jwb119

"The New New Thing" is not fiction, but it reads like it is.. Basically a bio snapshot of Jim Clark written by Michael Lewis (author of Liar's Poker, another good business book about Wall Street)

If that's not relentlessly resourceful I don't know what is! Loved the part when he lost the track and had to figure out which way to go.

Credit ratings are already crowdsourced by the stock market. This article is actually talking about crowdsourcing credit rating _models_, which is actually quite different and may be a good idea. I don't buy all the hype in the article though..

>Even while Moody’s gave Lehman a clean bill of health, the alternative model showed the company was basically DOA. Andersen: The Lehman score was the lowest score we’ve ever seen.

In fact, I can't stand this type of backtesting analysis on credit risk. The reason that the model works and gives a low rating score is likely that it places a high value on the factors that caused the current recession, factors that are not likely to be the cause of the next major correction.

The real genius credit rating models are the ones that are predictive, rather than reactionary

>Nature works through nurture, and nurture through nature, to shape our personalities, aptitudes, health and behaviour. The question should not be which is the dominant influence, but how they fit together.

Interesting article

The market mechanism should step in before the courts (i.e. they would give you an appeal to stop from losing you to the competition). The problem in this case is that there are no significant competitors.

They are sliced, diced, and leveraged when they are resold to investors as MBS or CDOs, not when presented to the loan recipient

Did you guys read the article? I thought there were quite a few things hacker-ish about the subject and his views.

This is also a fairly egregious application of Signaling Theory.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

So, he basically assumes that Wall Street has settled into an absurd equilibrium point where any one firm would have a massive incentive to break with the pack, yet they all refuse to do so because not one person at Goldman/Morgan/Barclay's etc understands marketing as well as Seth Godin? Convenient..

Wonder who the nefarious "other organizations" are..

here is the link to the "IT doesn't matter" article that is mentioned. i hadn't read it before and found it quite interesting.. http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/01/it_doesnt_matte.ph...

Re: 1337 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

Great article. I think you should consider an alternative subscription model.. one time access.

I am one of the demographic that initially used the site after either a HN or Cnet link (can't remember which one). I actually purchased a domain or two and made a mental note that I will use the site next time I am in the domain market, as I found it very useful.

For someone like me, I only look at domains once every few months at most. I just don't have an active appitite for purchasing - but when I do, it is a big priority. If you offered limited time access for a $5 a pop fee or something similar, I think you'd have a large audience (myself included).

Also important to point out there are some risks that we don't want to start taking again (i.e. 35x leveraged banks)

I could be wrong, but making it to the front page of CNN doesn't necessarily qualify as "winning" in my book. There has to be a better metric for measuring the success of a job search.

I'm just as curious about Scoble's new relationship with Rackspace as I am about his new project.

You may already be aware of this, but the current buzzword for what you are talking about is "co-working".

It is gaining quite a bit of traction here in nyc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coworking http://www.nwcny.com/

i'm curious as to how the black market on something like this would work. my knowledge is limited on the chips themselves, but they seem like something that would likely only be purchased by companies serving a high volume of traffic (thereby making the chips hard to sell on the black market because of the reluctance of large companies to deal with second hand goods of questionable origin).

"The world’s greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to be America."

It will be interesting to watch how/if this changes over time, specifically in regard to the seemingly new attitude exhibited by the world community (i.e. the indian example discussed in the article).

It would make more sense to tie this rule of thumb to a measurable index (i.e. the Russell 2k or a Technology ETF) rather than just pick an arbitrary number. Both are down about 50% from a year ago.

its hard to find something like this convincing when the "index" that is the core of his argument is only taken back to 1998

great find. absolutely fascinating observation on social dynamics in a small space. i found the physical features that affect the interaction to be particularly interesting (about 7:00 in).

I agree with the author that many people go into graduate school for the wrong reasons. However, it doesn't follow that all graduate school is bad.

The key here is the distinction between practical and impractical knowledge. The author seems to operate under the assumption that only practical knowledge is good. In her experience, she has been able to gain practical knowledge at least as efficiently outside of the graduate educational system. I agree with her point here, but I don't think you can discount the value of impractical knowledge - which I would define as knowledge that does not have any immediate real world application.

The value in impractical knowledge is twofold: 1) it can (and often is) able to called on later and 2) it can serve as an introduction to other practical knowledge. For instance, even the lawyer that the author has argued has wasted his/her education by transferring to a different career field may immeasurably benefit from some theoretical aspect of his graduate experience. More likely, an experience in graduate school may introduce a person to a subject area or conceptual idea that has a practical application they would never have been exposed to outside of that environment.

Some may argue that both of the above benefits can also be obtained through real world work experience, which leads to the question of knowledge for its own sake. I personally am a believer in learning for learnings sake, although I'm not sure I can articulate that argument in a comment length...

i didn't think it was possible, but this article actually made me feel good about the relative state of the U.S. economy

You can't throw out the idea that "blue chip" stocks are a safe haven based on 9 months of underperformance.

"simple mechanics creating rich dynamics"

great concept

the article is good, but i can't help the feeling that it is just applying a clever name to a common sense principle that is relevant to just about every field (including finance and technology)

Great site. Interesting biz related side topic: Have sites like this trended too far towards the policy of "no account required"?

This is a service I actually want to sign up for and I wasn't able to find a sign up link after looking around for 30 seconds or so. Surely there would be some benefit to EtherPad to have me sign up for an actual account and collect data on me.. which in this case I am happy to have them do since they are providing a solid service..

the actual paper is here: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/79655/gazelle.pdf