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My favourite travel startup is Adioso.com because they focus on simply finding you the cheapest flight whether you are looking to go somewhere specific or just anywhere international. Direct and to the point, no pointless social features.

Hi nicko. Do you have an email address I could ping you on. Would love to quiz you about your experience :)

I read something once that said you should do as many deals as possible.

In theory, whenever you do a deal (a good deal), you are getting something you want and so is the other party. So the more deals you do, the more progress you are making towards things that you want and hopefully only giving up things you are happy to give up.

I have to say I haven't done as many deals as I would like.

Part of doing deals seems to be having the imagination and experience to think about what is possible simply as habit, rather than just accepting the standard way that people do things by default. It's a hard habit to learn.

> You write that like it's unusual. It's not - it's how life works.

True. How about substantially more so than usual?

> If you want more return, you have to play against someone who thinks that you're incorrect and is willing to pay if they're wrong.

I suspect that doesn't describe what most of the participants in the game or those that were collateral damage thought they were doing.

If things were simpler, then perhaps the participants would actually understand what they are playing I guess.

Which means regulation, ratings and market forces that are intended to stop things getting out of hand might function somewhat better.

Right, so they didn't really understand the risks involved.

It's not like thousands of people woke up one morning and independently, by coincidence, decided to default on their homes.

It's a long complex causal chain, with snow-balling effects and the like, that very few people had an appreciation for because the instruments involved were very complex and there were too many layers involved.

This lead to a very non-linear system where it was impossible to have visibility over the whole thing.

Nice one. For me the big takeaway from all of this has definitely been that when things get too complex, all sorts of things that we rely on for the system to function properly stop working.

In particular, the hiding of risk removes a lot of the correcting mechanisms from the system.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's argument that we should ban complex financial instruments and keep things very simple and close to those primitives makes a lot of sense to me.

Whether it's in anyway practical or not, I have no idea.

Perhaps, but I would have put understanding the risks within the scope of understanding the instruments.

And yet a lot of the interviews I've heard about the crisis indicate a lot of the people dealing in them and rating them did not understand them.

Telling people that they should try harder is unlikely to solve the problem in the future I think.

Thanks for all those essays Joel. They gave me a flying head start into how software development should be done when I got started.

As someone who, like you, is trying to figure out the right thing to do in Melbourne, it's hard to say isn't it. On the one hand things seem so ridiculous in terms of debt. On the other hand we have strong population growth and demand here it seems. Although, I have no idea what our growing population is doing for jobs.

Because, things are very centralized here, the options for buying are getting further and further out and the public transport systems doesn't look like it's going to be upgraded to match any time soon.

Inner city apartments are currently pretty small and expensive too, which hopefully changes with some more supply.

Wish I had a crystal ball on this one. All that said, Melbourne still rocks :)

Agreed, I wish the world had more like him. Even when wrong, he's wrong in interesting ways and we end up learning something new.

Aside from the censorship issues (I know which end of that spectrum Senator Conroy sits and I can't imagine him moving), I cannot believe they are going ahead with a plan that they have been told repeatedly will fail.

From the tv debate held here a while back, it all seems to be based on the ridiculous agrument that we have to try something...anything...for the children's sake.

No, you really don't have to try things we know will fail. That's just pure idiocy.

Thanks. I agree, although perhaps you underestimate your ability to influence some of the top recruiters in the world?

I'm just trying to understand where the criticism is coming from because I don't get it.

Joel, on a slight tangent...we've been seeing all sorts of Jeff and Joel bashing posts lately, which personally I don't get why people get so worked up.

If I had to take a guess though, it would be that as you guys get more and more successful there's a fear that you will succeed in creating the number one method in the world for getting a programming job and it will end up discriminating against people who don't answer questions on StackOverflow or fit your model of a programmer.

That somehow you guys end up being the gatekeepers for defining what a good programmer is and how they get hired.

I was wondering what your thoughts are on this?

That's certainly an interesting take. Would you say the same thing about poor people that are earning their living as a result of war or other things that negatively impact the planet as a whole?

How exactly is stating that a product has less impact on the environment in any way political? Is there a brand of politics I'm not aware of that says that building piles of toxic waste is a good thing?

Sunshine? Gotta love that entrepreneurial optimism there Tom!

Now just need an iphone friendly page...

Rogue is on the iPhone. Nethack and Dwarf Fortress would be amazing. Does anyone have any inside info?

I agree. Even if he is right in his approach, he could really do with being teamed up with someone who has a personality as strong as his and is much better at the aesthetic and fun part.

The sad thing about BOP2K is that for all the potentially clever things going on behind the scenes, you could probably re-write it with a handful of simple rules and random generators and 99% of users could not tell the difference.

My biggest concern with his approach has always been that ultimately it will just feel like you are randomly poking the world to try and make something interesting happen.The chance of an interesting narrative developing is some where in the realm of winning the lottery.

Add on top of that the chance that it will ever be in form that people actually enjoy and want.

I do applaud the man's passion, a lot of his ideas and willingness to try it though. I hope one day someone picks up his books and surprises us all by making it, or some form of it, work.

Anyone else here been following Chris Crawford's adventures into interactive fiction in trying to get away from the rule based approaches?

Yeah doing some more thought on the issue I reached the same conclusion. It would be great if someone could prove that I am consistent enough in what I can control and my body is also producing a roughly consistent random factor on top of that. If so, this would make the relationship to a coin flip a lot more sensible.

Maybe not a great deal but there is something going on there. Discussing basketball in terms of coin flips which takes skill and technique out of the equation is definetely missing something key or so it would seem to the player. If you can prove that statistically it doesn't matter then so be it.

I've been playing 2-3 times a week for 18 years at a high grade. I have no doubt its much less of a variable in the NBA but I am suggesting it is a variable that rarely gets mentioned in that there a number of definitions people could take for the term "hot hand" and ways it could be discussed. No one is the perfect robot.

Just to add to that, the other variable that I recognise as a player is your feel for the weight of the ball at any given time or night. Sometimes it feels like you're just guessing how hard to shoot and other times it feels like you could throw anything up and you know you're going to get close.

I don't think people do a very good job and explaining why players object to these studies.

Because rightly or wrongly the player feels like at different moments there are different probabilities that they will make the shot based on all sorts of things. It's not just a fixed probability you carry with you at all times.

Using season averaged statistics is useful and tells one story but it does not tell this story because it can't be measured. That's why to a player it feels completely wrong IMHO.

These articles always bug me some what as they usually leave out the issue of technique. There are certainly times when I start heaving the ball at the ring with a lot less focus on technique and without taking the time to set my feet correctly. When I get my act into gear and concentrate on it I'd bet there is greater chance it's going in.

Now presumably this is less of an issue with professional players. I'm guessing LeBron James is a lot more consistent in his technique than I am but it seems like a major variable thats not really discussed.

The argument against the term "hot hand" seems to be against some silly naive notion that the stars align and you are on a shooting streak greater than some fixed probability would dictate.

But I've always thought of the term in the sense of the player shooting well i.e. the player has good technique and shot selection tonight and has raised their probability of the shot going in.

Which of course cannot be distinguished from anything else so I'm no doubt mostly wrong as well but it annoys me it isn't properly mentioned that I've seen.

a) Is it working? If not, why? b) Do you think you know how to do it better?

If yes to both then do it. If no to a) then you'd want to be fairly confident that they got it wrong in some way and didn't just prove it to be a bad idea.

I enjoyed the abstraction layer argument but I can't figure out what point Joel is trying to make about the lone MicroISV developer. Don't do it? Don't do it unless you can afford to hire a layer of sales and marketing at some stage? Do it, but don't be surprised that it fails and I told you so?

Absolutely, although I'm struggling to find a good famous quote to support this point of view.

Is there anyone who doesn't believe that it works though? i.e. It won't lead to a reasonable positive return?

Believing that it works means simply accepting the average return of the market through index funds as you said, which sounds reasonable to me, but it is admitting defeat that you can't beat the market in the long run.

Seems to me everyone would agree it works in general and the trouble starts when you try and do better than it.

Is your reason for not looking for inefficiencies to exploit and do better the fact that it takes more time than you have to devote to it, don't believe its possible in the long run (i.e. largely luck), you require some special insight other people don't have, other?