asr

Though I've never heard "advertising" and "marketing" used to describe information content vs. persuasion, it would be a great shorthand.

A sample of 250 could be wrong but at least it's a study, and so much better than an anecdote.

It's also much better than the original article, which says, as justification for teaching children to read early, "I will wait for the results of empirical studies before insisting on definitive claims, but my guesses are as follows.... Again, I know this is just speculation, but it seems very reasonable to me, and in the absence of better evidence, I feel justified in acting on what seems very reasonable."

So, to sum up: the best evidence we have says this does not work.

If that's your question, good luck finding someone who knows the answer, but I will note that when the energy sector goes downhill because energy is cheap, that helps, not hurts, a lot of the rest of the economy--energy is an input.

How old are you? The algorithm made a difference :)

Also, "the market" is big.

[The researcher's] theory is that people who sleep for more than eight hours sometimes have an underlying health problem that is not yet showing in other symptoms.

So, it's not the long sleep that is causing the increased mortality risk, it's the hidden illness.

TLDR there is a correlation between sleeping longer and decreased health. Not worth three minutes of your time.

I am sure this is not quite how you mean it, but to me this comes across as saying "if it doesn't affect my life, or my friends, then who cares." You should care about things that don't directly impact your life -- partly because you can make a difference in these things, sometimes, if you get involved.

Time to get out of the shire and see the world, bilbo.

Interesting, but I can't say I agree. Some jobs are compensated in risky, performance-based ways already (e.g. sales). And conversely, if everyone prefers job security, freelancing websites could attract better-quality workers by becoming more like employers.

There are a number of other theories for why firms exist, but the classic explanation is that it reduces transaction costs if you can bug Jill down the hall for 10 minutes of her time instead of hiring an outside contractor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

(Aside: I'd guess it's because there are people like me, who often read comments before or without reading the article, that a well-written but not on-point comment like this can get upvoted. I wonder how you'd fix that?)

TLDR of the opinion for the rest of HN:

"Public performances" are subject to copyright protection. The Copyright Act says: "To perform or display a work 'publicly' means to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a [public place] or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times." That last part was written specifically so that cable companies are engaged in public performances (three boos for Congressional idiots who write laws specific to one technological era and then don't update them).

The majority says because that sentence talks about public transmission, it implies there's such a thing as private transmission. And transmission of a unique server copy to a specific customer is a private transmission. (See pp. 29-30.) They think this case is about a "rooftop antenna [that] is rented from Aereo and its signals transmitted over the internet."

The dissenter says that "public performance" includes any stream whose fundamental purpose is to retransmit live TV to a large audience. And that's what he thinks Aereo is doing. (See pp. 49-50.) He thinks Aereo is functionally doing the same thing as a cable company, and that "Congress made clear its intent to [cover] ... 'all conceivable forms and combinations of wires and wireless communications media,'" so it doesn't matter whether there's a private copy on the server or not.

(Link to opinion: http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/82dcbc3a-986...)

(Not really going to touch the rest of this...)

Thought I'd doubt it would be litigated, unless the founders are particularly stupid in addition to being immoral.

Shapley also won--I don't know much about him, but I'm sure his theoretical contributions are the underpinning for all later work in the area, he's a giant of the field, etc. etc. etc.

Also, who cares who started it? Usually, competition is good for consumers--in this case, if Apple approved this app, competition would mean we have two natural language search apps on iOS. The problem is that Apple is "competing" by hurting their users, not by improving their products. And Google does this too (see: lack of turn-by-turn navigation on iOS), but my sense is they do it less.

As the article does, it's more helpful to focus on how the competition takes place than on casting blame for starting the "competition," which is fundamentally a good thing.

Also, civil disobedience doesn't mean what you think it means:

  much like civil disobedience, you have no right to complain once
  you are found to be breaking the law/policy and are punished for it

On the bright side, at least he's thematically consistent! "I keep getting screwed over by life" is the only reason I can think of to start the post with so many words about Final Clubs before the pivot.... Suffice it to say, anyone who can graduate from Harvard with a CS degree and feel screwed over needs some perspective.

So bespoke suits have gone from being a huge part of the suit industry to being a tiny part of it (not non-viable, just not very important). If bespoke tailors want to keep from becoming ever more expensive/niche, Davidson speculates, they will have to adopt at least some labor-saving techniques.

Note your solution--raising prices--is exactly what Davidson is annoyed about. As tailors raise prices, fewer and fewer people can buy bespoke suits. Which is bad. I'd like a custom-built suit, but I definitely won't bet getting one.

You've jumped into this assuming Davidson is writing about a business problem. But I think he's coming at it from a consumer point of view. He doesn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out if the bespoke tailor can raise prices because, well, higher prices reduce consumer surplus, so that doesn't solve the problem he's concerned with.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying we don't get nearly enough information to decide! And that's ok, because that's not the point of the article.

(Though, personally, in this case, I don't think Google's getting enough credit. The added space for search tools is designed to make search better for most users, and probably do, even if most of us don't need them.)

The next time someone suggests antitrust laws are uniformly bad and should be abolished due to their (mis)application in tech, this is a great counterpoint.

The crux of Stross's argument for why we should fear Amazon's low prices is that it's "predatory pricing"--that Amazon was selling e-books below cost so they could jack up the prices later after they had their monopoly (or, equivalently, lower payments to authors after they were a monopsonist).

But apparently Stross didn't read the DOJ complaint, because it turns out Amazon's e-bookstore was consistently profitable! 9.99 bestsellers were just the equivalent of cheap milk at grocery stores--loss leaders.

The DRM prediction in the article is pretty good, but both you and Stross misunderstand why Amazon is winning. It's not because they're cheating--it's because they're more efficient and so can make money at lower price points.

I didn't mean professional in the sense of "money-earning," as you would use the term applied to participants in a certain field.

That's exactly what professional means. A professional web designer is someone who gets paid by others to design websites. Sometimes, artistic license is part of what customers want (see: professional chefs, painters, etc.). But web businesses like Exec generally want to earn money.

So any site that is optimized for profit qualifies as professional, regardless of how much you like their design.

Of course, there are caveats. Maybe some designs, while generating more conversions, would attract more short-term, price-conscious customers, instead of the upscale clientele that are ultimately more important to Exec's long-term profits. And maybe, for this service, it's important to be seen as "stylish" to generate good word of mouth. But, ultimately, whatever design is best for Exec is the most "professional."

  When the game blows up ... and one employee, who didn’t work on the product,
  and is more about his own games then the team, jumps in the press and becomes
  the story, it is very hurtful to all the people who are on team.

  [W]hen you give blood, sweat and tears on something and someone who doesn’t
  even work on the project, and prioritizes his own games as his own professional
  development over the team, becomes the story it is very demoralizing.

  [M]y point is that it wasn’t about Shay. It was about the 41 other people who
  made it happen. Those are the people I would throw myself in front of the
  train for and those are the people I want to celebrate.

He didn't apologize. After an apology, you need to back up your words with actions.

tl;dr: if you build a tool which solves a significant and recurring pain point for creative professionals, you can get away with not supporting IE.

The article does not provide much insight into building a consumer-facing application--this is the equivalent of a company using an intranet app which is IE6-specific.

Coming from the TSA, it amounts to "we are afraid to face questions from someone who will know enough to ask hard questions." Which I agree is unsurprising, but it's not exactly a compelling defense of their position.

[1] Under, for example, Rule 801(d)(1)(A): http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_801

Agree or not (and I don't), it's not some beyond-the-pale view. Chill with the space aliens.