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chendies | 9 years ago | on: Mathematician Says Big Data Is Causing a ‘Silent Financial Crisis’

Transparency of pricing models does not immediately result in better outcomes for consumers. In some cases, it may actually result in worse outcomes.

Consider when there are few companies within an industry, like rare metal mining. If they chose to use the same, open-source pricing model, and any changes to that pricing model would be reflected by all companies, the optimal pricing model would be to price at the monopoly level -- to raise the price to where it would be if there were no competition and a single firm in the marketplace.

In the case of lending, however, different firms have different levels of risk acceptance. Many firms (big banks) avoid high-risk borrowers. A few firms (pay-day lenders) are willing to lend to those borrowers, but only at a high interest rate. Somewhere in the middle is a collection of scrupulous lending opportunities.

Any regulation that would restrict the acceptable interest rates to a narrow band would reduce not just the (unscrupulous) loan sharks but also the banks lending to high-risk customers.

This would necessarily result in loss of borrowing ability to those labeled "high-risk".

Is this a desirable outcome? Maybe, maybe not. But it should certainly be discussed.

chendies | 9 years ago | on: FBI says foreign hackers penetrated state election systems

The benefit of transparent elections outweighs the costs of counting paper.

If we really wanted to do elections cheaply, we'd just hire a couple of undergrads to write a Node.js script and give polling stations some desktop PC's loaded up to the page. Would hardly cost anything. But doing elections cheaply is not the point.

chendies | 9 years ago | on: Forum engine written entirely in Assembly

This is very impressive. I wonder what the server costs to run a website like Reddit would be if they hadn't used Python and instead used assembly, C or C++.

The benchmarks game [1] suggests that C++ can have a speedup of 10x to 100x for many toy benchmark programs and use far less memory. A highly optimized assembly version could add another factor.

While code closer to the metal would require higher investments in coding, it would be drastically easier to scale. And in the long run, server costs will dominate, so it would be beneficial to reduce those.

Who knows if Reddit would be cash positive if their codebase were written in a different language?

[1]: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/cpp.html

chendies | 9 years ago | on: Age differences in learning from an insufficient representation of uncertainty

Maybe older people are better at rationalizing low errors.

e.g. if there is a small error, older people can convince themselves that they were right and the world is wrong. (My reasoning was correct, but the answer was wrong by chance. Therefore I won't change my reasoning).

However, younger people are less able to rationalize these small errors, forcing them to accept the conclusion that they are wrong.

chendies | 9 years ago | on: Evidence Mounts That Rembrandt Used Optics to Paint Self-Portraits

Vermeer was also suspected to have used optics to help him paint, as highlighted in the documentary Tim's Vermeer [0]. Although their evidence is circumstantial, some color artifacts are difficult to explain in other ways. For instance, the falloff of light matches what would come from a video camera, but would be extremely difficult for an artist to see by eye.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS_HUWs9c8c

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