Marketplace Transactions Open Thread

This is not an offer but it is related to marketplace norms.

Bryan Caplan argues that romantic relationships are the last refuge of the just price theory. Relationships are expected to "equal" in that both parties the burdens and benefits are split equally. If I do the dishes, my partner is expected to sweep the floor. If I pick which restaurant we go to tonight, my partner gets to pick next week.

I'm wondering if LWers would react if, hypothetically, they were offered the chance to be in an "unequal" relationship. Let's say you are looking for a long-term mate. A particular brilliant and attractive mate, the kind that would normally be "out of your league" offers you the following terms:

• You do 70% of the housework.
• You pay for 70% of the household expenses, even though you are both earn the same amount.
• 70% of the time, they get to decide what happens on date nights. (ex. which movies to watch, what restaurant to eat at)

Would you consider this offer, weighing the value of an attractive mate verses the costs of an unequal relationship? Or would you be offended that this person differed you an unequal relationship, when clearly only equal relationships can be just?

Conversely, suppose a mate who was normally "below your league" offers to reverse the deal: you only do 30% of the house work, ect. Would you be consider a lopsided arrangement with an unattractive mate, or would you reject it out of hand as being exploitative?

I'm writing a book on some failures of the traditional scientific process in the domain of software engineering (so-called). It's not finished but I'm told people who read it in its current state found it enjoyable, and by buying it now you'll encourage me to put more work into it (and get FREE! updates).

The obvious thing for me to add here is this:

Summary: I'm running an online advertising company specializing in Google AdWords account management. Find us leads; for every lead that signs up as a client, we'll donate 25% of the first month's management fee to the Singularity Institute or a charity of your choice, and give you (or SI, or another charity of your choice) 25% as a commission. For clients of the size we work with, the first month's management fee starts at around $2000 - meaning that a successful referral should earn you and your charity at least $500 each.

This is a thread where it's okay to talk about trading money for goods and services with other Less Wrong users, which might otherwise be considered rude because you'd be inappropriately introducing market norms.

So, is this a good opportunity to ask what is the market price of 1000 LessWrong karma clicks?

If you are a good programmer, the company I work for is looking to hire. We pay very well and offer great perks and benefits (catered breakfast/lunch/dinner, infinite snacks, they buy whatever you want to help you work better, completely flexible work hours and vacation days, plus everything else like health insurance, etc).

Also, the people are great (some even read LW), the work is fun, and the upside is huge. This company is working on a huge problem that will have a significant positive impact in the world, and has the resources to tackle it. There are about 60 people now, and it's set to double in size in the next year. We make actual money, and are very well funded.

Please send me a message if you want to know more/want to apply. Rough requirements:

• Are you a good enough programmer to get a job at Google? (some of our recent hires were hired away from Google)
• Willing to work full time in Mountain View
• Java/Scala familiarity are a plus

Thanks! I would love it if I got to work with more fellow lesswrongers because of this :)

PS: if this doesn't apply to you, but you know someone that might be interested, I would appreciate it if you sent them our way.

Full disclosure: I think I get paid something for recruiting new people, but I don't know how much. I'm honestly just trying to attract more awesome people to work with because I really like this job.

Discussion about the idea of this thread goes here. Feel free to explain why this is a great thread that should be duplicated monthly or a terrible thread that should be deleted immediately.

I'm looking for someone to help with me on a paid basis with statistical analysis. I have problems like the following:

1. When to inspect?
I have 10k documents per month steaming to office staff for data entry in offices scattered around the world. I have trained staff at HQ doing inspections of the data entry performed by the office staff, detecting errors and updating fields in which they detected errors. I will soon have random re-checking by HQ inspectors of entries already checked by other HQ staff.
The HQ staff currently detect errors on ~15% of documents (between nearly none and ~6% errors on particular fields on documents). I don't yet have a good estimate of how many of those events are false positives and how many errors are not detected at all. Users show learning (we detect fewer errors from users who have entered data on more documents) that continues over their first 2000 or so documents (where I start running out of data). Required: I need to decide when a document can skip secondary inspection. I need to decide when users (HQ or practice users) don't understand something and need training (their error rate seems high for the difficulty of data entry on that field). When I change the user interface I need to decide whether I helped or hurt, and I need future error prediction (after I changed the data entry environment) to recover quickly.

2. What works?
We have a number of businesses that sell stuff, and we often change how that's done and how we promote (promotions, press placements (that I can work to get), changes in price, changes in product, changes in business websites, training for our sales people, etc.). I'd like to learn more than I am from the things we change, so that I can focus our efforts where they work best. There is a huge amount of noise in this data.

Proposals should be sent to jobs@trikeapps.com, should reference this comment, and should include answers to the following two questions (and please don't post your answers to the questions on this site):

1. In my first example job above, across 200 users the average error rate in their first 10 documents was 12% (that is, of the set of 2000 documents made from the first 10 document entered by each of 200 users, 12% contained at least one error). Across so few documents from each user (only 10) there is only a small indication that the error rate on the 10th document is lower than the error rate on the first document (learning might be occurring, but isn't large across 10 documents). A new user has entered 9 documents without any errors. What is the probability that they will error on their next document?

2. What question should I ask in this place to work out who will be good at doing this work? What question will effectively separate those who understand how to answer questions like this with data from those who don't understand the relevant techniques?

I am (my enterprise is) offering you a script to time/space schedule compiler. Just describe your (complex) school with a script and let the program do ALL the calculations. If so happened that you are in such a position, that the (school) scheduling is your business.