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weiser

54 karma · joined June 6, 2007

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weiser··on Airbnb Paying More Than 10% Interest on $1B Financing Announced Monday
They are expecting to be bailed out, just like everyone else.
weiser··on Netflix's Junk Bonds Explain How We Are in a Corporate Debt Bubble
Anything with real intrinsic value will do well. For equities, that means value stocks over growth stocks.
weiser··on What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
In my experience, the best approach is to treat the notebook as the frontend. So widgets, graphs, annotations are generally ok. Anything compute intensive should be relegated to the backend.
weiser··on Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
How a blockchain works.
weiser··on Last German kaiser's heirs fight for riches lost behind Iron Curtain
This is simply solved with intermarriages. Make 2 people 1.

Happened throughout history. When it didn't, led to conflict.

weiser··on U.S. Designates China as Currency Manipulator
Symbolic moving, and possible stepping stone to other actions. Technicalities don't matter.
weiser··on My Manhattan Project: How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street.
In Savings and Loan crises of 80s, wall streets banks lost all the money they made during the previous 25 years. In the current crises, I dont know the exact number but it is worse than that.

So if you believe that wall street banks actually make any money, you might want to reconsider your view points.

weiser··on Smart People Really Do Think Faster.
So what happens when each node in the decision tree has probability attached to it. Worse still, what happens when you do not know the true probabilities of these nodes. Now imagine you have to deal problems all day with uncertain characteristics, i.e., decision trees have nodes with unknown probabilities. You will be stuck, unable to make decision.

This also reminds of the study in which a person's emotional part of the brain was removed (forgot name of the part, its the one that uses hueristics). So, he would have to make every decision completely rationally. That caused him to take a very long time to make even the simplest decisions, like which pencil to choose amongst a set pencils to write with.

weiser··on Smart People Really Do Think Faster.
These guys (http://www.visualspatial.com/) would not be happy with the way results of this research are framed.

This research seems to be suggesting that auditory-sequential (AS) learners are more intelligent, i.e., have higher IQ, than visual spatial (VS) learners.

If IQ is the measure of intelligence, then certainly, AS would be regarded as more intelligent. That is why AS learners do better at every single test that is timed or requires quickness of thought, be it SAT/GRE, mensa or job interviews at microsoft/google or a wall street bank or hedge fund.

weiser··on RIP, MBA - The economic crisis has exposed the myth of business-school expertise
Actually, the author is clearly stating the causal relationship. He is pointing out that free market fundamentalism is the cause of the crises and Business schools are the cheerleaders for free market fundamentalism.

Now, I personally do not agree with that argument, but your criticism of author's argument is unfounded.

weiser··on The mindset of an AIG Executive
I think this executive and all those who want to bury this guy are missing an important point.

In financial markets, you cannot judge performance simply by results, because it is very difficult to determine whether the good performance was due to any intelligent effort or simply due to good luck. Those guys making money off CDS were also being profitable for a long time. But now we know what they were doing was utterly shortsighted

So if this guy wants to prove that he deserves that bonus, he should show that he was doing something intelligent. If he knows this, than his letter is a deception. If he does not know this, he is not really that smart and does not deserve that bonus.

weiser··on Study: Old Age Begins at 27
Ok, so certain mental abilities deteriorate. Maybe, some other mental abilities improve.

The problem with this research is that it is trying look at brain from a certain view point, ignoring all other view points. A more holistic approach would provide a better understanding of how mental abilities change over time.

weiser··on Ask HN: Do you think primarily in English?
My view is that people think in (1) words (2) pictures and (3) concepts. How much of each depends upon the individual.

As for myself, I think mostly in pictures and concepts, very rarely in words.

I am bilingual, but since I rarely use words for thinking, languages don't matter as much.

weiser··on Do you know any programmers who exhibit these personality traits?
To all those who share the personality traits of this "friend" of the blogger, how many of you believe your coding speed is slower than other hackers? From coding speed, I mean, say amount of time to finish a well defined programming project. Or to come up with an algorithm to solve a well defined problem and correctly implement it.

I obviously share many of these traits, and I know for a fact that I was slower than many of my peers in school, and later at work. I just had to spend more time doing the same amount of work. In the end though, I was able to produce similar results, albeit with more effort on my part.

weiser··on Your Best Hire: It May Surprise You
An honest self-assessment is essential for hiring into your weakness. Unfortunately, most people are unable or unwilling to do that.
weiser··on NFL player IQ by position
Intelligence is a grand notion indeed. Check out the notion of multiple intelligences

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence...

IQ scores are useful for assessing mostly logical intelligence, and to some extent visual spatial intelligence.

weiser··on In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
Yes, thats true, some people might suck at everything. But that can be managed as long as thats a small enough minority. (we have government welfare for a reason, right? :))

The hypothesis I proposed is too broad to prove easily. Maybe, we can start with a narrower premise. We can disprove "if you suck in English class, you are no good for college". A friend of mine, a maths genius, got a D in History class in college (without deliberately trying to fail) He had straight A's in all technical courses (CS, maths etc).

weiser··on In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
I can bet that woman must be good at something she has never been tested on and probably does not know about. Maybe if we start from the premise that most individuals have something they are really good at, we might be able to move beyond the educational system of As and Fs and take advantage of people's abilities to the fullest.
weiser··on Controlled experiment in futures markets: onions
The lack of transparency in oil futures trading has been a concern for many, not just trading in itself.

See http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=257862

weiser··on Palestinians blow hole in border wall... to go shopping.
Agree. Anybody who pins the blame on any one side is an ignorant idealogue. People who think like that can only create problems, not solve any.
weiser··on The world's most toxic value system
"..it's not hard to find poor societies or societies with long histories of oppression where the thar mentality is much less virulent. Instead, I argue that the thar mentality causes poverty, and causes or certainly reinforces the oppression in the society."

the author then goes out to enumerate scenarios to argue how thar mentality might cause poverty.

I agree, thar mentality can cause poverty. But again, poverty can cause thar mentality. Imagine you are poor destitute. All you probably have to defend is your honor, or that your wife (if u are lucky to have one) is not doing someone else.

In the end, I dont know if thar mentality. causes poverty or vice versa. Maybe, they are both caused by some other factor. What I do know is that the Author needs to do a better job than this, Unless all he wants is to appease western cultural supremacists. In that case, he is doing exactly the right thing.

weiser··on Warning: Software Startups are Not as Easy as Everyone Says
I've played blackjack in vegas, and I am also working on my web app these days. The latter is relatively harder
weiser··on What reddit taught me about startups: making money (really?)
I understand the aversion to drowning users with ads, but still, many sites use ads without nauseating the users to generate decent ad revenue. Why was it so hard to do it for reddit?
weiser··on YC News Unavailable...
There is an infinite number of primes, but Paul Graham is the greatest prime.
weiser··on Google's Achilles Heel
All those companies/merchants advertising their products/services through adsense wouldnt want their ads blocked by IE. Google wont be alone in this fight.