gridlockd's comments

Efficient market hypothesis is nonsense. A lot of institutional investors are long-only. That is their mandate. All the information they may have does not change that fact.

It is unlikely that you will beat the market in the long run and if you do, it may well be down to chance, but it is possible, because the market is not perfect.

Furthermore, you can not "buy the market" in the first place. You can buy ETFs replicating stock indices, but that is not the same. If you bought the S&P you will have performed differently than if you had bought MSCI world. Ultimately, stock picking is just a less diversified version of buying an index.

Tensorflow-JS is that framework that you export to from Tensorflow. Tensorflow-JS is not Tensorflow, it's just the same brand.

Smash that downvote button to make society more just and less racist!

That "tiny minority" still has an outsized impact. The pareto principle applies to pretty much everything.

So you're saying that telling people to shut up will not actually change their minds and make the world a better place?

I don't like that. I'll give you a downvote, that will set things right!

Unfortunately, the self-styled "anti-racists" of today are giving me a tough time convincing actual Neonazis that there isn't some sort jewish marxist conspiracy out there to censor them.

The point is that people want to know what's going to happen before it happens. If I believed a Democrat was sure to win, I would want to allocate my stock portfolio different than if a Republican were to win.

Also, you can make money betting on the outcome itself. If the odds you get are underpriced relative to an accurate forecast, that's a great bet to take.

Furthermore, these forecasts influence where politicians put their focus. Let's say you're Hillary in '16 and you think Wisconsin is yours despite the forecast showing a narrow lead, maybe you should reconsider.

> Because a PhD is useful for a lot more than getting a permanent academic position. My first "proper job" was at a research division of a big corporation. They had ~20 PhDs when I started and expanded to ~100 over 3 years. I don't think any of those people would say their PhD was wasted because they didn't get an academic job at the end of it.

Why do they have so many more PhDs now? Because PhDs are a now a dime a dozen, not because a PhD itself is valuable. The opportunity cost of a PhD is four years of lost income during prime employment age, plus extra student loan debt.

Even with a higher salary (and higher tax burden), it's not clear that you come out on top during your lifetime. If you don't come out on top, it's a waste, unless maybe these years you spent doing your PhD were the best years of your life (probably not).

This isn't going to piss off current customers though, it's going to piss off customers from fifteen years ago, who haven't upgraded, or maybe the freeloaders that used CS2 lately.

A lot of people were pissed off about Adobe stopping perpetual licenses, but that didn't hurt their bottom line. In fact, they increased revenue because a subscription is a low upfront cost.

Most of the people complaining about this are non-customers whose strong-held beliefs on how to license software have been offended. These people don't matter to Adobe's business.

five sigma

gods > people

The gods help those who help themselves.

Green jelly beans linked to acne.

Of course there's lots of factors, but this is one obvious factor that must not be ignored.

> What about different strains and variability in how deadly they are?

Is there any evidence that the variations spreading now are different from those spreading earlier this year?

> What about the difference that the size of the initial dose of the virus makes to the end outcome?

There was a study done on hamsters that only showed a minimal impact of initial dose on disease severity.

On the other hand, you have increased mortality among healthcare worker, which could be caused by higher exposure. However, there's also the impact of such a stressful situation on the immune system.

Fair enough, it's arguably cynical to tell the children that Santa Claus isn't real. However, we're all adults here.

The highest-quality software can not win in the software market. This is evident from the software that is out there owning the market.

Quality is a trade-off, if you spend too many resources on it, you can not compete. Catching those last few bugs takes exponentially more effort.

Moreover, there are snake oil salesmen at every corner, telling you that if only you adopted some methodology, your defect rate would plummet. It's easy to get lost in that, not actually delivering a product.

> This is just pushing testing to the customer.

Correct.

> Why would the customer report a bug instead of switching to a less buggy product?

All products are buggy to varying degrees. As a user, you can't easily tell if another product is "less buggy". Would you risk investing time into figuring out another program that may turn out just as buggy? No. You most likely move on with your life.

Once users are invested into your product, it takes a lot to make them switch. Every single piece of software that I use regularly is either extremely simple or somewhat buggy. I haven't switched once because of it. It's a nuisance, but not a dealbreaker.

That's not to say that I like this situation, of course I would prefer software that doesn't have bugs and glitches, but I also prefer software that exists today, not tomorrow. The market has spoken: worse is better.

> Why do you think the customers are going to report bugs?

If it's an important bug, somebody will most likely report it. If it's not an important bug, not having it reported is most likely not important either.

> I can't say that I've ever attempted to report a bug on an iPhone app, Windows, etc. It's like yelling at the wind.

So, did you switch to Android or Linux/MacOS then? Is the grass really greener on the other side?

I don't buy the "bugs caught early are cheaper to fix" paradigm. Most bugs are caught early without special precautions, but special precautions can be quite expensive. Most software doesn't have truly catastrophic failure cases.

If there's a bug slipping through, someone will run into it, report it, and it'll get fixed. If nobody runs into it, the bug doesn't cost anything.

This is the most economic way to go about it, which is the reason why pretty much all successful software is kind of buggy. We all like to complain about it, but then we don't want to wait an extra year for the next version either.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you need really reliable software, the solution is not to eliminate all the bugs, that's impossible. Even with perfect software, hardware can fail, bits can flip the wrong way. The solution is to make sure that errors can't bring down the airplane.

This may be uncomfortable to point out, but at some point, the virus has to run out of susceptible people to kill. The real chance of dying from COVID for an individual is not the average of ~0.4%. It's 0.0% for the vast majority of people, but for people whose immune system fails them, it's closer to 100%. Such a condition usually takes years to build up. Excess mortality graphs show that a lot of people dodged the Influenza bullet in the past years, those were highly susceptible to die of COVID-19 this year.

> I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig.

Good! Maybe you can actually get something done using it then, instead of getting lost in mastering lots of concepts just for the sake of it.

> Just please do not make the mistake of believing that it is unique to Zig. Factor brings the best of Forth and Lisp together...

What is unique to Zig is that it has these features without bringing together "the best of Forth and Lisp". Sometimes, just being pedestrian is a virtue.