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nikkev's comments

nikkev | 1 month ago | on: Warren Buffett dumps $1.7B of Amazon stock

Their business models are increasingly converging with both generative revenue through seller fees, subscriptions, and advertising. Amazon is ahead in most of these areas and also has the higher margin revenue from AWS. Amazon also has a large base of prime subscribers they can sell incremental services to.

nikkev | 1 year ago | on: Apple Discontinuing Apple Pay Later

There are two types of BNPL loans: interest free and short-term interest-bearing accounts. In theory BNPL has a couple interesting advantages. First you're underwriting each individual purchase whereas a credit card involves underwriting a line of credit to a consumer. This enables BNPL providers to charge different prices depending on the product being purchased, for example someone making 2,000 a month trying to buy a 1,200 phone may warrant a higher interest rate. Also given the shorter term they should be able to better optimize their rates versus a credit card which is a pre-approved rate across the entire line of credit.

nikkev | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

One point neglected in discussions is the effect of spreading it to other territories that are not adopting a similar strategy. The majority of cases in the English-speaking Caribbean to date have been from persons who traveled to the UK recently.

nikkev | 8 years ago | on: North Carolina Is Ordered to Redraw Its Congressional Map

You're grossly missing the point. If your kid steals money from your wallet, you catch them and punish them. That does not make what they did right just because they were punished and you deemed their behavior unacceptable. What if you didn't find out? Or what if you decided to look the other way because it was only five dollars?

nikkev | 9 years ago | on: All of Statistics, by Larry Wassserman (2013) [pdf]

When I was taking a class in Statistical Inference, we used a combination of Statistical Inference (Casella and Berger), Introduction to Mathematical Statistics (Hogg and Craig) and Probability and Statistics (Degroot and Schervish). If you're still interested in learning about Fisher Information and the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound, you can refer to pages 514 - 521 of Probability and Statistics 8th Ed. It has a number of proofs which you can skip if you're not interested but it also provides a number of examples using different distributions to calculate both the Fisher Information and the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound.

nikkev | 10 years ago | on: Statistical model of IQ test beats humans at the same IQ test

To add to your second point, Andrew Gelman had some blog posts earlier this year detailing the challenges of doing online surveys, where he used simple questions that respondents "should" have been able to answer in a survey and found that a fair percentage >10% answered some of these simple questions wrong. I am assuming there is no incentive for answering more questions correctly so it's possible that some respondents may have answered blindly to finish quickly leading to lower scores.

nikkev | 10 years ago | on: The Surprising Problem of Too Much Talent

This reminds me of the argument from Chasing Stars by Groysberg. It is very difficult to separate an individual's performance from that of their environment. A lot of factors come together, including individual skill, to influence someone's performance. If you take that same individual and dump them into another environment it is very difficult (or impossible) to reproduce comparable levels of performance. Applying this to teams, there are a lot of factors necessary for them to generate a high level of performance that goes way beyond the individual talent/knowledge of each developer. That's why its necessary to hiring needs to be about more than just knowledge but personality and cultural fit as well. Then you need to look at all the support structures that you mentioned.

nikkev | 10 years ago | on: The Surprising Problem of Too Much Talent

Puyol was by no means an average player and neither is Pique. These are players who were/are considered to be among the top five center backs in the world at their peak. Isn't that by definition a superstar?

nikkev | 10 years ago | on: The Surprising Problem of Too Much Talent

I find the conclusions made by this paper to be dubious. Perhaps the reporting is weak and did not properly delve into the methodology used by the authors of the paper to draw their conclusions. But based on the article, couldn't it be possible that teams that have the higher percentage of superstars opted to load up on star players and therefore had less resources to flesh out the rest of the team. What would be the point of having let's say five or six world class players in soccer if you can only recruit below average players for the rest of the positions.

nikkev | 11 years ago | on: In Mathematics, Mistakes Aren’t What They Used to Be

I keep hearing/seeing statements like this when that is not the case. Models are inherently simplifications of the real world. I don't think the problem was with the math or anybody's understanding of it but more a result of the innate complexities of the market. The people at Goldman Sachs for example maybe knew about their exposure to the mortgage backed securities but they were unaware of the exposure of all the other firms in the industry. Also, a number of people expected and made a lot of money from the crash, although nobody expected it to be as bad as it was (again nobody had an accurate gauge of the exposure), it's not a lack of intelligence that drove firms but greed they were making so much money that they considered it foolish to stop and think what would happen and based on the aftermath they really have no incentive to. They suffered for a while but the government made every effort to assist them and now a few years later the market is back to record highs until the next inevitable crash.
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