The "Diners' Club" story is fun to tell, but it's really a fictional story created for advertisement. * Actually, there were a lot of "credit cards" when Diners Club started the business. One of the oldest such cards is…
Indeed. Even within a single economy, plotting a scatter plot for enough data points (e.g. 25 years) makes Philips curves just broken. It was a gong moment for me when I came across a short passage discussing its…
I'm seeing this right now. Worse, he is doing a minimum thing so he won't get fired outright (e.g. responding to internal chat many many hours late with a single word "yup").
This article is a good introduction to Xenophon. The major thing that's missing here is that his writings were actually very influential among ancient philosophers, especially ones of the Stoic school. For example, Zeno…
> The one time he tried running a hedge fund, it failed ruinously. Source? Taleb AFAIK does not publish his track record in a verifiable manner, so we're left to wondering if his bragging about himself really matches…
IMHO, the author tries to argue that we can get a better understanding by thinking in term of the structure of the payoff function, rather than focusing on the input itself. Yes, the try-and-error process and chance are…
The basic point of this article seems valid to me. The point the author is trying to make is that the structure of the payoff function matters a lot. Specifically, you need it to be convex for a try-and-error (or random…
This kind of scam is actually a minor issue and also a pretty moronic thing to do. You're destined to be doomed once you fake your parent's death.
Three facts. 1. Most of Japanese people have exactly zero interest about whaling. 2. Nor they do not understand why western people get so upset about it. ("What's so different with, say, tuna fishing?") 3. Anti-whaling…
While skimming the record of the questioned company, I noticed that several names listed there are actually the ones of other (existing) companies. For example, "中電光谷聯合控股有限公司" ("China Electronics Optics Valley Union…
The funny thing here is that Taleb dismisses Nate Silver as a wanker, calling him "does not know how math works"...
> Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg I also really enjoyed this book. It was a bitter story of an idealistic Open Source project failing miserably.
I once saw a CEO who wrote his own Web Framework and forced the entire company to use it. At the time, under the influence of React, the idea was to "build web application sorely based on Functional Programming". Since…
> Melted down our university computer labs How did admins manage to disinfect servers? It should have been a hell of fun for them, provided it was the first pandemic ever.
> I would be very very nervous just dumping my billions in a S&P 500 ETF. At that level of wealth, you really ought to have a portfolio manager who can slice and dice your exposure in advantageous ways. Why? A couple of…
> ag futures are insurance for farmers I know nothing about futures, but how does it work? Insurance works because a loss happens to some individual, not to all members of the class of people at all once. So insurers…
I've recently read Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". IMHO, this novel does a very good job at capturing one key aspect of gulag; It was not just all about "oppressor vs oppressed", but was a…
You need to consider inflation. In 1970, the inflation rate was 7-8%/y on average, so the "growth" these numbers imply did not exist in reality.
The "Diners' Club" story is fun to tell, but it's really a fictional story created for advertisement. * Actually, there were a lot of "credit cards" when Diners Club started the business. One of the oldest such cards is…
Indeed. Even within a single economy, plotting a scatter plot for enough data points (e.g. 25 years) makes Philips curves just broken. It was a gong moment for me when I came across a short passage discussing its…
I'm seeing this right now. Worse, he is doing a minimum thing so he won't get fired outright (e.g. responding to internal chat many many hours late with a single word "yup").
This article is a good introduction to Xenophon. The major thing that's missing here is that his writings were actually very influential among ancient philosophers, especially ones of the Stoic school. For example, Zeno…
> The one time he tried running a hedge fund, it failed ruinously. Source? Taleb AFAIK does not publish his track record in a verifiable manner, so we're left to wondering if his bragging about himself really matches…
IMHO, the author tries to argue that we can get a better understanding by thinking in term of the structure of the payoff function, rather than focusing on the input itself. Yes, the try-and-error process and chance are…
The basic point of this article seems valid to me. The point the author is trying to make is that the structure of the payoff function matters a lot. Specifically, you need it to be convex for a try-and-error (or random…
This kind of scam is actually a minor issue and also a pretty moronic thing to do. You're destined to be doomed once you fake your parent's death.
Three facts. 1. Most of Japanese people have exactly zero interest about whaling. 2. Nor they do not understand why western people get so upset about it. ("What's so different with, say, tuna fishing?") 3. Anti-whaling…
While skimming the record of the questioned company, I noticed that several names listed there are actually the ones of other (existing) companies. For example, "中電光谷聯合控股有限公司" ("China Electronics Optics Valley Union…
The funny thing here is that Taleb dismisses Nate Silver as a wanker, calling him "does not know how math works"...
> Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg I also really enjoyed this book. It was a bitter story of an idealistic Open Source project failing miserably.
I once saw a CEO who wrote his own Web Framework and forced the entire company to use it. At the time, under the influence of React, the idea was to "build web application sorely based on Functional Programming". Since…
> Melted down our university computer labs How did admins manage to disinfect servers? It should have been a hell of fun for them, provided it was the first pandemic ever.
> I would be very very nervous just dumping my billions in a S&P 500 ETF. At that level of wealth, you really ought to have a portfolio manager who can slice and dice your exposure in advantageous ways. Why? A couple of…
> ag futures are insurance for farmers I know nothing about futures, but how does it work? Insurance works because a loss happens to some individual, not to all members of the class of people at all once. So insurers…
I've recently read Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". IMHO, this novel does a very good job at capturing one key aspect of gulag; It was not just all about "oppressor vs oppressed", but was a…
You need to consider inflation. In 1970, the inflation rate was 7-8%/y on average, so the "growth" these numbers imply did not exist in reality.