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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

Reading Readers' Needs

With Gaurav Gandhi The books people pick to learn from often fail them. All too often, the book has intimidating jargon, or the examples are irrelevant to the reader, or there is too much duplication. Or the content is just wrong. Readers make poor choices about books because finding a

Building Together, Separately: Challenges of Software Development

With Atul Dhingra Microservices, Macroproblems A single page on Doordash can make upward of 1000 gRPC calls (see the interview). For many engineers, upward of a thousand network calls nicely illustrate the chaos and inefficiency unleashed by microservices. Engineers implicitly diff 1000+ gRPC calls with the orders of magnitude fewer

Unbiased Hiring

When hiring for technical positions, people often use high-precision heuristics conditional on relevance to decide who to interview. Otherwise, the interviewing burden would be too much. The advent of GPT makes use of high-precision heuristics yet more important as interviewing and resumes are less trustworthy now. The heuristics people often

Less Known Facts About Muslims in India

There are two main concerns about Indian Muslims. First, many fear that Indian Muslims are greatly behind other groups. The second, deeper concern relates to Muslim women. Many fear that sex gaps are much larger among Muslims than other groups. Let’s look at the facts. 1. Education: The literacy

How Many People Does It Take …?

A 700,000 square meter Hindu temple—the world’s second-largest Hindu temple--was recently inaugurated in New Jersey. The sect that built the temple is known for building many other elaborate temples, see, for instance, the temple in Delhi (TripAdvisor rates it as the second biggest attraction in Delhi) or

Take 80 mg Atorvastatin for Myalgia

Here’s a drug pamphlet with a table about side effects The same table can be found here: https://www.rxlist.com/lipitor-drug.htm#side_effects As you can see, for a range of conditions, the rate at which patients experience side effects is greater in the Placebo arm than

From Living Instinctively to Living With History

Listening to my maternal grandparents narrate their experience of living with Muslims was confusing. According to them, Hindus and Muslims lived harmoniously. They also liked each other. Hindus and Muslims wouldn’t eat at each other’s houses or might use separate utensils, but that had less to do with