10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66 … what is the next number in this series?
Give it a try.
This is a question asked during an interview at Google.
So is this one “You are shrunk to the height of a penny and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in sixty seconds. What do you do?”
Both of these interview questions are taken from this brilliant book which is about difficult interview questions at top companies.
Once you tried those questions – hit this preview link for the answers.
User generated content has almost taken over from traditional TV.
According to CTA Americans 13 and older spent 16% of their time watching user generated videos (like Youtube and TikTok) while 18% was spent consuming traditional TV content.
Metcalfe’s law – which states that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of users or nodes – works very well in comparing relative valuation differences across cryptocurrencies.
“Humans have evolved to out-drink other mammals. “Many species have enzymes that break alcohol down and allow the body to excrete it, avoiding death by poisoning. But about 10 million years ago, a genetic mutation left our ancestors with a souped-up enzyme that increased alcohol metabolism 40-fold.”“
Tim Harford writes about a study by Fisman and Miguel of corruption.
The two economists looked at the behaviour of diplomats in New York City (in the area around the UN building in midtown Manhattan, where many consulates are located).
Remember, diplomats then had immunity so can happily ignore parking fines. So whether any were left unpaid can be reasonably hypothesised to be down to purely to cultural attitudes to rules.
By looking at parking violations between 1997 and 2002, Fisman and Miguel found a strong and significant correlation between unpaid tickets and corruption perception.
The worst offenders – Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan and Bulgaria. “One Kuwaiti diplomat managed to accumulate two unpaid parking fines every working day for a year.“
The best – Denmark, Norway and Sweden and, to everyone’s collective sigh of relief, the British – who did not have a single unpaid parking ticket over the six year period.
“The same may not be true for all British politicians.A certain Boris Johnson once worked as GQ magazine’s motoring correspondent. His editor noted that Johnson had cost GQ “£5,000 in parking tickets”, but he wouldn’t have him any other way.“
The tragedy in Ukraine is why Snippet took a short pause earlier this week.
Here are a few interesting articles on how and why we got where we are today.
This is an excellent, well documented piece from Spiegel on the subject of NATO’s eastward expansion. Did the West cheat? As usual – it is complicated.
This was a good talk by the brilliant Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner recorded three years ago (2018), who tried to give a point of view not well expressed in Western press. The whole thing is worth a listen.
The five books series is always great on any topic and this one on Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, professor at Harvard in Ukrainian History is worth a read.
This was also an interesting read on the history of Ukraine and Bolshevism and the idea of a nation.
A basket of energy commodities – seaborne thermal coal, global gas, European electricity and US gasoline – has risen by a weighted average of 4x since 2018-20 levels.
This ranks as one of the top three worst price rises in history.
Digital assets, crypto, or, as it has been rebranded, Web 3.0, is absolutely worth looking into, not least because of the VC money going into it.
The number of developers working in Web3, as seen in this chart, is exploding and doesn’t fall with falling prices (full slide deck worth a flick).
To stay one step ahead this was a good piece from the Generalist, where Mario goes around asking those in the know what the next trends and most exciting projects are.
Some really cool, deliberately slightly out there stuff.
Meet levels.fyi – they collect actual like for like data on salaries, benefits, levels etc. for the US tech industry.
They use this to help people negotiate salaries (how they monetise).
Levels recently published a report for 2021 that has some fascinating data (h/t The Diff).
The table attached shows entry level engineer salaries.
Lots of other interesting stats – comp has been rising (generally highest entry-level salaries are growing +3.4% annualised since 2019) and the Bay Area still wins (40% higher than LA for example).
Google has been running an internal prediction market – Gleangen, and Astral Codex Ten has a great write up on the topic.
This is the second iteration of such a market (the first was called Prophit).
Google claims that anyone can now build a prediction market on Google Cloud.
Prediction markets are fascinating as a tool but have struggled to get really big and more importantly to solve the three key issues (real money, easy to use, easy to create own markets).
Metaculus is a community dedicated to making accurate predictions (they have a great resource page) as is Manifold. Neither use real money.
Kalshi is a new startup ($30m of funding) that is trying to make events into an asset class via a real money prediction market. As is Futuur.
Polymarket, the biggest such market in the US, was recently fined and forced to shut down in the US (it remains open elsewhere).
John Foley, founder of Peloton, was so determined that “one of his sales techniques was to have customers test out the bike; he’d give them headphones and turn up the volume so when they talked to him about how much they liked the product they’d end up shouting an endorsement to passersby.“
In the early days of Salesforce “when a competitor was holding an event at Cannes, they booked all the taxis in Nice for the night and had sales reps stationed in each one to pitch their product to people going to the competitor’s event” (h/t The Diff).
These remind me of an old Snippet on how some major consumer apps got their first 1,000 users – often in surprising ways.
The ECB, by introducing a new publication – “monetary policy at a glance“, is trying to address the declining and very poor readability of its existing press releases.
The decline in readability, measured by the Reading Ease Index (REI), is largely down to the introduction of more complex monetary tools (e.g. TLTRO).
