byrneseyeview

13 ms·

61.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
This comes up as a hypothetical risk whenever stories like this break, but I know of no cases where it happens. That includes situations where individual link-buyers and link-buying sites have been publicly outed by commentators or competit
62.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
I am shocked that this isn't standard practice. Last time I got a job offer, the first thing I did was call up two people who'd sold their companies to that employer, one guy who worked there, one guy who'd quit, and one who'd been offered
63.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Disparate Impact is not a real explanation, because it's equivalently useful at any stage of the argument. For example, "Disparate Impact" might explain why banks don't lend so much to group X. So if we find some good underlying variable th
64.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
No heuristic is perfect, but the question is whether this situation is common enough to swamp the general informational effects. So, three possibilities: 1. Adam Sandler will pay a fractionally higher interest rate. 2. The heuristic will ro
65.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
If that's exactly what happened, the market would have already adjusted; no loan officer is going to say "I know poor people's social networks will indicate that they're even less responsible than they look on paper. I can't wait for them t
66.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Banks are in a competitive industry; if their costs go down, they'll cut rates to increase sales, unless there's some implicit or explicit cartel behavior that keeps them in line. But if that were the case, you'd expect banks in general to
67.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
If I were writing a social network layer to a creditworthiness algorithm, the first thing I'd do is create some kind of taxonomy of friend networks. Got 500+ friends? See if the Google results for your name indicate fame (i.e. you show up i
68.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
It's very hard to argue against this. Either your social network is a good signal, or it's not. If it's not a good signal, the people who use this information are going to lose money--they will quite literally pay for being wrong. But if it
69.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Thank you for the correction. I'd been using terminology ineffectively. The way I was taught it was: - An algorithm is a step-by-step process for transforming any valid input into a specific valid output. - A heuristic is a process that bri
70.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
This article alludes to the "bee sting" theory of poverty (see http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/03/30/... ). That brings up an interesting question: in historical terms, the subject of this story is quite well-off; he
71.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Yeah, that's more of a heuristic for determining the health of an infant. An algorithmic approach would give you a definite yes-or-no for all baby inputs. And the analogy breaks down here because the online ecosystem adapts very fast. It wo
72.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
The usual equation for startups is "This has a small chance to change the world." Fiddling around with the non-world-changing outcomes is premature optimization, since the best exits come from failing to change the world and merely creating
73.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Are there really algorithms for judging the truth? I think the closest we can get is heuristics for identifying whether or not something is being actively deceptive, but it's a big epistemological leap to say that we can definitely determin
74.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
For funding, the median is less useful. I wouldn't be surprised if the median series A returned a loss. If optimizing for the median outcome is your goal, VC funding is probably not a good plan.
75.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Part of it is competitive intelligence. I want to know who's doing big ad buys on Huffpo and FoxNews and the NYT. Agencies have gotten very clever at measuring the indirect effect of ads; most of them don't get a direct click, of course, bu
76.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Banner ads pay my salary, so out of professional courtesy, no. It's very easy to voluntarily blind yourself to ads. Plus, if I see something egregious on my employer's site, I can let them know. I use Ghostery to see who's buying data from
77.
The Strange Math of Scale on the Web(digital-dd.com)
1 points by byrneseyeview 15y ago|0 comments
78.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Wealth does correlate with intelligence: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-covariance-between-cognitiv... The phrase "does not necessarily correlate" needs some unpacking. I think anyone would agree that for N=2 that's true, but for higher
79.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Better title: "Anonymous Internet commentator: Here's a bunch of common knowledge you can glean from any basic investment book. I'll omit the half that makes my argument look bad. Also, I can pretend to be someone who wouldn't naturally agr
80.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
The command economy argument is a subset of the transaction cost argument. Lots of people have long-term plans, and some of those plans involve extensive cooperation from third parties. Companies are a smart abstraction for coordinating thi
81.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3221693 This is a very relevant alternative view. Money quote: At Zynga, however, Mark Pincus apparently likes to do things a bit differently. Rather than simply firing under-performing employees and h
82.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
I know a company that did this. They found a big client, and did a small project at breakeven. Result: the client was impressed, so now one of their biggest clients is paying breakeven rates; factor in the cost of flying an account person o
83.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
I used to think it was an industry with low barriers to entry, as did lots of people who have lost lots of money on Groupon clones. I'm not sure why, but it turns out to be a really tough business for all but a few companies.
84.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
That argument is sort of like a chess strategy that starts with "If I get four moves in a row, I can checkmate my opponent." Nobody is denying the basic facts you've cited, so it'll be very hard for you to find someone whose ignorance of th
85.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Is this accounting for immigration? The US has the same issue: the white population reproduces at barely above or barely below replacement (it varies), but immigrants have much higher fertility. And, weirdly enough, comparable infant mortal
86.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
But pollution per marginal dollar of GDP per capita is lower. That could just be an artifact of the rich world relatively de-industrializing: as the US gets more Facebooks and Starbuckses, China gets more steel mills. But it also seems that
87.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
GK Chesterton tells a similar, but sort of contradictory, story: In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists
88.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Right, but there's a glaring statistical error. Schools are very stratified by skill level. So you may have someone with a 1550 and a 2.5 HS GPA, sitting next to someone with a 1300 and a 3.8 HS GPA. One smart slacker, one hard worker who i
89.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
That 6-7% is 6-7% of the offering price, not the day's closing price. So the statement "In this way the bank could artificially jack up the new company’s price," is the opposite of the truth: in this way, the bank lowers its fee in exchang
90.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Doesn't that seem kind of redundant? "People who do well on IQ tests have systematic advantages which allow them to do well on IQ tests, but IQ tests are meaningless." Obviously, it's possible to imagine a world in which IQ is not largely h

More ›