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Gaurav

https://gsood.com

The GitHub Sampler

GitHub is the world's largest developer platform, making it a compelling place to build developer tools and study software development. However, with over half a billion repositories and an API that limits responses to a thousand results, it feels nigh impossible to answer even simple questions like, "

Picks, Shovels, Superstars, and Poachers: Explaining the AI Investment Boom

Standard real-options theory makes a clear prediction: when technology advances rapidly, costs fall steeply, and technical approaches remain uncertain, firms should wait. The option value of deferring irreversible investments dominates the value of moving early. We observe this pattern across industries with rapid obsolescence—semiconductor firms stage their fab investments,

Not Eating the Free Lunch? The Puzzle of Unspent Allotted Money

"[T]he share of unspent money under the MPLAD scheme at the end of the tenure of the current Lok Sabha nearly doubled to 16 per cent compared to 8.7 per cent in the 16th Lok Sabha (2014-19)." The Business Standard p.s. You can read the

Results May Vary

Economics papers are reproducible but not very robust

Coding At a Distance

Senior professors have long lived the future of coding. Professors ask. Underlings code. Professors critique the output, e.g., "I prefer statistical significance stars for the betas but not the constant term." Underlings revise the code. The cycle continues. Something similar can play out at companies. Now, thanks

Using Reward Models to Select Pre-Training Data

Large code models currently treat all code as equal during pre-training, then use RLHF to fix the resulting problems. This is backwards. We should allocate pre-training compute toward good code from the start. The approach is straightforward: score code quality using verifiable signals, then weight training examples proportionally to their

No Comparative Advantage

The case for free trade is based on the principle of comparative advantage. For example, Indians “pay” for Snapchat (and, let’s say, allow it to repatriate the profits) because Americans are better at building it, and Indians are better at producing something else. The example doesn’t land. India

Diabetes as a Dummy Variable

“Adults with diabetes are nearly twice as likely to have heart disease or stroke as adults without diabetes.” NIH These alarming numbers are used to justify more pre-emptive testing, e.g., Calcium score for the heart, more aggressive use of statin therapy, etc., among diabetics. The analyses that underlie the

What do we learn from bestseller regressions?

In The Bestseller Code, Archer and Jockers learn about the attributes of bestsellers by regressing whether or not a book is a bestseller on features of the book’s text. They find that topics like “human closeness” are prognostic of a book’s success. So is the author’s ability