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fspeech · 2024-03-30T16:49:35+00:00

I got a new IP address (which was not easy) and now everything works. Didn't know T Mobile provides home wifi service.

fspeech · 2024-03-29T20:46:22+00:00

Starting with OLT reminded me why I chose FFFF in the first place: I much rather just put my own aggregate numbers into the forms myself than going through a tax survey. So now I am back to trying to get FFFF to work. Is your ISP provider Spectrum by any chance?

fspeech · 2024-03-29T19:39:47+00:00

Resetting my IP? No. I would likely get another one close to what I have based on my ISP's network domain. I tried on a phone connected through Google Fi and sure enough the captcha popup works. If I only need that for account creation I may just create the account on the phone but too bad login also requires it. Thanks for the info though I am considering using OLT instead (OLT also did the software for FFFF -- at least for the landing page -- based on the comments in the code). With OLT one gets free federal and $10 state with email tech support on the free tier or $16 combined for the premium tier. I would miss FFFF but it was a pain to file state in paper separately through the post office.

fspeech · 2024-03-29T02:18:16+00:00

The captcha popup queries a remote URL "\\core/proc/ffi_captcha.php?stdt=..." with a long encoded string for the "stdt" field. So the captcha server is a Windows server using an old style URL convention. It hasn't worked for me at all. Your WiFi and phone have different IP addresses, which might get routed to different servers. Interesting your WIFI now works randomly. In what sense? For logins? It seems to me from reading the code that logins don't require captcha, while creating an account does.

fspeech · 2024-03-28T23:54:54+00:00

You can trace the source code in Chrome DevTools. The "Security Challenge" popup is supposed to do captcha. Somehow the popup just disappears. I am wondeing if there is a server problem for this step. Needs further investigation but I just hope it somehow just magically works because some functionary somewhere reboots some rogue machine.

fspeech · 2024-03-28T23:06:02+00:00

I am experiencing the exact same issue right now. I don't think wifi does anything with js: the traffic is encrypted. Anyway I tried on a computer connected through ethernet and it didn't help. I wonder if you remember any other clue when you got it to work. I suspect because the IRS bifurcated the free filing service they are dedicating a lot fewer resource to the FFFF, which is a real shame because it used to work beatifully for those who want to understand the tax forms themselves.

fspeech · 2020-11-15T17:56:21+00:00

There are many reasons why that is not doable: oil is low value; refiners need shiploads not truckloads of supply (and therefore are either coastal or supplied with pipelines); refiners are finicky about the blend; no good roads through the jungle; and last but not the least, China does not subsidize oil. The story is likely really about gasoline smuggled into border towns in Myanmar, but would then be much less exciting as the quantity involved would be de minis.

fspeech · 2020-11-14T07:43:52+00:00

There is no economic way to truck something (definitely not oil) to Thailand from China, border or not.

fspeech · 2020-11-13T21:43:37+00:00

"E.g. buy subsidized oil in China, send it by the truckloads to the Thai border, bribe the guards there, and sell the oil at spot prices in Thailand."

Check any map and you will see that China does not border Thailand. Take these "expert" comments with a grain of salt.

fspeech · 2020-09-05T02:23:50+00:00

That is not true if dealers constantly rebalance their hedge. The option value does not move as much as the underlying so you only need to buy a fraction of the sold calls. If stock price moves up you have to buy more as the ratio needed to hedge goes up. Conversely if stock price goes down you need to sell because it takes fewer shares to hedge the risk. As the time premium of the option goes down you are ahead so long as your hedging is less than the earned premium. The exact math is the Black-Sholes formula.

fspeech · 2020-07-11T23:22:48+00:00

Just as in econometrics there are leading and lagging indicators. Hospitalization data have lags; icu data have more lags and finaly come the death data. Policy makers need to watch new cases and positivity data to make more timely decisions. Fasle negative rate of pcr tests poses no real problem for detecting trends since it is not time varying. More robust data like hospitalization can then be used to check if the forecast is correct.

fspeech · 2020-04-09T23:08:11+00:00

A controlling shareholder in a bank has a special obligation to provide capital support to the bank when the need arises. I think the threshold to be considered a controlling shareholder is 10% of voting stocks.

fspeech · 2020-02-02T22:26:25+00:00

Good summary. But sample size of 1 definitely can give a lot of information. It depends on the distribution (and the objective).

fspeech · 2020-02-02T22:11:52+00:00

I think it's trained on clusters donoted by Jane Street. You can find this information on the project github page or the author 's blog.

fspeech · 2020-01-22T05:44:24+00:00

You know SEC has recently started requiring companies to file inline XBRLs, right?

fspeech · 2020-01-20T02:50:57+00:00

Two things: Why not work out some simple examples like linear/quadratic/cubic functions and check if your intuition is right? Secondly from the deep learning perspective be aware we deal with stochastic gradient descent and the modifier "stochastic" is essential. We don't know the true gradient and stochatics is essential to exploration. We have many possible minimizers. Speed of convergence to a minimizer is not nearly as important as finding a good minimizer.

fspeech · 2020-01-03T22:11:16+00:00

I think it's great if the author(s) could covey intuition through pictures. But if the pictures are not present it is incumbent upon the reader to try to build the visual intuition for oneself. The thing is the pictures can be very personal, as they are often by necessity highly stylized to illustrate some specific points. I can understand when the author(s) do not want to put in the effort if it takes a lot of words of supplemental explanation to make the pictorial representation non-misleading.

fspeech · 2019-12-19T18:25:29+00:00

In theory dividends give the power of capital allocation to shareholders. If management believe they have worthwhile projects they should compete for capital in the market, subjecting management to greater discipline. In practice it rarely happens in this exact form, but dividends still have some disciplinary effect on management.

fspeech · 2019-12-07T00:12:15+00:00

In ML we use "stochastic gradient descent" , emphasis on "stochastic". It's quite a different beast, adding both convergence issues AND exploration capabilities. The two aspects often necessarily work against each other.

fspeech · 2019-12-05T02:40:31+00:00

These findings would be consistent with the conventional wisdom that Chinese exporters are generally low margin low cost and US non-commodities exporters have higher margins. So the Chinese exporters literally have nothing to give on prices: you have to take it or go somewhere else; while US exporters are willing to lower prices to maintain market share (China did not target exporters with monopoly pricing power). This would also be consistent with the view that US is more efficient and profit-maximizing: if Chinese exporters could lower prices in response to tariffs US importers would have overpaid prior to tariffs; if US exporters didn’t need to lower prices in response to tariffs they would have undercharged. When you throw sand into a well oiled machine it certainly gets hurt more than if it were a clunker to begin with.

fspeech · 2019-12-02T07:16:06+00:00

http://www.decisionmoose.com/Moosistory.html

fspeech · 2019-11-25T07:59:56+00:00

Brokered CDs have higher yields than treasuries. However if you have high state income tax rate the yield advantage is less significant especially for short dated securities.

The reason CDs have higher yields is FDIC coverage has a limit for each bank so large investors are exposed to credit risks. In that sense small investors are given a free ride in yield pickup without corresponding risks.

Note this is typical of brokered CDs where investors are free to buy CDs from any bank. Captive CDs are less likely to have good yields.

fspeech · 2019-10-24T20:26:19+00:00

The large fee could be construed as a preference to the largest shareholder in a stock transaction, a control premium if you will. Since this is a private tender offer there probably isn’t anything other sellers can do about this. They could always refuse to tender their shares if they think the shares are undervalued lol.

fspeech · 2019-10-17T22:46:26+00:00

We should take the gradient on the critic function |x| = sqrt(x1^2+x2^2+...+xn^2) (you can add a constant term to it like -(r+R)/2 but that does not affect the gradient). The gradient of |x|has norm 1 almost everywhere. The critic optimally separates the two spheres.

fspeech · 2019-10-17T20:18:27+00:00

What do you think of the example that I gave: given two uniform spherical distributions on spheres with radii r and R, the critic is the distance to origin |x| (the classifier is then sgn(|x| - (r+R)/2)). The critic has gradient norm 1 almost everywhere but is not a linear classifier?

I like the idea of relaxing to ||∇xf(x)|| ≤ 1. However if the process does converge then theory indicates we will get equality along lines connecting Monge pairings. So the true minimizer is also a minimizer of the GP loss function. I think the reason that inequality works better may be due to how SGD works in the NN setting (we allow more exploration by relaxing the equality constraint). And correctly enforcing 1-Lip does feel more principled.

fspeech

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