dbroockman
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2 years ago
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on: Annoying A/B testing mistakes
Another one: don’t program your own AB testing framework! Every time I’ve seen engineers try to build this on their own, it fails an AA test (where both versions are the same so there should be no difference). Common reasons are overly complicated randomization schemes (keep it simple!) and differences in load times between test and control.
dbroockman
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3 years ago
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on: How Californians are weaponizing environmental law to eliminate housing
CA YIMBY has been making a lot of progress on this at the state level. If this stuff makes you mad it’s a good org to donate to:
https://cayimby.org/
dbroockman
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4 years ago
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on: What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity
This is a rewriting of history. Before we ever had results from the COVID vaccine trials, the FDA declared that the primary goal of the trials was to prevent any symptomatic infection in the first place. From June 2020:
https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download.
dbroockman
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4 years ago
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on: Booster dose of Pfizer vaccine shows 95.6% efficacy in Phase 3 trial
And that’s 95.6% efficacy relative to two shots! Relative to no shots it must be like 97%. Wow.
dbroockman
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4 years ago
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on: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma: systematic review (2003)
This paper is intended as a sarcastic critique of the push towards conducting randomized trials in academia/medicine, but it’s an obvious straw man. You could write this sarcastic article for any research method - “see, why do research using method X when we already know the answer from other methods?”
The problem is that there are plenty of research questions where RCTs show us that previous non-RCTs were wrong.
dbroockman
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5 years ago
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on: I almost quit caffeine in one year
I was similarly addicted and quit for similar reasons.
https://www.weancaffeine.com worked really well for me - I bought 3 packs and was off caffeine in a few weeks. I was slightly slower those weeks but it wasn't so painful.
dbroockman
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6 years ago
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on: Clearview AI helps law enforcement match photos of people to their online images
Holy shit, this quote is crazy:
> While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.
dbroockman
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7 years ago
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on: Oregon expected to enact first state-wide rent control law
Here's a great paper about how rent control is counterproductive:
https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/DMQ.pdf.
> Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals’ migration, we find rent control limits renters’ mobility by 20% and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15% by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law.
dbroockman
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8 years ago
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on: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians
It's hard to tell exactly what the underlying principle is from just the few questions we could get folks to answer, but the general pattern seems to be about like you describe -- on the environment, founders are pretty liberal; on issues of labor and product market regulations, they're fairly conservative; on everything else, they're fairly centrist. We have all the survey questions we asked that went into this index in the Appendix.
dbroockman
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8 years ago
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on: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians
Great points on both. On #2, we wanted to include those, but space constraints :/. Given the interest in this survey we'll probably do another after collecting more suggestions like these. Thanks!
dbroockman
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8 years ago
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on: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians
dbroockman
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8 years ago
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on: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians
The same logic holds for founders in other industries but they don't seem to like taxes/redistribution much (although we need and are getting more data on that). Would have been nice to ask about taxation on capital gains, but survey space was limited (you folks are busy!) and that is a relatively small share of federal receipts so not as important substantively, even if it speaks to this theoretical question.
dbroockman
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8 years ago
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on: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians
dbroockman
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8 years ago
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on: Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians
dbroockman
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8 years ago
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on: SFO near miss might have triggered aviation disaster
Seems like disaster was only avoided because there was good visibility. If there was fog that day, it sounds like this wouldn't have been avoided.
dbroockman
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9 years ago
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on: Uber C.E.O. To Leave Trump Advisory Council After Criticism
These kinds of councils have nearly no influence; they're photo ops. But leaving does signal that Silicon Valley $ isn't going to play along with Trump, which Republican Members of Congress are going to care a lot about as they think about how to raise money in the future.
dbroockman
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9 years ago
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on: Uber C.E.O. To Leave Trump Advisory Council After Criticism
> This is really unfortunate. If you're in the "Trump is a mad man" camp, don't you want voices of reason like Kalanack's to be in his ear?
I see the point, but this business council isn't going to meaningfully influence policy. The policymaking apparatus is huge and this is a tiny, tiny piece of it. However, it does send a signal to Republicans in Congress that the tech $ they want will not play along with Trump. That's a quite important signal.
dbroockman
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9 years ago
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on: A Silicon Valley down payment could buy you an entire house in much of the U.S
Fun fact: in Tokyo prices are 3x lower than in the bay area, in large part because new housing is legally much easier to build.
If you want to make the bay area more affordable, check out the great work these folks are doing to legalize building new housing: http://www.sfyimby.org.
dbroockman
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9 years ago
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on: Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
Good thing voters are incentivized to vote correctly like they were incentivized to answer correctly in this survey. Oh, wait.
dbroockman
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9 years ago
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on: These 2 Forces Will Crush the San Francisco Housing Bubble
The city doesn't have enough room to add many more jobs. This is like saying a restaurant that fills its tables every night must be in a bubble because it hasn't grown past its capacity. Right? (Not saying it shouldn't have more room (building). But as a descriptive matter...)
