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Think I’ve kind of learned that the more authentic and genuine it is, the better it will work for you.

A good place to begin—how modern Google search works: Mission of Google’s search: “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — like an advanced yellowbook. Google declared their mission in Our approach to Search, including 6 key aspects: (1) Deliver the most relevant and reliable information available. (2) Maximize access to information (3) Present information in the most useful way (4) Protect your privacy (5) Sell ads, nothing more...

ChatGPT makes it much easier to modify configurations for my website. I changed the font to Montserrat—an open source font provided by Google font (fonts.google.com) that is highly similar to Google’s proprietary logo font Product Sans. Google Sans [and Product Sans] is not available for use outside of Google. It is our brand font and is exclusively used in Google products. Fine. Google font has a delivery service—everytime the website loads, it fetches font files from Google....

Something interesting happened in today’s seminar course. One of my classmates presented his final paper, and as expected in a seminar setting, our instructor, Hu Fu, wants everyone to stay engaged and understand what’s being discussed. Today’s presenter had clearly prepared and read the paper but had no clue how to structure an academic talk. He skipped all the basics—no background, no context of the model provided—and jumped straight into the technical details....

Motivation Preview from problem set 2, question 4: (link to original file) This gives a reduction: [submodular welfare maximization] <= [maximize a monotone submodular function s.t. matroid constarint]. Remarks: hardness & approximation of the problem [submodular welfare maximization] >= [maximize a monotone submodular function s.t. matroid constarint] (Is it true though?). maximize monotone submodular function is hard. Because, for instance, one can reduce Partition problem to it. That’s why we started looking at submodular maximization s....

Following the news of Amazon’s lawsuits and after skimming through the complaints, here are my thoughts. price do go up | 羊毛出在羊身上 There’s no free lunch. While prices may seem lower on Amazon, the market is interconnected. Amazon’s attempt of achieving lower price would backfire. Amazon’s power forces sellers to comply with its Buy Box rules, meaning they must keep prices equal or higher across all channels to access Amazon’s vast demand....

Following yesterday’s coverage on Amazon’s series of trouble with antitrust regulators, I digged into the filing complaint of CA v Amazon and the orginal complaint and amended complaint of FTC v Amazon. We can obtain quite a bit of interesting information about Amazon’s Buy Box: (at least, from the perspective of regulators…) first, Amazon chose to make purchasing outside the Buy Box hard: Nearly 98% of Amazon sales are made through the Buy Box....

Here are recent news about Amazon Buy Box’s into antitrust trouble: California sues Amazon | September, 2022 Timeline: Sept. 2022: Attorney General Bonta sued Amazon in the Superior Court of California. The lawsuit basically focused on accusing Amazon penalizing sellers for listing products at the lower price on other selling channels—that if Amazon spots a product listed elsewhere cheaper, it will often remove the seller from the Buy Box on Amazon....

people in academia are generally too good at procrastinating. doing things at last minute isn’t entirely wrong. like, some job scheduling algorithms do look like they are procrastinating. plus there is the infamous structured procrastination… but at the end of the day, procrastination makes one think inefficiently in a rush, raise anxiety level and occasionally, blow up deadlines. so here’s an effort of trying to battle my procrastinating tendency during bloggings:...

Recap of week 2, and motivation for this week’s Part I: In an economy of $n$ agents and $m$ indivisible items, if all agents’ value functions are Gross-Substitute, the economy has a Walrasian Equilibrium $(\vec S, \vec p)$. The Walrasian Tatônnement process can find the equilibrium efficiently. The allocation also maximizes social welfare. But one subtle thing to notice about Walrasian Tatônnement is that it converges to an equilibrium. So here’s another way of solving it:...