Best of Twitter - Week of November 16, 2020
- A working mRNA vaccine (first ever in humans!),
- Apple M1 chip,
- SpaceX rocket launch,
- GPT-3,
- Tons of cool companies IPO'ing and tons more getting started,
- V-shaped recovery
- Electric cars
- Crypto going mainstream
Sure feels like the roaring 20's are starting 🚀
The ability for Apple to create M1, for Tesla to create Model S, for Google to innovate on Google Workspace are all predicated on the fact that non-competes are not enforceable in California as each team is led by a previous leader at a top competitor (Intel, Mazda, Microsoft)
This strikes me as an extremely common feature of the scientific literature. How much of our knowledge is built like this – 5% or 80%?
"the core assertion transforms from a hedging statement into statements resembling fact through several steps, but without additional evidence"
Podcast on how GDP numbers in poor countries are actually calculated. Extremely eye-opening. Seems you can't trust GDP rankings of poor countries without knowing estimation method. Still true today?
^ from a link downstream “Even the simplest numbers on Gross Domestic Product, for example, are undermined by "huge discrepancies and alarming gaps," he says. "The data are unreliable and potentially misleading." “
Reading today about major discoveries that received either skepticism, mockery, or a few journal rejections and the list goes beyond what I initially thought: oxidative phosphorylation, lasers, PCR, jet engines, airplanes, immunosurveillance, the cause of stomach ulcers, DNA,
Great essay by @jsomers on his path for self-teaching himself more about biology, and the fascination that we should have for the mechanisms that underlie so many complex processes of life. (I wish I knew more about biology myself).
Experiment to expose microbe (Deinococcus radiodurans) for one year in space outside the International Space Station concludes with the microbes still alive
universetoday.com/148842/earths-…
If you look at autocorrelated data, pick any random day, and look for a break in linear trend on that day, you will find a statistically significant break a ludicrous amount of the time. In this random AR(1) data with delta = .8, I reject the null at 95% about half the time.
^ thread
"But how will you compete with AppAmaGooBookSoft's infinite number of engineers to throw at this problem?"
"... Before or after the 5 year head start?"
Alec Stapp @AlecStapp
One thing I've never really gotten over about industry is just how much of the economy is about unfucking other parts of the economy.
Not in any grand political sense. I mean, at a practical nuts and bolts level, undoing the careless mistakes of others made further upstream.
One of my first projects at a ~data science~ startup was imputing some characteristics of a client's book of business.
Not because it needed sophisticated statistical inference. They could have just looked the relevant info up, if they had the names and addresses.
But they didn't have the names and addresses of their own clients, because someone accidentally deleted a column in the only copy of a spreadsheet. So they decided to try and machine learn them instead. Their own clients' names and addresses.
Some of the smartest people I know, like literal particle physicists, are working on the problem of data extraction from pdfs.
You're probably thinking of "extracting insight" or something but I literally mean pulling tables that already exist out of pdfs and into csvs.
^ thread