candybar

You're dodging the point here - the point is that the scope of the privacy policy should correspond to the scope of the business. And the NY Times privacy policy has basically the same scope as Google's privacy policy, despite them not providing useful services at the same scale. The evolution of Google's privacy policy in fact is about the increase in the scope of Google's business.

It's not so much hypocrisy as the fact Google's collection and use of data is skewed towards providing better services to consumers while New York Times's (and their partners' through the site/app) collection and use of data is skewed towards monetization.

That's not the point - the point is that this is a loophole that effectively says, third-parties can do whatever they want with respect to your private information through our website and app and we're not at all responsible. This more or less renders the privacy policy entirely moot. It's like a vegan restaurant coming up with a "vegan guarantee" agreement that is supposed to guarantee that the dining experience is vegan, but excludes "third-party" ingredients from the guarantee. And it more or less says, you're subject to Google's privacy policy, when you visit the New York Times site, which means everything bad about Google's privacy policy is included in the New York Times privacy policy.

From a technical standpoint, what's happening is that New York Times is running arbitrary code that it doesn't know anything about on the browsers of people that visit their site. And they are claiming that they are not responsible for what it does, despite the fact it's delivered through New York Times.

This seems pretty disingenuous given the range of services offered by Google and New York Times - New York Times is a regional publication that doesn't really have any reason to know your location besides ads, while Google offers a free mobile operating system that millions of apps run on top of, many of which (including their own) use the location capabilities of the platform to provide useful services.

From New York Times privacy policy:

Some of the services and advertisements included in the NYT Services, including on NYTimes.com and within our mobile apps, are delivered or served by third-party companies, which may collect information about your use of the NYT Services.

These companies place or recognize cookies, pixel tags, web beacons or other technology to track certain information about our NYT Services website users. For example, in the course of serving certain advertisements, an advertiser may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser in order to collect certain information about your use of the NYT Services. For another example, an advertiser or ad server may also be able to collect your device’s unique identifier in the course of serving an ad. In many cases, this information could be used to show you ads on other websites based on your interests.

We do not have access to, nor control over, these third parties' use of cookies or other tracking technologies or how they may be used.

For example, we use Google to serve advertisements on the NYT Services, which use the Google Doubleclick cookie, and in some cases, a unique device identifier, to show you ads based on your visit to NYTimes.com and other sites on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the Google Doubleclick cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy. If you would like more information about this practice, and to learn how to opt out of it in desktop and mobile browsers on the particular device on which you are accessing this Privacy Policy, please visit http://optout.aboutads.info/#/ and http://optout.networkadvertising.org/#. You may download the AppChoices app at http://www.aboutads.info/appchoices to opt out in mobile apps.

They are embedding third-party tracking technologies inside their app and letting each of them track however they want.

It seems to me that the idea of free will is used to justify horrible acts as well - the entire concept of retributive justice for instance.

This doesn't have much to do with speculation - the decision to rent or not is something that every owner can make and the economics of the decision don't depend on whether your investment was based on price speculation.

Generally speaking, wherever you have a strong rental market, vacancy is low - it doesn't make sense to keep units vacant in a strong rental market. Speculators aren't some magical creatures to whom normal rules don't apply - real estate speculators are merely investors who believe that prices will move in their favor in the future. That doesn't mean they are any more incentivized to forego rental income, which generally is a large component of the return on any real estate investment.

Edit: I'll add that if you go by classical economics, you'd predict rent to go down if price speculation is excessive, since builders respond to real estate price and if price is sufficiently above cost of construction, this leads to construction of more units, which increases supply and depresses rent.

My general understanding is that this doesn't necessarily work that way because the fundamental factors behind what makes a location attractive don't change - within reason, if you build more, in the long run, you just become a larger, denser version of what you were, which just attracts more people.

This doesn't make any sense - real estate speculation would increase the purchase price of real estate but cannot directly impact rental rates. Speculation means people are bidding up prices for real estate beyond what's supportable by current demand, based on expected future demand. This generally doesn't make sense in the rental market - as a tenant, you're not entitled to benefit from any future increase in demand and it doesn't make sense to pay more that what the rental is worth to you now. This means rents, in aggregate, are a relatively accurate measure of the current supply and demand, free of speculative intents.

Ironically, certain types of rent control laws could lead to the rental market being influenced by speculation. Rent control laws effectively turn tenants into partial owners - this means, depending on the law, it may make sense to rent at an above-market rate, if that allows you to keep renting the same unit at what would later be a below-market rate. Likewise, from the landlord's perspective, it may not make sense to rent even at a market rate, because to do so may lock you out of getting what would be a higher market rate in the future.

Again, observational studies are going to have all kinds of confounding variables - if you're going to make an argument that one of them is important enough to reverse the conclusion, you should have some evidence and certainly more than a just-so-story.

600K / 12M = 0.05 or 5% over 10 years. This means roughly 500 deaths / 100,000 annually. According to CDC (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm) the death rate in the US is 850 deaths / 100,000. These aren't exactly apples to apples but that seems enough to say this doesn't look especially high-risk.

But,

> only 10% of people with hypercholesterolemia received lipid-lowering therapy

Wouldn't this be much higher in the UK cohort? Also,

> The sex- and age- specific levels of TC in the current study of Koreans were lower than those reported in other high-income countries, including Japan, England, and the US

Which would reduce the effect (relative to what was found in the analysis of UK data) even further.

I don't think it adds a whole lot to talk about the confounding variables of this nature - it's an observational study, so of course it will have all sorts of confounding variables. If you are going to make a strong case that controlling for a specific confounding variable would reverse the relationship though, you should quantify the impact. It's unclear to me that statin usage would make a large difference, given that the study notes it wasn't a popular treatment.

My general feeling is that these types of studies tend to end up measuring overall health - given that most of the factors that lead to high cholesterol level were controlled for (BMI, physical activity, smoking status, drinking, etc) - and the average person in any population is relatively healthy and well-adjusted to the common diet, any large deviation from the norm in any direction statically makes it likely that the subject has some health issues.

What would be interesting to see in a meta-study is whether the optimal level of cholesterol either was consistent across populations that had very different averages or it tends to be near the median in each population. The former would be evidence that it's an independently meaningful biomarker; the latter would be evidence that it's just measuring how normal you are.

This is the exact opposite of how things are. Due to the constraints of the monetary union, the Bank of France is not a true central bank (the ECB is) and does not have the ability to print money or otherwise set monetary policy. It absolutely cannot indefinitely finance the deficit spending.

The Fed, on the other hand, is a classic central bank and it can print money to finance the federal deficit. I think you're misinterpreting the supposed "independence" of the fed - it remains a government institution that is largely independent operationally (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...), but it's not a private institution. In other words, it's not independent the way a private bank is; it's independent the way FTC is.

The methodology seems highly questionable. From the actual study (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspi0000187.p...)

"Social class was measured in three ways. To indicate subjective social class, participants saw an image of a ladder that 'represents where people stand in your country.' and selected the rung on which they felt they stood, relative to other people in their country"

"However, when difference scores were used (or the alternative joint-testing procedure), the conclusions were not so straightforward. Here, we found support for Hypothesis 1 only in the case of subjective social class. The difference score approach also showed that education and income were negatively associated with overconfidence, directly contrasting the results generated by the residual score approach."

So it's not so much that people from a higher social class are overconfident but that overconfident people appear to be from a higher social class due to their methodology and downstream assessment confirms their methodological bias. It's quite incredible this received as much attention as it did. Also this sample is limited to Mexican small-business owners applying for loans.

As someone who's somewhat ambivalent about race-based affirmative action (in short, I feel it's oversold at elite institutions and underused elsewhere) - a widespread adoption of something like this seems like an improvement over the status quo from the perspective of fairness. With that said, I don't think it will end up being used in this manner because fundamentally institutions are indifferent to your hardship and generally want the least fair process possible. At least as far as you can infer from their actions, top schools don't want students that overcame hardships. They want students that are likely to be successful. And given equal test scores, those that overcame more hardships are probably less likely to be successful, since they are likely to face more difficulties and less support in the future.

For example, if Harvard admitted purely by academics (assuming that a suitably hard version of SAT exists), they'd certainly have a student body that overcame more adversity they currently do. But they'd miss out on the likes of Jared Kushner who, despite low test scores, certainly had better career prospects than the average Harvard student. In reality top schools are generally looking for well-bred, well-rounded rich kids that are going to be successful no matter what. Everything about their process optimizes for this - relatively easy tests and low cutoffs, focus on extra-curricular and well-roundedness in general, ridiculous emphasis on sports no one without money would play, legacy preference, the list goes on. Admissions officers are even known to prefer more expensive extra-curricular activities - it's not about ability, it's not about effort, it's about interestingness and rarity, which are essentially synonymous with expensive.

Then to mask the fact that this is what their admissions process optimizes for, they just put the lipstick on the pig to make the result superficially palatable. This is where race-based affirmative action comes in - the whole holistic admissions process is fairly blatantly regressive, but somehow it's sold as a package deal with race-based affirmative action (it doesn't have to be) to put the critics on the defensive, as though they are the ones defending privilege. It's a fairly brilliant rhetorical technique, I must say. The holistic admissions process is primarily used to admit rich kids who aren't quite good enough academically over middle-class/poor kids who are great academically, but just have a hard time distinguishing themselves due to their chea, extra-curriculars that are available to far too many people to be interesting. But the fact that this process, combined with race-based affirmative action, yields a few more upper-middle class African immigrants and far fewer poor white and Asian kids, is apparently enough to give them the moral high ground.

They've done such an amazing job pushing this narrative that most people seem to think rich kids getting SAT tutoring is a big problem from a privilege perspective and de-emphasizing objective metrics is about leveling the playing field. It's the exact opposite - they want every excuse to admit the people that they think are going to be successful (and what better predicts success than growing up already successful?) and de-emphasizing objective metrics allows them to fill the entire class with mostly privileged people, without the riff-raffs that are academically good, but don't have the connections or the upbringing or the money to be successful.

I've worked in different contexts at a lot of different jobs (full-time, contract, etc) over the past few years and my overall assessment is that whiteboard coding interviews do work. By "work" what I mean is that places that do screen this way have more productive developers on average than others.

My feeling now is that the fact that it is arbitrary and doesn't have that much to do with real-life work may be a feature. You can dissect job performance in a number of ways but I think most people would agree that these four factors are important: general cognitive ability, conscientiousness, domain knowledge and motivation. And of those, domain knowledge is already relatively easy to discern from the resume and otherwise easy to screen for and if your company is doing anything unique, not as important in the long run. Almost any process would do a sufficiently good enough job of taking into account relevant domain knowledge. Thus what makes one process better than others has more to do with extracting other signals.

Whiteboard coding interviews, by being timed, somewhat arbitrary, yet something that is widely practiced and easy to study for, implicitly selects for cognitive ability, motivation and conscientiousness. It's hard enough that you can't be dumb, it requires enough preparation that you have to be somewhat motivated. And the process of preparing for interviews is sufficiently repulsive and it's easy enough to fool yourself that you're prepared enough when you really aren't, that studying to the point where you're prepared is a test of conscientiousness. This creates a paradoxical situation where the test itself isn't necessarily that relevant for the job, yet those who get through the test are almost always very good.

In short, given that what you need to do to pass these interviews is fairly widely publicized, the ability and willingness to do what it takes to pass positively signal that you'd make a good employee. Even if you're great at software development, if you're neither sufficiently motivated nor conscientious enough to prepare yourself to pass these interviews, it's unclear to me why you'd also go out of your way to excel at any given job - every job requires you to do things you don't want to do, learn what you don't care to learn and deal with a variety of suboptimal situations constructively. So while I'm sympathetic to the point of view that this shouldn't be how things are done, I think the willingness to say, "you know, this is how things are, so let's deal with reality as it is instead of wishing it away and ignoring some of the best job opportunities because I don't want to study" is a positive characteristic. Every job has challenges like that - something that in an ideal world is kind of stupid, is not at all fun to do and takes a lot of effort, but doing it is strictly better than not doing it. You want to hire people who are willing to do these things, not just complain about how stupid it is.

This isn't particularly convincing, given that it's such a small and skewed sample and the effect is so small. The average CEO in this sample operates a firm of 8B and makes 8M - the effect they found was 30M for firm size and 19K for annual comp for each percentage decrease in pitch. It's quite likely that merely adding, say, Steve Jobs or Michael Bloomberg into the sample would've been enough to reverse the effect. Also, what would be much more interesting is if CEOs as a group were substantially different from the general population in this regard - but they are saying the median CEO wasn't at all extraordinary.

To the extent that there is an effect, I think the causality may be the other way - voice pitch isn't an immutable characteristic of each speaker but situational. One well-known effect is that people tend to speak with a higher pitch when talking to relatively high status people and a lower pitch when talking to relatively low status people. It seems quite possible that CEOs of larger companies perceive wall street analysts and investors as lower status than CEOs of smaller companies do, causing this discrepancy. It seems far more plausible than lower-pitched men being CEOs of disproportionately larger firms, without the same effect holding up across the entire professional spectrum.

This isn't what the previous poster said - reach is something you can get on any of these platforms (and more), yet that was pointed out as what each has a monopoly on.

Can you define a market each of them has a monopoly over? There are many popular video apps and many popular social media apps. Exactly what does each of them have a monopoly on? A network effect is not a monopoly. Being the exclusive provider of convenience for some specific group of people is not a monopoly.

For example, in some religious town, it's possible that the only way to reach a certain group of people on a Sunday afternoon is to go to the church. This does not mean the church has a monopoly on reach. Likewise, it's possible that where you live, the only place you can get a meal at 2AM is Aunt Ann's Diner. This doesn't make them a monopoly. Nor is the only sushi restaurant in town a monopoly. We live in a world of differentiation - every service provider that has a reason to exist provides something that others don't. This doesn't make everyone a monopoly.

Also, on none of these platforms is it trivial to build a large audience. And it's certainly possible to build a large audience through other means. For any given platform to have a monopoly on reach, people must be spending so little time outside of this platform that it's impossible to reach them otherwise. That's not a world any of us lives in. Even Youtube accounts for a very small fraction of time spent on watching videos and Facebook and Twitter are two of a large number of popular social networks. Snapchat, WeChat, iMessage, Weibo, TikTok, QQ, VK, Reddit, LinkedIn and Line to name a few.

If you can use facebook, youtube or twitter to reach lots of people, how could any one of them be a monopoly on reach?

Over the past few years, I've talked to numerous early-stage startups of various kinds and all of them were making offers where the valuation would have to be 10-20 times their seed round valuation - which is already inflated, due to liquidity preference if you're merely taking RSU/options - for me to break even. And rarely was there significant sweat equity, nor were the founders' background substantially better than mine in any of those cases. If the potential for those startups was so great as to make their offers for early employees fair, they were essentially paying themselves millions a year, assuming most of the founders' equity was also being vested. And looking back, none of them found any kind of success where I would've come even close to breaking even.

I'm at a point where doing my own startup is beginning to look attractive and this is a concern - would my investors force me to make these types of offers to early employees? What kind of employees would I be able to attract with that? Is this just entirely about attracting anti-big company people, delusional true believers or those who have no shot at getting a decent offer elsewhere?

Btw, I've worked at startups, small companies and big companies and I don't buy that the rate of learning is higher at a small startup. At a big tech company, junior engineers already work on very large, complex problems and have tons of great people to learn from. As an engineer, there's no shortage of opportunities to learn. What can be potentially higher at a smaller company is the rate of career growth - if you're at a company that is growing at a crazy rate, you can become a somebody and have large managerial responsibilities quicker because being an early employee and having those relationships and foundational knowledge give you an advantage even over outsiders who would otherwise be more qualified. But even this is probably overstated at this point if you're not a founder, since tech culture is much more fungible than they used to be and nowadays everyone feels much more comfortable hiring experienced external managers over promoting internally those that aren't quite ready.

I general support workplace diversity and mechanisms to promote it but you're making it sound like it's settled science based on some PR piece by a consulting firm promoting a a white paper that almost certainly wasn't rigorous enough to meet any reasonable standards - how do you properly control for confounding factors and how do you define "better" decision? That's miles away from being published in a peer-reviewed journal, which in isolation is also miles away from settled science. This is a microcosm of the political climate we're in - we're too eager to accept what we want to believe, while setting impossible standards for claims that we're disinclined to believe.

If the median is A-, that means more than half the students are not getting an A. If we accept that Harvard does have some of the best students, well at least best at getting good grades, since that is at least partially how they get in, why shouldn't they have better grades on average? To do otherwise would seem unfair to the students, since people are often judged on grades by people who don't have any perspective as to what a given grade means at a given institution. It would not be surprising if getting an A at Harvard is still substantially harder on an absolute basis than getting an A at a much lesser school that has a much lower average.

This is a graduate school ranking based on a survey and fairly meaningless due to how it's done:

Specialty rankings of doctoral science programs are based solely on nominations by department heads and directors of graduate studies at peer schools. These respondents ranked up to 10 programs in each area. Those with the most votes appear in the rankings tables.

This biases the result towards top regional schools, whose peers rate them highly over well-known schools that are otherwise great, but have weaker CS programs than its best peers. Either way, this has no real relevance in terms of comparing the quality of those who complete their undergraduate programs. The selection effect dominates all other factors here and almost no school has separate admissions for computer science (not aware of any in fact other than CMU) which means to the extent most people rank them, it is roughly in order of the overall prestige of the undergraduate program in general. I mean University of Wisconsin - Madison is a great school, but on average, you won't find their graduates to be quite as good as Harvard or Yale grads.

Not that many people who work at big tech companies moved from places like Mississippi to Seattle/SV/NYC. Lots of them came straight out of school (and top schools these companies recruit from are concentrated on the coasts), lots of them came from overseas and most of the rest came from other coastal areas. Even those who came from places like Mississippi don't all prefer their hometown.

Also what makes places like SV and NYC great is that they are big and diverse enough to serve as acceptable second/third choices for lots of people from all kinds of places. Some people may prefer small towns and cities, but most people who do have are often driven by concerns like family and friends and have specific small cities they'd prefer. HQ2 in some small city in Mississippi may appeal to those who happen to be from that area, but don't offer much to others from small towns elsewhere in the US. If you consider that these companies employ glboal workforces, this is even more obvious - if a random American tech worker had to work in Turkey, would they rather work in Istanbul or a random small Turkish village?

I don't understand this idea that it would be better for top tech companies to be headquartered in random places in the US - it's obviously terrible for the companies involved but it also doesn't serve the greater good. It leads to 1) company towns that live and die with the company; 2) environmentally inefficient sprawl; and 3) talents being trapped in wrong situations at wrong companies due to immobility. Furthermore, a critical mass is important and innovation is not a zero-sum game - if Silicon Valley's capital and talent, etc was spread around the country, I don't think the outcome is that you get the same level of innovation and wealth creation, only distributed more fairly - a lot of it probably never happens. Innovation is almost certainly accelerated along by a concentration of capital and talent in a small area. This doesn't mean everything should be in SV, but that there are strong benefits that accrue to society at large from companies choosing to bring talent to an already talent-rich area.

What tax obligations are being negated here? My assumption is that Amazon is not paying any taxes because they don't owe any - as in, they have no tax obligations.

From an economic perspective, there's no difference between the sales tax that is paid by the seller or by the buyer. So it's not correct for you to take credit for the taxes paid on the transactions between you and Amazon - the economic burden is shared by both parties. Likewise, Amazon pays the payroll tax and any income tax that is paid by its employees, effectively increases the cost of transaction between Amazon and its employees, making it a shared burden by both parties.

This effectively removes income tax entirely for rich people. I can simply create a corporation and never take money out of it. If I need to spend money, I can just borrow (whether directly from the corporation or indirectly). Even if you remove the latter loophole somehow, you're effectively only taxing consumption, which is highly regressive.

In my experience, the best principal engineers are those who think of themselves as just engineers and simply focus on the best ways to make a difference without much preconceived notion of what that entails. The worst are those who have these strong preconceived notions about what they are supposed to be doing, often focusing exclusively on the more visible, politically expedient tasks in the name of having organizational impact, while eschewing hard technical tasks. Well if that was all that was needed, we don't need the technical ladder - managers that used to be engineers are perfectly capable of handling most of those. It's important to realize why principal engineers are given such autonomy and organizational influence - they are supposed to the best engineers that the organization has to offer and other engineers look up to them because they can do the same things they do but better. What you value in principal engineers should not be something you don't value in other engineers and vice versa. This idea they should be working on different types of tasks altogether and focus less on technical things specifically makes a mockery of the technical ladder.

So the worst part about this article, to me, isn't necessarily this notion that principal engineers shouldn't be all about tech - that I think is relatively uncontroversial. But the reality is that if your organization needs to stress this at that level, this should also be true at every level. If you want to have a great engineering organization, nobody, not even the most junior engineer should merely be converting tickets to code - they should ideally be doing all the things that she thinks principal engineers are doing. And whether someone on the team works more on soft, cross-team stuff or hard technical tasks shouldn't depend on one's level - it's entirely possible that interfacing with other teams or stakeholders is something your mid-level engineer can do well and also solving a very narrow technical problem is something you want your principal engineer should work on because it's extremely difficult. I will go even farther and say that if your engineering organization's challenges are such that the hardest problems that your best engineers should focus on are exclusively non-technical, you should reconsider why you need principal engineers instead of much cheaper project managers.

In one specific instance I observed at this organization, principal engineers were, on the whole, less technical than their managerial counterparts or senior engineers. Because the organization bought into this "principal engineers ought to focus on high-level, organizational, cross-team stuff" - their principal engineers were for the most part too busy trying to direct other teams' and people's work to do anything themselves. They had no deliverables beyond being the multiplier so they were also even more removed from the technical reality than line managers, who are at least forced to deal with what their reports are doing.

Maybe these are test accounts/artists created/used by Spotify developers? I don't know much about their culture but if there was an actual attack with actual consequences and these accounts were removed as a result, they would've said something.

Doesn't this mean Harvard should accept everyone? If equality of outcome is important - and I'd argue that it is to a much greater extent than most people would consider acceptable - doesn't it stand to reason that we should care about it at the level of individuals, not merely populations? What's strange to me is that people seem to think that equality is only important when talking about small differences across arbitrary social constructs, while entirely ignoring much larger gaps in individuals.

Most of the top employers in the market have similar types of interviews so you have to study anyway unless you want to rule out all of them and any time spent preparing for such interviews amortizes across all of them. Meanwhile, a take-home test is almost always a one-off and takes much longer on a marginal basis and rarely is even used to make the final decision - every time I've done a take-home, I've also had to go through the full interview loop.

Also, "an hour of my time programming a solution to a problem" is likely not an actual work-sample/take-home - it's likely a replacement for a phone-screen that doesn't require an engineer to conduct, thus can be given to many more people to keep the top of the funnel large. The only time I've done a real take-home in less than 10 hours, it was rejected for not being polished enough.

I'm all for high taxes for the rich but this particular scheme is fairly unlikely to generate that much additional tax revenue and I think it's even possible that this will reduce tax revenue. Because income in the form of unrealized capital gains is not taxable at all and corporate tax rates are going to be much lower than 70%, it will certainly cause people to shift personal income into one of these forms. Income tax beyond a certain point is almost always going to be regressive because of the fixed costs involved in converting one type of income to another. A much better approach is making taxes relatively flat and spending more progressive - this is basically how it works in Europe.