choffstein

This is a great answer.

To answer the question about the 3-sided die: the question is flawed for 2 reasons.

First, the way you phrased it, you know the information a priori. It's like me learning that the car isn't behind door #1 before I choose. In that case, I have a 50/50 chance on the other doors.

But what if you didn't tell me before? This introduces our second problem. Let's say I roll the die and you hide it under a cup. I tell you I chose side A and you tell me A is physically impossible and ask me if I want to switch. Well of course I want to switch ... but I didn't learn any more information about sides B and C. It's a 50/50 toss-up. In terms of the game show, you basically just opened the constant's door.

A critical element of the original problem is when the information is learned and knowing that the contestant's door will not be opened. It is what allows the phrasing from zaksoup above.

"Mr. Moy’s past work, however, that makes his presence among us interesting."

I don't know why. He was Director of the US Mint: he printed coins. It's a manufacturing business. It has nothing to do with monetary policy, fiscal policy or law as far as I know.

If the Secretary of the Treasury said something ... well, then we'd have a story.

You can grab her by e-mail: [email protected] or twitter: @LittleWorldsInt

Is it possible to set this up so that you can point it to a remote URL to fetch the CSV? For example, I'd love it if I could point it towards a Yahoo! Finance API call that returns a CSV file and have my dashboard auto-update. Or Dropbox URL. Or any remote URL. That would be awesome.

It never really says it is an acqui-anything. Maybe they are just winding down and getting jobs?

You might want to check out the "AI Game Programming Wisdom" series. I think at this point, there are four of them. "Game Programming Gems" is another series worth checking out (I think there are 8 at this point); each book normally has a section on game AI.

The books are a series of articles written by industry practitioners solving a problem they have run across. Normally the articles contain inline code, and the books come with a CD with executable examples and code to accompany the articles.

As I said below, it's likely that I am hyper-sensitive to these issues. I urge you to continue sharing your journey and your stories!

Be careful not to take away credit from yourself, though; in finance, your father may have been able to "open" a door for you, but you would still have to walk through it.

Keep on walkin'.

As I said, I am likely over-sensitive to these issues; finance isn't exactly the most well-respected industry at the moment.

I am a 20-ish year old and despite "what I do" has been done before, the "way I do it" never has -- and that is plenty "exciting." There is nothing safe or low-risk about starting a hedge fund.

I get your point about "having more meaning" -- but I'd argue that is true for any business endeavor, not just tech startups. If what I was doing didn't have truly personal meaning for me, there is no way I could stomach the stress.

Maybe I'm overly sensitive because the article seemed to compare the easy hedge fund life to the tough tech start-up life, which I think is a gross over exaggeration in the divergent profile: I believe that they are tremendously similar.

As someone who has started a business in the finance space trying to leverage technology, I take some offense to this. My business partners and I have worked our asses off over the last several years to get to where we are today: billions of dollars in assets powered by our investment models. Trust me: asking someone to give you money to put in your strategies is not easy. Unlike the start-up space, there is no "minimum viable product," "traction" metric, or even "asset" that has some intrinsic value (like a unique algorithm or brand). You either have a track record, or you don't. New strategies don't, so it's all "trust." Sure, I can show a "back-test" or "stress-test" -- but everyone knows those are bullshit anyway.

You think you know stress? Imagine knowing that every day, your models are making investment decisions for billions of dollars. Sure, it's a drop in the overall pool of assets in markets, but it is enough to keep you up at night, worried about someone's retirement or someone's college fund. Drop a few more percentage points than the market? Goodbye hundreds of millions of dollars. Yep, that's going to happen at 50 when you start your "easy life" as a hedge-fund manager.

I'm not saying my stress is greater. I'm just trying to make the point that every business has its own share of problems, and to say that being a tech entrepreneur takes any more balls than being any other kind of entrepreneur is naive.

Can we please stop, as a community, with the "woe is us, the tech entrepreneur?" It's embarrassing. Starting a business is starting a business, no matter the industry. In fact, I'd argue that we live in a golden age for tech entrepreneurship that has never existed in another industry. Imagine trying to start a bio-tech business or a manufacturing business (well, arguably "outsourcing" could be the manufacturing entrepreneur's "scale"...). There are no "seed" rounds. The assets you have to raise are probably 100x what a tech entrepreneur has to initially raise. On top of trying to build a product, you probably have to manage building and factory development, understand legal regulations for your industry, and manage tons of labor.

We live in a time where you can roll the dice and start a business in the tech space with a handful of smart people, some elbow-grease and maybe $50k in a seed round. This is a golden era.

I respect the hell out of what you are doing -- starting a business is NOT easy -- but please don't say it takes any more balls than starting a business in any other industry. It doesn't.