alexophile

"Researchers have recently uncovered what appears to be a site of significant religious importance in the region of the ancient Mojave Desert. Human remains were found scattered around a central monument believed to have been used for sacrifices along with a series of yet undeciphered pictograms that are theorized to indicate something of great importance buried below. Scientists hope to get clearance for a neutrino scan of the area by the end of next year."

I guess this was the answer to my question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2149968

Who downvoted this? That's not cool. Asking for an explanation is always ok.

Anyways, Yuri Milner (with Ron Conway) recently announced a blanket offer to all YC companies: $150k in no cap convertible debt. The title could have been to a story where a YC company dropped, presumably forfeiting the offer, only to be tracked down specifically and offered much more.

[edit: typo]

I was kind of hoping this would be a story of Yuri Milner tracking down the one that got away.

Right, I didn't mean to imply that this was deliberately misleading, just that I would imagine these things to be far more useful internally than to the casual observer. (i.e. it would be great for spotting consistent sore spots and the like, but not necessarily a statistically viable indicator of customer happiness)

My guess would be that the biggest benefit from this is going to be when people hear about how great the customer service was at 37s, stop by to check it out, and see a chart full of smiley faces, each one potentially representing an echo of the great experience they heard about.

PS: I would like to add a frowny face for never getting a response to my application :(

Do you publish response rates? Things like this always scream selection bias to me. If it were, say 90/7/3, but it took 300 interactions to get 100 responses, that seems like a misrepresentation.

That being said - I really appreciate the idea, but it only really works if you trust the company already. I have plenty of reason to believe 37s (even applied to be a part of the team being tracked,) but if this were State Farm or Comcast or something like that, it would be a pretty laughable concept.

In many ways, I think that's already what it is. HN was created to, and still does, serve the purposes of YC. I don't know where the money comes from to keep it up and running, but I would imagine it's part of the YC operating budget.

In short, I'm sure the value it represents now is far greater than what one could garner from trying to directly monetize it. Just look at any of pgs posts - people upvote the bejeezus out of them: he can instantly and effortlessly access thousands of high quality eyeballs.

There are surely people that would pay egregious sums of money to have this kind of community in any vertical, and tech startups are pretty hot - I struggle to even fathom what could possibly constitute a fair price for jeopardizing that.

[edit: Google says it's spelled 'bejeezus']

If they want to do that, then they should have avoided "pad." They can't come out with a "touchPhone" or a "touchPod" without looking like they're trying to imitate Apple. Not that HP/Palm don't deserve some creedence, but I would never recommend anyone go head to head with Apple on branding alone - and that goes double if your strategy is clearly derivative of theirs.

Does anyone else think this is a terrible name? For me at least, this brings up an image of the trackpad on my laptop - which is... imperfect at best.

Aside from that, it just seems horribly generic. Touch? Pad? That's all you have to say about your product?

Right, I think that's more because, at the time, it wasn't all that bad to refer to women pejoratively.

I was under the impression that the only way to use "broad" non-pejoratively is in reference to the actual breadth of something.

That being said, sometimes it's safer to study abroad from afar.

In my (biased, but well-founded) experience, it comes down to a question of whether I'd rather be distracted by a cute girl or an old man getting reprimanded for looking at dirty pictures.

[bg: I really like libraries - worked at one in the suburbs in high school and have since moved to the city, which exaggerated the weird bits]

One thing that's worth noting: if you're on a college campus, a great place to find some legit quiet time is in departmental libraries, especially the social sciences.

What I don't understand about all this is why there isn't a way to use these clearly failing schools for experiments in alternative styles of education. Say what you will about things like voluntary attendance, but when your school is descending into anarchy, it just seems like there's too little to lose not to go out on a limb.

The school my mom used to work at was rampant with corruption and ineptitude. It was taken over by the state BOE and three years later, nothing has changed. When the school falls into dire straits, why not offer it up as a test case for passionate researchers?

He wrote criticisms of just about every major western belief system - if you take into account his larger body of work, saying he was anti-this or anti-that just seems disingenuous. Much of what he wrote was criticism for its own sake because that's what leads to progress.

He wanted his critiques to hit hard; he wanted to be subversive. My reading, at least, is that he wanted to teach people to be critical of highly-regarded cultural norms and morals and his writings are essentially case-studies in exactly that.

I wasn't trying to reduce his criticisms to adolescent jabs - I have great respect for his analysis. But he occasionally gets a little carried away and takes an unnecessary pot shot. They're symptomatic of his sort of unique brand of narcissism and, were he any less of an intellectual force, probably would have been edited out of the final versions.

I like that comparison, he is kind of the troll of philosophical history. The interesting thing about Nietzsche, though (esepecially in Geneaology) is that he takes on so many different voices to address different existing philosophies such that you can't really say (although many have) that he's anti-semitic (In fact, IIRC he seemed to dig the old testament Jews' style) or anti-christianity.

The difference between his adolescent jabs at Christianity, Judaism, the English, etc. and an ironic motivational poster is that he had a sort of overarching point to make. Among other things, he wanted to demonstrate that existing philosophy was essentially a really deep catalog of the personal biases of a bunch of well-spoken white dudes.

If you come from a solid grounding in (specifically Greek) philosophy, the concepts and questions Pirsig raises are familiar, but for me the way he addressed them seemed much less self-indulgent.

Greek philosophers were public intellectuals and, for me at least, reading their texts was somewhat off-putting because of the level of... grandstanding for lack of a better word. ZAMM seems so much more honest. It's framed as a man attempting to pass on actionable wisdom to his son that will make him a better person.

The questions are the same questions people have been asking for thousands of years: what is good? (and derivitives thereof) but Pirsig frames his answers with a very appealing humility.

Having lived off of my writing for a spell, I struggled deeply with the problem of metaphysical quality and no amount of classical philosophy ever brought me the admittedly limited clarity I felt like a got out of ZAMM. YMMV, though.

When I was interviewing a founder at SpiderOak, he mentioned that they did this for some bigger clients (complete with zero-knowledge encryption) to get them up and running faster.

Reminds me of pgs "Fundrising Survival Guide":

"More often than not the company comes to a standstill while raising money. And that is dangerous for so many reasons. Raising money always takes longer than you expect. What seems like it's going to be a 2 week interruption turns into a 4 month interruption. That can be very demoralizing. And worse still, it can make you less attractive to investors. They want to invest in companies that are dynamic. A company that hasn't done anything new in 4 months doesn't seem dynamic, so they start to lose interest. Investors rarely grasp this, but much of what they're responding to when they lose interest in a startup is the damage done by their own indecision."

http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

...unless you're dealing with the government, banks, or car dealerships.

I'm curious as to why this necessitates a new app. Justin.tv is a pretty strong brand, why not wrap this functionality into the existing app?

Not that I would do it differently, there's dozens of reasons, but it's a blog post I would want to read.

I signed up for LinkedIn probably 4 years ago or so, and all it's really done for me since is notify me by email when all the business school grads I've ever met discover LinkedIn.

ahh. Guess I missed that in the link title. It would still be nice to see on the landing page, though.

Landing page would benefit from some additional information... specifically, where the conference is taking place.

I think my real problem with all this really comes out when he mentions the Kurt Wise case:

"Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand."

The problem with this line of thinking is not with the conclusion - his conclusion is soundly derived from his body of evidence. But I take issue with what he chooses to admit into the corpus of evidence to be considered.

If you read the Scripture as the word of God, I have no problem with that. If you take that as a guide for what determines a good life, that's totally groovy. But the Bible cannot and should not be used as a piece of evidence in determining scientific fact.

A text that considers calling something a "miracle" adequate explanation is, by definition, non-scientific. If you believe in such miracles, that doesn't bother me one bit, but if you accept a miracle as evidence without explanation, you are not practicing science.

A fun side-story: There was a question on Quora recently - "Why did Duck Duck Go Block Mahalo.com?" and Jason Calacanis, of course, felt it necessary to weigh in. I had to read this response twice, assuming there was some intended irony:

"if they did that is a big mistake... we are not close to spam and a we have the best articles on many things like how to play guitar, speak french, etc."

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-DuckDuckGo-block-Mahalo-com

Seems plausible.

http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Pritzker_family

I have an 07 Honda and the dealer (and I believe the owner's manual) specifically instructed against any ethanol. Unfortunately, I'm also supposed to avoid anything above 87 octane... Basically, I just have to go around Iowa.

Disagreed. I think everyone has the potential for creativity, it just gets scared out of us as we grow up. Teaching someone to paint or take well-structured photographs is pretty much trivial as long as they put in the effort. And once you give somebody a tool to adequately express the way they see the world, most can barely help but be creative.

An interesting addendum: John Maloof, who 'dicovered' her work, as it were, decided to try and locate her after some time. His search turned up her obituary. It had been posted the previous day.