georgeek | 3 years ago | on: My experience as a Unit-18 Berkeley Lecturer
georgeek's comments
georgeek | 4 years ago | on: Don't Waste the Good Days
When your family and kids appear, work stops being a 0-sum game. Instead, you're constantly arbitraging between it and the rest of your life. The good news is that you can recognise and structure it as a positive or a negative sum game.
georgeek | 4 years ago | on: DJI Mavic 3 Drone
Hasselblad has its roots in military optics and space-constrained imaging solutions. They have made many professional surveillance systems over the years with smaller sensors. Hopefully this is not just a slapped logo.
georgeek | 4 years ago | on: Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)
Burgers and sausages are some of the most detached ways to eat meat. While a steak has bones, a burger is much more abstract. There is probably a good anthropological theory behind this.
georgeek | 5 years ago | on: Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future
Which is why you should always separate a transaction into smaller chunks - you could liquidate 20% of a position once per week.
georgeek | 5 years ago | on: SEC Approves NYSE’s Plan for New IPO Alternative
Banks do compete but it's not really an iterated game - a company only goes public once.
georgeek | 5 years ago | on: Wall Street Begins Trading Water Futures as a Commodity
Almost everything that one would need for daily subsistence is tied to benchmark future contracts: cattle, soy beans, rice, wheat, sugar, coffee are all traded as futures on exchanges. Most coffee in the world is traded against the Coffee C future benchmark for instance: https://www.theice.com/products/15/Coffee-C-Futures
Giving producers and consumers a way to get a standardized contract at a given point ahead in time usually makes the price of the underlying commodity much more stable.
It has been argued that the way our society operates is based on the concept of futures contracts. It all began with the Dutch tulip futures in the 17th century that stabilized flower prices and made them a viable business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
georgeek | 5 years ago | on: Java is better than C++ for high speed trading systems
Chronicle Software's OpenHFT stack has a few of their libraries: https://github.com/OpenHFT
georgeek | 5 years ago | on: Jane Street Market Prediction ($100k Kaggle competition)
Such competitions might have two goals in mind: recruiting and signal diversification. The recruiting angle is obvious.
Any alpha that is not fully correlated to existing alpha is worth its weight in gold for an organization with the size, sophistication and complexity of JS. That's part of the reason why efforts such as 2Sigma's Alpha Studio exist: https://alphastudio.com/
georgeek | 5 years ago | on: U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas
The effect will only be seen in the future, smoothed over a few years.
georgeek | 5 years ago | on: Christo has died
C&JC figured a way to finance their projects through a few big landmark donations along with a proto Kickstarter campaign. They would sell numbered plans and drawings with a deep discount before the event happens. They had different support tiers ranging from postcard to one of the first ten copies of each plan and have a thriving community of collectors.
georgeek | 6 years ago | on: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming
Yes: as usual with disease the poorest countries are going to be hit the hardest. If you think that Lombardy's medical facilities are bad, this will be quite the next level.
georgeek | 6 years ago | on: Biology Is Eating the World
Is this the hype train? Yes to a large extent. However some people at a16z do know what they are talking about. Ex: Vijay Pande is a partner there and an (adjunct) professor of Bioengineering at Stanford. He and the team around him do have an educated guess how biotech today is different from 20 years ago.
georgeek | 6 years ago | on: Bitcoin Rally Fuels Market in Crypto Derivatives
It depends on the type of derivatives. Consider commodity products: basic materials such as iron ore or coal or softs such as cocoa or wheat. Their (spot) prices used to be extremely volatile. Coincidentally, one of the first big economic crisis was caused by a pump and dump scheme in tulip seeds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
In this case, futures contracts for those commodity have helped tremendously lower the volatility and make everybody more responsible. It's a good question if the same is going to happen with futures contracts for crypto
georgeek | 6 years ago | on: Uber's Losses Reach Double Digits in IPO Debut
Yes. I am OK with accepting tracking cookies on other sites but I just close the tabs if they I see anything related to Oath as a matter of principle.
georgeek | 6 years ago | on: Deep learning outperformed dermatologists in melanoma image classification task
Every doctor tends to have a very static sensitivity-specificity preferences (true positive rate aka recall and true negative rate, respectively). One of the interesting consequences of using an automated diagnostic tool (already mentioned in Esteva et al 2017's Nature article) is that the sensitivity level can be chosen dynamically, depending on additional risk factors.
georgeek | 7 years ago | on: Toyota's Takaoka #2 Line: The Most Flexible Line in the World
That's the whole concept of kaizen, or improvement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
georgeek | 7 years ago | on: As McKinsey Sells Advice, Its Hedge Fund May Have a Stake in the Outcome
McKinsey has a lot of Chinese walls internally: most partners and consultants who have been working for one client would never advise that client's competitors. The firm is very careful about keeping the trust their clients have in them, as that's ultimately what they're selling.
georgeek | 7 years ago | on: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
TLO is a Zerg player, so he probably does a lot more errors when playing Protoss. Also, every top player estimates when to do a sequence of actions and spams it a few times to maximize the chance of execution. Meanwhile Alphastar only has to do that once.
georgeek | 7 years ago | on: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
Just a reminder that Google, or any company for that matter, has a fiduciary duty towards their shareholders to file a patent for everything they have learned about and that hasn't been patented yet.
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It's eye-opening that the salary of an adjunct faculty member at Cal with 100% appointment with classes taught to 1.5K+ students (CS61A) is less than the tuition fees of 8 students.