hooande

75 ms·

721.
by hooande 14y ago
Correlation does not equal causation. There was a world war going on in the period from 1914-1917, when inflation of the dollar was at it's highest ever [1]. It's possible that the effect could have been much worse if we were still on the g
722.
by hooande 14y ago
Obama's use of public funding is rather historic. In his first election, he raised more money in small increments from individual donors than any other candidate before him. That's regular people paying $10 or $20 each instead of Citizens U
723.
by hooande 14y ago
This could be renamed "Common Machine Learning Mistakes". Great advice all around, of course. Insufficient data, lack of or incorrect data prep, and poorly defined success criteria are problems that plague all forms of machine learning. As
724.
by hooande 14y ago
Our increased production of oil is due to the new technology of fracking (fracturing the ground to get oil out of it). The situation is certainly not "We could have been fracking 15 years ago, but we didn't feel like it because Saudi gas
725.
by hooande 14y ago
The author brings up some good points about the potential for arbitrage between prediction markets. But in my experience, intrade has a strong conservative bias. This is more likely a case of people betting on their (incorrect) political co
726.
by hooande 14y ago
Honestly? It's cool to see a statistician getting media love. I imagine for most people he's like a real life character from Big Bang Theory. I've seen him on tv several times and he comes off as incredibly nerdy, but he's skilled at talkin
727.
by hooande 14y ago
This seems like a great trending topic detection algorithm, but nothing revolutionary. The "hours in advance" part is probably more to do with the scale of twitter's data and their decisions about when to publish topics on their website tha
728.
by hooande 14y ago
To his credit, he was wise enough to publish a book at just the time when people want to hear from him most. The downside of being the king of political prediction is that you're only popular once every four years. But you're really really
729.
by hooande 14y ago
I think that a Liberal vs Conservative two party system is inevitable in any large group. This assumes that most humans fall into broad liberal (counts on government, believes in helping the poor, open to new ideas) or conservative (dislike
730.
by hooande 14y ago
Because it's gambling. Some are better gamblers than others, but no individual can consistently have more ups than downs over a period of years. "I was making a lot of money but now I've stopped" is the same thing as "I was lucky until I wa
731.
by hooande 14y ago
At the risk of being labelled as negative, I'm going to disagree. The majority of people just don't care. They don't care about politics, about science, about reason or about anything outside of their day to day lives and relationships. Tha
732.
by hooande 14y ago
The office of the presidency has more power than you think it does. The president is expected to set the legislative agenda, meaning that he or she has a lot of influence over what the houses of congress will talk about. ie, the ability to
733.
by hooande 14y ago
In defense of Herbert Hoover, he wasn't a terrible president. The chaos caused by market speculation was out of his control. It's always possible to point out something that someone could have done differently in hindsight. More than anythi
734.
by hooande 14y ago
I don't understand the economic argument for legalization. It will turn the price of drugs into price + taxes. The current complex distribution and supply network doesn't have to pay taxes because they are already illegal, so they'll contin
735.
The Night A Computer Predicted The Next President(npr.org)
8 points by hooande 14y ago|0 comments
736.
by hooande 14y ago
What bothers me is the triviality of the examples in the article: Next year’s version of the Excel spreadsheet program, part of the Office suite of software, will be able to comb very large amounts of data. For example, it could scan 12 mi
737.
by hooande 14y ago
As hackers--and I include in this definition those who hack software, hardware, social behaviour, and marketplaces--our mission is first to UNDERSTAND and then second to INFLUENCE. Maybe I can help with the understanding part. Here are so
738.
by hooande 14y ago
Are you familiar with the 10,000 Hour Rule? It says that the mastery of any skill requires 10k hours of deliberate practice of that skill. Meditation is the act of deliberately practicing and developing one's ability to resist distraction
739.
by hooande 14y ago
This looks interesting. How does Machist get their clients? And what do they do to ensure client quality? A bad client who doesn't really know what they want, or over/under communicates can be a burden. I feel like the only way to attract t
740.
by hooande 14y ago
I'm sure the flight hackers are aware of skyscanner, and probably know how to use it better than the average person. There are probably many exceptions like "Oh, if you're flying here skyscanner sucks and you really want to use X instead".
741.
by hooande 14y ago
They didn't say that they invented general intelligence. This is clearly providing a natural language interface to an existing api. It doesn't take degrees in neuroscience and philosophy to do that. They've clearly spent a lot of time to bu
742.
by hooande 14y ago
I would use a good natural language understanding api to do basic research, ideally monitoring many different feeds for topics of interest. It could also be a good way to monitor trends or competitors. I can't think of many uses cases for n
743.
by hooande 14y ago
Facebook appears to be immune from privacy concerns. No matter what they do, the average person will keep using it. So what's to stop facebook from offering a "Narrative Data" style service of their own? If facebook said, "we're going to sh
744.
by hooande 14y ago
Basing teachers' pay and job security on surveys from students seems like a good idea, especially given the numbers mentioned in the article. One problem is that it might give too much power to students. I was a dick back in high school. Th
745.
by hooande 14y ago
Life now is clearly better and more interesting than it was 100 years ago. But the pace of innovation is much, much slower. 100 years ago cars, household electricity and recorded sound were all brand new. Every one of these things represe
746.
by hooande 14y ago
HFT is gambling, pure and simple. I bet the price is going up, someone else bets that it isn't. Personally, I don't have a problem with gambling and I don't care if other people do it. It certainly sounds sketchy, given that they are using
747.
by hooande 14y ago
What would the 2012 equivalent of The Jetsons be? How do we see "future people"? The Jetsons was more cliche than prediction, playing up the average person's view of the future. Our version of that might be ultrathin (credit card) phones, f
748.
by hooande 14y ago
Hilary Mason is brilliant. But Yahoo knows what they're doing when it comes to their advertising. YahooMail is one of the most valuable properties on the web in terms of CPM. Their ad display makes for a crappy UI experience, but it also ma
749.
by hooande 14y ago
You shouldn't declare yourself to be the underdog, it shows a lack of confidence. Other people will do that for you. Everyone loves a David vs Goliath story, but this seems like an unnecessary concession. And you can't say "screw black swan
750.
Scientists Unveil 'Google Maps' for Human Genome(npr.org)
8 points by hooande 14y ago|0 comments

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