HN user
Off topic but I really hate modern web design. I found the content of this article interesting but I could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc. One of the reasons I like HN is the prevalence of personal blogs that just have text for me to sit and read.
Terrifying read
Reading some of the compendiums with Watersons commentary are a really interesting look into how things changed over the years and an insight into comic publishing
The notion that big business is conspiring to keep children from playing in the rain because of… reasons… might be my new favorite conspiracy. I’m bought in.
I'm not aware that these currently exist but the concept of reinsurance on reinsurance is not new (it's called retrocession). I will do some digging and see what I can find - thanks for the suggestion.
Thank you! As an Actuary I'm not exactly known for my design skills so it was a lot of effort to get things looking the way I wanted.
While Covid 19 was certainly a "Catastrophe", the market for pandemic insurance in 2020 was minuscule and to my knowledge did not cause any insurer solvency issues. There were a few cases of insurers being instructed to pay out significant claims by the courts on Business Interruption losses which the insurers argued were not covered due to existing policy exclusion.
Product development is usually highly specialized as there are a lot of nuances and frictions within the insurance industry that outsiders may not fully understand. It helps also to be in the industry and have the network with insurers, reinsurers, brokers, etc. This is not at all to suggest there isn't room for clever people to bring innovation to the market though!
Book recs are hard to specify for CAT bonds but for insurance in general:
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk - Peter L. Bernstein
The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
On the Brink: How a Crisis Transformed Lloyd's of London - Andrew Duguid
The last one is a personal favourite of mine
Thank you! No matter how many times I read things over I managed to leave a few behind. I will make those edits shortly.
New opportunities for retail investors have been popping up lately! That’s a big part of what Riskvest is meant to document.
The lack of information was my inspiration for building Riskvest. I called my own broker and when I said catastrophic bonds they asked if I meant buying bonds already in default.
On the risk side - your comments here are part of the myth I’m trying to dispel and will have lots more to say in future posts.
Yes for a single CAT bond you are exposed to potential 100% principle losses. But if you buy a bundle of CAT bonds that focus on say California Earthquake, Florida Hurricane, Japanese Typhoon, and a Cyber Event, you can imagine the diversification benefit you get there.
I’ve already created a very very simple model for people to play around with and learn the intuition for CAT bond return patterns. A default means 100% loss and this is unique vs. other bonds. I plan in the future to build a much more robust model.
https://www.riskvest.io/data-lab/cat-bond-portfolio-simulato...
Correct on every point and great insight, hello fellow insurance person.
I will clarify that CAT bonds can have industry loss triggers OR actual indemnity triggers. If an indemnity trigger then the insurer has to prove the actual loss. But you’re right on ILWs (Industry Loss Warranty) in that there is additional model/basis risk considerations.
Insurance companies try to minimize this basis risk. Because while sure it’s great to be in the situation where your CAT bond recovers when you didn’t have large losses, it’s NOT good to be in the position where you had big losses and you don’t recover. Certainty of recover can affect things like how much regulatory credit you get for your reinsurance.
Blown away by the traffic from this post!
For the web designers here please let me know if you noticed anything amiss. Ive had particular issues getting captchas working so please comment if you run into that issue.
The lack of quality is what gets to me. I've used AI tools in many aspects of my life to great benefit. Yet, nowadays scrolling through Reddit, X, or even video based platforms are a deluge of drivel. It was bad enough that I was spending too much time on my phone instead of interacting with other people but now even the content I'm interacting with isn't human!
At risk of derailing the conversation, I finished Cryptonomicon earlier this year and really enjoyed it. Any recommendations for similar books?
NJ residents who work in NYC do not pay the city income tax.
As someone who learned most of my initial coding abilities through R and RStudio in a data science context, and since moved on to more “standard” languages and IDEs, I’ve yet to find anything that comes close to the flexibility and integration of RStudio for hacking together data analytics.
VS Code/Python has made some major improvements in the past couple years but it’s still very clunky compared to the ease of running R code line by line without having to start up a debug instance. And now with copilot the most frustrating parts of R (such as remembering all the Tidyverse syntax) have been abstracted away.
The intention was for a 10:19am test, however the test was set using UTC instead of PDT time zones.
I believe it was Schopenhauer who said in one of his essays that (I’m paraphrasing) just because content is new, doesn’t make it good, because with a constant stream of new content, what’s good doesn’t stay new for long.
Snowcrash
I’m convinced that the people who constantly parrot this online are just terrible at excel.
Sure, advertising is collectively a multi-trillion dollar industry propelled largely by computer/data science, but it is still only a fraction of overall economic activity driven by advancements in data analysis.
The past couple decades have seen huge advancements in safety, reduced workplace injuries, auto injuries, etc. all driven in some part by analytics.
This sentiment that “all data analysis = advertising = evil” seems very reductive. It reminds me of all the comments I see from my technical peers about how “useless” other departments are such as HR and Sales, when they’re fundamental to a healthy business which pays the salaries of programmers.
The author seems to extrapolate from their experience of having a “six figure data job straight out of college clocking out at 5pm everyday producing no value” (paraphrasing) that all “data work” must be producing no societal value.
I don’t like throwing around out the phrase “privileged/out of touch” too often but this post doesn’t seem fit for the top position of HN.
As someone who is only vaguely familiar with the P = NP problem, can someone explain to me if proving P=NP automatically solves the numerous problems that can then be “quickly computed” or does it simply prove there is an existence of an algorithm for each problem?
To rephrase if this is not the case - what value does solving P = NP provide?
Ask HN: How do you limit your son's software interest?
Show HN: A tool to quickly improve your skills
Amazing stuff.
A small part of me wants to unironically say “this is good for crypto”, in the “any press is good press” sense. It’s recognition of a uniquely “crypto” concept (blending to obscure blockchain transactions) by a very “high” power.
Shameless self plug - I'm an Actuary, and as a way to learn React I put together a website that teaches you the basic concepts and math behind these actuarial table.
There is some discussion about this above, but I'm curious - does the $2M reward count as ordinary income? Would persons on work visas (i.e. H1B) be able to collect without jeopardizing their immigration status? Could you employer consider it moonlighting?
Hmm. I got an email yesterday saying my Heroku database was automatically upgrading, something I’ve never seen before. Maybe related?
It’s not just HN. It’s all over the web. There are some novel and interesting products being developed (reading about the theory behind Uniswap liquidity pools blew my mind) that people totally ignore because it’s easier to hate on the latest meme coin.
I find this line of thinking frustrating and dismissive of new(er) technology. Is "blockchain" necessary for anything? Probably not. Is it potentially the best solution when compared to the alternatives and weighed on its pros and cons? Maybe - but one has to be willing to investigate before dismissing it.