socketnaut | 5 years ago | on: QA job interview questions for managers to ask
Had to triple check that this wasn't satire after reading the first two points. Focusing on familiarity with buzzwords and trendy tools is exactly the wrong thing to do.
socketnaut's comments
socketnaut | 5 years ago | on: Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth [pdf] (2000)
I see, so you're saying the expected profit on the trade is $0 assuming an efficient market and ignoring trading costs? Your comment is confusing the way it's worded because the expected value of the option is non-zero.
socketnaut | 5 years ago | on: Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth [pdf] (2000)
When you say "expected value" are you trying to say most likely value?
socketnaut | 5 years ago | on: Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth [pdf] (2000)
You can reliably lose money in absence of commissions by buying at the ask and selling at the bid. You can't invert that to make money.
socketnaut | 5 years ago | on: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
Because most people search fares online and book the cheapest ticket.
socketnaut | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: SBA PPP Loan Forgiveness Calculator
Framing it as a loan seems like a good way to get funds out as quickly as possible while making it easier to get back anything that's misused.
socketnaut | 5 years ago | on: Bye, Amazon
It’s not a statement about fairness: it’s a statement about filtering / sampling bias.
socketnaut | 5 years ago | on: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too
“actualllllyyyyy” he’s saying something different. If you take a 0.3% chance for N days where N is large, you’ll land it 0.003N times, or once every ~333 days.
The chance of landing it within any particular window of K days is a different concept (which you showed how to reason about).
socketnaut | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why aren't there many credible online bachelors programs?
Depends on your field. If you're studying mathematics or computer science, learning happens mostly through deep work in isolation and there's enough material out there (books, papers, etc.) to support more than a lifetime of problem-solving.
Events and conversations might offer superficial exposure to new ideas or areas of interest but actual understanding requires extended, focused thought that nobody else can do for you.
socketnaut | 6 years ago | on: Shall We Play a Market Timing Game? (2018)
You need to be smarter than volume-weighted average, not smarter than the average participant. The demographic you have in mind is trading relatively small amounts of capital.
socketnaut | 6 years ago | on: It costs $1,800 to get an engineering job offer
Calculating opportunity cost for time spent based on wages is pretty meaningless for salaried jobs. I might make $X/hr at my day job, but I don't actually have the ability to work an extra hour and get an extra X dollars.
socketnaut | 7 years ago | on: Reconstructing Twitter's Firehose
The statistical claims in the article make the assumption that tweets are being sampled uniformly at random, which is most likely false.
The fact that 3 machines handle 20% of tweets suggests that tweets are not in fact assigned to machines in a uniformly random manner. I would guess that there is a geographic bias as to which machines handle which tweets.
socketnaut | 7 years ago | on: Four new DNA letters double life’s alphabet
Which mountain was it?
socketnaut | 7 years ago | on: Efficiency is fundamentally at odds with elegance (2013)
This just seems like survivorship bias. An algorithm / tool / technology tends not to remain in use if something that is both more elegant and more efficient is available. Therefore, if you survey the well known options you'll see a negative relationship between elegance and efficiency. It doesn't imply a general relationship nor does it preclude the discovery of an approach that is both more elegant and more efficient than anything available today.
socketnaut | 7 years ago | on: It’s better to be born rich than gifted
It's not that simple because taxes modify gains but not losses.
Imagine we bet $1 on a coin toss. The expected value for either of us is $0. Now imagine the winner is required to pay 10% tax on his proceeds. The expected value becomes (-$1.00 + $.90)/2 = -$0.05.
socketnaut | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to retain core competency in math when your job doesn't require it?
You might be more comfortable with Python syntax than with standard mathematical syntax, but I wouldn't think of it as being closer to "just a logical description" or closer to being the "raw idea." You're just choosing to use different notation.
I would guess that most people comfortable with both representations would feel that standard mathematical notation is lighter and conveys the "raw idea" more directly.
socketnaut | 7 years ago | on: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter
I’m all for frugality. But you wouldn’t pay $2 for the freedom to use those 45 minutes in some other way?
socketnaut | 7 years ago | on: $100M Was Once Big Money for a Startup. Now, It’s Common
You're applying the "one-third rule" to pre-tax salary, but it's generally applied to take-home pay.
socketnaut | 7 years ago | on: Amazon is raising the price of Prime to $119
If you spend that much on Amazon you should look into their 5% back credit card. There is an inherent "annual fee" in that it requires a prime membership, but you spent enough that it would more than pay for itself.
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