larsonf

7 ms·

1.
by larsonf 13y ago
"More buyers than sellers." Any two-sided market will have prevailing prices at certain volumes (even if internal to a dealer) that are not perfectly matched before the actual trade. Say, SPY at 180.5 X 1000 bid and 181 X 1500 O
2.
by larsonf 13y ago
True. Perhaps fundamentally bitcoin really just is cash and not a speculative instrument. And just like cash (as in, like, paper money), there's a huge amount of risk whenever a nontrivial amount of your net worth is tied up in it.
3.
by larsonf 13y ago
Interesting (slight?) counterexample is the foreign exchange market 10-20 years ago, just as it was going electronic. Lots of levered investment but lots and lots of fraud as there was almost no regulation. Like this example, you would have
4.
by larsonf 13y ago
Why not go meta? Sure, a company like Google directly does more good than Goldman. (Although, trivially, you could argue a taco stand does something arguably more important than inverse-indexed search) Non-trivially, though, in order for a
5.
by larsonf 13y ago
Hey shubb, I've read your posts for a while; like the way you think. Let me buy you a pint next time I'm in London (in US right now, but there often enough). Thoughtful tech people in London good to find. an email that I made: spe
6.
by larsonf 13y ago
I think you're right on this. It's not so much about whether the stance is true or not and whether we should debate that. It's that articles that discredit something as trivially untrue by way of a trivially small statement.
7.
by larsonf 13y ago
No matter someone's stance on this, it seems a bit forward to discredit a relatively widely-held theory as something that is weakly argued by providing a few bullet points and then an outright assertion of another competing theory. Thi
8.
by larsonf 13y ago
I think you could compare this to sports or other game-like activities where success is by nature relative. There's no 'need' per se for athletes to practice 40 hours a week, but they do it in order to win. And the amount of
9.
by larsonf 13y ago
Is it just me or does "People who don't need money" seem like it should be in the 'winners' list? If you don't need much money, won't you do well come what may?
10.
by larsonf 13y ago
Technically, sure. But 'arbitrage' today is interpreted broadly--more along the lines of buying basically the same thing and making the difference at some point in the future. Like stat arbitrage. Merger arbitrage. Capital struc
11.
by larsonf 13y ago
Does anyone have any insight into the underlying architecture of these large-scale projects? Like programming languages, project structure, how many software people involved? I imagine it's something along the lines of CERN or NASA pro
12.
by larsonf 13y ago
Awesome, although I don't know why you couldn't have it automatically accept the 'honor code.' But then again, perhaps if you're using this instead of just rolling your own solution you might not really need/wa
13.
by larsonf 13y ago
I think it comes down to who we think the battle is against. One narrative says that it's murky industrial cooperatives lobbying to stay incumbent that keeps these new startups down. And the resulting laws are/were formed from not
14.
by larsonf 13y ago
100% to all of these things. But do you see how the conversation we are having is now about simply the regulations and whether they are really protecting people and not about how there are some incumbents trying to protect their turf? The
15.
by larsonf 13y ago
I read this and kept thinking whether the hotel lobby is really the reason why Airbnb runs into trouble. Or, for that matter, even whether the Taxi Lobby is what is really hitting Uber. Yes, hotel owners and taxi drivers are not exactly ple
16.
by larsonf 13y ago
This article and a lot of the articles on the San Jose State are all of over the map when it comes to improving MOOCs: more TAs, more focus on the content, etc. They do , however, share one major thing: that half of the kids failing the SJ
17.
by larsonf 13y ago
I have been wondering for a long time why Starbucks and other coffee shops don't simply charge for wifi. 5 USD/3 hours seems like an absolutely great deal. Whenever I do work at Starbucks it's very productive and would be hap
18.
by larsonf 13y ago
I think there might be an interesting point underneath this. If everyone who feels like the author actually stayed then SF might not have the high rents/excitement/cultural contact that you get with large amounts of young, single,
19.
by larsonf 13y ago
I don't know though. RapGenius seems to have broken down crowd sourcing of understanding context/word meaning into very small bits. This could be absolutely huge for a machine learning input that you really cannot get with Quora o
20.
by larsonf 13y ago
I think this misses the point of minimum wage. The whole point of minimum wage is that the work is not very important and very commodity-like. Minimum wage protects the importance of people, not any particular type of work.
21.
by larsonf 13y ago
This is going to sound a bit glib, but the problem sort of fixes itself. Look at China. "Sweatshop" sort of manufacturing has largely left. Now the country has more Rolls Royces and Bentleys sold there vs any other sans the US.
22.
by larsonf 13y ago
There is one huge reason why this isn't as scary as it could be: Tabloids. If you read through the Tabloids, there is no doubt that some of the stuff in there is slightly true. But you, as the reader, have really no way of knowing what
23.
by larsonf 13y ago
None of this is advice. I just like talking about this stuff. One of the ways to get familiar with investing is to buy shares in an ETF on the S&P 500. ETFs are like mutual funds traded on exchanges; you probably know that but maybe you
24.
by larsonf 13y ago
"I've fallen on tough times and can't continue my education" If this has anything to do with the monetary cost of education I say this: If you are in the States, take out as much Federal Loans as you can and get the degr
25.
by larsonf 13y ago
I think you are hitting this exactly right. I mean, people 'lose' money all the time for things they get pleasure for. And Even when the thing they gained is very abstract. Like vegas. People lose money almost by definition. Or basketball g
26.
by larsonf 13y ago
At least in baseball, a lot of teams--believe or not--are not run like businesses where the main goal is to earn a profit. Instead, they are run organizations where the main goal is to win. The argument is that winning leads to more busines
27.
by larsonf 13y ago
EC2 specifically, AWS generally. The learning curve is a bit steep but ultimately you will have a huge amount of power to do exactly what you want.
28.
by larsonf 13y ago
Absolutely. I've always thought of this in relation to the outcry against "the 1%" in the US from people outside the country (like Scandinavia, etc). We might be unequal in the US but the One-percenters don't have the right to use deadly fo
29.
by larsonf 13y ago
I couldn't tell from your comments, strongvigilance, but do you code as well? I'm interested finding who on HN code but also show a deeper understanding of finance beyond just passing interest.
30.
by larsonf 13y ago
"He's on Linkedin, Lemon, he might as well be dead" I think this post does a good job of calling out low-ball offers from startup founders. In some ways it speaks to just how many developers are really on the market and how much funding is

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