igonvalue

I just received an email notification from Stack Exchange today, "1 new item in your Stack Exchange inbox". I was intrigued, thinking someone had commented on one of my questions or answers. Did people still do that? Maybe an LLM-powered bot had interacted with my post; after all, they are probably the main users of the site.

Turns out, it was just a system message "You are now able to set your unique username for your profile." Someone who was responsible for growth marketing probably figured this would boost user engagement. The last gasps of a once vibrant platform.

Tangential but related: Do these workout apps correct for the movement of the ship when tracking your runs? I imagine it's a borderline-common scenario that someone on a cruise ship goes for a jog on deck?

I'm wondering about the broader context here: Are stories like this rare or common? Are they increasing or decreasing in frequency?

Here's Trump and Powell publicly disagreeing about these exact Fed renovation costs in July 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvYljCN970s

Powell corrects him in real-time. Worth watching given today's statement.

The article has an entire infographic titled "Most banks held more assets than deposits at the time they failed".

Searching for what excess mortality looks like in a "normal" (non-pandemic) year, I found this interesting statistic:

> By the year 2017, the United States was already suffering more excess deaths and more life years lost each year than those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/United-States-COVID-19-was-...

Spoiler alert.

> Kelly wrote to Sale on New Year’s Day, instructing him to direct the $1,000 to Heifer International, a nonprofit that gives away breeding pairs of animals. Sale puzzled him by replying, “I didn’t lose the bet.” Kelly assumed he hadn’t seen Patrick’s decision, and he had the editor resend it.

> But Sale had read it—and rejected it.

> “I cannot accept that I lost,” he wrote to Patrick. “The clear trajectory of disasters shows that the world is much closer to my prediction. So clearly it cannot be said that Kevin won.”

> Like the raging denialist in the White House, the cantankerous anarchocommunalist has quit the game after the final score left him short. Sale says he is seeking some sort of appellate relief, if only by public opinion, when in fact the rules included no such reconsideration. Kelly is infuriated. “This was a gentleman’s bet, and he can only be classified as a cad,” he says.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this Sale fellow sounds like an asshole.

In order for this to work, one needs to jailbreak the Kindle. Is there a way to jailbreak a Kindle Oasis running the 5.12.x firmware? (My reading of the MobileRead Forums says this is impossible.)

Supposedly he got in trouble with the Church after appearing in the Bill Maher documentary Religulous. I looked up the video clip and thought it was refreshing how few fucks he seemed to give https://youtu.be/iTV-VgrbnZU

> We document that a portfolio that mimics the purchases of U.S. Senators beats the market by 85 basis points per month, while a port- folio that mimics the sales of Senators lags the market by 12 basis points per month. The large difference in the returns of stocks bought and sold (nearly one percentage point per month) is economically large and reliably positive.

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/gov2126/files/ziobrows...

Is there a specific name for this general phenomenon?

What exactly are these passwords used for? The post mentions "controlling this object in the RIPE database" but I'm missing some context necessary to understand that.

Patrick, it seems like this latest episode isn't available on iTunes. Maybe it's related to the error message I see when I load the feed in my browser [0]

> This page contains the following errors:

> error on line 3559 at column 476: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0xE3 0x81 0xA8 0xE3

[0] http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed/

The clickbait article headline is "Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?"

The answer is buried three quarters of the way into the article:

> When they started interviewing seniors, companies found — as Pratt did at Howard — that many were underprepared. They hadn’t been exposed to programming before college and had gaps in their college classes.

So why isn't the article titled, "Why Aren't Enough Black Coders Prepared for Silicon Valley"?

Honest question. Have you read the article?

> But they have tied the notion to another equally provocative question: Does Harvard shortchange Asian-American applicants in admissions?

According to this, the #1 is the "top choice".

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/travel/faq-52-places-to-go...

> my current job pays about $250k, and one year, I invested $100k of that into a startup, leaving me with ~$150k of salary.

Sorry to nitpick, but how exactly does the math work out if the $100k is presumably drawn from post-tax income?

Adjusted for inflation, that's over $26K in 2015 dollars [0]. But of course the punch line is that price increases since then have significantly outpaced inflation. This phenomenon is known as Baumol's cost disease.

[0] http://inflationcalculator.us/

What would actually happen in the pictured Dark Knight scenario where a relatively small part of the middle of the the bridge disappears? It seems like if the road deck is sufficiently rigid the vertical suspenders near the middle would realign and provide at least some of the tension force previously supplied by the removed suspension cable. Is there any reason why the bridge must fall?

I think this is actually pretty common for graduate students of mathematics.

> students are required to demonstrate the ability to read mathematics in French, German, or Russian by passing a two-hour, written language examination.

http://www.math.harvard.edu/graduate/

Would you recommend reading it? This review claims it's too rambling and confused to make it worthwhile[0].

[0] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/book-review-de...

It's since been dressed up with some mathiness, but this idea was originally proposed in the comment threads of pg's original article. [0] See the responses there for a few reasons why it just won't work.

To be concrete, assuming "performance" is measured as return on investment, min(performance) will always go to to -100% (i.e., bankruptcy) with a large enough sample size.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10484200

Assuming that the distributions are exactly equal, the test would still give misleading results in situations in which the bias does not manifest as a different cutoff.

For example, if a VC funds all male founders but flips a coin to decide whether to fund each female founder, the test would fail to detect overwhelming bias.

Obviously that specific scenario is not realistic, but I believe something like this is plausible enough: A VC funds all male founders who are considered promising, and all female founders who are considered promising AND went to school with one of the partners.

And it's not hard to imagine a plausible scenario in which the test would give false positives rather than false negatives.

> A beta prior is equivalent to assigning “pretend votes” to each new item. Instead of starting out with 0 upvotes and 0 downvotes, we start out with a upvotes and b downvotes. If we expect that most items are bad, we could start with 3 upvotes and 10 downvotes. After getting u real upvotes, and d real downvotes the posterior distribution is Beta(a+u, b+d).

Fascinating. Does this follow as a straightforward consequence of how the beta distribution is defined? Otherwise, is there a proof that someone could point me toward?

> The popularity of an item has a Beta(a,b) prior

Is there an optimal choice of a, b given, say, a specific utility function?

See also http://www.idlewords.com/2009/06/transnistria.htm

I'm not sure how common it is, but the linked site actually has an interesting discussion of this phenomenon, which Wikipedia calls "affirmative racial gerrymandering"[0], and how it would interact with the proposed scheme: http://scorevoting.net/TheorDistrict.html#Minority

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_S...

Um, has anyone taken a look at the other stories on this domain?

http://www.ewao.com/a/1-scientists-prove-our-dna-has-telepat... http://www.ewao.com/a/1-11-reasons-why-the-hollow-earth-actu...

> value as a latent hiring marketplace

StackOverflow has been trying to monetize this aspect of its user base for a few years now [0], but has not made much headway as far as I can tell.

[0] http://careers.stackoverflow.com/

> Commodities without an alternative (e.g. water) and natural monopolies (e.g. networks) should be owned by the public.

Why do you think there's a water shortage in California right now?

> This is a crazy story, one that seems like it must be a conspiracy theory.

Well, it is a conspiracy theory, isn't it? Just because it's true doesn't make it not a conspiracy theory.