According to the article (and the discussed research) this was only a minor factor:
"The researchers also explored the possibility that index changes are more predictable today than in the past, leading sophisticated market participants to trade ahead of the events. They concluded that this played only a minor role in their findings, however."
The two main factors being:
"...an increase in migrations over time from the S&P MidCap 400 index, and an overall increase in the market's ability to provide liquidity to those investors seeking to buy and sell around the time of index changes.
The additional liquidity has 'made it easier for everyone to trade, and as a result, the prices move less.' says Dr. Greenwood.
And with more stocks migrating to the S&P 500 from the S&P MidCap 400, midcap funds are selling as S&P 500 funds are buying, leading to 'a wash' in demand, he says.
This factor is actually lessening over time. The BlackRocks and Vanguards of the world have dozens, even hundreds, of index funds - all with different benchmarks and goals. When a stock is "rebalanced" out of one fund, it ends up being added to some other fund that the same company manages. So the transfer occurs as a notation on the internal books; no actual arbitrage-able trade actually happens. This is even happening in the ESG space - we are starting to see fund "pairs" - one fund tracks the companies that meet the specific rules of that fund, and the other tracks the companies that do not.
Note that this isn't perfect - index fund A has more assets under management than index fund B, etc. But as index investing grows, the actual investor inflows and outflows are what dominate, not rebalancing moves.
> This is even happening in the ESG space - we are starting to see fund "pairs" - one fund tracks the companies that meet the specific rules of that fund, and the other tracks the companies that do not.
This is very interesting. Do you have any examples of these funds?
There is an easy to understand white paper about this concept at CRSP’s website. Their particular ESG indexes aren’t investable, but it seems to be only a matter of time given that all their others are.
> I read all his novels (and some of his short stories), he's one of my favorite authors
That makes at least two of us. :) But, I suspect there are quite a few more HN readers who like Kafka's works and literature in general (the first is arguably very correlated to the other), judging from how often literature related articles appear on the HN front page. Often, when that is the case I also can't help but wonder the same about the correlation between being a fiction and HN reader.
To me, Kafka’s work is particularly axiomatic. It has an internal logic and tends toward involution. I could see how this would appeal to technically minded people, whereas Dickens, or Austen, authors whose work tends to be discursive, might seem boring or without basis.
They are axiomatic in that Kafka's worlds are frequently built upon a set of conditions, and the development is contingent upon how these conditions interact, whereas other writers often depart from pre-established rules because they become cumbersome, or they introduce new ones as a matter of convenience. Kafka, in a story like The Burrow, seems to be in search of a complete system that becomes fully expressed by virtue of an exhaustive exploration of its potential, in accordance with its own stipulations. It develops like a drop of ink in a glass of water. Due also to a desire not to retread ground, as he criticizes Dickens of doing, this may be why much of his work went unfinished.
By involution, I mean that Kafka's stories, to a greater extent than just about any other writer, forestall the influence of "outside" forces. His worlds do not rely on historical context, and his characters hardly, if ever, propose a new and narrative-changing idea from whole clothe, although the conclusions they draw are often strange, novel, and sudden. Kafka's land surveyor in The Castle is always circling back to the fact that he is a land surveyor as the basis for his behavior, even though he never actually fulfills or comes close to fulfilling his vocational imperative.
I always recommend Reiner Stach's three volume biography of Kafka to people. The author does a great job of looking into the literature as much as he looks into the life.
I recently watched an interesting conversation between Todd McGowan and Walter Davis on Kafka[1] which you might enjoy.
There's a bit in the aforementioned interview where they mention if one is learning German, a good introductory route is reading Kafka and Heidegger's Being and Time. I've been contemplating whether I should learn German to read my favorite thinkers in their primary written language (and even potentially make a move to Germany, away from the weariness of California), or, rather, become more grounded in the English language.
Thank you for the link, I got 17 minutes into this lazy slop and got to the something about law (judicial law that is) being "alive and sexual" and couldn't take any more.
Little useful is extracted, it's mainly academics grooming each other over their cleverness. I just couldn't bear it any more.
An essay on writing by Raymond Carver [1] (as well as pretty much anything by Raymond Carver and authors he mentions in the essay :)). It's about good fiction writing, but, I think, good to keep in mind for writing in general.
No discussion of Carver is complete without mentioning his relationship with editor Gordon Lish.
>Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts––two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten––and he was unnerved to the point of desperation.
> Vector search, though, isn't as good on handling typos and not good at all when it comes to as you type searching. Vehic won't match on auto, for example.
This is incorrect in general case and it entirely depends on the model that is used to produce word vectors and the text corpus the model is trained with.
For instance, fastText model is trained on words, but also their parts (n-grams), so it should produce word vectors that would be close (in cosine-distance) to vectors of their corresponding typos and partials, even if the text corpus that was used to train the model doesn't contain same typos and partially typed words verbatim.
Could you share details about the machine translation engine that is used (or where to find out more about it)? Are there any plans to open source the extension code (with the WebAssembly optmizations that are mentioned in the article)?
You can find the engine used here [1], the API built around it here [2] and its WASM port here [3] and the WebAssembly matrix multiplication optimizations are here [4]
I can experience something similar with the ventilation system in my apartment. Usually, the sound of it is immersed in the background noise together with other sounds coming from the outside, so most of the time I'm not aware of it at all. However, sometimes when I meditate I hear it and if I focus my attention on it, after a while it becomes clear and loud, rich and versatile, not unlike a music played on a wind instrument.
Related to this and discussed quite a few times on HN ([1],[2]), 'In Praise of Idleness', an essay by Bertrand Russell: https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Prais... . I return to it every once in a while, if not to regain a bit of sanity, than just to enjoy clarity of thought and style in his writing.
I wonder where the fascination with trains and railways (that I share) comes from. Maybe from the 19th century industrialization and technological revolution when railway was one of its main symbols ("locomotion of progress")? Related to this, it was a great surprise to me when I first found out about the origin of the term 'hacker':
"3. The Early Hackers
The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1. The Signals and Power committee of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club adopted the machine as their favorite tech-toy and invented programming tools, slang, and an entire surrounding culture that is still recognizably with us today. These early years have been examined in the first part of Steven Levy's book Hackers [Levy] .
MIT's computer culture seems to have been the first to adopt the term `hacker'. The Tech Model Railroad Club's hackers became the nucleus of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the world's leading center of AI research into the early 1980s. Their influence was spread far wider after 1969, the first year of the ARPANET. "
A few possibilities for why people find trains fascinating:
1. Their place in history. Sailing has been around forever, but only recently in the grand scheme of things did land-based travel become quick and convenient. And trains did it. Cars came later. Trains revolutionized both industry and personal mobility.
2. Nostalgia for a time in the past when they were at their peak, before they were partially supplanted by cars. There's something intriguing about a technology we don't use nearly as much anymore but was once able to bear a key part of the burden of making society tick.
3. Cars and trains are both neat machines, but most people own or have access to a car, so there isn't a feeling of mystery or exclusivity around cars. How many people get a chance to drive a train even one time in their life?
4. Where they are used, trains naturally make themselves the center of attention. With cars, they come and go constantly, so the arrival or departure of a car isn't really an event. The arrival or departure of a train is an event, often with a schedule. When they were the dominant form of transportation, in a small town, probably everyone in the entire town knew what time the train arrived. Trains also make a lot of noise (whistles, horns, engines, etc.), so that's another way they're the center of attention.
5. A passenger train is part of the public sphere and is a location where things can happen. So it is its own social setting, like work, school, church, etc. are social settings.
Your list reminded me of a brilliant adventure/detective game "The Last Express" that manages to capture quite a few aspects surrounding trains - joy of traveling, historical significance, nostalgia, confined social setting...
Trains were also responsible for the need to make advances with another geeky / hacker favorite:- Accurate time keeping, along with standardized time zones.
Interesting point. I'll mention though that accurate time keeping that worked on sailing ships was a navigation breakthrough in the 1700s. It's what you need to figure out your longitude.
Ah yes, indeed they were accurate. I should have been more explicit about widespread agreement as to what the precise time that should be accurately measured actually is/was.
My pet hypothesis is that train systems are intellectually complex, but bound in a framework of knowable rules. It seems like some people just can't resist diving deep into systems like that (credit card rewards, board games, or, of course, computer programming).
There's something that seems to make train sets much more universal. Compare it to slot cars which are nearly identical technologically but don't have the same geek cred. The only complexity difference is that you get some track switches if you're lucky, but I remember some slot/rc car systems having things like that too. The other big difference is the speed, maybe being slower let's the analytical or imaginative parts of the brain engage?
It's amazing how in a model, such as this one, the control system has gone from a bunch of mini-computers and relays over the years, to these days, in modern layouts, tiny DDC control modules and very compact hand held DCC controllers. And on top of that a reasonably mature common control protocol defined by the NMRA (https://www.nmra.org/) that's pretty standard world wide.
I was a rail fan growing up, and my dad and brother are still in the hobby. I always thought the fascination was pretty simple: trains are the biggest machines that are ubiquitous and can be observed up close in virtually any populated area.
Also why no (or almost no) female model railroad hobbyists? I think there's a male aspergers thing going on.. same reason you'll see men programming for fun, but not so many women.
They are big engineering problems that move and in the case of steam if not managed properly explode.
That’s innately cool to a certain subset of people (including me) also the minutiae and detail required to run a complex rail system safely is again fascinating.
Here's my anecdote. Ever since I was about 3, any large machine fascinated me. Construction vehicles, trains, planes, even the garbage trucks making the rounds in my neighborhood, and the dumpster trucks making their rounds at my school. At least for me, it's simply a fantasy over big giant machines. Maybe not so different from how native Amazonian tribes sometimes mistook airplanes flying over the rain forest as gods.
Some of this is the romance of steam. My love of steam comes from my father, he was around in the 50's and 60's when steam was superseded and disappeared in a very short period of time. He spent hundreds of hours photographing the last mainline steam in the UK - before it was gone never to return.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563187
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29936104
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31504052