connoredel

It's true that Bitcoin doesn't have a lot of transaction volume, but this isn't where you'd see that. "Spot volume" (trading volume) is taking place on centralized exchanges -- not on the blockchain.

Pretty sure he meant "freshman or freshwoman"

I moved to SF two years ago after living in NYC for 4 years. When people here ask me if I miss New York, I tell them I miss aspects of it -- the bars, restaurants, nightlife, art, fashion. But increasingly it's the little things about daily life in New York that I miss. I saw a video on Reddit of someone doing something dumb in the subway (a daily occurrence), and I almost cried. Similarly, this story choked me up. I had also seen those bars. I always figured they were meant for some other anonymous New Yorkers, not for me.

This is why paperweights exist. Office buildings all used to have ventilator shafts which effectively created lower pressure in the interior of the building. In order to make it work, you needed to have your office window open AND an interior window open (typically above your office door, so you could still keep your door closed).

As you can imagine, there was a lot of wind whipping through offices. This is why the paperweight was invented -- and also why no one uses paperweights anymore.

In my experience, finding a framework when you're searching for a solution is not a consolation prize. When the consolation prize is the only prize, it feels like the first place trophy -- and it is, at that time. The solution doesn't actually exist yet, but now you have the tool to find it.

About a year ago, I had this inescapable feeling that I was spending my time poorly (not daily productivity but on a larger scale), and it was causing me a lot of anxiety. Then I read How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen. I walked away with a framework for finding out what I want to be productive towards, even though that thing -- whatever it is -- was no more clear to me. My anxiety disappeared, which is what I wanted all along!

Here's the way I look at it. Once your 401k or other retirement savings are on track to give you a comfortable retirement, that's like an option -- you are effectively guaranteed a minimum lifestyle. Within this bucket, you should certainly be balancing the expected value and risk "by the book" (diversifying, etc.).

How do you increase the value of an option? Increase the volatility. Continuing to minimize risk is not going to meaningfully change your lifestyle. Your call option already protects you on the downside, so you should try to blow it out on the upside, and take a risk.

You can also view your experience and skills (and the minimum salary it allows you to command in the market) as the same thing. After a certain point, try for something that will meaningfully change your lifestyle. Worst case, you can fall back to that floor salary.

The key insight is that you are unlikely to be experiencing the thing at a special time in its life. This is the Copernican principle (which J. Richard Gott uses in his version of this that Wikipedia mentions), which was basically "we (on Earth) are unlikely to occupy a special place in the solar system -- it's much more likely that some other object is the center."

Gott says you can be 95% confident that you're experiencing the thing in the middle 95% of its life. Let's say x is its life so far. If x is 2.5% of its eventual life (one extreme of the middle 95%), then the thing still has 39x to go. If you're at 97.5% (the other extreme), then the thing only has x/39 left. So the 95% confidence interval is between x/39 and 39x

Of course, 5% of the time you actually are experiencing something at the very beginning or very end of its life (outside the middle 95%), which is a unique thing. But that's why it's a confidence interval < 100% :)

I prefer this form of the principle a lot more than "the expected life is equal to 2X, always."

Side note: I took J. Richard Gott's class in college called The Universe. Maybe not the best use of a credit in hindsight, but we studied some really interesting things like this.

There is an analogy to clustering (an unsupervised learning technique) here.

Take the simple case of 2 dimensions (each observation is plotted in 2D space) with possible values of 0-10. Let's say the extreme (far from average) space is within 5% of the border. The total extreme area is (10x10)-(9x9) = 19 (i.e. 19%). Now add a 3rd dimension. The extreme "volume" in 3d space is now (10x10x10)-(9x9x9) = 271 (i.e. 27%). You can see where this is trending. Add enough dimensions, and every observation is now "extreme." They become so far apart that each observation almost deserves its own cluster, and you lose any idea of similarity.

Back to this particular article: when you _add_ (or average) all of the dimensions -- like you do on an exam -- suddenly they are close again.

That's a hilarious comment, and a good point. But you can tell when your ad blocker is messing with site functionality beyond just blocking ads (i.e., the false positives your parent comment mentions). And at a certain point, this is a differentiator among the ad blockers.

To take it a step further: Is it immoral to eat whole foods for all 3 meals a day?

Research has shown we get most of the nutrients we need from our first meal (of whole foods) each day. We only need calories from that point on. Shouldn't we then just try to get the most efficient form of calories, so long as those calories don't do harm? Leave the other 2 nutrient-rich meals for the rest of the world.

He frames it as "this is not what Americans want." But just because we can increasingly eat 3 nutrient-rich meals doesn't mean we should. In fact, it means the opposite -- that we should give those meals away because we can.

I've always wondered why they don't use this to price discriminate even more. They always say the "actual value" of the education is way more than $55k per year or whatever, because the endowment contributes significantly to the operating budget as well.

So why not make the list price $100k? If your example is correct, this would only affect those who make between $250k and $500k (where 20% of their income is between $50k and $100k).

I think your point #2 is right on. This article is wondering why recent observations are not behaving the "backward bending supply curve of labour" [1]. But this curve assumes a constant return on hours worked (i.e. a constant wage). If it really behaves more like overtime -- where additional hours are worth more but only if you've already worked a certain amount -- then the marginal hourly wage can rise as the marginal leisure value rises, and the equilibrium is pushed further out. In other words, it changes that curve to strictly increasing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_...

This is a really good point. Now I'm pissed that I contributed to a Roth earlier in my career.

Another one that no one has mentioned: state income tax. I live in CA but would put a >50% chance that I will live in a lower tax state when I retire. Thus, Traditional > Roth.

IIRC, the lead for an angel syndicate can make deal-level carry (as opposed to the fund-level carry that is described here). This leads to some incredible risk-taking: there is no consideration for how they might be harming their "fund-level return" (i.e. the return on all the investments they as an individual have participated in) -- and they don't really care because that isn't their biggest opportunity. The biggest opportunity is the carry they can make on this _one deal_ if it's a home run. So the average angel who is just participating (and not leading) has a really risky portfolio.

http://avc.com/2016/02/fund-level-vs-deal-by-deal-carry/

I feel like this is misleading without the % share of the total. These top 50 represent 2.7% of the total. OK, that sounds bad, but I'm not really sure how to interpret it.

Even if we get better at this, the top passwords will still be these, they'll just be lower as a % of the total. So until we have 100% unique passwords, this story will always be there, which just seems lazy.

Don't know why you're being downvoted. You astutely point out that just as defunding can cause a move toward privatization (or the belief that only private enterprise can solve a given problem), so too can overregulation lead toward nationalization (or even at state/local levels, the belief that only government can solve it).

That's not how it works at all. It's a market: there is a limited supply of impressions/clicks, and it is _buyers_ who decide the price. Buyers are rational -- I like to take that charitable view at least -- and are bidding less than the value to their businesses of those clicks. CPCs are actually down on average. If that's true, then it must be simply inventory growth: mobile is providing ever more interaction points with consumers.

I grew up a few miles south of Roebling, NJ -- a company town created for the Roebling Steel Mill. Some nice pictures here: http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2013/05/roebling_a_little...

This is in my opinion the best simple A/B test significance calculator. I like it for two reasons:

1) The multiple testing correction, which many people ignore when testing > 1 variants vs. the control

2) They display not only the p-value, but the confidence interval around the _difference_ between the variants (i.e. the effect size). It's tempting to observe an increase of say 50% that is statistically significant and think that you can be confident about the 50%. This is not the case! You chose your sample size to be confident that the actual effect size is > 0 -- not that you would have a tight confidence interval around whatever difference you observed. Depending on your sample, the lower bound could still be close to 0.

I wonder if there was any secondary equity sold. Spiegel famously took out $10M back in 2013 and bought a Ferrari. As an investor/BOD member, I think you need to balance between giving founders a taste of something so they don't sell at the first offer or push to IPO too early and potentially giving someone generational wealth when there is still so much work to do.

Remember Secret? Founders got $3M while investors with preferred stock even couldn't recoup their loss.

I can't help but think employees with common stock are always the losers here. Founders' "common stock" is really given preferential treatment -- it's obviously more liquid. Your average employee didn't get to sell his shares directly to some poor VC before the company went under.

I've heard that the Durst family made an app for changing the lights on One World Trade Center. They guard its distribution pretty tightly, though.

I have a fantasy about going on a date at some rooftop bar that has a view of the spire, asking her what her favorite color is, directing her attention to the spire, and making it happen. I suppose I'd settle for changing the sign on a Portland office building, though ;)

This is a good point. If these are each used by 2 people, it's not very interesting. It's sort of implied by the attention these stories get that the problem is much bigger than that, but I agree the story is incomplete without the magnitudes. And for the rest of us, we should care about the _trend_ of the % population using common passwords. In order to be safe, you probably need to stay above some constant level that is "good enough" for any hacker trying patterns or brute forcing. As the bottom gets more secure after reading articles like this or adopting password managers, we all need to step up our game. The first to go will be people who do things like:

- put a capital letter first and only first when a capital letter is required

- put a special character last and only last when a special character is required

- put a number next to last and only next to last when a number and a special character are both required

These will be the next patterns tried after the most common passwords, dictionary attacks, etc. -- and if you stay ahead of _these_ people then you'll be good for a while.

So, is man-made climate change solved? If the whole world agrees that we will all collectively take steps to reach an agreed upon level of temperature rise in 100 years, what else is needed except to do it? The rational thing to do is stop funding more and more studies, stop having summits, and just do what we all said we would do: carry out the plan. The whole world has agreed they are satisfied with the future climate this deal will bring us.

If Congress legislated tomorrow that all gun sales and manufacturing were to be banned, and all existing guns should be collected and melted down, then should we still spend time and money researching gun violence and lobbying for stricter gun laws? I think everyone would agree that would be a waste of time because gun control is inevitable given the plan to ban them.

Why does it feel like funding additional climate studies and appointing more bureaucrats won't stop like it would for the gun control example?

The idea that advertising is a consumption tax is wrong. You don't use "cost-based pricing" in advertising (i.e., you don't decide how much to charge to make sure you are covering your costs of acquisition). You decide how much to spend on a given ad channel based on the average revenue you expect to get from a customer. There may be other important metrics like payback period -- or sometimes even less tangible things like the number of customers may be important if scale is an end in itself -- but in any case, rational people in charge of acquisition are making sure they are getting some benefit out of the ads at the optimal price that was set independently. If you start marking your price up beyond what people are willing to pay just because you want to make some ad channel effective, you'll see conversion drop and the channel will become _even more inneffective_.

I would argue that two companies with identical products -- one who acquires customers organically and one who acquires customers through advertising -- should set the same price. The first will have higher net margins but the other will enjoy more total profit if they are smart.