zurla

discount code for HN readers?

Charlie Munger: "One of my favorite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The heart and soul of the integrity of the system is that all the packages have to be shifted rapidly in one central location each night. And the system has no integrity if the whole shift can't be done fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the thing to work. And they tried moral suasion, they tried everything in the world, and finally somebody got the happy thought that they were paying the night shift by the hour, and that maybe if they paid them by the shift, the system would work better. And lo and behold, that solution worked."

superman does good. red beacon is doing well

I think he actually argued that men might have a different distribution for mathematical ability than women. Specifically, he suggested men might have a higher variance in their distribution, meaning more men in the tails at both sides. But the distributions would still have the same mean. So men are not 'better than math' than women -- there would be more dumb ones and more smart ones, and less in the middle, effectively.

This phenomenon, by the way, is commonly observed in other species for various genetic traits. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for the males to "roll the dice" and have a higher variance for many traits. For example, one superstar male frog can have many more offspring than one average male frog. But one superstar female can really only have as many offspring as the average female. That's a crude over-simplified explanation, but the idea is sound.

if you're using ruby, check out daemons and especially daemon-kit which includes a nice rapleaf patch to daemons

Submitted on 12 May 2005 (v1), last revised 11 Jun 2005 (this version, v2)

what a killer SEO move. a ton of links all pointing to digg.com. they already get a ton of search traffic, but it will only go up from here

I do think there is a legitimate debate as to whether or not we should have bailed out AIG. To address your later points, there are plenty of respectable people who argue we should have let AIG go bankrupt. "Financial experts", if it makes you feel better, for example Jim Rogers, whom I mention since you seem hung up on this point.

The company should have gone bankrupt (and certainly would have, without US government intervention), in which case none of these people would have seen any bonuses at all. he should be grateful for the $1 :-)

yes. i've been disappointed that the controversy about the bonuses on the order of $200M have gotten more press and attention than the AIG bailout which is orders of magnitude more taxpayer dollars.

I believe PG said he is taking more of a long-run view on this. He's not trying to make Arc what's hot right now, but rather thinking more about a "hundred-year language"

if an MBA speaks nonsense and there's no one there to hear it, is it still as useless?

or better yet, clip to evernote

"The root cause of this crisis is fractional reserve lending, and micromanagement of interest rates by the Fed in particular and Central Banks in general. The Fed started the party by slashing interest rates to 1%, but Central Banks everywhere drank the same punch to varying degrees." -- http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/10/global-co...

sock puppet voting?

Taleb is the man.

"No country in the world has ever succeeded by debasing its currency"

"That's a little like saying the purpose of religion isn't to achieve salvation" -- more quality journalism from Time

the MS offer was not that high when you factor in how many people work at xobni. i've heard some tech acquirers say they initially value a startup at $1M per engineer before factoring in the value of the actual product. xobni is up to what, 14 or 15 people now?

"Various studies conducted over the lifetime of the SAT show a statistically significant increase in correlation of high school grades and freshman grades when the SAT is factored in." from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT