mrfredward

10 ms·

31.
by mrfredward 6y ago
The customer chooses the card, the retailer pays the fee. Other companies can't undercut Mastercard's fees because the consumer(the person making the decision of payment type here) doesn't know or care what the fee is.
32.
by mrfredward 6y ago
St Louis Federal Reserve: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT Keep in mind this is savings economy wide divided by personal income economy wide, so people with big numbers (high earners) disproportionately affec
33.
by mrfredward 6y ago
If you have a plan that relies on everyone in a nation of 300 million behaving ethically and honestly when there is a big incentive not to, you have a bad plan. The moral failing is on the clinics, sure, but if you want to fix the problem,
34.
by mrfredward 6y ago
Software is unique because it can be copy pasted. A builder that makes a house in 4 months the first time might estimate 3.5 months for a near identical house. But to deploy the same desktop app on two computers you merely reuse the install
35.
by mrfredward 6y ago
>"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" We really need to stop using Hanlon's razor when discussing businesses at scale. It is a great rule of thumb for everyday people, who are much mo
36.
by mrfredward 6y ago
>have been accomplished almost completely by reducing the weight of the cars This is entirely false. All the work in materials to make cars lighter has been countered by added amenities (from power seats all the way to chilled cupholders
37.
by mrfredward 6y ago
The fact that you think "leave it alone" is an example of lacking critical thinking skills shows just how subjective this is. On the assumption that not many people being interviewed by Microsoft in the 90s had an iPhone style pla
38.
by mrfredward 6y ago
Cognitive biases are a real problem for free markets, but the question isn't whether free markets are perfect, it's how they compare to the alternatives. People can make poor choices because of cognitive biases, or they can have c
39.
by mrfredward 6y ago
This post is making an error, or at least a poor choice in terminology, when thinking profit only means GAAP accounting or taxable profit. Malone cut costs by reducing tax liability, getting better prices on programming, and increasing the
40.
by mrfredward 6y ago
Funny to see it mentioned in the article: I remember my middle school English teacher coming back from a continuing education course and saying she would no longer grade us in red ink, because studies showed red ink felt more critical and h
41.
by mrfredward 6y ago
The fact that Congress provided some relief to self-employed people during a once in a century disaster is absolutely not a good reason to reclassify people as employees. Businesses got billions in forgivable loans to simply not fire the pe
42.
by mrfredward 6y ago
Another important factor here is international currency exchange. For a deeply simplified example: say you printed a bunch of money and handed it to Americans who wanted to buy electronics with the money. Factories in China would happily me
43.
by mrfredward 6y ago
>>It clears out the old to make way for the new. Just imagine working for a boss who had been climbing the company ladder 200 years. Or trying to buy a house in a market where people had been accumulating capital for centuries. And le
44.
by mrfredward 6y ago
The author compares it to asking about 2+2, but I think it's more closely analogous to asking "What can we say about 4 and 2+2?" Given the ambiguous wording, I wouldn't expect anyone to answer confidently, and lost of in
45.
by mrfredward 6y ago
The distinction that makes ai compression creepy is that it can use prior knowledge of what a face is. Traditional compression has no high level knowledge of what a video call looks like, the algorithms are about patterns in how pixels chan
46.
by mrfredward 6y ago
The same author has a post from 2013 (3 years after "Why I stopped reading HN") addressing what is lost when programmers chase internet points. https://sealedabstract.com/rants/hey-programmers-we-need-to-...
47.
by mrfredward 6y ago
Poorly behaved graphics drivers maybe? It would be quite a surprise to see an intentional exploit used on a pdf with such a narrow appeal.
48.
by mrfredward 6y ago
>ISAs are securitized and resold. Lambda has zero incentive to do anything above and beyond pushing students through some percentage of the program. I disagree with your analysis of the incentives here. The price people pay for tomorrow&
49.
by mrfredward 6y ago
US healthcare spending in 2019: $3.6 Trillion US Financial Sector profits: $422 billion >It would still be worth conducting fintechy business. It would barely affect bonuses. It is absurd and blatantly false to claim the entire burden of
50.
by mrfredward 6y ago
>It takes about 80 watts to heat up a liter of water 1° celsius You're confusing power and energy here.
51.
by mrfredward 6y ago
For the individual you are correct, which is why companies haven't had much trouble getting people to buy non-voting stock. But for the system as a whole, it's pretty important that the shareholders have the ability to vote for bo
52.
by mrfredward 6y ago
In the article: "Better yet, if you happen to know a miner (we didn’t), you could have them include the transaction directly in a block" But how could you guarantee the miner was trustworthy, and wouldn't just take the money
53.
by mrfredward 6y ago
I believe the reason for that rule is to avoid polluting the thread with "did you even read" type remarks. Starting an argument won't help the thread recover from an uninformed comment. Nothing in the rules discourages downvo
54.
by mrfredward 6y ago
>I'm totally open to the idea that someone will come along and explain to my why my idea for how the Fed should give everyone money is just not workable. Congress has this power, and can always use it. The fed doesn't have this
55.
by mrfredward 6y ago
The Fed just buys debt...the closest thing to giving away money they can do is nudge someone's interest rates lower or make a loan easier to get. Congress decides how the money is distributed when they're spending it.
56.
by mrfredward 6y ago
In the paper: "The physical setup allows the initial conditions to be described by 2 parameters and the evolution of the system by 3 parameters" Let's see, 3 input parameters, relying on a ton of pre-computed data, no ability
57.
by mrfredward 6y ago
Looking at earnings growth as a steady process can be misleading when profit margins vary. Intel has a 26% net margin, and AMD is just over 8%, so if AMD gets Intel's pricing power their earnings could be 3X as high before any change i
58.
by mrfredward 6y ago
According to the article, the tracks are designed for sustained g-forces of 5Gs. These are the accelerations that are sustained for greater than a second. According to the annotations on the NYT's plot, the g forces which are most alar
59.
by mrfredward 6y ago
Another commenter pointed out that one of the paper's authors, Valter Longo, has already written a number of books on intermittent fasting. While I think it's great when scientist publish in a form that is more accessible to the p
60.
by mrfredward 6y ago
>You say the company is evidently pleased with your work and that may be true, but now you're part of the problem. You think the company tolerates shitty work, so you've decided to tolerate shitty work. Don't. For a non-ma

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