snewe

A commenter

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/nanosolar-solar-powe...

makes an interesting point about the true gains in efficiency. The second press release:

http://www.nanosolar.com/company/blog/nrel-certifies-164-nan...

states:

"In terms of our current baseline production process, our best production rolls now achieve higher than 11% median efficiency measured as equivalent to panel efficiency, with very tight cross- and down-web uniformity."

Looks like a local version of RescueTime.

Perhaps this explains the hate for PHP by "real" developers:

"It tends to be that code wins. If two groups are arguing, but one group has an implementation and the other doesn't, well, the implementation wins. It almost doesn't matter how braindead it is; if we should have the feature, but we can't agree on the implementation, we'll go with whoever builds it."

John Cochrane (economist) has some excellent tips on writing for PhD students:

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/Paper...

Biden dreams of a wonderful new way to travel:

"Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes."

Now imagine that people actually start taking trains. Wouldn't you expect the TSA to start screening trains too?

Here is the BLS report: http://www.bls.gov/opub/regional_reports/200908_silicon_vall...

Not only are AppsFire users likely unrepresentative, but the set of AppsFire users that completed the whole survey (i.e. "Tell us how much disposable income you have!") are even less representative. Apparently the editors are TC have the weekend off.

Technically he tapped demand previously unsatisfied in the market.

Ebay does this bidding for you. Anytime you enter an auction, the price you are willing to pay should be independent of how everyone else in the room values the object. If your willingness to pay is a function of the last bid, then you probably should stick to fixed price sales.

How about you bid your "reservation price" and have no regrets? Simply bid the most you are willing to pay and then last minute bidders won't matter. That is the beauty of a second price auction.

What about the new law about robo-calling? Will they be affected by that?

Here is the story:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/08/getting-most-revenue-fro...

Seems like direct competition with PubMatic.

Note that most VC funds have their fees fall as time goes on. Many fees fall by half after year 5 or 6.

This may explain my observation that people who drink diet sodas drink a LOT of diet sodas, while people that just drink soda do so occasionally.

That would be the "structural breaks" idea. The process in the last 80 years that generated the downward trend in times has changed recently due to technology, etc.

That simple regression does not indicate anything...the author does not show that the data follows an exponential; he just imposes it. What about a non-parametric regression? What about structural breaks in the time series?

Webfaction

I read it as: "You can now share a document with your Google Groups members by inviting your_group@googlegroups.com"?

Link to original article: http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five-key-reaso...

"Institute a 10% tax on landlords that flows into a federal savings account in the name of the renter. The renter can draw from his account only for a home mortgage, or at his retirement."

So landlords raise rents 10% (or more) and the effect is simply forced savings. Why not just make the SS tax rate 10 percentage points higher? Ridiculous.

Blog spam. Direct link:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/send-mail-from-another...

This letter:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kana...

effectively shows that the original paper ignored endogeneity, mis-interpreted coefficient estimates and data-mined.

Exactly what I thought someone should write. I gather it didn't work out because it was difficult to monetize?

Someone needs to keep track of these types of predictions and track how often the author is wrong. It is costless to make big predictions, because rarely do people come back and say "You were wrong." It would be nice if I could search for this author's forecasting performance.

Thanks for knocking something off my to-do list. However, what I really wanted (and I wrote an ugly version for myself) is an update for apartments. We were looking for 1-2 beds that allowed dogs/cats within a certain prices range, not in certain neighborhoods. Add that feature and you have an awesome product.

What about Google bookmarks? They are also private, you can export them and I suspect are backed up.

For those with Wordpress blogs, here is a plugin to do the same:

http://github.com/paulwilliam/wordpress-github-gist-shortcod...

Important point about the cost of the original acquisition:

"Even so, it’s important to remember that Google paid for YouTube in stock, not cash, that represented a tiny fraction of the company’s total market capitalization. (The deal was initially valued at $1.65 billion.) And immediately after the merger was announced, Google’s shares rose, which in some sense seemed to pay for the deal on its own."

Yes, but suppose it fell 11 percentage points from 90%. That would be a smaller real drop.