Viewing profile — larsonf

"More buyers than sellers." Any two-sided market will have prevailing prices at certain volumes (even if internal to a dealer) that are not perfectly matched before the actual trad…

True. Perhaps fundamentally bitcoin really just is cash and not a speculative instrument. And just like cash (as in, like, paper money), there's a huge amount of risk whenever a no…

Interesting (slight?) counterexample is the foreign exchange market 10-20 years ago, just as it was going electronic. Lots of levered investment but lots and lots of fraud as there…

Why not go meta? Sure, a company like Google directly does more good than Goldman. (Although, trivially, you could argue a taco stand does something arguably more important than in…

Hey shubb, I've read your posts for a while; like the way you think. Let me buy you a pint next time I'm in London (in US right now, but there often enough). Thoughtful tech people…

I think you're right on this. It's not so much about whether the stance is true or not and whether we should debate that. It's that articles that discredit something as trivially u…

No matter someone's stance on this, it seems a bit forward to discredit a relatively widely-held theory as something that is weakly argued by providing a few bullet points and then…

I think you could compare this to sports or other game-like activities where success is by nature relative. There's no 'need' per se for athletes to practice 40 hours a week, but t…

Is it just me or does "People who don't need money" seem like it should be in the 'winners' list? If you don't need much money, won't you do well come what may?

Technically, sure. But 'arbitrage' today is interpreted broadly--more along the lines of buying basically the same thing and making the difference at some point in the future. Like…

Does anyone have any insight into the underlying architecture of these large-scale projects? Like programming languages, project structure, how many software people involved? I ima…

Awesome, although I don't know why you couldn't have it automatically accept the 'honor code.' But then again, perhaps if you're using this instead of just rolling your own solutio…

I think it comes down to who we think the battle is against. One narrative says that it's murky industrial cooperatives lobbying to stay incumbent that keeps these new startups dow…

100% to all of these things. But do you see how the conversation we are having is now about simply the regulations and whether they are really protecting people and not about how t…

I read this and kept thinking whether the hotel lobby is really the reason why Airbnb runs into trouble. Or, for that matter, even whether the Taxi Lobby is what is really hitting …

This article and a lot of the articles on the San Jose State are all of over the map when it comes to improving MOOCs: more TAs, more focus on the content, etc. They do , however, …

I have been wondering for a long time why Starbucks and other coffee shops don't simply charge for wifi. 5 USD/3 hours seems like an absolutely great deal. Whenever I do work at St…

I think there might be an interesting point underneath this. If everyone who feels like the author actually stayed then SF might not have the high rents/excitement/cultural contact…

I don't know though. RapGenius seems to have broken down crowd sourcing of understanding context/word meaning into very small bits. This could be absolutely huge for a machine lear…

I think this misses the point of minimum wage. The whole point of minimum wage is that the work is not very important and very commodity-like. Minimum wage protects the importance …

This is going to sound a bit glib, but the problem sort of fixes itself. Look at China. "Sweatshop" sort of manufacturing has largely left. Now the country has more Rolls Royces an…