arx1422's comments

My kids love that playground. Sure you hold your breath when you see them from afar (no parents allowed in) messing around with a sharp saw, but it's worth it. A great space.

Empirically I have outperformed over the past two decades. But lets qualify that the backdrop market environment matters. If the market surges straight up 12-18% a year for years on end I will tend to drag. As a value oriented investor I get less interested when valuations are higher which admittedly can cause underperformance if momentum keeps pushing things up. You can't get off the train too early. I saw too many of my peers think the bull ride was over in 2012/2013 because they got too anchored to post-crisis valuations and failed to see normalized valuations as appropriate.

When the market churns flat I tend to outperform because I have a sizable yield component and my individual name alpha shows its strength. When the market crashed in 2008 I ended up the year on short positions so that really impacts longer run outperformance. In December I went on a shopping spree after being defensively positioned into it which left me much better off than if I had passively been long the whole time.

My point is that no one strategy fits all investing risk thresholds or environments. I like to aim for a nice 7-12%/yr with minimal drawdown volatility and hedges against nasty things happening. I look "stupid" if the market is up 20% in a given year and I am not. Over the longer term nasty things seem to happen every X years which has vindicated the approach thus far.

I'll add that some of these sentiments are cyclical. We have been in an environment for the past half decade where the greatest engines of growth were the megacap leading tech companies. When the largest are in the lead like that it is difficult to differentiate versus the indices. Second, this has been a tremendous bull market. In this kind of market nearly every hedge is a bad hedge which doesn't mean it wasn't a very prudent hedge ex ante.

A flat market is in many ways the best place for actively managed long-short funds to differentiate themselves. Given where overall market valuations are we are probably past the point of double digit market gains for a while (although I could have said that years ago). So I think that skillful active managers will be better positioned. That said, I recognize that I am an active manager so 1. I may be talking my own biases but 2. I think I can differentiate real investment skill from charlatans, which is very hard for even very smart non-professional investors

Depends on which part of the capital markets. In large-cap/mega-cap equities I think it is quite hard to add value with active management. There are still large inefficiencies to exploit in the small cap arena. December was a good example. In late December you had a liquidity drought where one could buy just incredible values for a week or so.

C# along with lots of more recent programming paradigms have been moving in a more functional dimension for a while. I guess its not surprising the F# user base/culture is probably more excited to be beta-testers"new functional goodies" before things get ironed out enough for C#ers who (to broadly generalize) are more interested in getting something built than the theory of how it gets done.

"Acute cannabis consumption nearly doubles the risk of a collision resulting in serious injury or death; this increase was most evident for studies of high quality, case-control studies, and studies of fatal collisions" - https://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e536

I don't hate weed. Quite the contrary! But the whole point of a smoke is to put you in a different place and that place is not conducive to the safety of those around you while steering two tons of metal at 70MPH. I'll take us off on a different and probably unpopular tangent - if you say that marijuana makes absolutely no difference to your baseline judgement, reflexes, focus, etc... then you might be hitting the pipe a bit too often (i.e., massive tolerance and habituation) and it's maybe time to consider scaling back.

Downvote me to oblivion on this - I don't care. If you drive while high you are threatening the lives of others just for kicks. You don't want that blood on your conscience if something goes wrong. No your reaction times, focus, and judgement are not the same. They just aren't. I am not anti-marijuana by any stretch but there is a time and a place for it. Driving is not that time.

At least in NYC, there are now after school programs where they pick you up directly from elementary school and take you to play in professionally run D&D campaigns. Plus there is no social stigma attached for the kids playing - its seen as "cool" as any other activity. I am sad to bequeath to my children a climate ravaged over-indebted husk of a planet but at least in some crucial ways they have it better than I did!

This has some points of merit. The issue with the American system is what happens when you get rocked by no fault of your own despite hard work and initiative. This becomes somewhat more apparent when you are older. Did you randomly pick a career path out of the hat in your 20s which dead ends in a dying sector twenty years later due to shifts unforeseeable two decades earlier? I'm not sure how old you are but there is a path dependency in life and particularly when you have family obligations in both generational directions (caring for children and aging parents) it isn't so easy to just totally change career course halfway through your life. Not impossible - but pretty darn difficult.

Then you need to fear for feeding your family and providing them with medicine. Did you or a loved one get really sick along the way? Tough for you.

" I’ve been to the US a few times" - Clearly then you are a registered expert on the United States socio-economic system :)

Evernote isn't perfect. That said I've used it forever since the days when it was just a desktop application and have thousands of notes. I've never lost one. While it shocks me, after many years there is still no real alternative to seamlessly synch all the documents I am reading and filing across all my computers and my iPad. The product is feeling a little stale as if active development has stopped but it does work fine as it is.

An unfortunate missed chance for NYC to diversify its tax base away from a dangerous reliance on the financial sector.

If the debt load was excessive on an otherwise OK business then the debt would be restructured vs. putting the company into liquidation. The idea that absent the debt Toys R Us would have figured out how to invest in innovation is totally speculative. This is a badly reasoned article.

I stopped reading productivity p*rn, optimizing task managers, finessing my setup, and just did the work.

Every few years I get stuck for a few moments in the state between sleep and waking up. Always manifested the same way. In the middle of a dream environment a gateway with a totally alien, totally inexplicable intelligence would appear. I'd be paralyzed by it for a few seconds. As I got older a realized the terrifying alien world/intelligence was waking consciousness intruding into the dream state. Always interesting after I wake but true Lovecraftian horror as it happens.

Curious how old the author is. Those of us who had computers in the 80s and 90s remember how 3 years or so was what you got before obsolescence set in. Mobile devices are still developing at that kind of rate. Desktops and laptops last so long because for 99% of needs they maxed out on necessary specs many years ago.

I didn't go to Harvard and I'll freely admit that when I come across Harvard people, they are as a general pool, stunningly impressive in whatever discipline they are in.

This is one of the most responsible comments I've ever seen on Hacker News.

Another point - Bloomberg by an large doesn't fail. This isn't some consumer "build fast, break things, and iterate" model. I can remember one time in my two decades using Bloomberg that something broke. For half a day this year the IB chat system went down. The world of finance practically ground to a halt. But that was the wild exception. Compared to most platforms Bloomberg may be a bit archaic but it is rock solid and thats way more important when you have billions on the line in realtime.

Bloomberg has a massive network effect which makes it difficult to displace. Particularly when you move away from exchange traded products like equities and into areas like corporate fixed income, interactions are still conducted via bilateral discussion (i.e., online chat and text price dissemination). To be in the game you need to be where everyone else is talking. There is an ecosystem of price scraping and trade processing in Bloomberg which facilitates the whole trade and portfolio management process. I can route orders via Bloomberg to any broker and monitor execution of my orders in real-time. No the costs are not cheap but it is a lot cheaper than hiring several members of an operations team which would be necessary if this was all done manually.

Bloomberg is also like an operating system. For example, there are electronic execution venues in many types of instruments which use the Bloomberg as their front-end. This is very valuable. When you are a trader, screen real estate is critical. You can have 6 30" monitors and it still isn't enough if your tools are fragmented across 50 platforms. The more you can keep things integrated into a few core tools the better.

You are also paying a ton for ultra-responsive service. When millions or billions are on the line you don't have time to mess around on a help-line. On a Bloomberg you have 24-7 ultra-responsive skilled help who are responsive in around 30 seconds.

There are other reasons but end of the day if you are a pro then 30k/year isn't cheap but its a lot cheaper than trying to hack around with amateur tools.