Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots • Hacker News Board

Re: Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

#41

Post by JumpCrisscross » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

unmole wrote: post #29

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> oftentimes you can use the “opposite“ of that strategy, so to speak, to make money The opposite of Robinhooding might be buying a smattering of stocks and holding until infinity. It’s better than constantly trading options, a consistently losing strategy. But I wouldn’t call it a winner.

If buuying OTM options is a consistently losing strategy, the opposite would be selling OTM options. And that's a reasonable way to make money.

> the opposite would be selling OTM options. And that's a reasonable way to make money.

It's the original "vacuuming up nickels in front of a steamroller" trade. It looks like it works well for a while until it doesn't.

Option pricing has many degrees of freedom. Most result in value frittering away. As a result, most options trade participants lose money. (By design. It's a hedging tool.) The alpha bleeds into the underlying market through market makers' hedging.

Re: Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

#42

Post by ethbr0 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

I first heard about this in the context of software project estimation.

The author (forgotten to me) made the point that nobody has permission to think about disasters when estimating project completion time.

So why not explicitly ask them to? "So now we have our estimate, what would cause us to miss it?"

And in the course of giant monster attacks, you give people permission to talk about specific scenarios that are actually very likely to derail the schedule.

It was an interesting observation, vs the "just multiply the everything goes right estimate by X" method.

If everyone else is being positive, no one wants to be the lone (realistic) downer.

Re: Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

#43

Post by throwaway316943 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

WJW wrote: post #20

throwaway316943 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it like the weather map that was mentioned. Your job is to fill in all of the parts of the map that will kill the pilot. Once you’ve exhaustively done that, the clear path will be evident.

How will you know you have indeed exhaustively done so though? This seems like a strategy that will only work for extremely well understood fields and things like "career development" that the article talks about are definitely not well enough developed that you can exhaustively enumerate all the ways it can go wrong.

Using the weather map analogy again, you’ll only have accurate data for some parts of the map and you’ll need to rely on second hand information or predictive modeling to fill in the other parts and after all of that sometimes you just have to go look for yourself.

Re: Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

#44

Post by ajuc » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #4

Suppose I want to build a program that trades in the markets to make money. So to do the opposite I would try to lose money as fast as I could, according to this? But the way to do that is just to churn my book a lot and pay costs and spreads. It's not clear how that illuminates how to make money.

> But the way to do that is just to churn my book a lot and pay costs and spreads. It's not clear how that illuminates how to make money.

Well it suggests to invest long-term?

Re: Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

#45

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #42

I first heard about this in the context of software project estimation. The author (forgotten to me) made the point that nobody has permission to think about disasters when estimating project completion time. So why not explicitly ask them to? "So now we have our estimate, what would cause us to miss it?" And in the course of giant monster attacks, you give people permission to talk about specific scenarios that are…

Spot on. They used to call me 'Dr. No' because that is exactly what I would do, but it saved us tons of money so it was tolerated. We also actually delivered on time and within the budget but I'm sure it cost us contracts to more optimistic competitors.

Re: Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

#46

Post by nmstoker » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #37

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please share more about what you have actually come up with?

https://d18qs7yq39787j.cloudfront.net/uploads/solutionfile/6...

I like the stealth treatment you apply to the loo to reduce edges. Without wishing to imply my own bathroom needs a clean this would actually be handy in people's homes too (even though generally people are less wayward than they are in public loos)

Re: Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

#47

Post by tonyedgecombe » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #42

I first heard about this in the context of software project estimation. The author (forgotten to me) made the point that nobody has permission to think about disasters when estimating project completion time. So why not explicitly ask them to? "So now we have our estimate, what would cause us to miss it?" And in the course of giant monster attacks, you give people permission to talk about specific scenarios that are…

You need a distinct pre-mortem where everybody brings a list of the ways a project could fail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-mortem

Re: Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

#48

Post by simonh » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

Convince them that the world is a globe, when it's actually flat, so they get their navigation calculations wrong and their plane's crash when they run out of fuel.

Re: Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

#49

Post by motohagiography » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

kaycebasques wrote: post #11

HN loves this idea of thinking in reverse. Is anyone here actually doing it? What problem did you solve?

Security architecture: Under what circumstances does this entire product or solution bankrupt the company and ruin customer lives?

Re: Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots

#50

Post by andridk » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

As I was clicking this link I was thinking "Oh great, now I'm on watch list". Turns out, it's about thinking and problem solving and I was pleasantly surprised.