Viewing profile — aothman

TS does not fight the math of venture capital the same way Indie.VC did. My understanding from Einar (and the reason I made an LP commitment) is that the same extreme power law of …

Of course there is a way to broadly index among all non-negative seed investments: by broadly indexing among all seed investments. The fraction of money-losing investments in a pop…

Your last paragraph is a misinterpretation of this paper. You are interpreting the result as saying "Investors would benefit from broadly indexing at seed". The paper instead says …

Study author here. You can think of the AngelList investment data as being split into three roughly equal-sized groups: markdowns, markups, and no valuation updates. The reported I…

HiScore author here. HiScore allows domain experts to easily create and maintain scores. It is currently being used by a major environmental non-profit and by IES, a startup that a…

Seems strange to write an article complaining about the Harvard bubble when the only reason it's getting printed in the Paris fucking Review is that it's about Harvard in the first…

Uncle Tom's Cabin is an awful book. First off, it's boring and damn near unreadable (it was one of the only assigned books I never made it through in college). But in a larger sens…

My favorite Friedman-ism is this one: "I had lunch with a group of professors at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, or HKUST, who told me that this year they will …

As an AI researcher, I think obstacles like "not having your robot fall over all the damn time" are a little more immediate than robots having a nuanced understanding of ethics. I …

"Proverbial Stanford" coincides a great deal with "Proverbial Harvard" - both are wealthy private schools that admit the very best students and have society's bias towards the well…

As an elitist alum, I don't like these programs one bit. I can't help but feel that they are, in a small but meaningful way, watering down the value of my degree. And even though i…

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, Ken Pomeroy (kenpom.com) runs a fantastic basketball analytics site. He's a big proponent of what are called "tempo-free stats", which a…

Pittsburgh's 1985 win (in the middle of the steel industry collapse) prompted a lengthy screed about how cumulative ratings are assembled from a UW psychology prof: http://www.brie…

As an AI grad student, this kind of sensationalism is somewhere between a minor irritation and a serious threat. AI always has had a severe problem with over-promising and under-de…

"Your time to break even is quite a while on a per-article basis" - and that's the crux of the matter entirely. As per this WSJ article http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/08/12/where…

http://catandgirl.com/?p=1163 "Every once in a while a window appears - and you realize the past is just the present with different technology and funny clothes"

My research involves making electronic agents to mediate interactions in markets, with one application being to prediction markets. One of the things I've discovered is that predic…

Chuck Klosterman wrote a wonderful essay (it's in his collection "Eating the Dinosaur") about laugh tracks, and more broadly, about the way we use laughter. His thesis was that, es…

Looks impressive, particularly if those are real trading results. One concern I immediately have is overfitting, particularly for claims about how various difficult values have bee…