danielsoneg

I like it. I think you've got one too many lines, though: you don't need both a confuse-o-meter and an understand-o-meter - they're reporting the same metric. I'd consider averaging them into one line for overall sentiment.

Nobody gets forced into anything. You agree to a 2-year contract when you decide to get a phone for ~$400 below market price.

A more accurate version is:

> A business is valuable to own if you think it may bring you more value in the future […]

The mistake is conflating money and value: money can be a value, but other things, like riding into space, the prestige of owning a paper, and general quality of life are also values. A decision makes economic sense if the value you gain from it exceeds the value you give up to get it, regardless of the form those values take.

Not to mention they're just Gorgeous. I had a set I picked up at a thrift store just for the look - Wikipedia's faster, but damn, Britannica had Gravitas.

In my rather limited experience as a sysadmin, I've found avoiding those calls to be one of my best motivators: My systems work like they're supposed to because I like my sleep.

Consider it a performance-based bonus.

Two reasons: 1. Logs filling up with login failures from drive-bys masks legitimate/focused hack attempts. 2. If there's a security vulnerability found for sshd, non-standard port choice reduces the risk of drive-by scanners.

Non-standard ports don't stop dedicated attacks, but they do reduce noise that can obfuscate a dedicated attack and can reduce your exposure to uncommitted attackers.

I was just thinking the same thing - but Noam Chomsky writes, and talks, and lectures, and by that, he creates, just as we do when we write software.

Aside from the privacy issues, I think this is the biggest cock-up of the whole thing: They managed to predict, with shocking accuracy, the fact that the girl was pregnant - yet they missed that she was a teenager living with her parents. This is why I worry about algorithms: We're extremely bad about identifying what's important information until we screw something like this up. In this case, the father called Target sheepishly. In other cases, he may have beaten his daughter or disowned her.

In this case, the difference is if Foozits were something you used to stop your whatzit from itching, the proprietor probably wouldn't mention that out loud in the company of others. Target, on the other hand, is fine sending you an ad for it - and I suspect when the day comes that they can announce that to you when you walk in the store, they'll use all the tact and grace they apparently used in divining a girl was pregnant without also divining her age.

I think part of the problem is that it's a very difficult question to quantify - we can't control the inputs, we're not totally sure what we want from the outputs, it's unlikely that a uniform process will work to get the outputs we want, and we don't have the materials to guarantee a uniform process from start to finish.

On the input side, each incoming class is different: they vary across geographic and socioeconomic lines, they're all affected by factors which occurred years before we ever got them in a classroom to begin with.

On the output side, we really _Don't_ know what we want. It's easy to say, "students who can read, write, and do math," but the devil, as always, is in the details - how do we measure that in a way that doesn't immediately become a metrics problem á la No Child Left Behind?. More than anything, we need to foster successful individuals - but we're not sure how to do that on a large scale and the education system is but one part of a child's life.

The answer in a lot of ways seems to be "Very Good Teachers" - but what makes a good teacher? What sort of support structure is required? Are we willing to pay for enough Very Good Teachers? Do we have enough? Can we train more?

Further, to what degree does the attempt to constrain the education system so we can quantify the results inhibit individuality? In assuring a child knows his multiplication tables, are we imposing a system that will prevent that child from the free expression that would eventually lead to a great artist? Many of our finest works - the pieces of art by which we define our culture, spring from people who would, by any other metric, be considered failures by a system intended to raise successful individuals.

All this is complicated by the fact that the end result of a good education system ultimately is a good society - something we won't know until 20, 30, 40 years later. Everything else is a proxy: We think a high college attendance or graduation rate will get us there, we think more scientists and engineers will get us there, we think more well-rounded individuals will get us there, but ultimately, we don't know what makes a good society, nor what works to get us there.

I think there are improvements we can make, teaching methods that work better than others, and probably ways to quantify some of those differences, but ultimately, we don't even know the bounds of the problem we're trying to solve in education.

I think it's worth bringing up a factor mentioned here a while ago - Piracy serves as a useful market signal. The fact that people are pirating content means there's demand - if they're pirating it, but nobody's paying for it, that means the rights holders are creating a product people want, but the price & delivery mechanism aren't right yet. That's an awful lot better information than just that people aren't buying something - and I'd argue it's one of the signals that got the record industry to actually start taking DRM-free music sales seriously.

Obviously it's not a great signal on price - piracy's always going to have the lowest price - but knowing there's demand means you can start to adjust your strategy to try to capture some genuinely lost sales.

The site's down, but you can buy the folded version at Powell's Books for $12.95 here:

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780981855127-0

No luck on the wall hanging versions yet.

Because then I've gotta deal with two windows. Cmd+~ : One's now in the background, the other isn't. Switch apps, one comes back, the other doesn't. Switch monitors, the sizing's off. Try to do anything other than 50/50 split, have to adjust manually. Try to use TM's project browser (seriously), doesn't work. Try to swap that second file for a different one, have to close the window, open a new window & reposition. It's generally a much clunkier workflow.

Granted, I only know that from using VIM (and occasionally SublimeText), but it's been one of my "Dear GOD Give Me This in TM" requests for a while. I've got SizeUp and love it - truly one of my must-have apps - but to me it's a hack, not a solution.

Wealth accumulation roughly follows the process of "1. Earn money 2. Don't spend it" - It doesn't strain credulity that IQ might be correlated with the former, but not the latter.

I'm curious as to the effect on quality of life - measuring wealth in dollars is easier, but a pretty imprecise measure of the overall effect on someone's life of a few IQ points.

I'm even more curious as to the effects on happiness...

Edit: Not much, apparently: http://www.quora.com/Happiness/Is-it-true-that-less-intellig...

They've got the design down absolutely pat - the look of the item, the look of the print-outs, the site, the video - it's great.

They've also got some valid uses for it in there - yeah, we've all got screens, but those screens are used for an awful lot of other stuff - this gives one quick place to find a couple useful pieces of information, a whole lot faster than otherwise.

It is, however, absurdly wasteful. Anything I can read off that, I can save on my phone for a pretty comparable reading experience.

I think it's the software, more than the hardware, that's attractive - Give me that information in an app on the same schedule that little box would print it, and I'd use it. It looks like a pretty good filter and delivery mechanism, but I've got no use for a bunch of scraps of thermal paper…

Yeah, I wasn't sure of how to approach the mental aspect - I didn't mean to say construction or other physical labor required little mental ability, because I've done enough of it to know that's just not the case.

I think coding is different for two reasons - and please do excuse me, because while I've _done_ physical work, I don't do it for a living, so I'm coming at this slanted:

First, with physical work, you're doing, well, physical work. There's a correlation between physical activity and mental acuity, and, as you mention, you can take out some of your stress out on productive labor (if I do that, I have to buy a new mouse). You also have a balance between the physical and mental side - I'm not sure if there's a corresponding mental equivalent to muscle memory.

Second, you can 'outsource' some of the modeling to the actual physical object - the work you're doing has a tangible component, so you don't have to keep the entire thing in your head. That part, to me, is the most draining aspect of coding - I've gotten much better at structuring my code so I can compartmentalize most of that away, but when I'm working with older code or other people's code, I've basically got to have a very accurate representation of the entire program in mind the whole time. That gets really tiring really fast.

I think one of the other big differences, though, is that I can screw up an awful lot more than you can and get away with it - if I completely arse up a section of code, I can go back in and redo it at basically zero cost. If you arse up a floor, well, now we need to buy the raw materials for a new floor. The corollary between experts and amateurs mostly holds between construction and coding - give an idiot enough time and eventually you can have either a house or a program - the difference is he'll cost you an awful lot more trying to build the house. That breeds a level of patience and caution which, frankly, is probably better for one's outlook on life in general.

Anyway, again, sorry if I seemed to demean physical labor - I really didn't intend to. Like I said, I've seen enough experts in action to know the difference isn't in the hands.

I suspect two differences:

First, "working hard" and working the sort of insane, body-destroying hours that Arrington & co are advocating are two different things. It's good to work hard, be diligent, and get things done, but balance is essential. Arrington doesn't agree.

Second, Work for our parents and grandparents involved physical labor in some degree - ours does not. Our work takes a huge toll on the body for what seems so sedentary, and requires (I'd suspect) much more demanding mental processes, which are also extremely draining.

So yes, work hard - as did your father and his father - but don't kill yourself, and don't spend it all in what my doctor calls the Chicken position.

That's about half of what got us into this mess, isn't it?

If you do this well, Yeah, I'd rather pay for it - we're not talking bank, but for a couple bucks a month, if you do what you say you'll do and I stop having to worry about whether Facebook's decided to loot my underwear drawer while I wasn't looking, I'll happily pay.

You could also consider a Cloudblaze-type model - some stuff for free to get the aggregated data you need, and some pay services. I just want to make sure I know which side your bread's buttered on.

Also, if you're at NYU - talk to the folks at ITP. Lot of interesting, privacy concerned people connected to that group.

Honestly, the biggest problem I have with this site right now is that I don't know how you're paying for it - or how you intend to keep doing so. That's pretty much the exact problem with the sites you're monitoring - if I'm not paying for the service, someone else is.

I'd pay for a service like this - hell, I'd _rather_ pay for a service like this.

Microsoft's pro-PROTECT IP [1], though I don't think they've made a statement on SOPA yet. They are, though, as pointed out, a member of the BSA, which is very pro-SOPA.

1: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...

I was briefly skeptical, but on reflection, I like this for three reasons:

First, email just doesn't work for contacting Congress. They get entirely too much, and it's entirely too easy to get lost in the pile. It's the preferred means of communication for most of us on HN, but it's just not effective outside our industry. Phone is better, but there's nothing quite like flooding someone's office with paper to convey the will of the electorate.

Second, SendWrite is one of the companies that would be hurt by the bill - being able to generate volume like this shows the reach and effectiveness of their lobbying efforts. Sacks of cash are the backup currency of Congress - Votes are still the coin of the realm.

Finally, you guys are putting your cash on the line for this - that's a powerful statement, and I applaud you for doing so.

Sunlight Labs has an API that'll do it by zip code: http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Sunlight_Congress_API/

They've got libraries for Ruby, Python, and even PHP, and the interface is drop-dead simple. Definitely worth a look - I'm baking them into one of my projects right now.

Just add a short delay between the keypress & the search/url push, and add a check to see if the query is the same. If after a ~second or so the query is the same, do the search and update the URL.

One of my favorite anecdotes about that comes from an article found here (can't remember the exact article): The author (a developer) went along with their lead salesperson on a call to MIT. After demoing the product, which normally sold for $150k, the MIT rep asked about the price. The salesperson immediately said "$1 Million" - the MIT rep chuckled and said, "Oh come on, that's ridiculous - you know we don't pay more than $650k for software." The salesperson responded, "Ok, we'll let you have it for $650k - now let's talk extras."

So yes, price is a function of demand first - don't tell the customer what it's worth, let them tell you.

The other big problem is that debt loads don't drop along with prices - which effectively makes them rise. Falling prices (which lead to falling wages) + stable debt loads make it far harder for debtors to pay off their debts, which puts even further drag on the economy.

Yeah, but nobody listens to 15M tracks. They listen to a small subset of those tracks, and that subset differs from person to person.

Heck, for fun, let's say you were to listen to music 8 hours a day every day for a month (~30 days) -

  8hrs * 30 days = 240hrs
  (240hrs * 60min/hr) / 3min/song = 4800 songs.

Basically, you're paying $5-10 for a maximum of 4800 songs - or, between $.001 and $.002 per track, if you listen constantly.

Or, from the other side: Spotify's premium is $10/mo, which comes with no ads. They pay $.003 out to each band - let's just pretend they follow Amazon's 'agency' policy of a 70/30 split, so Spotify's making roughly $.001 on each song, and it's costing them $.004 total for that song (hypothetical - just stick with me). If we assume they're not losing money, then an average $10/mo user must listen to at most 2500 songs per month, and if Spotify's costs are higher than $.001 per track, the number goes down.

Point is, the industry's providing _ACCESS_ to 15M tracks, but they're only having to deliver ~2500/mo - but that's a different bundle of 2500 songs for each user. It MAY make sense from their end just to call it 'unlimited' and rely on the fact that the user can't consume music fast enough to really upset the economics for them.

(Incidentally, if you were to decide to listen to each of those 15M songs once, you'd wind up paying:

  15,000,000 Songs * 3min/song = 45,000,000 min
  45,000,000 min = 750000 hrs = 31250 days ~= 1027 months
  1027 months * 10/mo = $10,270

The record labels, then, value their entire collection of music at $10,270 - if you only listen once!)

> When you pirate something, you're sending the message that you want the content.

That, I think, is an undervalued point here - Piracy as a signaling mechanism is, I think, why an awful lot of what's currently out there for digital delivery (Hulu, especially) exists.

The industry's still not entirely sure what a viable market model looks like - that's part of the reason why Fox pulled their 8-day move. Bittorrent's shown people will do it for free, Hulu's shown more people will do it if it's easier even if they have to watch ads, Netflix has shown people will pay for it (though recently they've shown the selection needs to be bigger), but nobody's hit the magic bullet that both consumers and industry will accept yet.

In the mean time, piracy is certainly a valuable signal for the industry that demand exists - it's just that the price and mechanisms aren't right yet. (I'm sure the content producers feel the same way /s)

Well, it is harder in a game to indicate to the player when they should press the Rhinoceros button - sure, running man to WWI fighter plane is fairly intuitive, and the squiggly-line-to-polygon-to-point-cloud powerup basically speaks for itself, but finding some fairly obvious method of indicating this is the point in the game story/world where the rhino is called for can be more of a challenge.

Ok, this is just ridiculous. I've really tried to do this right - I have Netflix, RDIO, Pandora, and Amazon Select, and by and large, if something's available on those services, I don't go trying to dig it up somewhere else.

If I'm not paying for something, it's because the media companies won't let me, not because I'm not willing.

The USD has a century of relative stability behind it - there have been ups and downs, but there's never been a full-fledged currency crisis, and a USD from 1911 can still be used today. The Euro is a stronger threat to the dollar than we've had in some time, but it's still a relatively new currency and it's showing strains already. There's a reasonable scenario which the Euro is a secondary reserve currency, but it's going to take some time and some drastic crises in the US which somehow don't spill to the rest of the world before the USD gets dethroned.

You're right, though - the picture's looked an awful lot rosier. I don't believe there's anything concrete that assures the US's decline, but that's not for lack of trying on the part of Congress.