Cost of false positives (2011)

https://laughingmeme.org/2011/07/23/cost-of-false-positives/

Imagine you’ve got a near perfect model for detecting spammers on Twitter. Say, Joe’s perfectly reasonable model of “20+ tweets that matched ‘^@[\w]+ http://’”. Joe is (presumably hyperbolically) claiming 99% accuracy for his model. And for the moment we’ll imagine he is right. Even at 99% accuracy, that means this algorithm is going to be incorrectly flagging roughly 2 million tweets per day as spam that are actually perfectly legitimate.

If you’ve never run a social software site (which Joe of course has, but for the folks who haven’t) let me tell you: these kinds of false positives are expensive.

They’re really expensive. They burn your most precious resources when running a startup: good will, and time.

Briefly: Anonymous Questions

https://kellanem.com/notes/anonymous-questions

As leadership, Q+A serves several important functions.

Direct File on GitHub

https://chrisgiven.com/2025/05/direct-file-on-github/

The IRS has now published the vast majority of Direct File’s code on GitHub as open-source software. As a work of the U.S. government, Direct File is in the public domain. And now everyone can check it out.

Releasing Direct File’s source code demonstrates that the IRS is fulfilling its obligations under the SHARE IT Act (three weeks ahead of schedule!). Now that Direct File has paved the way, I hope that more of the IRS’s code, paid for with taxpayer dollars, will soon be available to all of us.

‘We Are the Most Rejected Generation’

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/opinion/rejection-college-youth.html

Not long ago, I was at Williams College, speaking with a fascinating and terrifically observant senior named David Wignall. We were talking about what it was like to be young these days, and he made a point that I’d never considered. “We are the most rejected generation,” he said.

He’s right. He pointed to the admission rates at elite universities. By 1959, about half of American college applicants applied to just one school. But now you meet students who feel that they have to apply to 20 or 30 colleges in the hopes that there will be one or two that won’t reject them. In the past two decades, the number of students applying to the 67 most selective colleges has tripled, to nearly two million a year, while the number of places at those schools hasn’t come close to keeping up. Roughly 54,000 students applied to be part of the Harvard class of 2028, and roughly 1,950 were accepted. That means that about 52,050 were rejected.

The same basic picture applies to the summer internship race. Goldman Sachs, for example, has 2,700 internship positions and receives roughly 315,000 applicants, which means that about 312,300 get rejected. I recently spoke with one college student who applied to 40 summer internships and was rejected by 39. I ran into some students who told me they felt they had to fill out 150 to 250 internship applications each year to be confident there would be a few that wouldn’t reject them.