ckelly | 8 months ago | on: SV AI Startups Are Embracing China's Controversial '996' Work Schedule
ckelly's comments
ckelly | 8 months ago | on: SV AI Startups Are Embracing China's Controversial '996' Work Schedule
ckelly | 2 years ago | on: The U.S. housing market vs. the Canadian housing market
ckelly | 3 years ago | on: The Magic of Sampling, and Its Limitations
I bet many would think n=100 would be worthless once the population reaches millions, or especially billions.
One HN-related piece of evidence for that is when I pointed out what margin of error would be for a n=164 survey sample, I got downvoted hard! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8050801
But I saw this hundreds of times talking to customers when I ran a survey sampling product out of YC.
ckelly | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Bloomberg Terminal for Individuals
ckelly | 3 years ago | on: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company
> If the market price reflected the probability, then an arbitrage strategy should not be profitable > The market doesn't reflect the probability of an event happening.
No, the market's implied probability could be right, on average, across all deals...and the top merger arb funds could absolutely still be profitable by selecting deals when they think the market is mispricing the probability (for the reasons you mention: better experience, knowledge, etc.)
It's like the sports betting market: you can roughly impute a team's win probability from the (opening) betting line...and even if that's right on average, the top gamblers are still profitable.
And, of course, sometimes things with a say, 40% chance of happening do happen...so that doesn't mean the market was "wrong" about the chance (i.e. your LinkedIn mispricing exmaple).
But sounds like we're in full agreement you can't look at the implied probability from the market price and draw some conclusion about it definitely happening, or definitely not happening (e.g. the market not taking it seriously).
ckelly | 3 years ago | on: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company
It's absolutely fair to impute a rough probability of deal closure from the stock price. The whole "merger arbitrage" industry works around that premise.
Sometimes the market doesn't think a deal has a 100% chance of closing (like MSFT and LinkedIn) and it still closes. There were valid antitrust concerns circling that deal, e.g. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/298573-salesforce-rais...
ckelly | 4 years ago | on: What if performance advertising is just an analytics scam?
ckelly | 5 years ago | on: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
ckelly | 9 years ago | on: Google Optimize is coming soon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Website_Optimizer
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2661700?hl=en
Some screenshots still floating around:
ckelly | 9 years ago | on: Is Sugar Killing Us?
ckelly | 9 years ago | on: Introducing Initialized Capital
ckelly | 10 years ago | on: The murky history of moderation and how it’s shaping the future of free speech
This article misstates when Google acquired YouTube. It was October 2006, not October 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Company_history
ckelly | 10 years ago | on: Thank you, Y Combinator
Enjoy your time abroad, Garry.
ckelly | 11 years ago | on: Airbnb Logo Redesign Survey: More People See Hearts Than Naughty Parts
ckelly | 11 years ago | on: Airbnb Logo Redesign Survey: More People See Hearts Than Naughty Parts
ckelly | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: What has recently pissed you off that ideally a product could solve?
ckelly | 12 years ago | on: Snapchat usage triples among teens in the last year
Most people are surprised how "few" respondents it takes to get to 5% margin of error at 95% confidence levels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_error#Different_conf...
In this case, .98/sqrt(365) = 5.1%
So, perhaps counterintuitively, 300-400 respondents gives good read on large populations (like Snapchat users...or the US population!).
ckelly | 12 years ago | on: Snapchat usage triples among teens in the last year
Hope that helps.
ckelly | 12 years ago | on: Identifying Gender by Handwriting: You’re Probably Not as Good as You Think