Byrne's Eye View

Entrepreneur and essayist Paul Graham recently argued that every city sends ambitious people a message, and

New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.

A few New Yorkers took offense, notably Charlie O'Donnell, who argues that New York is a fine place for startups, especially if you're already connected there.

I think both sides are paying too little attention to the highly distorting effects of New York's high cost of living, and its status as the center of the world's financial system. For startups, the relevant issues are:

• I talk to many programmers who follow the same staccato pattern -- two years of coding for Credit Suisse, a year and a half building a blogging platform, three years at Morgan Stanley, two years creating a new web development framework. Since software developers in the city make so much, they can afford to save up and launch a startup every few years (the flip side is that they don't have to be as committed to their company -- a single-digit percentage chance of a seven-figure payout looks less enticing than a steady six-figure paycheck, especially when rent is due).¹


• Finance attracts a huge number of extremely smart, ambitious people, because hedge funds and investment banks are almost by definition the high bidder when it's a cash-only auction. Startups can offer hipness and options, academia can let you in on the prestige Ponzi scheme, but only a big bank or hedge fund will let you pay off a decade's worth of student loans in a few years.

  But these smart people don't always stick around. Some of them get bored, and they get bored about when they have enough money never to work again, and a few decades' worth of career time still left. Some of them drop out of sight, but some of them switch to venture capital.

• Finance creates huge subsidies for people who aren't actually involved in finance. Many hedge funds prefer to have a receptionist rather than an automated phone system, and most would really prefer someone polished and articulate, even if there's a premium. So funds act as a sort of infinite scholarship fund for well-educated people with other interests (most do this by accident, but some are explicitly looking for artists, writers, and other creative types). Attracting so many high-IQ right-brained types gives web design shops and music-related startups a natural talent pool.

Rather than talking about cities and ambition, it might make more sense to discuss cities and centers of gravity. In Boston, schools drag smart people out of business (unless those smart people are peculiarly sensitive to when they're doing meaningless non-work. In San Francisco, startups grab them with funky work environments and the possibility of an options-driven payout. And in New York, everything revolves to some extent around the financial industry -- an almost unlimited pool of money that naturally subsidizes smart people. Is there a better place to start a business than a place where the smart people go to get rich?

[1] Credit for this point is due to dpapathanasiou.

I have a Google query question: I know how to use the Boolean terms like AND, OR, NOT, etc. to exclude some false positives, include multiple possible matches, etc. But what I'd really like is a "Not Just" option. For example, if I'm looking for resumes (about 20% of my day job), and I want to find someone who went to Columbia, I know that I'll have to search for "Columbia" because most people don't bother to call it "Columbia University". And I also know that I'll get lots of people who a) live in Columbia, SC, or b) were admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia. Unfortunately, a) excludes people who went to Columbia and then moved, and even worse, b) excludes people who may have gone to one of the top law schools in the country and then practiced law in the capital, and who are thus probably very good candidates, indeed.

So I'm looking for a way to either tell Google or a job-search engine to ignore bad search strings containing good ones, but not to exclude them. I imagine it's Computer Science 101 to construct an ignore-but-don't-exclude out of normal Boolean operators, or perhaps Computer Science 401 to prove that this is impossible.

I've always felt about Eliot Spitzer the way devout Republicans felt about FDR in about 1938, so the news that he had a Lucy Mercer of his own -- and that she was a professional, no less -- was good news to me. I never thought he had it in him. Spitzer seemed too reptilian to end his career this way.

From time to time, Forbes adds to its list of the 400 wealthiest an appendix of who added money the fastest (per hour) to their fortunes. Assuming a 40-hour workweek and a 40% average tax rate (okay, let's knock it down to 30% and assume she's dallying with members of the right committees), "Kristen" was earning up to $11,000,000 per year. Not quite Forbes 400 material, but if she puts the money into tax-free munis at 6% after working from ages 18 to 28, she'll be nearly a billionaire by the time she's eligible for Social Security. And that, of course, assumes that her sessions with Eliot didn't enhance her star power.

Here is The New York Times breaking the story.

The Smoking Gun has documentation.

Dealbreaker goes all dealbreaker on him.

At to why I dislike him so much, here's a summary: Spitzer's legal tactic (singular!) is and has always been to take a complicated industry, spot a small amount of fraud, and conflate it with a standard practice to get better headlines and bigger penalties. Thus, the practice of market-timing was treated as identical to fraudulent backdated trades, bad analysts at investment banks were turned into a conspiracy to hype IPOs at the expense of the investing public, and paying commissions to insurance brokers became synonymous with price-fixing. Eliot Spitzer (who buy the way invested money with admitted stock manipulator and clownish con artist Jim Cramer) slandered tens of thousands, and destroyed billions of dollars of investor savings, all in a pointless quest for better PR and more electoral victories. I'm thrilled that he got caught having sex with a whore, and wish him all the misery he deserves.

Notice: about half of my readers seem to be programmers or at least familiar with programmer jargon. The other half are not. I'm trying to compromise between not boring the first and not annoying the second.

Paul Buchheit claims that "If CPU speed doubles every 18 months, then [Javascript] in 2007 performs like C in 2002." Since C is chosen for performance and Javascript chosen for features (it's what makes Gmail and Google Maps a lot more usable than their precursors), this basically means that people can slap together slow-running programs now and expect them to be as usable as carefully hand-crafted, ultra-efficient applications -- within a couple years. Then consider this interview with science fiction author Neal Stephenson:

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater.

A third data point: In Founders at Work, Paypal cofounder Max Levchin talks about how one challenge with his Palm-based cryptography startup was that a particular operation took about two seconds -- and he had to make it look like his program was doing something, because otherwise two seconds of nonresponsiveness would be annoying.

In light of what Levchin said, I think I can divide interactions with computers into three categories:

1. Things that happen basically instantly, like a character appearing on the screen when I punch a key.


2. Operations like Levchin's decryption, or copying a file, or starting up an email client -- things that take just long enough for someone to notice that they're tedious.


3. Anything that gives you time to get up and have a cup of coffee: rebooting, compiling, installing new games, transferring CD- to DVD-sized chunks of data around, downloading media.

I suspect that advances in computer speed mostly show up in shifting things from one category to another: drawing a picture on the screen might have taken a lot of effort thirty years ago, but now it happens instantly and is the basis for our interactions with computers; opening a web page was in Category 3 for me for a while; click the link, go do something, come back in a few minutes to see if it's loaded -- now it's in Category 1. Anyone designing a new operating system can make a couple tradeoffs: should booting up take 55 seconds instead of 60, or should wobbly 3D windows be something that happens right away rather than after a couple seconds of choking? In every case, the radical improvement is noticeable, so it's what wins. But the 'radical' improvement just means changing how we do an activity we already do -- the really radical stuff is a lot riskier than the shift between categories.

As long as that's true, we should expect new operating systems to give us faster, more accessible glitz, not profound changes in how we use computers. Paul Buchheit can now do in a browser what he would have had to do on a desktop in 2002. But that just means that, after half a decade of exponential increases in computing power, he's doing the same old thing.

If Amazon.com patents the "One-more-click purchase", will they have a monopoly by induction?

Guaranteed trick for making writing more pretentious:

1. You can use more words, unless
2. ... you can use the same number of words, with more syllables, unless
3. ... you're ending a sentence with something like "... less pretentious than I am," which should be "... less pretentious than I.

Look at this, then look at this, and then ask yourself: does Tom Tomorrow ever actually talk to people with whom he disagrees, or does he merely fantasize about stating his argument and leaving them speechless?

A while ago, I suggested that real 'campaign finance reform' would restrict spending extra time the way we already restrict spending extra money.

Today's Wall Street Journal mentions that:

More good publicity came last week when talk-show host Oprah Winfrey committed to campaign for him for two days in Iowa as well as New Hampshire and South Carolina.

How much would Mitt Romney or John Edwards pay for this? $100,000? $200,000? Would they pay less than the McCain-Feingold-mandated maximum per-person donation for Oprah's services, if they were bidding against one another? If the answer is 'no', it's obvious that Oprah is violating the spirit of McCain-Feingold. She is essentially laundering her vast wealth and selling her celebrity by taking a break from her job to tell her fans whom to vote for. If the point of McCain-Feingold was to reduce the influence of powerful people on politics, why did they leave such a gaping loophole?

James Flynn says:

Two twins raised apart, thanks to having slightly better genes than average, would both get into increasingly privileged environments. Both would get more teacher attention, would be encouraged to do more homework, would get into a top stream, and by adulthood, they would both be far above average. Moreover, thanks to their identical genes, their environmental histories would be very similar.

He's attacking the idea that the 80% correlation between IQs for twins raised apart implies that genetics can play a strong role in determining IQ. But the way he phrased it is interestingly discursive. A more compact way to say that is "Genes for intelligence are expressed through the environment." Which is a way of illustrating the absurdity of his view, because the above paragraph could also refer to those genes being expressed in brain size and structure. Imagine: "Twins raised apart have a slight IQ advantage, which tends to cause them to think more complex thoughts than most, which causes their brains to develop in a way different from most. Thus IQ is not caused by genes. It's caused by things genes cause."

I'm not sure what Flynn is doing here, but I'm pretty sure it isn't science.

I just got some pretty standard spam: someone gave me bad feedback on eBay (which I haven't used since I tried to sell my Social Security benefits a few years ago), and of course they want me to go to a website that looks like -- but isn't -- ebay.com, so I can resolve it.

The nice part is the footer of the email: it's a link to eBay's guide to detecting spoofed emails. The link, of course, goes to a .ru domain that tries to steal my eBay password. These phishers have a sense of humor

Alex Kates writes that Facebook applications suck because the only really popular ones are 1) awful, and 2) viral.

We use 'viral' too often to remember that it's not necessarily a good thing. A 'viral' video is, obviously, a video that people see and want to forward to their friends, who see it and want to forward it, etc. But any virus will slough off features that aren't necessary to getting passed on -- which is what has happened to viral Facebook apps. They aren't 'viral' anything -- they're just pure viruses. The most common I've seen are 'vampire', 'zombie,' and 'werewolf' applications, with which a user 1) adds the application, and 2) tries to get other users to add it, too. It's okay that these things exist, even if they're bothersome to ignore, but I'm going to request some honesty:

Someone needs to create a Facebook AIDS application. Add it, and you're Facebook-AIDS positive! Try to infect all of your friends!

Dilbert author Scott Adams has suggested a giant externality-generating conspiracy in the course of trying to defend his blogging hobby as a business.

A few years ago I tried an experiment where I put the entire text of my book, "God's Debris," on the Internet for free, after sales of the hard copy and its sequel, "The Religion War" slowed. My hope was that the people who liked the free e-book would buy the sequel. According to my fan mail, people loved the free book. I know they loved it because they emailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for free. For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market value for my work at zero. Oops.

So I've been watching with great interest as the band "Radiohead" pursues its experiment with pay-what-you-want downloads on the Internet. In the near term, the goodwill has inspired lots of people to pay. But I suspect many of them are placing a bet that paying a few bucks now will inspire all of their favorite bands to offer similar deals. That's when the market value of music will approach zero.

Is that really what he suspects? That there's a massive, uncoordinated conspiracy to temporarily overpay for a product to radically increase production, causing a glut that cuts prices further? Discussion questions:

1. Is this the most parsimonious explanation?


2. Is it plausible that this exists as a conspiracy?


3. Is it plausible that this exists as a random phenomenon?


4. If this kind of thing works, why not try it with, say, oil? Or, if you want to be all economical about it: why doesn't this work with any product that, like recorded music, has a very high fixed cost and a very low marginal cost? Does this explain overpaying for semiconductors in the late 90's to ensure lots of below-capacity foundries in the 2000's?


5. And anyway, where does he get his data? The only sales figures I've heard for the new Radiohead album are imaginary, so what makes him think it's not like any other easily-downloaded album?

Radiohead is not revolutionary: they're just admitting that the Internet has changed the music industry; Scott Adams is not insightful: he's come up with an implausible hypothesis to explain imaginary facts. Stick to drawing comics, monkey-brain!

Some other research has shown that, in fact, if you do open up the solution process you can get anywhere from 10X to 100X improvement in problem-solving performance.

-- Karim Lakhani, Harvard Professor

Last-resorts will always look this way. Another way of stating this is that "An unusual solution is more likely to work than a standard solution that has already failed." Richard Feynman had a nice anecdote about this (which I can't seem to find on Google): his incredible toolkit of analytical techniques included a slightly obscure calculus technique (something about inverting and then integrating -- don't ask me for details). When his colleagues had tried all the standard techniques, they'd come to him -- and, pretty frequently, his trick worked. This gave him a great reputation, but only because they didn't know that he would have tried everything they thought of, first.

To really judge an unusual method (like open-sourcing a problem, or Feynman's math trick), you'd have to ask what happens when people try it first. And the obvious result would be: that problem-solving methods tend to be used in about the order of their utility, except in a few non-sound-byteable cases.

Campaign finance reform either goes way too far, or not nearly far enough. I don't feel like making first argument, because that one seems natural (what, you get lots of ads if you're rich, but not if you have rich friends? Why not?)

If it doesn't go far enough, the question becomes: how can we make campaigns more equal? Once we've reduced the influence of people with excess wealth, what should we do next? I'd suggest that the next thing to fix is the excess influence of people with too much spare time. Ron Paul supporters, for example, stowed away on Romney's free busses, turning Romney's money advantage into leverage for Paul's spare-time advantage. To equalize this kind of thing, we just need to subject those people to the same constraints that face Romney's most avid supporters. Thus, in the spirit of campaign finance reform, I suggest that:

1) Nobody be allowed to think about, talk about, or write about politics for more than an hour a week, and 2) No one be allowed to say the name of any candidate during the 90 days before the election.

McCain and Feingold, I await your approval.

Most of the comments I get are spam, and most of the spam I get is generic, but in the last few days I've noticed something strange. Before they get down to the business of selling cut-rate pharmaceuticals and porn, spam comments introduce themselves with "Great site! Very informative! Click here for..."

Since spammers are in the marketing business, and everything they do is automated, their market research gets done automatically. So this spam is only common because it works. Someone out there thought "Well. This guy is turning my otherwise decent blog into a Discount Xanax Emporium. But he's so nice about it."

It isn't hard to instantly win any argument: It is undeniable that someone who believes something either a) lives according to their principles, or b) does not. This makes everyone either a) self-serving, or b) a hypocrite.

As long as arguments are about people and not truth, a) or b) offers a guaranteed one-sentence riposte to any conceivable position.

In case you're wondering why I haven't blogged much lately: my girlfriend and I have consolidated book collections, and given each other to-read lists. Top shelf, hers. Bottom shelf, mine. Shelf flipped for easy reading (click for full size):

These are actually the emergency to-read shelves. The actual to-read lists are about three times as big.

The Minneapolis bridge collapse was a disaster for the language, too:

investigating professionals will remain on scene. They will remain on scene until they understand and see what, in fact, they believe is the causal factor here or a probable series of causal factors.

Yes. The "causal factor". I bet this disaster recovery business is exhausting -- he can't wait to go to sleep in a nice, warm unit of bedular furnishing.

It reminds me of this: when you analyze the text for patterns, law doesn't look like English -- it looks like bytecode.

I first heard of this in a programming textbook. When you're dealing with human beings, you can pack information more densely by being less accurate: similes, analogies, and references all make it easy to say a lot with a little. When you're writing legal code or computer code, you have to make everything you say explicitly clear, because colliding interpretations make vague statements worse than useless.

I can think of an easy way to let government employees talk like humans, without worrying about two million-dollar commas and the like: port the legal code to Prolog, and treat commentary as comments.

By popular demand, I'm switching from markdown back to normal HTML, because people who subscribe to my RSS feed are getting the raw markdown, which is no fun at all.

I work at 40th and Lexington. Did you hear about 41st and Lexington?

I heard something that sounded like thunder and didn't stop; looked out the window and saw a geyser of mud go up fifty feet and not abate; within a couple seconds my coworkers and I had ditched the office (and our phones, hence the blog entry).

I got out of the building fast (as did everyone else): never have I been happier to live in a city of big steps and sharp elbows. Just try to imagine a place that could be evacuated on foot this fast.

I've added two new links in the sidebar:

• Unenumerated is a blog about nearly everything from someone who clearly knows the subject matter. Topics include cryptography, finance, property rights, history, and the relationship between Kolmogorov Complexity to common law as illustrated by gunfights in Westerns.
• Unqualified Reservations is even more entertaining: the author, 'Mencius Moldbug', riffs on property rights as illustrated by Fnargocracy and how Dubai and other city-states show that "a government (like any corporation) can deliver excellent customer service without either owning or being owned by its customers." This kind of attitude makes some people really mad, which is a good sign; after carefully reading the Manifesto, I'm pretty sure I count as a 'formalist'.

In other news, comments and trackbacks are open. Link at me. Talk to me.

Most of us are hypocrites. None of us should care. Hypocrisy is a popular sin because it's so easy to find: if you say one thing and do another, you're probably doing something wrong. But it's only easy because it's such a cowardly form of moral arbitrage: in effect, calling someone a hypocrite is saying "I don't know what you did wrong, but you must think you did something wrong."

It's never hard to find an example of why accusing someone of hypocrisy is moronic: take the editorializing on Al Gore's advocacy of lower emissions contrasted with his carbon-spewing lifestyle. It's true that Gore pollutes more than most of us, and asks us all to pollute less -- but from the perspective of caring about climate change, it really doesn't matter exactly what Gore does if the net result is less carbon. Objecting to Gore's advocacy of lower emissions on the grounds that he doesn't appear to follow this belief system in his personal life is Moral Marxism -- caring more about actions and intentions than about results and the parties that suffer for them.

The World Economic Forum in Davos was "carbon neutral," despite all these folks flying it to attend, because in large part, people donated money to third world countries to plant trees or build hydoelectric dams for electricity.

That's more or less the point of a division of labor: rather than treating carbon as a sin for which we owe penance, we can treat it as a problem to solve as cheaply as possible. And solving a problem cheaply is synonymous with paying whoever can solve it for less to do so -- polluting and buying carbon credits is hypocritical in the same way that buying groceries instead of having a garden is.

It takes a simple thought experiment to show that the Gore kerfuffle is ridiculous. We can assume that pollution is either bad or neutral, and thus that either Gore is bad for advocating emissions cutbacks but good for enjoying his high-carbon lifestyle, or he is good for wanting lower emissions but bad for burning so many fossil fuels. Now, he could try to satisfy the anti-hypocrisy contingent by cutting his personal emissions to be in line with his stated preferences. That would almost certainly mean he couldn't make any movies (flying around looking pensive spends more carbon than a quiet evening at home) and cutting back from a mansion to a middle-class house would certainly preclude some furrowed-brow soirées among the cares-about-carbon set.

Unfortunately, this means that pollution proponents are less satisfied with him (he's not burning much fuel!) while opponents are equally annoyed (he's not suggesting any more cutbacks!). Consider: if someone out there lives a low-carbon lifestyle but sees pollution as okay, and he an Gore maintain their views but switch their lifestyles, the only (moral) difference is who's doing the polluting versus who's doing the pronouncing -- the level of pollution and criticism are unchanged. In fact, the only constituency pleased by that turn of events would be the anti-hypocrisy crowd: the only people who believe that it's a good idea to be consistent are the ones who don't believe in much of anything.

It's easy to gravely opine that our actions ought to be consistent with our philosophies, but it's also a null criticism. If a hypocrite is someone whose actions and beliefs appear to diverge, they must be doing something right. They're also doing something wrong, but as long as hypocrisy is the object of criticism, they'll have no idea what. Hypocrisy is morally neutral, because correcting it means a 50/50 chance of being better or doubling down on error -- it's hardly useful to argue that we shouldn't hedge our bets.

I started posting actively on reddit in late 2005. I stopped a few weeks ago. I'm know I joined a site worth joining, I know I left one worth leaving, and I bet I know why: at any time, the average person most likely to want to join a group is below that group's average at whatever the group values. For reddit, this was trivial: it was founded by smart folks and funded by more of the same, so at first reddit was a chance to look over the collective shoulder of, among others, an MIT professor (assuming that RTM is also this RTM).

So, consider reddit when the only people who know about it are people like that and their friends. Who would want to join? The current users have smart and informed peers, but those peers already know lots of smart people. The next cohort attracted to reddit is going to be, on average, a notch or two lower. They're the ones with the most to gain -- but since it's a democratic site, they also influence the content. And since there are more of them, they have a disproportionate influence.

What I've noticed recently on reddit is something slightly tragic: it's frighteningly easy for smart people to applaud some pretty dumb stuff. Most reddit users stick to the front page, and articles only reach the front page if they're frequently and rapidly voted on beforehand. In the time it takes for a few dozen compsci devotees to read this paper on the lambda calculus, how many people laughed at and voted on this? It's not that smart people don't find gags like that funny -- the problem is that those gags metabolize viewers into popularity faster, so a new user visiting the front page would consider reddit almost exclusively gag-oriented -- their next crop of users will be the type who find gags hilarious and don't especially care about more complex posts.

Reddit values interesting links, but it rewards people who can hack the interestingness test by submitting stuff that's easy to read quickly. They aren't unique: Digg is already a cesspool, and Netscape is a bad joke. But link-sharing sites aren't the only ones subject to this phenomenon. LinkedIn is one of the few career-related sites that doesn't seem like a contest of wills between users and site designers. But the most active users are trolling for new 'friends to pump up their network. Dealing with people like that is a liability -- and they're increasingly common. As on reddit, the users you'd join the site to actually network with are only there because they have a vested interest.

The sites without interesting founders and backers don't take off at all, and the rest are predestined: A social networking site will form around a kernel of interesting users -- who will almost immediately have something better to do.

In a recent essay, Bruce Schneier comments on how we deal with security threats by preventing the last attack -- that after the Oklahoma City bombings, we worried about far-right white loners with access to fertilizer until about the day before twenty Middle Eastern men hijacked some aircraft. He pointed out how ridiculous this was given that we form our first impression of attackers during the attack itself, which is when our information is as bad as it's ever going to get.

For example, the Columbine killers weren't creepy, friendless goths; they had friends, and they behaved like typical adolescents. Of course, they spent an unhealthy amount of time playing video games and shooting guns -- but they did that with a group of friends who blatantly don't fit the moody psycho lone male killer stereotype. As far as I can tell, their gun fascination was typical right up to the moment that it included shooting fellow students.

So it's ironic that so far, Cho Seung-Hui fits the incorrect assessment of the Columbine shooters. He was lonely, violent, and weird, and the only reason he didn't stand out more was his shyness. At least Cho showed some blatantly worrisome obsessions with his awful writing -- but if this and poor interpersonal skills is enough evidence to consider someone a potential killer, we need to keep a close eye on Chuck Palahniuk and Brett Easton Ellis.

The best conclusion I can think of is that the people who are prone to going on shooting rampages or committing terrorist attacks are all outliers. They're bad data. We don't have enough information to usefully profile the people behind these attacks -- all we can hope to do is minimize the damage and accept that some forms of technology are deadly, and that they'll end up in the hands of murderers.

I just read Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future. I picked it up because I'd heard the author's name and because I'm a fan of posthumanism and singularitarianism and other associated philosophies (one of my atheist friends said he used to like the idea of the singularity until he realized how religious it sounded -- which, as far as I'm concerned, is one of its best features: Ray Kurzweil is an eschatological prophet for secularists). I had no idea Fukuyama was vigorously opposed to the whole notion and worried that genetic engineering would destroy humanity.

He certainly sets forth some powerful arguments -- that it would redefine humanity out of existence, that it would create a genetically-enhanced aristocracy, that we don't know the effects of messing with our genome until decades later -- but his analysis has just enough depth to miss the obvious refutations.

For example, Fukuyama considers the possibility of fiddling with a child's genes to raise his IQ a standard deviation or two, for a fee. Some rich parents would unhesitatingly do this; many poorer parents wouldn't be able to afford it. Suddenly, intelligence would be (even more) heritable, and each rich generation would be even smarter and richer, creating a permanent aristocracy. All of this is true -- Fukuyama gracefully ignores the fact that aristocracy is a bad idea because it's arbitrary. If I can be pretty sure that Joneses are, on average, 50 IQ points smarter than Smiths, there's no problem with it -- it just makes it slightly easier to identify smart people.

Fukuyama's solutions are, in fact, even worse than his analyses. His theory of law is that we create some behaviors that are Permitted and some that are Forbidden, based on what we, as a society, believe ought to be universally allowed or unilaterally banned. That's not how laws work -- laws impose extra constraints, and they change behavior, but they're created, enforced, and obeyed (or broken) by humans, so absolute success is absolutely impossible. We as a society have deemed tobacco and marijuana harmful. We express this by charging a financial tax on tobacco use, and occasionally assessing a temporal tax (i.e. a prison sentence) on marijuana use. This doesn't get rid of either practice -- it just changes the incentives (confining tobacco smoking mostly to the already addicted, and putting marijuana distribution in the hands of people who are already criminals and thus have the least to lose). Western governments could probably enforce restrictions on human cloning and some edgier forms of genetic research. If we do, progress will still happen and discoveries will still be made -- and to take advantage of them, you'll have to be friends with Vladimir Putin or Hu Jintao.

Fukuyama's strongest criticism of biotechnology is that we may end up changing humanity to the point that it's no longer recognizably human. Once again, he makes an obvious mistake -- the humans of 2107 will be unrecognizable to us. But consider that in 2007, I'm typing this essay into a five-pound object that contains ten days of music, several hundred thousand words of text, and has the capacity to instantly transmit this essay to an audience anywhere in the world. Would this be comprehensible to a farmer in 1907? Would it even make much sense to an executive in 1957? You have to move up another twenty-five years or so before you can even imagine people who would be informed enough to realize that this is cool, rather than just bizarre.

It's easy to scare yourself by imagining your self of today confronting the world a few decades from now. But Fukuyama is 55 years old -- by 2057, he'll have spent nearly half of his life in what we today can consider the future. If he's having trouble accepting the next few decades all at once, he might do what the rest of us do and take the future a day at a time.

So the day I post my litany of complaints about the software developers I'd like to help hire, I find a more or less dead-on essay about the same problem from the opposite perspective.

The first part of the analysis is almost tautologically true: everyone you'd want to hire is someone everyone else wants to hire, so it's hard to find great candidates. On the other hand, luck and randomness play a role, so there are always at least a few unattached-but-brilliant people floating around. Hedge funds solve this by hiring smart PhDs straight out of school and paying them more their first year than they've earned in the previous decade. Investment banks solve it by poaching those PhDs after the smart ones have gotten settled and the lazy ones have burned out. And we recruiters solve it by developing strange and esoteric heuristics for quickly identifying unconventionally great candidates.

Unfortunately, the essay loses steam when it starts to get idealistic. It would be great if all the programming jobs out there were interesting tasks and fun companies, but it's a statistical fact that most workplaces are depressingly average, and most programming is sadly prosaic. If you want to write programs that you know other people will find useful, at a job that's 1) not so bad that everyone will quit, but 2) not so great that they don't have an excuse to pay you, you probably ought to sign on at a hedge fund or i-bank.

If you want to work on the Perfect Problem at the Perfect Office with the Perfect Coworkers, the only company I can fairly recommend is your own.

I haven't been writing much. I've been busy with bad excuses -- new job, new neighborhood, new girlfriend, etc. However, at least one of those is a blog-safe subject, so I'll go ahead and explain that the most frustrating part of recruiting is that I have to reject qualified people for adding ludicrous details to their resume. Herewith, the best examples of the worst behaviors:

• Do not claim that English is your first language if your homepage includes a section on "My hobbies and funs." It's okay to be a non-native speaker -- in fact, it's impressive that you'd go to the trouble of emigrating just to work on Wall Street! -- but if you lie, don't lie transparently.
• Do not assume that having a major in marketing, a minor in accounting, and an officer position at a fraternity gives you the sort of rigorous quantitative background needed to out-program and out-trade the Math, Physics, or Comp-Sci PhDs we asked for.
• Don't list any 'skills' that can be portrayed by a single stock photograph. "I know TCP/IP" is good -- "I am an energetic team player and a proactive problem solver" will be gleefully rejected.
• Don't act as if a résumé that consists of back-to-back multi-month snits followed by quitting due to 'restructuring' or 'personal reasons' will land a good position. We'd rather see consistency at a bad job than a pattern of flitting back and forth between good jobs -- even though quants and programmers mostly interact with computers instead of people, enough people skills not to be a pariah would be nice.
• It's not personal. Hedge funds and investment banks are incredibly demanding -- they pay for the top 1% of the top 1%, and they tend to get it. This means that they reject some ridiculously qualified people. On the other hand...
• It's personal. Hedge funds are driven by the personalities of their founders -- since high-bandwidth, low-ambiguity communication is essential, they tend to hire people as similar to their current employees as possible. At the currency funds, that means a gaggle of economics PhDs. At the mathematically-oriented companies, that means topology experts, linguistics gurus, and AI wizards will have an easy time. MIT-educated fund managers prefer MIT assistant traders; Microsoft expats like other Microsoft vets. In short, there's an element of luck (which we, as a good recruiting firm, take advantage of) in deciding which candidate resonates with which job. There's a lot of work here that I'm itching to automate, but I don't think we'll ever code our way out of that.

Most of this list consists of things I didn't really believe when I started. I'm a fan of meritocracy and mathematical tractability -- so in addition to prodding any potential applicants, this list is my way of kicking myself a bit. Meritocracy is hard to achieve because merit is so hard to estimate: judging potential hires is a matter of communication, and communication is a ridiculously complicated lattice of experience, expertise, culture, and chance. At this point, the question of matching hires to hirers is a brutal Bayesian mess of miss-weighted and incalculable probabilities and variables. So it's a hard problem.

Note: views in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer or anyone else besides me.

I've been hired, which is good news and bad news. The good news is that I have another regular paycheck, and a great source of information about the way hedge funds really operate and the kind of people who work for them. The bad news is that I have less free time, and every trade secret I've learned is a five-minute blog entry for me and a year's competitive advantage for whoever I heard it from, so I'll have to be vague if I say anything at all.

I now work for a company called Minera, which does IT and quantitative finance recruiting. It may be the best possible way for absurdly deferential people like me to learn sales: I call people who've posted their résumés to job-seeking boards or responded to job ads, and I tell them that their dreams have come true and they have a chance to interview at a hedge fund which -- if they're incredibly lucky and talented -- won't cut them before the next round of interviews.

Getting a job with a hedge fund is grueling; they tend to want ex-Physicists who dropped out of Physics because it wasn't enough of a mental challenge; they want programmers who know Java like Shakespeare knew English, and they want at least five of each so they can still proudly hire the top quintile. Fortunately, most of the people who apply for jobs at funds are obligingly brilliant -- I've always known, theoretically, that MIT had a top 1%, but actually looking at the résumés can still be stunning.

I'm still getting used to the job, and learning about the prestige scale of various awards (perfect SAT, Math PhD, Putnam Fellowship, Nobel Prize...) and learning about danger signs (it's good to be a team player; it's very bad to say so on a résumé that will be read by adults), but so far I enjoy it. Oddly enough, investing is great training for a recruiting position: I'm still starting with numbers, moving on to intangibles, and keeping in mind that all I'm really buying is a stream of future cash flows, but now I'm doing it with a bit more finesse. Of all the analogies I've heard or used to describe the business (matchmaking and slave auctioning come to mind), I still like this one the best: "Exactly like analyzing stocks. Only more so."

I'm going to get back into the swing of updating; I've gotten a new job and a new apartment in a better part of the city than the last one. So I'm leaving Bedford-Stuyvesant behind. The usual term that comes to mind when you look at a neighborhood like that is 'decay', and for once the connotation is wrong and the denotation is dead-on.

Stripped of its negative implications, decay what happens when the only way for organizations to handle their current situation is for them to break down into their constituent parts and then be rebuilt. In biology, it's how corpses turn into fertilizer; in economics, it's how people and property spend a little time being misdirected and a lot of time being underused before they all get sorted out.

I'm happy to let the neighborhood sort itself out and start being productive again, but low rent doesn't compensate me enough for being in the crossfire while that happens. So for now, I live in the East Village, where everyone knows more or less what they're trying to be and how they ought to relate to one another, and our social and cultural organizations are just complex enough.

Also, my commute is about a third as long, and I'm surrounded by bookstores and coffeeshops, so it's a pretty good deal.

The idea of a triple-blind study reminds me of something I've been thinking of lately: The Quick and Clean Method for Stopping Statistical Dirty Tricks. Basically, instead of letting one person come up with a hypothesis, design an experiment, collect the data, and present them, you'd delegate each task to a different person -- so the guy handling the data has a bunch of numbers and knows how they're related, but doesn't know if he's studying annual interest rates compared to employment growth or if he's comparing Amazon Basin rainfall to Chinese urbanization rates on a by-decade scale.

Most researchers will, for entirely innocuous reasons, have expectations about their results, and these expectations will have a serious effect on how they treat the data they receive. I suspect that for some experiments, the stated error rate in experiments is artificially low because scientists are throwing out the data they 'know' can't be right -- but even bad data tell you something about which instruments and measurement techniques need improvement. If every discrete task is farmed out to a different individual, the average participant's only motive will be accuracy -- not only will they probably not develop an agenda, but they may not even know what they're studying.

If you wanted to be terribly pompous about this idea, you'd call it a Rawlsian solution that forces actors to make decisions from behind a Veil of Ignorance. On the other hand, my grandmother never read Rawls, and she used the same trick to keep people from fighting over who got the bigger half of the cookie.

Note: this is something I came up after reading about AEI's awfully clumsy solution to the same problem.

Epitaph for an options trader: "Expired out-of-the-money."

I fully intended to write a quick "I'll be on vacation; blogging may be light" note, but I didn't have a chance before I left. As of right now, I'm snowed in and on unreliable dialup, so I'll have to wait a while before uploading anything I've written in the last few days.

The financial markets have been obligingly dull the last few days, which is some consolation. That said, I won't be able to seriously resume blogging for a few days -- see you January 2nd.

It used to be fashionable for killers, arsonists, and well-meaning ill-doers to have a self-justifying (or story-padding) book on hand when they were caught. Catcher in the Rye was a favorite. I'm not sure if the trend is dead or if it never really existed, but to anyone looking for such a book, I'd recommend Letters to a Young Contrarian. Not that it's a good book to get caught with -- it's just a good book for turning general anger into specific conviction (and hopefully channelling that conviction into something more useful than violent crime).

The fact that Christopher Hitchens has remained employed and out of jail for the last few decades is the best sign that, Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush notwithstanding, we haven't slipped into anything resembling fascism. If I ever become a fascist dictator, he'll be the first intellectual I send off to the Gulags. Hitchens' positions aren't material, but he's great at defending and articulating them, though (he'd have to be, if he was going to be the most vocal opponent of the first Gulf War and the most prominent defender of the current one). Letters is a guide to being persistently opposed to the well-meaning and non-thinking majority (or minority), and staying true to principle while being a genuine pest. There's lots of good advice from someone who's been arrested, shot at (vaguely), and disappointed (by friends and leaders) frequently.

Unfortunately, Letters is a short book (141 pages), and it's about 30% quotations and 20% allusions to then-current events, leaving only around 70 pages of useful and relevant thought. You'd be unlucky to agree with more than half of it (I found the casual dismissal of Milton Friedman a bit irksome, but I'm still getting over referring to that great economist in the past tense) and unwise to agree with all of it (unless you're also a Trotskyist-turned-neocon with a keen interest in lit-crit, you'll find some views you just can't relate to), but Letters to a Young Contrarian is a delightful and helpful little book.

Back by the popular demand implicit in a lack of popular unrest, I'm presenting yet another reason to hire me: My résumé is a .pdf file, instead of a .doc. To people to whom this means anything at all, it sure doesn't mean much, but it's still important. Some people will tell you more than you thought there was to know about the paradigmatic differences between writing something up in Microsoft Word and writing a more or less identical document in a text-processing program, but a secondhand simile on a similar subject will do nicely:

When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind's eye: "The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter's box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from home plate." and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions.

This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.¹

That's how I like to operate; I'm not a good typesetter or web-designer, but if I'm going to do either task, I want to get it done once, not constantly worry about it while I ought to be busy writing (if Hunter S. Thompson had been using Microsoft Word, rather than broken pencils and cocktail napkins, Gonzo Journalism never would have happened).

But nobody needs yet another essay on the ascetic virtues of a UNIX monk, so I'll cut it off now by noting that my résumé is online, and the typesetting and formatting are fantastic.²

[1] That quote, by the way, is from In the Beginning Was the Command Line, which has probably had a bigger impact on me than anything I've read since Roger Lowenstein's canonical Warren Buffett biography, which, along with my parents, convinced me to get into the investment business in the first place.

[2] Who am I to judge? Nobody -- but I sent it to one of my graphic design-geek friends and he announced that he has a New Favorite Font Family. And I was just sticking with the default.

So I was walking around after dark in Brooklyn, and you won't believe what happened. Or maybe you will, if you have more faith in assumptions than data. Anyway, my iPod and I were minding our own business about half past eight, when I rather suddenly met the three least competent criminals ever.

"Let's get his stuff!" said the first, by way of introduction. Then he hugged me. Really. This is How It's Done: Planned loudly and badly, with minimal talent and zero panache.

"HEY!" I replied, not so conversationally. If you're imagining this, note that I did an absolutely perfect Gilbert Gottfried voice, really really loudly. "HANDS OFF!"

"Quiet down, man," said the second thug. Say what you want about people who gang up on lone guys listening to gentle Indie music, attack them from behind without warning, and try to steal their stuff, but my new friends had a sense of decorum and politeness sadly lacking in most youth today. The third mugger punched me and got about halfway through a second round of hugging -- neither of which were very effective, because all three were bundled up like Family Circus characters, and couldn't get a decent grip or an accurate punch.

"GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME!" I added. Then I wiggled out of his grip and ran like hell, trailing headphones behind me. They didn't follow very far, so I ducked into a convenience store to calm down and assess: They stretched my shirt a little, deprived me of the connector-bridge-thing from my headphones, and didn't give me a chance to pause my iPod, which is going to have a terrible effect on the accuracy of my iTunes play-count. But other than that, they failed.

They failed. They attacked me in the dark, by surprise, and outnumbering me three to one, and their spoils of victory consist of a piece of plastic with a nice logo on it. I expect better of random after-dark assailants in a slightly bad part of a slightly bad borough. What gives?

Also, note that despite walking alone in a bad neighborhood while flauting my iPod, I'm not an idiot and had they been armed I would have given up my stuff without a challenge. And I can blame a little of my behavior on violent music -- prior to switching to Picaresque, I was listening to "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" from the Kill Bill soundtrack, and was thus in a mood to pick a fight or maybe bite someone in half for looking at me funny.

This site appears to periodically break and suddenly go through a stunning transformation from one weird publishing/layout schema to another. There's a pretty good reason for this: I don't quite know what I'm doing, here. Basically, I've been trying to make my site similar to kottke.org, in the sense that I write several different blogs and publish them all on the same page. This is actually extremely easy: I just publish one blog, with multiple categories, and then pretend that the categories are each separate blogs (and I've neatly avoided breaking any links to archives by creating a 'quicklinks' category that sits right where the 'quicklinks' blog used to be).

If you happened to visit the site while I was fixing things up, you probably noticed that everything was positioned wrong, or that there were duplicate entries, or that there weren't any entries, or whatever. This demonstrates the promise and peril of doing on-the-fly web design at 3 AM (and the promise, peril, etc. of visiting a site at 3 AM, too). Now that my blog is basically how I want it to be, all that chaotic editing and re-editing should slow way down. Thanks for your patience!

I'm your host, Byrne Hobart. I've been writing various sorts of blogs in all kinds of random places for the last three years, and I've been thinking vaguely bloggy thoughts for even longer. I thought I'd finally get myself a domain name and a serious¹ blogging platform, and really get down to business. So that's what I'm doing.

A few useful facts about the author

• I bought my first stock when I was 11. It's moved sideways since. I bought my next stock when I was 13; I paid $9.98 per share, and sold at $10.30. It's up a little less than 900% since then.
• I read constantly, usually three or four books at a time. I also read (and love) The New Yorker and The Economist. Obsessive reading is actually a bit of a distraction for me. I remove the labels from shampoo, vitamins, aspirin bottles, etc., so I don't waste valuable seconds re-re-rereading the ingredients.
• I'm pretty picky about which computers I use. I run OS X and Emacs, for basically the same reasons: They both have the kind of learning curve that lets me do what I need to do without the interface getting in the way, but they both let me really dive in and figure out 1) How things work, and 2) How they could work better. Quicksilver is a pretty essential OS X tool; hard to describe exactly, but you'll miss it if you ever stop using it. Other than that, I dabble -- Opera, Safari, and Firefox have their merits as browsers (in order: Speed, OS integration, versatility), and I don't spend enough time doing other stuff to really care.

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