ajscherer

Mr. Spock would've immediately made this distinction. He also would've objected to the whole "teachers union -> bad education -> bad economy -> bad military" handwave. I like Dilbert, but as I've said before this is why Scott is writing cartoons and not proofs.

I feel a lot of complainers about political correctness miss this. Companies strive for political correctness not because of the personal sentiments of executives or investors, but because it makes them money to be PC. Allowing swastikas on xbox live would be making the service less appealing to customers in order to advance a personal ideal (that this is the internet and you should be able to say whatever the hell you want).

The right to free speech means that the government can't punish you for your speech. It doesn't make it illegal for someone to do otherwise legal things (such as banning an xbox live account) in retaliation for your speech.

I don't understand why so many people view the first amendment as a guarantee that one's self expression will never have negative consequences.

Likewise, Congress can't just pass a law to spend 20% less without identifying exactly what it is going to spend less on and how. Getting people to agree on those particulars is the problem.

What makes it worse is that the things you might get wide agreement on cutting generally are things that would save negligible amounts of money. Also, even people who care a lot about the government (one way or the other) generally aren't willing spend time learning all the details of what the government is spending money on. Its really complicated and boring and I think people (especially us hn readers) would rather think of the problem at a higher level of abstraction (and in greatly simplified terms). Unfortunatley that just isn't helpful at this point

Just like in WarGames the only sensible strategy is to not participate.

The value of your service to a user isn't going to increase simply due to the passage of time or growth of your site. If they wouldn't pay for it on day 1, the odds are they won't pay for it after 2 years of using the service. If, in the process of trying to monetize your service, you "hold hostage" a portion of the value that the user has contributed to your site, they are going to be pissed.

This has all happened many times now. I think companies trying this route in the first place will be easier to change than peoples' reaction to it.

He wanted to spend his time reading and discussing articles on hn. His problem was that he was finding it increasingly unrewarding. So he quit.

Your last point regarding the best tech-news site is irrelevant. He is replacing hn with "arguing with people in person or via e-mail, reading disagreeable books, and the like."

"Anyone who believes that repealing the corporate income tax, the capital gains tax, and the death/gift tax would not increase economic growth by at least 0.12 percentage points needs to consult a psychiatrist, not an economist."

Edit: The more I think about it, this analysis is silly. Sure, a sustained increase in GDP growth rate will dominate a decreased tax rate in the long term. Unfortunately, what happens during the "me and/or my kids are still alive" term matters. For example in his "you're insane if you don't believe it" scenario where a 3% decrease in tax rate leads to a .12% sustained increase in economic growth, the government would take in less revenue for the first 150 years. In his "what I'd like to believe" scenario with the 3% cut and a .26% sustained growth increase, it would only take like 70 years to break even.

Nice try.

It is? I'm not a good hacker, but this one didn't gratify my intellectual curiosity at all.

This sums up my thoughts on the issue. Does anyone have a good reason why curation works better than search for mobile apps, but the opposite situation holds for web apps?

Couldn't Google give every app on the marketplace a website and just use the regular PageRank as part of App search? I have always felt like the Android app discovery process should start at google.com, and I think links from friends and online forums would immediately become the most common way to find good apps. Why pay people to do what the web could do for you?

Also, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible for someone to create a "better" (louder / faster / more sophomoric) fart app than what already exists on the App store. Is Apple ceding those farts to Android? Or would they make an exception for a really good fart App?

It seems to me like the problem isn't that there are certain things you aren't allowed to say, but that there certain things that a large group of people aren't going to even bother taking seriously. It could be because they've seen the argument before and consider it both obviously wrong and inflammatory, or it could be because they've been brainwashed / self-deluded. Regardless, that is a problem with humanity, not the hacker news community.

If I came here and posted a comment to the effect of "Paul Graham is a huge idiot", I would expect to get downvoted, but I will have succeeded in saying it.

Is your idea of freedom of speech "nobody gets mad at anything I say, even if my remark is formulated specifically to get them mad"?

This pretty much sums it up, although I don't think its just about making politicians look good. Censoring craigslist will reduce the amount of prostitution and trafficking in the world from the perspective of everyone not directly involved in prostitution and trafficking.

That aside, I observed a ton of hand waving in this talk, and I'm willing to bet it isn't backed up by the appropraite amount of rigor in his "research". In particular, I am concerned about how hard he tried to poke holes in his own theory, given the risks that might pose to his forthcoming (at the time of the talk) book.

Since we just had Cargo Cult Science posted the other day, this is a great time to think about this. I sometimes think that we (hacker news readers) might actually be more suseptible to accepting theories that haven't rigorously examined because our need to understand things is unusally great. So when we come across a theory that is internally consistent, not obviously wrong, and just sort of seems to make sense, we tend to reject any attempts to discredit the theory, lest we risk going from understanding to not understanding.

In other words, I think we sometimes value the feeling of understanding something over any utility that would come from actually understanding it.

This won't necessarily have the effect of making the remaining Helium last longer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I do agree with you that worrying about the resource needs of society 500 years from now is unlikely to prove useful. Furthermore, it strikes me a bit odd that the lives of humans hundreds or thousands of years after we are dead is of such great importance to everyone. Unfortunately, this article seems to be discussing running out of Helium in our lifetimes, which probably is something we need to think about.

This study compared 26-Inch MultiSync widescreen (MS LCD2690 at 1920x1200 resolution), 24-inch MultiSync widescreen (MS LCD2470WNX at 1920x1200 resolution) and 20-inch MultiSync traditional format (MS LCD2070NX at 1600x1200 resolution) monitors.

There was no 30" monitor involved in either of the studies, nor was there any monitor with a resolution above 1920x1200. The slide with a graph showing a drop-off from 26" to 30" is an estimate based on the 4 configurations they tested (the 3 listed above and dual 20" standard monitors).

As far as I can tell the findings of the study were:

1. The 24" and 26" widescreens outperformed the dual 20" standards on a text editing task. 2. The dual 20" standards outperformed the single widescreens on a spreadsheet task, but by a lesser margin. 3. The 26" widescreen significantly outperformed the 24" widescreen on the text editing task at the same resolution.

How do you conclude from this that 2500x1400 is the optimal resolution for the vast majority of people?

In other words, do you think a free service that was created recently and isn't especially pretty can be successful, but if the site is generating revenue from those users the design becomes problematic?

(btw I think ebay is the only truly ugly site in that article, and I think hn looks just fine).

I just don't think it's valid to say that carmakers should continue to be able to profit making cars in a world where nobody wants them simply because its hard work that they like.