echair

1,687 karma · joined May 28, 2008

echair··on Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo’s online search business for $20 billion

I wonder if Yahoo would be allowed to build a new search business. I'm sure they could do that for way less than $20 billion.

echair··on Beware the church of climate alarm

Wait a minute, didn't you give humans fire in the first place?

echair··on Ask HN: Is relying on scribd's API a big mistake?

The likelihood of scribd suddenly disappearing seems small, whereas the value of speed in developing new services is large. So seems like a good bet.

echair··on President Obama: Listen To Entrepreneurs

Forbes: Listen to entrepreneurs. Your pages are the most horribly cluttered on the web.

echair··on Exclusive publication for top 50,000 Harvard alumni

Clearly produced by undergrads. What they don't realize (and why this mag was doomed) is that out in the real world, the more successful the alumni, the less they're defined by having gone to Harvard. The kind of rah-rah alumni who'd be interested in all these inside jokes are the ones who peaked in college, and who thus (if their selection algorithm was correct) didn't get sent copies.

If they'd sent this to the 50,000 least successful alumni, but told them they were sending it to the 50,000 most successful, they'd have probably had a very active readership.

echair··on Ask HN: What's the status of Heroku? (and other Rails hosting questions)

99.9% uptime is not that great, actually, if you do the math. That's a 44 minute outage every month.

echair··on The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace

"At Amherst David perfected the style he would wear for the rest of his life"

When I got to this I realized I was reading the wrong magazine's article about him.

echair··on Poll: Allow stories about the election?

Someone actually winning the election is interesting to hackers, because it's interesting to almost everyone.

echair··on Poll: Allow stories about the election?

This is a community of entrepreneurs

The site started out as "Startup News" but they broadened it shortly after to be "Hacker News."

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "

echair··on Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder

lack of diversity in type of ideas

news site: http://reddit.com

geolocation on cellphones: http://loopt.com

form builder: http://wufoo.com

server administration: http://virtualmin.com

electronic components: http://octopart.com

Etc, etc. Lack of diversity? It seems like these ideas span the whole range of Internet startups.

echair··on A programmer's view of the Universe, part 1: The fish

Because he has something thoughtful to say about the topic. Is there a better qualification?

echair··on Ask HN: Is clojure (lisp in JVM) next big thing?

Like which Lisp did?

echair··on Is Math a Young Man's Game? No

Because you can't pack enough different institutions within a sufficiently small radius.

Parents want 5 year olds to live at home. They're ok with 18 year olds not.

echair··on Is Math a Young Man's Game? No

Because colleges select applicants by aptitude, and elementary schools by proximity.

echair··on Apple now has 9% US market share, volume growing at 6x the industry average

it is possible that Apple sold as many (or almost as many) personal machines as Dell, and more than any other manufacturer

Indeed. This article

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/14/technology/moritz_apple_anno...

says they now have 17.6% retail market share.

echair··on How I Make $2,000 Every Year Without Doing Very Much

Sounds like a description of every government employee in a third world country.

echair··on A Capitalist Manifesto : requirements for true capitalism

Why do we need to do more than add a few additional regulations limiting the risks banks can take?

echair··on Paul Krugman wins economics Nobel prize

The closest thing is the Fields medal.

echair··on Competitors ready to challenge iPhone

...while Apple is already working on whatever comes next.

echair··on Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas

Is there even one person who's currently living this way?

echair··on Yes, Uncov is Back

Dziuba is pretty damn smart

I've never seen any sign of this. Can you give me an example of something especially insightful that he wrote?

echair··on The United States is now, in some very general sense, bankrupt

I don't know if I trust someone who doesn't know the difference between its and it's...

echair··on Yes, Uncov is Back

I never thought it was funny, but those who did may not like it so much in a bad economy. It won't be amusing to hear someone always being negative when all the other news is negative already.

echair··on Microsoft Opening Three-Headed Search Technology Center in Europe to Challenge Google

They must have read the Spiegel article about how the US had lost its dominant economic role.

echair··on $700bn Bailout is shot down by House of Rep Vote (205-228), US stock market plummets

This is a victory for the stingy saver

Not if he has his savings in stocks. In fact, if he followed the conventional wisdom and put (100 - age) percent of his assets in stocks, a 40 y.o. stingy saver just lost 5% of his savings today alone. Which is almost certainly more than his share of the $700 billion.

echair··on DNA indicates humans in N. America 14,300 years ago

"The findings kill the suggestion some of the earliest Americans came from Europe."

How exactly do they do that?

echair··on The Myth Of Our Free Market Past

It seems like he invented this myth in order to debunk it. Surely everyone knows the 19th century was dominated by cartels. If people only know two things about Teddy Roosevelt, the second is "trust busting."

echair··on Once Again, A Startup is Defined As …. : East Coast Blogging

It means about as much as any other English word. I.e. it's not mathematically precise, but it does convey something.

echair··on Nifty New Risk Calculations of What's Likely to Kill You

I would not be surprised if everyone turned out to have nascent cancers. As we learn more about human biology, having cancer seems to be less and less a binary thing.

echair··on One founder's nightmare

Tip: the more personally you are involved in some dispute, the more careful you have to be to be crisp and understated when describing it. This would be much more convincing if it weren't so rambling. As it is, I read it and think "I don't know the rights and wrongs of this particular situation, but I could easily imagine that this guy would be a huge pain in the ass to deal with."

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