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.