pcprincipal's comments

Related story - my first job out of school was in investment banking. My desk worked on some esoteric securitization products (basically bonds backed by aircraft and shipping container leases) where all issuance had basically disappeared when I started, which was right after the 2008-9 crisis. These products generally were in the A/BBB area, and generally had traded like high yield bonds before the crisis. When I first started, we struggled to find investors and were generally seeing 6-8% yields on some small deals. By the time I left three years later, yields were getting down to the 4% area, issuance sizes had tripled and new paper was routinely 3-4x oversubscribed. I have some friends who still work there and tell me not only have yields kept coming down, but lower quality leases are being thrown into securitization pools. I 100% agree on all the comments here saying the big story is lower rates driving people into riskier investments. When the next crisis hits, people will talk about how negative rates forced people to reach for junk companies and questionable securitization paper.

> In September 2018, the Company completed its acquisition of all issued and outstanding shares of Astro Technology Inc. (“Astro”), a pre-revenue start-up company that provides artificial-intelligence (AI) enhanced communications solutions, for a total purchase price of $43.3 million in cash.

Anyone care to explain how a pre-revenue company can be valued at $43mm? I know the argument can be made Google paid much more for Deepmind, but Google's market cap is 51x more than Slack's on the secondary market right now.

Long time swimmer and runner here - the biggest difference between the two IMO is the focus on lung capacity for swimming.

A common swimming training set most competitive swimmers will be familiar with are "lung busters". You do a 200y free that's 50y breathing every 3 strokes, 50 every 5, 50 every 7, 25 every 9 and then a 25y butterfly without breathing. I had a coach who would have us do 6 of these on 2:45 (meaning about 15-30s of rest for strong distance swimmers). Everyone would be audibly gasping for air by the end of these.

In races, how often you breathe is a critical part of race strategy. In a 50y/m free you generally shouldn't breathe at all; in a 500+ race, there are big debates about whether to breathe every 2 or 3 strokes. Additionally, how much to kick is a key part of strategy since kicking's contribution to speed is not great compared to how much oxygen it depletes.

I really don't think running compares in terms of how stressful the sport is on the lungs. That said, running 400m sprints with small rest intervals is extremely hard on every part of the body and I found the muscle stress from running far greater than from swimming.

Another strategy to help ditch the phone - try for a few days rating each day on a scale from -2 to 2 and recording a few notable things about each day. I learned about this technique from Jim Collins, who shared it on a podcast with Tim Ferriss[1]. Collins says sorting the spreadsheet is especially useful because you can see patterns and learn what separates good days from bad days.

I bring this up in relation to this article because after three days of doing this (for those interested, [-1, 0, 0]), I concluded distractions are the biggest reason I didn't go [2, 2, 2]. My phone for me at least is the #1 cause of distractions - simply looking at it and seeing a notification can derail my train of thought. Setting it on Do Not Disturb and only checking a set number of times I'm thinking will be helpful.

One more thing here - knowing that I need to rate myself at the end of each day absolutely is in the back of my mind during the day, which I think is a positive.

[1] - https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/

The concept of owning demand is explored really well in this blog post[1]. A good excerpt:

> In short, if somebody successfully inserts themselves between you and your customer, they can exercise tremendous control over you, including taking a big chunk of your profits or outright killing you.

[1] https://florentcrivello.com/index.php/2018/10/22/own-the-dem...

Worth noting that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has some interesting explanations about why practitioners write better and more accurate books than journalists in "Skin in the Game". As you probably guessed from the title, practitioners have a lot to lose by writing a bad book about their practice because it impacts their livelihood. Journalists - while they do face some consequences for bad books - don't pay the same price, and are more likely appealing to a general audience when they write a non-fiction book.

"Free Will" by Sam Harris. A buddy told me to read this after we got in a long debate about free will at a bar. Basically, he told me I wasn't even grasping what free will is, and that the hour to read the book would totally change everything for me. Lo and behold, he was right and the next conversation we had about free will was much deeper and largely framed by the insights in this book. It convinced me that the real question isn't "Do we have free will?" but rather "What is free will?"

"The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch. It's difficult to pinpoint this book as being about a thing or a set of things, but my best attempt is to say it's about attaining knowledge and the non-existent limits to human knowledge. I've never felt more inspired than when I finished reading this book and reflected on the infinite lengths humankind has to go on technological progress. Overall, it's an incredible argument for optimism about what is possible.

Top 3 for the year for me below. All of these are completable in 2 or so hours and non-fiction. For me at least, this is notable since so many non-fiction reads take 400 pages to make a point that could be summarized in 150:

- Free Will, Sam Harris - one of my buddies strongly recommended this book after debating me on the subject for an hour plus. While some of the question of free will is semantics, Harris deeply changed my position on to what extent we determine our own actions. When someone can present an argument to you for an hour and a half uninterrupted, it also makes a difference - perhaps the best way to influence someone is to recommend a book.

- It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy At Work, DHH and Jason Fried - made me rethink the tradeoff between working harder and working smarter. This book strongly debates how most companies structure PTO, the work week, meetings and so much more and offers opinionated alternatives. Basecamp is clearly thinking independently from first principles here, and I really admire that.

- The Way to Love, Anthony de Mello - meditations on freeing yourself from attachment and your own programming. This book pairs really well with Free Will (I read them around the same time) because both offer unique perspectives on why we are the way we are and why change is possible (Free Will actually optimistically concludes change is possible without us being in control of our actions).

Shameless plugs - I blog on my favorite reads of the month at theconsider.com , which also is available as a monthly e-mail (https://theconsider.com/subscribe/).

Thank you so much! This is great advice and I'm excited to look into the links you posted. Appreciate you taking the time :-).

I'm baffled that this company as of October is targeting a $120B IPO valuation [1]. I'm assuming there are institutional buyers out there at this price as the article says banks advised them on this number. It would be one thing if the prospects for Uber converting revenue to its bottom line were great, but margins are shrinking. The CEO admits "we're in a big battle" with Lyft and more competitors are coming. Waymo will be all over the news next month [2]. IPOing in this environment - at least at a valuation 1.6x its last round [3] - seems difficult.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/16/uber-targ...

[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/waymo-to-...

[3] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/27/toyota-to-invest-500-million...

Definitely, sorry for late reply. Here's a few:

- Pick Em strategies on DraftKings - https://medium.com/draftfast/evaluating-possible-strategies-...

- Thinking in multiples - https://medium.com/draftfast/thinking-in-multiples-7e7c76ee2...

I 100% agree with this as a Daily Fantasy Sports player who has published some blog posts and code related to strategy. Any success I've had has been in sports and formats that are not popular and I purposely do not write or open-source code on. Edge can go away almost immediately; I saw this firsthand in DFS when a number of websites came in with free tools that pros had been using for years.

I play in the stock market a little and my best wins have been on small cap stuff where I've had some edge with unique knowledge of the industry and have taken the time to read SEC filings / keep tabs on earnings reports / closely watch competitors, acquisitions, etc.

To be clear, I still think this article is great from a learning about Keras perspective. That said, to anyone who thinks building some ML models and outperforming the market is easy, remember that edge is only as good as the number of participants in the market who don't have it.

Question for this company / anyone who runs similar businesses - is $1MM ARR enough to pay 7 people? I'd be interested to know what they do in EBITDA and how they think about salaries. This is actually a general question I have about start-ups. The economics of having a business that makes $1 - $10mm in revenue and hires 7 - 100ish people is still difficult for me to understand. Yes, you can raise equity or debt because equity / debt holders believe in a certain business model and then use that capital to pay people, but to be a standalone business without VC or bank funding, you need cash flow (not revenue) that can pay engineers market value.

Re: "the problem I've always had with these types of systems is that there's always that one item on your to-do list which ends up more complicated than you expected", I 100% agree. To avoid being subjective like you mentioned, I often prefer to time-box my tasks if I think there's any risk of the scope being unclear. So instead of:

- Migrate photos from iCloud to Google Photos

I'll start with:

- Spend 1 hour trying to migrate photos and write down where I left off

This avoids the issue of being unsatisfied at the end of the day because something didn't get done or something took longer than expected.

If something absolutely has to get done and cannot be time-boxed, I like to veer conservative and either start way earlier than necessary or devote a whole day or more to doing just that one thing (example: taxes - start early, work fire drill - drop everything until it's done).

I read a lot of articles on TSLA and usually fail to see any mention of their power business. Granted, this is a small part of revenue right now ($1.1BN for FY17 of $11.8BN total), but growing fast and with some highly visible data points (Puerto Rico, South Australia). They are going to win multi-billion-dollar contracts if the US or other countries decide to rebuild their grids. As a TSLA shareholder, this opportunity actually gets me more excited about the future of the company than autonomy. It seems to me they have less competition doing huge battery installations than building autonomous vehicles.

I've been using Moment (https://inthemoment.io/) for about a year and am really proud of how I've been able to reduce total screen time from 4 hours to 45 minutes per day. Most of the gains were due to deleting Safari and Twitter from my device (Moment breaks down app usage based on battery usage).

To anyone reading this, be aware of how grabbing your phone in the morning to read headlines or Medium digest can turn into 30 minutes or even an hour. Think about how checking e-mails can take you completely out of context and badly dilute the quality of your work. Consider how the amazing small interactions with other people that make life beautiful can be destroyed by even a glance at the phone.

Monitoring phone usage and actively cutting it down I really feel has improved my quality of life. Now that Apple has built in tools to do this, I hope more people will treat this as seriously as they treat exercise, nutrition, etc.

Some I haven't seen mentioned here:

1. Coders at Work

Peter Seibel does an amazing job of asking programmers questions that make them explain their methodology. The interview with Donald Knuth is awesome; really enjoyed hearing him talk about literate programming.

2. The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder's 1981 Pulitzer Prize winner I think is a brilliant case study on how engineers work together and the things that can go wrong and right with different personalities interacting with highly technical ideas. The project in this book starts without the consent of management, which to me shows the value of questioning the system to add business / engineering value.

3. Little Schemer

Small book that will give your brain a serious workout and show you how to problem solve with Lisp like languages. Even if you never end up using a Lisp dialect, this book expands your brain.

I have more here, all of which I recommend for software and other careers http://benbrostoff.github.io/books/

Just read Issue #35 and subscribed - congrats on getting this off the ground. I have some feedback as I run a similar newsletter for long form books and articles over at https://theconsider.com. The following has come from subscribers and been helpful to me:

- The paragraph to paragraph format can be a little jarring in teams of reading through. When you move from OpenAI to QT in #35, for instance, there's no clear transition. In my newsletter, I'll use bold titles to break up recommendations

- Add a time estimation on how long it will take to complete the article / blog post / whatever. When something can be done in < 15 minutes, people generally read on the spot. If longer, people will make time for it if they're interested. Either way, it's helpful to the reader to just let them know how big a time investment something is

- Add a place for people to e-mail you their favorite coding articles, papers, etc. Some of my most clicked recommendations have come from subscribers

Awesome job again. I'm excited to get this on the daily.

This is great and has an awesome level of detail on information gain. I have found decision trees really useful for getting a feel for what features in a dataset matter and trying out different max depths on trees to get more insight into the data.

I wrote an article earlier this year on how I use decision trees to classify players for daily fantasy sports into different groups that people may find useful https://medium.com/@bmb21/why-is-caris-levert-projected-for-...

Highly recommend Moment for iOS for tracking phone usage. I feel like I've gamified how much time I spent on my phone and am shooting for <30 minutes / day.