did-demand-medi... if demand media is allowed to amortize
22.
by aothman 16y ago
http://catandgirl.com/?p=1163 "Every once in a while a window appears - and you realize the past is just the present with different technology and funny clothes"
23.
by aothman 16y ago
My research involves making electronic agents to mediate interactions in markets, with one application being to prediction markets. One of the things I've discovered is that prediction markets where prices influence events are significantly
24.
by aothman 16y ago
Chuck Klosterman wrote a wonderful essay (it's in his collection "Eating the Dinosaur") about laugh tracks, and more broadly, about the way we use laughter. His thesis was that, especially in the mundane interactions among strangers that po
25.
by aothman 16y ago
Looks impressive, particularly if those are real trading results. One concern I immediately have is overfitting, particularly for claims about how various difficult values have been optimized to be the "best possible". It looks like the pa
26.
by aothman 16y ago
I think ultimately the profit cut they take - a practically usurious 50% - is too large to be an equilibrium price for what they do. There is a long-term sustainable biz model in what they're doing, but it involves taking a much smaller cut
27.
by aothman 16y ago
Cool demo, but from a practical perspective there's absolutely no reason to use GAs to solve a non-linear optimization problem. I know people like them because they have a really pleasing and intuitive backstory, but as a grad student in AI
28.
by aothman 16y ago
Touretzky is also one of scientology's biggest online critics: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets/ I believe CMU's lawyers are well-acquainted with responding to legal threats against him.
29.
by aothman 16y ago
The point about turning out a generation of clones is spot on, and ultimately the cruelest irony of the whole thing. The best way to get into an elite college is by standing out as an individual; the colleges asian parents desperately want
30.
by aothman 16y ago
Why Austin (and not New York or Boston)? What was it like doing YC and then not staying in SV? Was there any disagreement among the founders or investors about moving away from the valley?

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