flipper

In Freakonomics Steven D. Levitt argued that crime rates in a locality are linked to abortion laws in the same locality a generation earlier.

Basically, in the US, states that legalized abortions after Roe v Wade 1973 noticed a drop-off in crime starting around 1990, whereas states that did not legalize abortion did not see a drop. He claimed that changes in police methods around the same time were not so statistically significant in altering the crime rate.

'dramatic saving rolls' - heh, I liked that.

The problem with making those rolls, maybe, is that MS is now disinclined to strike out in a new direction?

Protecting the fortress from the plunderers (Sun, Netscape, Novell, etc) has turned out to be so profitable that they've forgotten how to rape and pillage (Lotus, IBM, Digital Research, etc).

I'm not a Microsoft apologist either, but they did plenty right to get where they are. Read Accidental Empires by (almost Dr.) Mark Stephens.

Microsoft got to where they are because Bill Gates was one of the first people, perhaps the first, to see that there was going to be a large and enduring market for personal computing software and he had the ability to make MS a force in that market. PCs were a disruptive technology that (effectively) killed mainframes and minicomputers and created many new uses for computers.

Even if MS do everything wrong they are still going to be a large and profitable company for many years to come. Their software is a de facto standard in too many places now for that to change in a hurry.

Their business is now in a mature phase. That means that while profits are huge growth has declined. They should be using that war chest to fund new tech. Ballmer seems to be quite smart but I don't know if he's a visionary. Perhaps he should stick to milking the cash cow and ask Gates back to recommend where MS should invest.

The article was possibly aimed at engineers or mathematicians so the author thought the benefits didn't need explaining.

A soft maximum might be useful if you want a differentiable function that closely approximates the max() function. By differentiable I mean you can work out the rate of change of the function at any point. With the hard maximum, the rate of change at the hard edge is not defined. Nicer to have one function to represent the RoC and not have to worry about special cases.

In the early '90s I wrote some software in Microsoft C++ that was distributed as an executable. An IBMer MBA friend of mine was horrified that anyone could distribute as many copies of my program as they liked without each user having to buy a C++ compiler.

Almost 20 years on Microsoft sound like IBM did back in the day.

According to the article, they have 100 million users, most of them in Asia. Why is that not a success story?

Sure, they knocked back GOOG's $30m offer in 2003. Perhaps they didn't sell as they didn't want to be holding stock they couldn't sell if they wanted to (GOOG didn't float until August 2004). They managed to get an offer for more than three times as much, six years later.

Many of us would be happy with that kind of failure.

Yes, giant gsme of chicken. I don't think Murdoch has any intention of blocking Google, he's trying a North Korean-style gambit - "I am renowned for being difficult and dangerous, give me what I want or I'll do something nasty."

Murdoch threatening to block Google is like Kim Jong Il proposing to bomb South Korea - absolutely suicidal, but given how "crazy" he is no one can count against him doing it.

Like most North Korean gambits, it's mostly posturing but the fact that it comes from a potentially threatening source means it has to be carefully considered.

Yes, News needs Google, they just hate to admit it. Knowing that's true, Murdoch is trying to maneuver News into a better bargaining position with Google.

There can be no better sign of who is most powerful in this struggle than the fact that all the threats and overtures are coming from News and Microsoft. Google is the Gorilla, Microsoft is the Chimp, and News is the customer who wants the vendor to pay to provide their service.

Yes it was thin, but it was pitched at college kids who may not have heard it before. Many of us got way past college before we read any of this stuff, regrettably.

This article reads like a case story out of 'Winning Through Intimidation' by Robert J. Ringer (a book anyone who is thinking about starting a startup should read). "Tanner" sounds like a Type Number 2 Master Intimidator.

The author escaped with only getting the tips chopped off a couple of fingers rather than losing his whole hand (read the book and you'll understand what I mean).

Good in-store salespeople also master the art of looking slightly surprised and/or disappointed when you decline the extended warranty, the implication being "Oh dear, Sir cannot afford the extended warranty, Sir is not quite as magnificent as I estimated him to be."

The disappointment, however, is genuine as as the article points out the warranty is about 80% pure profit.

The author of this article unwittingly makes the argument he was trying to oppose, which is that money drives your choice of location.

He acknowledges that his startup was 100% bootstrapped and profitable. In those happy circumstances it doesn't really matter where you are located, unless taking venture capital would help you grow faster (if fast growth is your goal).

However most startups wouldn't exist without some capital, and Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of wealthy tech investors. Those investors like to be able to keep a close eye on their investment, ergo all the entrepreneurs cluster where the money is.

Well, it is already happening.

I am studying Law as an external student. All lectures are delivered using Powerpoint + MP3s. Tutorials via Wimba (both chat and audio). Study groups are actively encouraged (for some subjects they are required) and also use Wimba. Legal databases supplement traditional textbooks. Exams are done either on-line or invigilated at a University in my home town.

My campus is 1900 miles away and I need not visit it during my entire degree.

You might not be able to do it that way in Chemistry or Physics but in Law it works very well. I can't see why it wouldn't work in Mathematics or many other subjects.

Maybe, but it could still be a pretty big number. And don't we owe it to our descendants to warn them?

Kasparov lost the last and deciding game of the match with a horrible blunder playing the Caro-Kann, a defence he did not often play.

Kasparov believed that the Deep Blue team had spent a lot of time analyzing his style and looking for weaknesses. He felt it was unfair that Deep Blue was designed to beat him, personally, but he wasn't able to study it in the same way.

Kasparov decided to play an unusual defence in game 6 hoping to avoid any theoretical surprises his opponents may have prepared against his favourite defences, but it didn't work. At the same time, the pressure he was under no doubt contributed to his defeat.

Of course now Rybka doesn't need any 'help' from human handlers, it can comfortably beat strong Grandmasters (Rybka 3's ELO is over 3200).

If it is any consolation the surge in computer chess strength is largely thought to be due to modern engines evaluating positions more like a human would, rather than looking at more positions.

An oblique link to HN - Kennedy was a senator for Massachusetts, the original home of YC.

Exactly. The VCs would expect the startup to spend the capital on growing the business quickly, and if that means hiring consultants and paying them a top rate then so be it. In fact, the startup would get in trouble with their financiers if they didn't do it.

I've been to Poland twice (Lodz) and didn't see any asian or black people at all, so I can only speculate that the asian man survived the 'cut' but the African-American did not because he would place the ad as being American.

Here in Australia we often get commercials on television that are made in the US then dubbed here, usually for toilet fresheners or other household products. You can always tell the difference because they're shot in soft focus and the colours look too saturated. They also tend to use the same four people to provide all the voice-overs: the Mum, the Dad, the little boy, and the little girl. They exclude African-Americans from those, too.

[UPDATE] My brother, who has in-laws in Poland, reckons there are some asian folks there now (migrants rather than children of migrants, as in the ad), but still pretty well zero black people.

It does seem arse-about that an angel would charge a fee to let a startup pitch to them. Surely, the angel is the one with the money, and the startup is the one that needs it, not the other way around.

Charging does solve one problem for the less-than-bright angel - if they receive enough pitches, it means they don't actually need to work out who they should invest in, they can make plenty of money from fees.

I wouldn't say that most chess players are like Fischer personally, it's that chess has a tendency to consume players to some degree, the way it consumed him almost completely. That's what I meant by archetype.

Personally, I found the rush from winning a game of chess to have a different character to winning at some other competitive game, and I think ego has something to do with it.

Maybe I suffer from some of the same flaws Fischer did (without the same gifts).

In his prime, Fischer was the archetypal chess player. Just because he was an insane genius does not mean that all the things he said were wrong.

Because he was so good, he could say things about the game that were controversial, but deep down a lot of patzers knew that what he was saying was right.

Sure, one's source of enjoyment from chess varies between players, but what both Scott McCloud and Fischer were pointing out is that winning a game of chess makes you feel wonderful, and losing one makes you feel bad.

I think virtually every chess player would be familiar with those feelings, and would concede that "crushing the other guy's ego" (or its corollary "not having my ego crushed") has a little bit to do with it.

Whether you are playing Spassky for the World Championship or a game of blitz with a friend, the emotions are the same.

Bobby Fischer was widely attributed as saying he played chess because he liked to crush the other guy's ego. That's really the attraction of it - beating someone up with your mind.

It's fitting, not ironic.

Yes, when viewed through the prism of our our national cricket team's 'play for keeps' approach, we can appear to be aggressive hot-heads. However, what is considered acceptable on the sports field is not generally approved of elsewhere!

In my city there are many people from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, as well as us Anglos. It's a pretty relaxed and friendly place.

I live in Australia too and don't deny that there are some racist people here, like other countries. But it's one thing to hold those views and another to attack someone because of their race.

In the three incidents mentioned in the article, there is no evidence the perpetrators were racially motivated. The first incident was robbery, for the other two there is no mention of who the assailants were and what their motive was.

There are many more East Asians (Chinese, Malaysians, Vietnamese, Indonesians etc) in Australia than Indians, it would be interesting to know why they are not being affected by this alleged racism, or if they are why they are being silent about it.

Arrest the assailants and interrogate them.

I presume the $800 billion in new buildings was really $800 million. Still a mind-bogglingly large amount for a single university to spend.

"Odds are, nothing your VC does, no matter how helpful or well-intentioned, is going to tip the balance between success and failure."

The effect of VC advice is in principle measurable. That would suggest an empirical approach is possible to determine whether YC is really 10x better than a 'regular' angel. Of course you'd have to consider the effect of how being chosen by YC might affect the performance of a startup. Also, whether YC is better at picking 'winners' than a regular angel.

YC is really the first angel/excubator to sell themselves on the idea that they are mostly not money. They have to, because they don't give a lot of it.

Rather than egocentricity, isn't it really measuring skepticism? I would expect rubing is a skeptic.

I noticed on the only 'tabloid' news site I ever look at that swine flu stories are now 'below the masthead'. They've decided for the time being at least that the story is running out of legs.

While I would consider myself a skeptic too it did at least prompt me to go and get my flu shot.

Oh dear, we've been rumbled!

Putting aside the hyperbole of the article's title and the PR-release tone of its content, one may ask why IBM would feel the need to add to DB2 the ability to run Oracle apps. Well, to steal customers from Oracle, of course. To me that's more or less an admission that Oracle are the gorilla in enterprise RDBMSes and DB2 is the monkey.

The fact that Oracle disdain compatibility with other databases and their tools are generally horrible is a reflection of their hubris, borne of their market position.

Disclaimer: I am an Oracle DBA. I'm not in love with Oracle as a company or anything, they've just enabled a lazy person to be paid far better than he deserves for a long time.