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ctkrohn's comments

ctkrohn | 6 years ago | on: The Roots of Lisp (2001)

Funny to see this after all these years. I read this paper just before starting college in 2003 and it inspired me to spend most of the summer writing a rudimentary Lisp interpreter in rudimentary C++. That was my first piece of my code that actually worked, and was more than a dozen or so lines. Good memories.

ctkrohn | 8 years ago | on: Introducing the GoodWatch

Does anyone know what the apparently pocket-sized notebook computer is? The one in the picture about halfway through the post, with the watches draped over it.

ctkrohn | 9 years ago | on: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined

Right, those anomalies could simply exist unexploited until the market is better understood. For example, you used to be able to earn money buy buying the 501st largest company in the US: if it happened to become the 500th largest, all the S&P 500 index funds would be forced to buy its stock, and it would outperform the other stocks that had already been in the index. Similarly, the 500th largest stock would be a good sale candidate: if it becomes the 501st largest company, the index funds will become forced sellers. Now this effect is very well known, and there's no more money to be made by exploiting it.

ctkrohn | 9 years ago | on: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined

Here's perhaps a better way to say what I'm getting at: identifying and investing with a manager that predictably outperforms a benchmark is just as difficult an intellectual challenge as constructing a portfolio that outperforms that same benchmark. Both of these tasks are so difficult as to be essentially impossible for an unsophisticated retail investor.

ctkrohn | 9 years ago | on: Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined

If the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (in its stronger forms) is false, there should be managers who are able to identify the cheapest stocks within the S&P 500 and thereby outperform the index. A disbeliever in EMH should look to identify these managers and pay them some fee, rather than simply investing in the index and trying to minimize fees.

I think it's plausible that these managers exist, but they're impossible to identify ex ante. Furthermore, a smart manager will charge fees that are equal to the alpha they generate. So even if the EMH is false in some broad sense, individual investors should act as if it were true and simply invest in low-cost diversified funds.

ctkrohn | 10 years ago | on: Soundproofing for New York Noise

Very common, to the point of being nearly universal except in relatively recent construction. Many (perhaps most) NYC apartments don't have thermostats. Don't like the heat the landlord has chosen? Open the window or buy a space heater. Want to be cool in the summer? Buy a window air conditioner.

ctkrohn | 14 years ago | on: Lake Vostok Reached

Believe it or not, there's a novel that combines pretty much all these things: Charles Stross's "The Atrocity Archives." If you're into sci-fi, you need to check this out. It's a bizarre but hilarious mashup of James Bond, Slashdot, Office Space, and H. P. Lovecraft.

ctkrohn | 14 years ago | on: SPJ: Escape From the Ivory Tower, Haskell From 1990 to 2011

SPJ actually discusses this a bit in his talk. He says that Haskell has tried to achieve the ease and intuitiveness of imperative programming through things like the "do" syntax sugar for monads. He agrees that there's still plenty of improvement to be made; on several occasions he jokes about how Haskell programmers envy other programmers' ability to get things done quickly.
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