Viewing profile — mrfredward

Liquid retail stocks follow Benford's law because there is a notion of intrinsic value from the company and an army of quant traders trying to exploit any price inefficiency caused…

I guess we need to make a distinction between the blog post and the Gary Smith post it links to here. Gary smith (the person I think you're referring to having spent a career in th…

Benfords law is used to find evidence that the numbers came from a person, not a measurement or mathematical process, right? So anyone who knows what a limit order is should not be…

I am a few months in to a 15 year mortgage after recently refinanced at a 2.125%. Here's a rough breakdown of where each dollar of my last mortgage payment went: Principal: 60% Int…

Here's an example for something as simple as a hobbyist using a metal lathe in their garage: For a rough part, you can measure how much material you need to take off, do it in a fe…

The downside of seniority based pay is that people who show little to no motivation can end up the highest paid on a team if they simply avoid getting in trouble for 20 years. I kn…

From the code you linked: > Computing professionals should protect confidentiality except in cases where it is evidence of the violation of law, of organizational regulations, or o…

The dictionary defines ethics as the field of knowledge dealing with moral principles, sure, and that's not at all what I'm talking about here. Perhaps I erred in using the word to…

You've confused ethics and morals. The ethical action (which is about professional standards rather than your conscience) is usually to follow the legal agreement you've signed (ba…

From the tweet it looks like an awesome search feature. Just type what you wanted to search for right inline and then it can drop the result in without you ever changing a window o…

Somewhat buried, but this my favorite takeaway >Errors of omission are generally much more serious than errors of commission, but errors of commission are the only ones picked up b…

I believe width is referring to pulse width, which should be a time unit.

For a very basic CRUD app I tend to agree with you. But for anyone dealing with synchronization between threads/processes/machines, modeling engineering problems with large systems…

Well of course not, but it's a pretty strong risk factor.

>the power differential is so intense that evidence can be ignored This is a good point from the article to expand on, it's not just coincidence that the Hanoi rat massacre and the…

Oops, yeah I mixed up some numbers there, would have to be a mustang loaded with options for my comparison.

There is no metric for "inflation for cars". What the BLS data is saying is that the nominal price/quality for cars has stayed the same. So in 1990 you could get a mustang for $20k…

Worth noting that the executive get paid at least a comfortable base salary for as long as the cash-burning business keeps its doors open, and if hype creates a pop in the equity p…

Take a look at the "Many Assets" subheading in the original post.

>Comparing their asset balance with the market cap of its stock is complete nonsense. Ben Graham, one of Warren buffet's mentors, wrote a famous book called the "Intelligent Invest…

+1 For Dietrich's version of it. He renames sociopaths, clueless, and losers to opportunists, idealists, and pragmatists, and in general tones the theory down a bit, and I think th…

>You're forgetting many people live in apartments in dense urban areas How much sunlight do they get in parking garages?

Contracts are sometimes a useful deterrent, because going to court sucks and can cost you a lot of money. They're also not a replacement for trust, because going to court sucks and…

There's an awesome introductory book on information theory which in one chapter resolves Maxwell's demon. The argument is that the energy needed to reliably send a single bit of in…

>Is following Conway's law a bad thing, though Is following the second law of thermodynamics a bad thing? I say so jokingly because thermo is a little more rigid, but I still think…