Goosey

I use groupon and similar services (LivingSocial, some more local sites) constantly. It is a GREAT way to both save money and to discover new things. I feel like the author is being a little overly harsh on Groupon when: A) He admit's he should have done the back-of-envelope math to determine it could be difficult to get the dentist appointment. B) He had no issue getting a refund.

I know we are a society of convenience, but are we really at the point of boycotting and writing rants to influence other's to follow simply for being slightly inconvenienced with no direct financial loss?

Just to offer a counter-opinion, I went to the site searching for a video to explain it to me and left when I couldn't find it. I did click to start creating a site, but since I didn't have any site I actually wanted to create I felt intimidated by this approach and gave up immediately.

Looks like a slick product though, I will definitely give it a try when I have something I actually want to make! :)

I tried it out for the amusement factor. As wasteful over-privileged american $10 for a random amusement is in my price range. I spend more than that on bad movies.

At first it was kind of amusing. Absolutely did not have any affect of making me feel positive or awesome. More of a 'ha ha check out this wacky service' conversation topic than anything.

After a week it started to get old very quickly. I started to avoid answering when that 'UNKNOWN' number called in, preferring to receive my false affirmations via voicemail. There is an interesting/creepy dynamic in that I am having the same people call every day and forming these unspoken "yes we know each other" type relationships.

The one thing that has helped me enjoy the service again in the last week is that they hired some female callers. I know that these calls are just a service, but there is some deeply hardwired circuits in my lizard brain that make a cute girly voice insincerely saying "You're awesome!" make me feel much better than a guy doing it. Not "Oh my day is great now!" better, but it at least makes me smile and feel good for a moment. Evolutionary heritage at work.

All in all it was fun, but I won't renew for another month. I do feel good about trying it out rather than just passing armchair judgement about whether or not it would actually be enjoyable.

You have hit on a way of thinking that, for me, was inspired by reading David Sirlin's masterpiece 'Playing to Win'. The book is available on amazon or for free on his website http://www.sirlin.net/ptw

Although the book focuses on competitive video games it quickly establishes an important point that can be applied to nearly every situation in life: There are two types of people in a situation, "scrubs" who make up a subset of rules for the 'game' they are playing and those who understand the true extent of the rules.

One view I hold as a result of this thinking is my strong support for financial regulation. I was depressed to see so many people pointing fingers at wall street and talking about them being so immoral and corrupt. What they did was extremely damaging to society as a whole, but their motivation lies in winning their 'game' which is the money acquisition objective; and they pushed to the very border of what the rules were. Those playing the game came out very successfully; society may be crumbling around them, but they have their huge bonuses. Going angry-mob on someone for successfully achieving their objectives is just being a scrub. Most people talk about how they violated rules that don't exist: imaginary rules hiding behind noble sounding words like ethics or morality.

While the scenario can be depressing looking at it that way, it ultimately is accepting reality for what it is. This is how you can chart a path to actually deal with the issue; if you don't like the way the game is played, you have to change the rules.

But in my personal life it generally has a much more positive theme to it. I learn the rules of what is valued at my company; how much depends on social behavior and how much on productive output. I learn the rules of social interactions at parties and clubs; and adjust my behavior to maximize my gains. Even on Hacker News I learn the rules of what is acceptable as a quality comment, and what is not. I think this comment will get upvoted. It adheres to the values of adding to the discussion and providing new information... along with the always popular "personal advancment" story.

It's funny to me now seeing how many people fail at various 'games' in life simply due to not understanding the rules of the games. They fight against it, like a fish swimming upstream. If you don't even understand the rules of the game, how are you supposed to gain skill at it?

edit: Just to clarify, when I talk about the rules binding things like the financial system I do not mean the regulations alone (which may be broken through corruption as others have pointed out). Those rules are actually a subset; viewing them as absolute is scrub-talk. I am talking about the REAL rules of the game which includes 'shady' things like bribery.

There is a very good system for handling this type of thing: Prediction Markets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market)

The basic idea of a prediction market is like a stock market for outcomes with an end point. If you make good predictions you will make 'money' and if your predictions are correct but go against the common idea your rewarded even more handsomely. Of course a true prediction market has a shifting price point where you can choose to sell your 'shares' at any point, yada yada, but I think the concept applies.

The trick is you have to have the pundits participate in order to make it work. I suppose there could be some third-party that pulls their articles and 'ghost trades' for them?

However I think the truth is that pundits DON'T WANT to be held accountable. Even if they are shown to be 'the most correct' they are still going to be wrong some of the time and those will always be used as examples to attack them and their views.

Just look at another comment in this thread that tears into this pundit for his poor job predicting the Sony vs MSFT vs Nintendo war over this console generation. This is a SINGLE data point being used to try and dismiss his views.

edit: For anyone interested in prediction markets check out Inkling (http://inklingmarkets.com/). I don't work for them, but I just think they have done an awesome job of creating some useful software. I am trying to push for this to be adopted internally for creating 'confidence metrics' of how stable a build is going to be, or if a deadline is going to be hit.

Getting over the cultural teaching that I must eat everything that is served in that sitting was the KEY to my weight loss, personally. I had no real dietary changes. I found that if I just ate slower and stopped when I felt satisfied most meals were nearly twice the size they needed to be. Another upside of this is it is cost effective to grab lunch and have the left overs for dinner (or the reverse)

What's old is new again. Tabs at bottom reminds me of how interesting it is that the tab abstraction is successful in spite of the presence of a fully capable window manager.

This looks PERFECT for my needs, thanks!

EDIT: New startup idea: a startup that helps people find out about startups. I'm at the point where I assume any 'simple' idea I have probably exists, but finding it can be difficult (I spent about half an hour google-fu'ing and didn't find joesgoals)

Click-friendly version of link: http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...

I agree. People asking this aren't usually asking "What is your title/position?" they are asking "What activity is it that you spend the majority of your waking adult life taking part in."

It's a relevant question.

I really like this idea. One thing that surprised me when I entered Cognitive Behavior Therapy was the power of affirmations. The old Saturday Night Live 'Stuart Smalley' is an unfortunate social stigma that stopped me from ever taking the practice seriously until I was shown some hard evidence of it's effectiveness (no, I don't have it on hand, you can google as easily as me).

So I gave it a try. Then I tried it some more. Over time it really takes a transformation. At first I really felt like Stuart; but that is because I didn't believe the things I was saying. If I kept lowering the bar eventually I could find compliments about myself that I actually thought were true. The good feelings and confidence those smaller compliments gave me helped boost me to higher levels, and up and up, until the point now where I feel an abundance of confidence in most of my day to day interactions that I never had before.

Affirmations are really just a mind hack to architect your internal reality intentionally. You DO have an inner reality, so why not try to take control of it? :)

EDIT: Oh, but back to this startup.. I like this idea, but I hope they understand the principles behind affirmation therapy as a part of CBT. Simply telling someone they are awesome will have no actual affect if they don't believe what you are saying, so there needs to be a little bit of a day-to-day feedback process to hone in on the target emotions you want to generate. I doubt this much effort is being put in, but I might be willing to drop $10 to find out. :)

Google does require certain things in order for it to get the Google branding. Currently this seems to be limited to including the core Google applications, but if google deems the rise of handset-specific frontends to be an issue perhaps they could expand the license requirements?

I, for one, don't see the proliferation of Motoblur/SamsungSense/HTC-Whatever to be a negative thing. It is an additional factor that consumers can use to differentiate between phones. One reason I own a DroidX is the great hardware, but another reason is I think the moto skin adds a lot in certain areas (it's calendar widget, for example).

In other words: let the market decide.

I love the idea, but I want a version of this that is text only (Blurry Omegle). In general I prefer not having the camera involved.

EDIT: Just to clarify I think BOTH versions should exist, and within the same framework so that filtering applies universally (people could choose if they are interested in text/video/both). Especially since I Omegle at work, webcam only is a no-go for me.

And Scandinavian metal is very very metal

Great article to help me understand a bit more on how CDNs work! As others have pointed out the cost-effectiveness of deploying your own CDN is questionable in this climate, but the KNOWLEDGE of how your leased CDN works is certainly valuable!

It's a widely accepted rule of thumb that no technology can succeed without RPGs being involved. ?:o

I, for one, am very dissapointed by this. Even worse I feel somehow partially responsible. I have been a huge proponent of Wave in theory, but even after getting into the early beta I just never found myself /using/ it. I blame this mainly on it lacking the social graph I cared about.. But I thought I could just bide my time and in 5 years it would have taken over.

I am starting to feel like I will have to deal with "MY REPLY IN RED" company chain email threads from hell forever now.

And you show this by talking about being annoyed by the people on reddit? Are you not seeing your own tribalism or am I just not getting your sarcasm? :)

I agree 100%. This was useful for me to both learn a little bit of python and to learn a little bit of how tracert works. Great post.

It is a little unclear from your post: are you just speculating that since it is a good commercial it came from W+K, or are you saying that it DID come from W+K in a roundabout way?

It's really interesting to hear some of their past success, but randomly attributing any good campaign to them seems a little strange to me. :)

The tutorial video was highly amusing.

This is just me throwing out a toy idea here, but.. Consider that most computers have large chunks of unused space. Now draw a parallel to projects like Folding@Home which make use of unused CPU cycles for computation. Wouldn't it be nice to make use of the world's unused storage in exchange for providing your unused storage? This made me think of that as it sounds like this 'p2p supercloud' could be just another peer type. You opt in to share 100GB == you get 80GB of redundant off-site backup for free type system.

Now, I am not asking you to implement this peer type (although that would rock my world if you did), but would it be possible for someone to implement it themselves? In other words will you be providing a 'peer API'?

On the other hand, I do. You don't have to be as big to be the biggest fish in a smaller pond. (Or as 'The Dip' puts it, to be the best in the world start by shrinking the world)

<i>As for robustness, if doing X will cause a crash and your code does X, then you will just have a bunch of crashing processes rather than just one. How is that better? Wouldn't the real solution be to either stop doing X or fix X so that it doesn't cause a crash?</i>

Sure, but bug-free code doesn't exist and not all crashes happen 100% of the time. If you have a difficult to track down crash bug that happens for some mysterious reason once every 100,000 requests... Would you rather have that resulting in the entire server blowing up or one request-session blowing up?

But IronPython is FOSS. The fact that it is being bundled in a closed source plugin seems like an implementation detail to me. If Firefox wanted to they could expose this very same implementation of a python runtime engine.

And if only the Android client ON Verizon's network would allow you to make calls when connected by Wifi. It's all backward!

I like your word choice. I think next time someone casually reiterates programmer stereotypes in conversation I will calmly assert they are being a bigot (and pick my battles, take context and social relations into account, etc). It sounds much more effective to just drop the B-word than to launch into a counter-effective "let me prove to you this is incorrect" conversation.

It's fine; the source code to their product is not a competitive advantage ( http://blog.asmartbear.com/unfair-advantages.html )

A proper conversation should be an exchange of gifts. Your words are a gift to them, and theirs to you. Never give yourself a gift.

I think that there is a (strange, in my opinion) backlash against any 'hacking' of our personalities when it is presented directly as such. If the book had been named 'The Study of Social Intercourse' or something less "sleazy" I doubt it would be a controversial book.

My view is hacking your personality is no different then improving your coding skills. It is just another skill set and there are advantages that can be derived from improving it. And, as you point out, personality isn't something that can be directly changed.. Thats called 'faking it'. No, personality means changing deeper things, like learning to care for people (or learning to care for yourself). Plus... Compared to coding it is a skill set that is far more useful and influential (unless you get really lucky...)