fyi80

#5 "Echo their name back at them"

That is literally a specific advice to write low-quality "porn" content that stimulates superficially and then trigger an anger/betrayal reaction.

These "tricks" are copied straight from a used car sales lot, and we hated them there too.

You have interesting friends. Any email that puts my name in the subject line is spam.

Another horrible repeating of the "income inequality" trope, and then showing graphs of median income that don't get near the top l% of US earners, while citing a stat that the top 1% of earners are gaining.

200K income, you can easily afford to allocate 25% of that to a mortgage interest (plus 10% for principal, taxes, etc), $50K/year

3.5% mortgage -> 50K/yr * 100% / 3.5%/yr = $1.5M house price

interest rates are so low these days, you can spend 50% more on principal for the same interest, compared to 2006 when rates were ~6.25%.

Oh my. In my day they just gave us coupons for free personal pan pizza for each 10 books we read.

> You are asking, gwern, a question about what people like about your writings.

tokenadult, do you have an Ed.D or Ph.D in Education? Or maybe something related to Social Work?

Did you know that this communication style, which you use rather consistently in your HN posts, and which is prevalent in the education community, is poorly-received rather outside that community?

Not saying your style is wrong, just that is extremely grating outside the Ed world. It sits in the uncanny valley of faux-familiarity, and as such it breeds mistrust.

If I had $10 for ever hour I'd saved, I'd have $1000 every day. In reality, though, "saving an hour" on one task just leads to "getting stuck for an hour" on another task.

Java/C++ programmer who observed that English lacks Perl's qq operator or python's r''

> Erdos liked to tell another version of how Kummer computed 7 times 9: "Kummer said to himself, 'Hmmm, the product can't be 61 because 61 is a prime, it can't be 65 because that's a multiple of 5, 67 is a prime, 69 is too big-that leaves only 63.'

That's how I do problems like that, too (I am not a genius mathematician), and it is exactly the sort of thinking that kids should be doing all through K-12. Estimation, intuitive reasoning, analogy, pattern matching, logic, etc.

> that a course in introductory logic

This is barely touched in standard geometry text books. 2-column proofs and all that.

But most people don't notice it, and it deserves far more treatment. Many of the smartest people I know attended special gifted programs in K-12 that did teach formal logic and informal critical thinking skills.

(correlation != causation, though)

Or someone who has never used it, mocking its imagined failures, shows that when people gets there hands on it, they will see it wildly outperforming expectations and achieve mass-market appeal.

I hope you made exorbitant purchases at a retail postal shop to compensate for your extreme abuse of the system.

Only if they get a LOT of mail.

Well, if a drug has a dose in the ~200mg range, you can't physically fit many of them into one pill.

If only there were a way to predict that users searching for "taxi" tend to want local results, and users searching for "abortion" don't. You know, like that other search engine does, called, um, Google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=abortion

https://www.google.com/search?q=taxi

Or if you were willing to type more than 2 words into the search box before blaming Google for failing to read your mind, while you simultaneously tell Google to stop trying to read your mind.

Watson-ish system is IBM's medical diagnostics system.

and Google Search is basically Watson.

Check out the real estate section of your local newspaper. It has a long and glorious tradition.

Here's the actual policy document: http://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/drugpolicyreform

(It uses that horrid layout with broken scrolling that the NYT popularized with its Snowfall story.)

Where is the part where Hsieh wrote that he sold each item at a marginal loss?

Funny story: In 5th grade, on career day, the proprietor of an Army-Navy Surplus store explained margin to me:

I buy a shirt for $7, sell it for $10, and get $3 dollars profit and $7 to buy another shirt.

I was genuinely confused about the $10-3=$7 he was claiming he could use to buy more shirts, when it was already used to pay wholesale for the first shirt.

But maybe that was confusion about Return on Invested Capital, not confusion about margin.

Losses != negative margin.

Amazon was not profitable for 10 years, because revenue did not exceed variable+fixed costs. But revenue exceeded variable costs. They had losses for 10 years, but had positive margine.

Before startups or the Internet existed, the old joke was "Lose a little on every sale and make it up in volume".

"Not applicable" or "0/0 UI elements are correct" is a fine response to checklist.

The checklist motivates the automation. This advice is for people who have neither, to get started.

Care to guess how many African-American college applicants are white Jewish South Africans? Plenty.

This is of course much better, to avoid AA going to rich black kids over poor white kids.

Are you referring to Asian-Americans, or Asian international students?

Public schools love the international student tuition money these days, it's such a farce, turning "public" education on its head.

The geography imbalance, which exists, is not even close to explaining the disparity between general population and Ivy League attendees.

Define "merits". That is a huge problem in itself, as traditional measures of merit encode cultural discrimination.

"Exercising casually" is not the sort of "well-roundedness" that colleges select for. They look for "team captain", which, by the way, is far more common when your (expensive, private) school has 100 students instead of 1200 like a common public school.