Blog AF

Why polls fail, explained with interactive graphics

As Nathan Yau put it, “…what happens when you strip out all context from an NPR newscast and only look at the numbers.”

An extremely bullish case from a former Amazon bear. Ben’s writing is usually great, but this one takes the prize for clarity: connecting the dots from Bezos’ famous letter to shareholders in 1997 to the beginnings of AWS in 2006, to today. A must read.

Very seriously considering buying one of these. Seems like the investment would pay for itself with a few hours of tinkering.

An interesting account of incentives at work. Nobel prize winners, and other already well-known scientist, do not care about the prestige of the important journals, so they get to publish directly. Young, unknown, scientists on the other hand, are stuck with the old, considerably inferior, publishing system to prove their worth.

On one hand, the article makes good use of historical data to make a clear point: SaaS has been hit hard by the markets, both public and private. On the other hand, the URL makes good use of pirate jokes.

Some things about this country are still baffling to me.

Knowing what you don’t know is a first step. I think I have gotten that far, at least.

This story was recently reported by RadioLab and Note to Self in podcast form. It is crazy. As in, “we should be worried”, crazy. Whether you are a podcast person and listened to those episodes, or not, you should give this article a read.

A great profile on David Card, an empirical economist whose research has reshaped Economics.

Shifts in the landscape, and analogies of history, or how innovation in warfare technology can explain the implications of the rise of the smartphone.

A story of anthropomorphic cookies, scripts, and ad-blockers.

Our dependence on other species is not surprising. The depth of our dependence is.

New wealth flowing into a city, plus old wealth’s “build new things in other places” attitude leads to gentrification. We’re not in a bubble, but in a bifurcation, and SF has no relief valve to rely on. Only new city policies could change that.

In which 21, the Bitcoin company, unveils what the future of the web might look like.

A fascinating (but, at 65+ pages, excessively long) piece on the Obama administration and its foreign policy legacy.

Academic papers tend to utilize terse language and jargon to precisely describe processes and outcomes, but these “precise” explanations end up being impenetrable walls for the uninitiated. Thankfully, there are bloggers like Trask, Olah, Karpathy, and others who lower the bar to understanding the intricacies of academic machine learning. I am still trying to get through this one. Trask definitely made the task accessible. The DeepMind researchers, on the other hand, did not.