blackskad's comments

You're assuming all the sellers are always overpricing by a very large percentage and that nobody accepts a lower offer.

What usually happens though, is that you determine an estimated FMV (eFMV) based on recently sold properties in the neighborhood that are similar in size. Experienced realtors are usually quite good at this. You can add a factor to the eFMV to get your list price. As a seller, in the worst case, you may have to drop your list price to your eFMV. Best case, you get a nice bonus. When there are multiple bidders around your eFMV, but under listing, you have some leverage to get a higher bid. Let's assume your eFMV is 850K. "Look, I have a bid of 850k. You're at 825k. My list price is 900K, but if you bid 875k now, it's yours guaranteed." It looks like a steal in the buyers eyes ("25k below list price!") and you get a nice 25k bonus over the eFMV.

As a buyer, this silent "list price is always accepted" rule, gives you the ability to properly filter properties because the list price functions as a cap. This saves both buyer and seller time because you're not chasing unreachable properties. You can also get a realtor to get your own estimated FMV for the property that looks interesting. It's up to you to decide if the certainty of the buy is worth the difference between list price and your eFMV. If not, you can always bid something lower, closer to your eFMV but with the possibility that someone outbids you.

The process usually is really fast, because realtors are good at estimating a FMV, most sellers realize they shouldn't expect a huge premium over that estimate and buyers accept a premium for the certainty of an immediate sale.

No, it just reverses the dynamics: instead of starting out low to get people into the door, you start with a list price that's too high. If the bids you're getting are always far below your asking price, you know the free market isn't willing to cough up what you want, and you lower the price to something that is more in range. If your initial asking price is $1MM and all bids are around $800K, consider dropping the list price to $850k and see if they want to play now.

That's the usual dynamic in Belgium.

It's kinda weird that it's not included yet. The schema.org spec has a field 'recipeYield' specifically for this purpose and it's present in the meatball example on the site. It should be quite easy for the author to add it.

This standard is not unique to Google. It's part of the Schema.org initiative to add semantics to the web. The full definition is here:

http://schema.org/Recipe

The biggest problem with it, imho, is the lack of a proper definition of ingredients. An ingredient is just a plain string containing the unit, amount and name and sometimes an extra note. Having a quadruple instead of a string would make this standard a lot more useful.

There's a Belgian startup that matches flavors with a scientific method. https://www.foodpairing.com/en/home

He also did a funny TED talk on the topic. At just 14 minutes, it may be more manageable than a lengthy article.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/my-ted-talk.html

IKEA, on the other hand, designed their stores specifically to keep customers inside as long as possible. If you don't know the shortcuts (or don't notice them), you have to wander through the whole showroom & marketplace. And just about everyone leaves with more than what they initially planned.

The vendor experiment provides a nice solution to that problem. Check in the vendor directory into your own repository and you always have the required source code available, even after the original author removes his repository on github.

And lagging behind in terms of core OS updates. My last phones were Nexus phones and a Moto X because I knew they would get updates really quick (or quickish for the Moto X). I don't even want to try my luck with other vendors.

The easy thing about combining AI systems is that they don't argue. They don't try to change the opinion of the other experts. They don't try to argue with the entity that combines all opinions, every AI expert gets to say his opinion once.

With humans on the other hand, there will always be some discussion. And some human experts may be better at persuading other human experts or the combining entity.

I think it would be an interesting thing to try after they beat the number 1 player. Gather the top 10 (human) Go players and let them play as a team against AlphaGo.

The one expert, because the others would not be able to reach a decision on which move to play.

In this story, it's regulation that has put some companies at the merci of competitors. Small Startup Y has to hope that Big Corp X wants to license a patent for a fair $ amount. Startup Y has no way to negotiate a large fee down to an acceptable level, pay the expensive licenses or fight in court if they ignore the patent.

Considering two companies with patents, you get the Nash equilibrium where both companies go to court for patent infringement (assuming the plaintiff always wins). The payoff matrix could look like this, where the numbers are the changes in profits in %.

            | court    | not court
  ---------------------------------
  court     | -5 \ -5  |  -15 \ 10
  ----------|----------------------
  not court | 10 \ -15 |  1   \ 1
  ---------------------------------

Assume the profit of the previous year is 14%.

  - If no company goes to court, both profits grow slightly with 1% to 15%.
  - If one company goes to court, and the other doesn't, the plaintiff's profit increases with 10% to 24% and the defendant's drops with 15% to -1% (placing it a loss).
  - If both companies go to court, the profits of both companies drop with 5% to 9%.

If you want a real-life example of this situation, just look at the lawsuits between Samsung & Apple. Probably the only case where they'll evolve to the pareto optimal solution, is when patents no longer exist at all.

A world without patents would allow companies to win customers based on pure attractiveness and features, not by getting competition banned. Note that this isn't the same as giving your key designs away for free. It means I could reverse engineer an iphone touchscreen and create a compatible version, without being sued by anyone. Apple would still have the early mover advantage with existing customers; the consumer would have more/better/cheaper choices and i would have a more attractive product. (Note that this might not be the case for other sectors, like pharma, where it costs a lot to develop a new drug from scratch, rather than the cheaper additive innovations in the tech sector).