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foulmouthboyon The God Equation?

As the possibility of the Earth having the exact required characteristics to fit the equation by chance is remote, and the equation has, in theory, been in existence since the beginning of the Universe, this means that the Earth's orbit, rotation and weight must have been engineered to fit this equation.

The chance is apparently so remote that it couldn't be accomplished even given an infinite number of chances.

foulmouthboyon Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even Logged Out)

I don't understand why this is so bad. Google's trying to make sure you get more relevant results. If you already know what you want to find, you don't need a search engine.

foulmouthboyon The Dumbest Interview Question

That's a perfectly good question for an interviewee to ask. The interviewee needs to figure out if they're going to like working here or not and if the inherent annoyances about this particular job are going to turn the person into an asshole, then I'd like to know about it sooner rather than later.

foulmouthboyon New York Times: The Anti-Social-Network Social Network

Title should be fixed so that it doesn't make one think that New York Times is the social network in question.

foulmouthboyon Study: Hybrid cars hit more pedestrians

There actually is a statistically significant difference between .6 and .9 with those sample sizes. So the conclusion should in fact say that there is a statistical significance.

foulmouthboyon Study: Hybrid cars hit more pedestrians

Why not?

I don't think the initial hypothesis is so bad: If you can't hear something coming, you're more likely to get hit by it. A gas engine is significantly noisier than a hybrid one.

foulmouthboyon Study: Hybrid cars hit more pedestrians

They may have edited the article, but it reads, "up to twice as likely" and that observation is based on the incidents of bicyclists hit by hybrids vs standards (.6 to .3 percent respectively).

Also, to say that one can avoid being hit by a car by simply looking both ways when crossing a street is a little crass. I'm sure the thousands of pedestrians actually injured and killed by cars every year never thought to "look both ways".

foulmouthboyon What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

The way Apple has set themselves up with OS X actually does make themselves a class of their own. The decisions beyond just looks (e.g. will the software I need run? Do I prefer OS X to Windows? Do I need antivirus software?) make it so that comparing an Apple to anything else really is like comparing a Hummer to a Porsche.

foulmouthboyon IKEA's brilliant Facebook campaign

The brilliant part of it was making people tag their names into the Facebook profile's photos. You get those photos showing up in the Walls and news streams of contestants who then explain what they're doing to their 150+ friends who then tag themselves and share the promotion again.

Brilliant use of the tool to capitalize on network effects of Facebook.

foulmouthboyon Why everything you think about User Centred Design is wrong

While I agree with lots of what's being said in this, the initial analogy really leaves something to be desired. Obviously, the concept for the very first hammer went through a design process as what's been charted out in the blog. Man needs to pound one thing into another to hold it in place. Man tries rock. Man asks around to see what might work better. Etc. The process just didn't linger at the initial steps as long as the final step because the physical application of the tool is such an important thing to demonstrate.

In digital, where much of the initial design surrounds process and more abstract concepts, we can hang out around the early steps longer and to greater effect.

foulmouthboyon UC Berkeley students take over Wheeler Hall

Their primary demand is to rehire a bunch of custodians who got laid off? These kids need a couple of courses on "Look out for number one".

foulmouthboyon The death of the blog post (and rise of the blogazine)

I'm surprised that people would be so dismissive of this. Good design should obviously result in something usable, but there's nothing wrong with presenting it in such a way so as to take advantage of the medium.

The best way to present information is not always text on plain background. This should be obvious for anybody who has had to visualize data to make it understandable. The blogazine idea carries data visualization forward from quantitative to something more qualitative.

foulmouthboyon Why kids don't program

I just tried opening up terminal on my MacBook Pro, typing in what you wrote and nothing happened.

foulmouthboyon The Big Lie About Twitter

One thing not touched on regarding the strategy of following a lot of people. Whenever you follow somebody new, an email is sent to that person. For people who already have lots of followers, this may get lost, but for people who use Twitter relatively casually, getting this email along with a sample tweet is a great way to get introduced to a Twitterer that they may be interested in.

It may not be the intent, but it works well as an announcement mechanism as long as you remember that not everybody uses Twitter for business reasons.

foulmouthboyon Fast Food Is Why You’re Fat

Did you read the post? It's a commentary on countries that literally eat their food more quickly compared to others.

foulmouthboyon My Take On Net Neutrality

What's there to be scared of? In the US, utility companies are extremely efficient and capable of servicing a huge number of customers with a near constant uptime.

foulmouthboyon Ask HN: Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, or ExpressionEngine?

I can play too!

SiteCore, TeamSite, TypePad, Blogspot?

foulmouthboyon Most people still don't get password security...'123456' is most common

64 people using '123456' out of over 10,000 people (who were caught in a phishing scam), doesn't mean that most people don't get password security.

foulmouthboyon Will California become America's first failed state?

Because the cost of doing that is free?

foulmouthboyon Adobe to buy Omniture for $1.8 billion

To me, this is Adobe's play at being everything that it takes to build websites. Start with the tools and popular platforms and move right into the measurement and optimization.

foulmouthboyon 09/09/09 - The Day the Record Industry Died

Right. I don't think we're disagreeing. Just pointing out that the stuff that individuals do is essentially the stuff that only record labels could do once upon a time. I was responding to the idea that record companies didn't do anything.

foulmouthboyon 09/09/09 - The Day the Record Industry Died

Record companies had to ensure that magazines wrote about their artists, music was played on the radios and recordings would be available to purchase in stores. The average person on the street could only take their word of mouth so far. Now, the equivalent person on the street could write a blog post with an international reach while also uploading and sharing an MP3, which is basically what the record company was doing in old timey times.

foulmouthboyon Why Your Metrics Suck

Simple metrics or complex metrics won't get you anywhere unless you have the proper context around them. Why should I care about this metric? How did this metric get calculated? What am I supposed to do now?

foulmouthboyon Ask HN: I'm about to write a business plan. Where should I start?

Start here: http://www.quickmba.com/entre/bplan/ The rest of the site is a very good general business reference, complete with recommended reading. I used it while I was completing my MBA and found it to be a good high to medium level reflection of what I learned.

foulmouthboyon Kurt Vonnegut explains drama

Vonnegut's book A Man Without a Country has his full analysis (with drawings) including his thoughts on Kafka and Hamlet.

foulmouthboyon The Value of Game Ideas

Patent law.

foulmouthboyon Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked 10,000+ of Them.

I'm so glad somebody actually did some research into this. The original "study" of one 15 year old Morgan Stanley intern (writing about his circle of friends) should never have been taken as seriously as it was.

foulmouthboyon Humour is an act of aggression

Humor at the expense of others CAN be an act of aggression.

Good natured jokes made by a manager to make his or her employees feel at ease is a demonstration of people skills. People use humor in stressful situations not necessarily because they want to be in charge, but to actually lighten the tension. How is that aggression?

There are so many obvious situations of humor being anything BUT aggression. This is a completely ridiculous statement stating the exception to the norm as the general rule.

"Cars are used to kill people" "Food is poison" "Headlines are linkbait"

foulmouthboyon Ask HN: Just launched our beta, tell us what you think

Fair enough. As far as a main issue, what I should have articulated before is that the calls to action are poorly defined. I don't think it's nitpicking to say that most users aren't going to bother to scroll down or to control-F to find a FAQ if their personal 5 second read isn't as informative as someone else's.

It's not immediately obvious what you're supposed to do when you want somebody's service. When you click through, it's not obvious what you're getting when you click the bid button. A moment of panic sets in when I push the button and give some random price expecting some extra verification step and instead I suddenly think I might be on the hook for a $100 haircut.

foulmouthboyon Ask HN: Just launched our beta, tell us what you think

Really? I understand the idea of bidding on these people to do some sort of work for me, but beyond that, it's not clear how any of it is supposed to work.

What does it take to bid on somebody? Do I need a credit card? If somebody has a city listed, does that mean they can only perform their task within that city? Within 50 miles of the city? Do I go to them? Can I cancel a bid? Etc. etc.

I know that some of these questions are answered, because I happened to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and click on FAQ, which appeared in very faint green letters in what's typically a blind spot anyway.