bokonist

I also thought it was going to be a fad. What is interesting is that everything people use Facebook for day-to-day existed back in 2005. We used email for sharing life updates, various tools for photo sharing, AOL Instant Messenger for chatting, mailing lists for groups, email and evite for organizing events, etc. The novelty of Facebook was profile browsing and poking each other. And if Facebook had just remained that it would have been a fad. What is impressive about Facebook, is how they managed to little-by-little get everyone on their network, and little-by-little beat out the tools people were using before Facebook.

Interesting, now, in 2015, Facebook is a worse tool for me than it was in 2009. Any tool that my boss is on, my aunt is on, my old high school classmates is on, etc, has lost any coherence to it. I now have to obey standard internet security: anything posted on the internet or on Facebook in my real name has to be treated like it is on my resume. Because, de facto, it is.

I would love to read a blog post with further explanation of what you found out when trying to solve unemployment with your startup.

I switched to reading most non-fiction on my ipad, for exactly this reason.

The issue is that you need to find an idea for a product, wherein 1) the product has the potential to generate tens of millions of dollars of value 2) the first, valuable, version of the product can be built in a couple man years. That is really, really hard to do. There are tens of thousands of smart, competent people searching for such ideas, working on such ideas.

If you want to make millions of dollars, if you want to make much more money than the average smart engineer, you need some secret. You need some idea or skill that happens to be the right thing at the right time. Nobody can tell you what that secret is. If Sam could tell you, it would not be a secret.

So you are right. There is something critical missing. What is missing is the actual secret, the actual idea that you have a unique insight into. But nobody can tell you what that will be.

In the first cut of your analysis (without rebalancing) the portfolio actually goes negative (I'm looking at the first graph in the notebook). An equity portfolio cannot go negative unless you are using leverage. Then from late 2012 to 2015 the portfolio rises by 400%. Looking at the companies in the portfolio, I don't see how they could have generated that kind of return. Is this algorithm using leverage? If not, I don't see how you can get those results. If the algorithm is using leverage, then comparing to a simple investment in the S&P is not valid.

That is not the correct way to think about it.

Say that the initial offering is for 10 million shares at $20 a share. Then the price pops to $30. That $30 share price is based on a much smaller net influx of investment. It does not follow that you could have sold 10 million of shares at that price. The $20 price is a discount that is needed to make the market clear a very large number of shares, all at once. Furthermore, the pop to $30 only happened because retail investors know that the institutions buying into the IPO are reputable, long-haul investors like Fidelity, who will not be dumping the stock immediately. So if you don't have Fidelity and other reputable investors putting in money at $20, you will never get the pop to $30. And because of their size and reputation and relationships, institutions like Fidelity will be able to command discounts, like any big buyer can. The IPO-ing company generally needs Fidelity much more Fidelity needs to buy the company's stock. Thus Fidelity can command the discount.

The company and investment banker make you sign a contract saying that you will not buy or sell any derivatives or options or any security based on the stock. Now they probably couldn't catch you, and I'm not exactly sure what happens if you refuse to sign the contract, but it is also not necessarily worth the legal risk to attempt your proposed strategy.

Funny you mention this, I have just started building a site to help with this exact problem. Seems like there is so much good content out there, but it is hard to find the good evergreen content once it leaves the front pages of social media sites. I am not starting with scientific subjects (I'm starting with history, sociology, and general life issues). The difficultly will be that there is a lot of content to get through, so I'm going to have to figure out a way to crowdsource the curation, somehow.

"heck, it's Valentines day, do something sappy and tell them how I feel"

I have never seen this actually work. I have failed doing it myself.

Sappiness is what girls want from the guys they are already head-over-heels attracted to. It does not work for converting a girl from neutral or slightly attracted into wanting to go with you.

The best thing to do is just to hang out with her casually, flirt, be playful, tease her, do active things, go for walks, have fun, and gradually escalate physically, escalate touching, escalate sexual innuendo in your conversation. If she reacts positively, escalate more, if not, then there is sometimes nothing you can do.

The best book I have read on this subject is "Models: Attract Women through Honesty" - http://www.amazon.com/Models-Attract-Women-Through-Honesty-e...

1. From reading their post, it seems like they made their own REST API for the key server. So it would be nice if they open sourced the service behind it, to alleviate fears of lock in.

2. You're right, it probably should be SRV.

Two things that would make this have more hope of becoming a standard:

1) open source the key server with the REST-API 2) allow domain owners to define their own key server via a DNS TXT entry

A 1% tax is a little bit steep. But what if the tax was only .1%? Or maybe you make it a 0% tax for the first ten years, .1% tax for the next twenty years, and 1% a year after that?

If the tax was only .1%, the corporation with big pockets would have to raise their bid to millions of dollars in order to bankrupt you. And in that case, just take their bid and walk away with the millions!

It seems fair to me. If you want something protected by the long arm of the state, if you want to impose a burden of DMCA compliance across all of industry, you should have to pay some tax to pay for that service.

Why do you think that would improve outcomes?

From my observation, if someone is smart, they can teach themselves out of a book, with a bit of guidance to keep them on the right track. If someone simply lacks the cognitive power, there is nothing a teacher can do to make them smart. The student can improve somewhat with practice and drilling, but they still plateau at a lower point than the smart student. So we need to spend enough money that their is a guide to help students get through roadblocks, but I see no evidence that we are spending too little to provide appropriate guidance. I think one hour of personal guidance for every 10 to 20 hours of self-practice is a perfectly normal ratio. That is what we do when training new engineers, or learning a musical instrument, and there really isn't much of a way to gain more benefit by increasing the quantity of guidance.

I think that teaching could be improved somewhat, at the high-end. But it could be done by reallocating existing spending, not spending more. I do think that mentorship helps a lot, but mentorship needs to come from an experienced practitioner. So what we need is a system where a programmer can work a job for a few years, then take a mentoring job for a year, then work for a few years, etc. This would require eliminating the need for education degrees, and optimizing teacher's time for personal mentorship rather than grading tests, building lesson plans, and performing classroom management. It really would be an entirely different job than what is now considered a teacher. A "teacher" now is really just a glorified day-care worker, paying them more won't help much.

Instead of focusing on reducing the inequality, we need to convince the rich people that paying more tax to educate the majority of the population is a good thing for themselves in the long run.

Education spending has steadily risen over the last fifty years. Years of schooling has steadily increased.

In my experience, the impact of spending money on education is greatly exaggerated. I was a smart kid, probably 2.5+ STD above the norm in IQ, who went to public school for a while, then to private school. In public school, I learned math mostly by going through problems in the text book. At expensive private school, I learned math mostly by going through problems in the text book. Kids who were at the bottom of the bell curve at this private school still struggled, there was nothing money could buy to make them struggle less. The primary benefit of an expensive private school is that I was surrounded with other smart people, who I could have nerdy conversations with, rather than being a weirdo nerd. The second benefit is that you get to start building a network earlier. This benefit was very limited though, as we all scattered after graduation into different locations and careers. Most of that $40k is being spent on luxuries, not on stuff needed to educate, because education is inherently quite cheap. Mostly you just need to read stuff and practice, with just a bit of guidance from a mentor to check your work and keep you on the right path.

Anyone who wants to spend more money on education needs to state exactly what the money should be spent on, why they believe spending that money will have a positive ROI, and also needs an explanation of why the money we are already spending has not equalized things.

Imagine you had the freedom to design an education for your child and a group of his or her peers. Any money that you save could be spent on helping them get started with a mortgage or investing in their startup or spent on interesting travel or vacations. How much would you need to spend to max-out their learning? How would you spend it?

The glass walls would be more tolerable if the mid-section was opaque/frosted glass, so you still get the light but you also get a degree of privacy.

It also depends on your definitions.

If the bottleneck to learning is nutrition or lead exposure, then one should advocate directly for policies that would fix nutrition or mitigate lead exposure, rather than generically advocating for more school funding.

You can cite academic articles, but only do so if you can personally vouch for them being good, rather than just relying on the echo chamber of citations. Because if I follow your link, and look at the paper, and find it is the typical esoteric nonsense, in which the key assumptions are completely hand-waved away, then I will be annoyed.

The usage of words has shifted, but my point remains. The genetic/ethnic/racial difference between Irish and British was much, much less than that between the British and Black Africans. So my point remains that it may be much more difficult to assimilate across very large ethnic/racial differences.

The quantity of citation, within an echo-chamber, means nothing to me. Academia is in its own world, and it is very easy for academic papers to become increasingly divorced from reality, since there is no mechanism for overall accountability. This is common across many institutions throughout history, such as with scholasticism and the Catholic Church. Also, academia is highly politicized, and people cite what they believe they want to be true, and rationalize after the fact. The process of becoming an academic is now so fraught and grueling, that only people who buy into the overall methodology and way of thinking will go to grad school and join the mandarinate. So quantity of citation among the same group who all share the same biases, is not proof of anything.

I lost my respect for academic papers in college when taking a political science course. We were reading these absolutely absurd mathematical models of how bureaucracies made decisions. Having interned in various parts of government, I found the whole thing absurd. Bureaucracy is actually very interesting, there are many great books on the topic, there are many great memoirs that can aid in understanding what goes on. But we were reading none of them. I told my professor as such, and she had no defense, she said that was just the way political science was done. The entire field was completely divorced from reality, and producing nothing of actual value to someone who wanted to learn about bureaucracy. They were in their own bubble of citing and building upon each other's esoteric models that had nothing to do with how the world actually works.

Further reading since then, in reading many economic papers, then comparing what happens in the real world, in reading computer science papers, and then seeing how divorced it is from real world problems, has only reinforced my view.

Academia does produce some good stuff. But there are a lot of bubbles of useless paper-writing, and a lot of politicized research. So now I only trust output that I have verified or that has been widely replicated by people outside the bubble.

As for this paper in particular, it makes some big assumptions - that immigrant labor is an imperfect substitute, that natural resources don't matter, that increasing immigration will increase the amount of capital, etc. If I adopt the same assumptions, I am sure I could construct a mathematical model to replicate the author's results. But all those assumptions are very dubious, and yet the author spends little time justifying them. So this paper adds nothing to the debate over immigration, because it does not justify its assumptions, and it is these assumptions which are the core of the issue.

Although my argument may be wrong, at least they're cited (by me and over 2000 other peer-reviewed articles, for what its worth).

Citing useless/irrelevant articles that you have not read and verified yourself, and claiming these articles are "facts" when they are really interpretations and models that hinge on layers of debatable assumptions, is much worse than citing nothing at all. (I didn't leave citations on my comments because I'm providing interpretations for people who already share the same facts and background knowledge, if you don't share the same facts, you can ask for citations on particular statements, but I may not have time to actually hunt them down at the moment).

Here's the The Economist on wages and immigration written for the lay person, lest I may Euler you.

Umm, this is simply the Economist parroting the point of the Euler-er, the Economist is not adding value. Periodicals like the economist are written by journalists who generally have little life experience or domain expertise. They went straight to journalism out of college, and so they default to just accepting academic papers as being the authoritative word, because they do not know better.

The issue is that most Americans don't have high enough literacy (including math) ability to benefit from the best of free online education.

Notice your slippery phrasing. Most Americans don't have enough literacy ability to benefit from the best free online education. Well, yeah, if you define the best as the advanced stuff then that is true by definition. There is plenty of free basic education material out there too. The core of math literacy is just lots of drilling on multiplication tables and such, which does not cost money at all.

I don't see you addressing my central point. For the Americans without basic abilities, is lack of money the bottleneck? Every American already gets many, many years of quite expensive schooling trying to teach the basics. Reading and textbook material for teaching the basics is not, and need not be, expensive. So either a) schools are grossly incompetent at actually teaching or b) schools are being asked to do the impossible, and are hitting up on innate cognitive limits in the average person (or maybe a bit of both).

You say "in fact" but the papers you site are the farthest things from "facts" that are imaginable. They are academic models that are at the same time, grossly simplified and grossly over-complicated, that have all sorts of debatable assumptions, with the whole thing being obfuscated in academicese, thus making any sane evaluation of the logic completely impossible. Did you actually read these papers? Did you understand the models and the math? Do you agree with the models? Why? Do you agree with the assumptions behind the model? Why?

Relevant: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/

Question for Sam about the issue of high-skill immigration: Does YC have any sort of tracking of the number of engineers blocked from going to YC companies because they could not get a Visa? Could Sam write an essay with some anonymized examples of what happens when a skilled worker is prevent from working for a YC company? This kind of first-hand evidence can go a long way toward convincing other people of your point.

I've added a sentence to make it clear I was talking about "immigration more generally"

As for your point...

Anyone who gets on a moral high horse about "discrimination" is going to end up in web of contradictions before long. Virtually every human institution is based on "discrimination", and much of that discrimination is going to be at least partially based on factors such as innate ability, geography, or genetic distance. Families and kinsmen treat family members differently than outsiders (you don't let anyone off the street into your home). Local community members discriminate against carpet baggers and tourists. Software companies discriminate against people not smart enough to write good code. "Elite" colleges are elite because they discriminate based on class, character, and aptitude. Etc. Etc.

"Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a matter of justice—I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth."

I'm going to leave aside the issue of high-skilled immigration for moment and talk about Sam's addendum of "immigration more generally."

Low-skilled immigrants from Africa and Latin America have not yet shown evidence of assimilating into the American mainstream. Income and educational attainment is still much lower, the communities are still segregated, etc.

So there are two possibilities:

Possibility 1) It will be just a matter of time before they assimilate, just as it took time for the Irish or Italians to assimilate.

Possibility 2) For a variety of reasons, assimilation across racial lines is much more difficult. It is even more so when there is a fluid border with Mexico, and the U.S. no longer does the same sort of cultural imperialism it did in the early 1900's in order to assimilate immigrants. Thus long term, assimilation will not occur. Long term, the U.S. will end up looking a lot like Brazil, with a white overclass, a brown helot class, and a black underclass. Technology growth will slow as it becomes low status for the educated white overclass to do real work. Political corruption will grow as voters will vote as tribal blocks, and votes are determined by buying the votes, rather than making good policies for the nation.

I don't want to get into an argument about whether 1) or 2) is more likely. But I will argue that there is at least a 5% chance that 2) is true. If 2) is true, it would fundamentally change the character of the U.S. in a very negative way.

If we slow down immigration, and 1) turns out to be right, then we can always let more immigrants in later. If we accelerate immigration, and 2) turns out to be true, it cannot be undone. Not ever. Thus even if there is a 5% chance that 2) is right, it makes sense to slow down third-world immigration, until we can prove that assimilation will occur.

Sam says "It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any subject I want, for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world." but he also says, "I think it’s most important to fix the broken parts of the current system, but also to decide we need to spend more money on education....Spending money on education, unlike most government spending, actually has an ROI—every dollar we spend on it ought to return more dollars in the future."

So the cost of learning has become much cheaper ... but we need to spend even more money on education? Just because something is important does not mean you can spend money to improve it.

It is important to be healthy and strong. But there is literally no way I can spend more money than I do now to be substantially healthier or stronger. Once I spend enough to eat lots of meat and veggies, get some training on proper lift weighting form, get a gym membership with access to weights, etc, there is nothing else I can do.

The same goes for most forms of learning and skill improvement. Once you spend enough to pay for equipment and a few hours a week of mentorship, there is literally no way to spend more money to improve outcomes.

So my question for Sam is, what is the amount of money we need to spend to "max out" on learning? What specific things do we need to spend that money on?

Learning consists of four components:

1) book learning

2) practice

3) mentorship/coaching

4) motivation to do the above 3 things

As Sam points out, it costs very little money to grant access to an almost infinite amount of book learning. For #2, practice, you just need time. So you only need to spend enough to free someone from the need to work a job, so they have time to practice, you don't have to spend much on the school itself. Component #4, motivation, is usually a matter of peer group, role models, and rational expectations, it shouldn't need to cost money.

Component #3, mentorship, does cost money. However, the implication of "spending more on education" is usually that we should spend more money on schools and teachers. School teachers and professors, usually make very poor mentors, because they are not practitioners. In software, most people I know got much better practical mentorship on their first few years on the job, than they did in school.

So if we want to "fix education", we need to get students good mentors. That would mean replacing our teachers and professors with practitioners who maybe spend a couple years on the job, then a year teaching, then a couple years on the job, etc. Or it would mean instituting an apprenticeship system, so people could learn in a workplace environment in a safe and productive way.

If the government wants more innovation, then it should stop cutting the amount of money it spends producing it.

It seems like every week there is new post in Hacker News about how broken the grant system is. If we want to spend more money on research, we also need to fix the funding system so that the money isn't just going down a black-hole.

Target a real GDP growth rate.You build what you measure. If the government wants more growth, set a target and focus everyone on hitting it.

Need to be very careful here. Futurists of the early 20th century thought that as technological progress advanced, more people could transition to activities of arts, craft, and leisure. If you target the GDP, or some new variation of GDP that still measures material output, you will make it official government policy to keep everyone on the treadmill, to produce more and more at the expense of transitioning to a art based economy.

One way to do this would be charge a decent-sized fee on every share traded (and have the fee go to the company); another would be a graduated tax rate that goes from something like 80% for day trades down to 10% for shares held for 5 years.

I agree with this. Another way to do it would be to simply enforce a 5% transaction tax on all stock sold within a year of buying it. That said, is there really anything preventing a CEO from just ignoring the ups and downs of the market?

"How do you distinguish two doctors with high prediction ability and low success rates (compared to the average for that procedure)"

The doctor is never compared against the "average for that procedure" for exactly the reasons you give. The doctor is only compared against that doctor's own predictions.

So as a patient in need of a surgery, you would get opinions from 3-4 different surgeons, each one would offer their personal outcome probabilities. The patient gets access to that doctor's stats that score their actual track record against their own predictions. The patient should then choose the surgeon who gives the best odds but also has a track record of hitting their predictions.

A doctor who tackles hard cases should still have a good success rate against their own predictions. Such a doctor will just lower their predictions according to the riskiness of the case. If the doctor is good, such a doctor will still get business, because the skilled doctor will still offer better odds (odds that the patient can actually trust) than can be reliably offered by a less skilled doctor.

The one weakness of my system is that it does not give any sort of global score. There is still the problem of having to find 3 to 4 good surgeons to ask for an opinion in the first place. But at least once you have gotten to that point, you can have trustworthy predictions upon which to base your decisions.

I ask for the doctor's official opinion/prediction about the probabilities for my own surgery. This must be the doctor's opinion because every person and every surgery is different. A doctor's job is to analyze each person's situation, and then use their experience, knowledge, and professional judgement to give the patient the doctor's best estimate of the benefits and risks of a given procedure. This is not "adding sh*t to their plate", this is formalizing a core job function of every doctor.

The patient would get the doctor's prediction track record directly from the hospital or a third party monitoring agency. That way the patient knows if the doctor is generally accurate in their predictions, or if they are consistently overconfident in their own abilities.

If a doctor was wrong once, they are wrong. If they are consistently wrong, then that shows up in their stats. Patients will no longer trust their predictions, and will seek other doctors. The doctor will have to really improve their prediction ability (a good thing) or else go out of business for lack of patients.

Recently I had a major shoulder operation. I was shocked at how little information I had about who was a good surgeon. If I didn't have a family member who worked in the complaints department of the local big hospital, I would have had no way of knowing who was considered good or bad.

My surgeon told me that I had a 90% percent chance of success, and a 1% chance of nasty complications like nerve damage. The literature on the procedure said that typical success rates were 75% and the complications rate more like 5%. Was my surgeon particular good? Did I have a better shot because I was young and healthy? Or was my surgeon suffering from the Lake Wobegon affect and overconfidence? There was no way for me to know as a patient.

That said, naive score keeping could go very awry, for very obvious reasons that others in thread have mentioned.

Here is the system I would like to see. Tell me how this could get gamed:

Surgeons should be required to give official, written, probabilities to all potential patients. So for instance, a surgeon might say that there is a 90% chance that I can play football again, a 1% chance that my arm will end up worse than before the surgery, and a .01% chance of death.

Then surgeons should simply be measured against their own predictions. When I go to a surgeon, I should have access to that data. The surgeon has no incentive to be overly conservative with the probabilities - because then I will go to a surgeon who is more skilled, can predict better outcomes, and the track record to prove it. Nor does the surgeon have an incentive to be overly optimistic, because then they will get dinged for not scoring according to their own predictions. Nor does the surgeon have an incentive to turn away high-risk patients, they just need to state the risks accurately.

The patient wins because the patient can finally have the most accurate as possible information about the risks and benefits of a surgery, and can get multiple opinions, compare them, and have good data about which surgeons are reliable in their predictions.

"College is about protecting the young from an unforgiving society...Traditionally, college was to protect young men from the horrors that society inflicts upon men of low status,... It protects the students, and it protects the market from their wage depression, and it protects society from a deluge of unemployed people..."

I am not aware of any evidence that these motivations were the conscious intent behind the creation of the post-World War II university complex (except to the extent that avoiding mass post-war unemployment was a motivation for the GI bill in particular). Nor does it seem like it was the subconscious or institutional intent either. Do you have any evidence for these statements?

In my understanding, the post-war college system was created because the nation's leadership believed in the goals of training people for the workforce and the Utopian goal of educating every person as a philosophe. The people in charge of the system at the time were academics themselves, who were true believers. As the university industry grew, there is a big incentive to cater to the whims of the students in order to attract students, so universities have made themselves a very pleasant and sheltered playground for 18-22 year olds.

The subconcious, adaptive motivation for the creation of the university system, is that the idea of a university education is a self-replicating adaptive fiction. Whether or not the education is useful, the more people who have the education, the more people who are indoctrinated to believe that said education is useful, so the more the belief replicates.

If I was pg, unless I was writing essays based directly on the YCombinator experience, I would write under a pseudonym. Once you achieve a certain level of fame, it is simply too dangerous and aggravating to write honestly under your own name. This has only gotten worse in the past few years with the rise of angry twitter and tumblr mobs. The world is full of people who wish to punch upwards and tear someone down of higher status. And then on the flip side you have too many groupies who will agree with you just because you are successful. Of course, maybe he already is writing and submitting essays under a pseudonym, we may never know ...