mdnahas

15 ms·

91.
by mdnahas 2y ago
Economist here. You’re not considering agglomeration effects. Smart people near other smart people are more effective. So world GDP growth may be faster. (Economists have pointed out that US growth is slower because SF is so expensive,
92.
by mdnahas 2y ago
It is partially true. Yes, the US invents the best medicines. But we spend 17% of our GDP on healthcare and a good portion of that is paper pushing and the prices used to compute GDP are not realistic. The best statistic - median life
93.
by mdnahas 2y ago
As a quant who went back and took the PhD economics classes, I can tell you that macroeconomists are not experts. The number that predicted the Great Financial Crisis is a handful. They study these things, but they know little. The microe
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by mdnahas 2y ago
Me too. My progressive lenses give me eye strain and it is much worse at the computer. I have non-progressive lens for work and they’re much more comfortable. (Especially with my large monitor.)
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by mdnahas 2y ago
My father worked at Bell Labs. (Take your kid to work day was a blast for me!) My father points out that the monopoly deal with the US govt turned Bell Labs the profit center. AT&T charged its customers a fixed percentage of its cos
96.
by mdnahas 2y ago
Economist here. If you’re looking for what to tax instead of income, the best things are: land, pollution and consumption. Land is great because people will not use less of it, no matter how high the tax. Pollution is great to tax, becaus
97.
by mdnahas 2y ago
Former quant, current economist here. One policy economists of all stripes agree on is having 0 tax on corporations. We should tax the profits when they show up in the owner’s income. Otherwise, you are taxing owners who are poor. https
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by mdnahas 2y ago
The XOR light switch is a trick. And, even if you know it is possible, it is hard to figure it out without someone telling you. My uncle and cousin were doing their own electrical work and couldn’t figure it out. I had seen the trick as a
99.
by mdnahas 2y ago
I emailed the author to correct the section on XOR swap: Once upon a time, when I was an aggressive young programmer, I tried to show off by replacing this swap: void swap(int a, int b) { int c = a; a = b; b = c; } with xo
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by mdnahas 2y ago
The best swing dance lesson I ever attended taught the feet work last. The worked first on the feel of leading and following. Leaders took their partner by the hand and just lead them around the room. Then tried to make the follower s
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by mdnahas 2y ago
What I learned from my burnout: “Hope is a zero-calorie meal”. You can keep going on hope and belief for a while, but eventually you need sustenance. And that’s physical and social: good food, natural settings, daylight, being part of a
102.
by mdnahas 2y ago
I've been in the trenches trying to change housing policy in Austin and the description in this article is very real to me. It has taken my group, AURA, years to learn the ropes of local politics: what specific policy we want, who has
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by mdnahas 2y ago
I think that’s a sign that ASML hasn’t had much competition at that scale. And that the new tech requires buyers willing to take a risk and invest in learning the new process.
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by mdnahas 2y ago
I did that once and one contributor had a huge negative value. His team had reimplemented a feature and his major contribution was deleting the old version.
105.
by mdnahas 2y ago
I’m an economist who has looked into something like this. This paper is about intra-company performance. I’ve look at incomes of the whole population. There, you find two distribution. Wages seem to follow a log-normal distribution,
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by mdnahas 2y ago
If you have questions, email me at hackernews@mike.nahasmail.com. — Mike
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by mdnahas 2y ago
Parchive, a.k.a. “.par2” files Parchive is a file format for redundant files. If any of the original files are damaged, the redundancy lets them be restored. It is used for transmission over faulty networks (like Usenet) and for protecti
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by mdnahas 2y ago
Under $100: “PureSleep” a mouth device to treat sleep apnea. I tried CPAP but drooled in the face-mask and had congestion with a nose-mask. PureSleep isn’t perfect, but I’m much healthier and productive with it. (I may spend more for a
109.
by mdnahas 2y ago
I am economist and former quant. I wrote a report on the gender pay gap for a candidate for Congress. There is evidence of a gap. Glassdoor has a great report showing that salaries for the same company and same job title are about 7% lowe
110.
by mdnahas 2y ago
I’m helping a YIMBY group in Austin, Texas. In the USA, we’ve tied the legal right of what you can build to the land. So, a housing shortage causes land prices to skyrocket. We need to break those connections (height limits, unit limits,
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by mdnahas 2y ago
I’m a transportation activist in Austin. Where did this happen?
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by mdnahas 2y ago
Valve has some great talks on monetizing free games. People will pay for social features that don’t change the game mechanics. E.g., make every donor’s avatar visually different, so people acknowledge they’re good people. E.g., wear a g
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Stripe mining bank account data via "linked accounts"(support.stripe.com)
2 points by mdnahas 2y ago|1 comments
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by mdnahas 2y ago
My new landlord asked me to pay my rent using Apartments.com. The website said 2.75% fee for credit cards and free for paying from a checking account. When you select "checking account", it asked for my bank, login name, and pa
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by mdnahas 2y ago
Politicians in democracies favor property owners because they are a majority, reliable voters and are likely to stay in the district. Therefore, the tax and political policies encourage owning a house. Many families take inordinate risk
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by mdnahas 2y ago
Computational Geometry has a technique for avoiding all of the complex cases where point are colinear, coplanar, cocircular, etc.. I’ve forgotten the techniques’ name, but coordinates are integers plus an epsilon term. As the epsilon goe
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by mdnahas 2y ago
Having burned out hard, my explanation is hope. Hope is like a zero calorie meal. It will keep you going and focused, but eventually you’ll collapse. We can learn to push through hard times, but not forever. You need connection, exerci
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by mdnahas 2y ago
I don’t have enough to retire on, but spent my last decade working on what I wanted. I worked on Formal Proof, until I realized the problem wasn’t the tech but the math-proof business model. (Academic mathematicians aren’t incentivized
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by mdnahas 2y ago
Did similar in NYC in Central Park. Organizers were lawyers, so rules took 3 hours to sus out, but the game took less than 2. The other team brought walkee-talkies! My team won. A devious member waited and then changed clothes into a br
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by mdnahas 2y ago
As an economist, I totally agree. Funding of high-return majors by good students should have rock-bottom interest rates. The govt should only be stepping into the loan market if the market isn’t happening. (Not that the market is doing

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