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I've been seeing similar comments to this around recently and I've been trying to identify the argument behind it. My best effort is something like:

1) Businesses will act in their economic self-interest to capture regulations/regulators. This is done to leverage the power of the state for themselves.

2) This capture is a bad thing, presumably due to net harm it causes to other business/customers/individuals/freedom.

3) Absent regulation businesses will not be able to (or be less able to) bend the power of the state to their own economic interests and will have to use other tactics.

4) Those other tactics are less harmful (or more beneficial?) than the effects of regulatory capture, to the degree that they overwhelm any good lost from removing regulations.

Does that roughly capture it? If so, is there evidence to support point four somewhere?

"Go with the flow" - it's ok for being friendly, but crap for making the life you want to live "Run away from a fight" - A knife fight sure, but in grade school and in metaphor it's pretty bad advice. "Smart is sufficient" - it's not even necessary

Java developers, business analysts - Vancouver, Canada

Elastic Path Software - A bootstrapped Vancouver company which makes eCommerce software for BIG companies. We're growing like mad and need smart, experienced Java devs.

We don't do telecommuting, but come check us out anyway, Vancouver is hard to beat as a place to live.

http://www.elasticpath.com/careers

He also takes the "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." quote out of context, as so many did at the time. Schmidt was pointing out that the government can demand access to data about your searches, and that you need to be conscious of that and be careful.

Between two misinterpretations and quoting a 'quip' to imply that google somehow things it should make all your decisions for you, it is a pretty shoddy post.

Check out padmapper.com does a nice maps mashup of craigslist plus other sources. May still not work if the data in your city is too poor, but works great for me.

I suspect that in many, especially larger, organizations excellent people need to hop to advance. Think about how co-workers and bosses react to a junior employee who quickly outstrips more experienced colleagues. Promoting someone junior rapidly past other people can cause resentment, or be structurally unavailable. The company may have policies about maximum annual raise, so an excellent person may advance in responsibility but not in pay. When taking a new job your position and pay are determined by your capabilities to a greater degree.

There are definitely alternatives to 'job hopping' including consulting/contracting to get rid of the stigma while essentially doing the same thing. Alternatively you can get a job with (or start) a start-up so you can have 'measurement and leverage'.

Kind of aside the main discussion, but the Canada line was approved at 1.35 billion, cost 1.9 billion, and had it's scope significantly reduced in order to manage that. It being a p3 allowed hiding 'competitive' information such as cheaper but disruptive construction and single track sections from the public, and the cities involved until after it was approved. I like having new mass transit, but I'm not sure this can be used as an argument for the economic benefits of the olympics. Though it could be an argument that the olympics give political cover to push through large projects irrespective of the problems/benefits and that may or may not come out well.

I'd love to have most of the things you mention, and some are on their way such self driving cars but there is lots of interesting work out there How about - pranav mistry's sixth sense project - bio printers creating organs with ink jets - combinatorial genomics - google street view (still blows me away to check out a friend's new place in NZ from my couch in Canada) - photosynth - Self replicating 3d printers - open source UAVs/autonomous helicopters

and that's just off the top of my head. I remember being prett impressed by the last 'what are you working on' thread as well. - combinatorial genomics -

I find the type of salaries discussed here downright surreal. I live in Vancouver, BC which has some of the best 'quality of life' according to various random surveys. This translates into an median annual FAMILY income of ~$60k CAD and a median house price approaching 1 million CAD. My wife and I both work in tech, and both make more individually than the average family income, but not a whole lot more.

The salary range in Vancouver seems to top out around $150k, and that is uncommon. New grads can expect something between $50k and $80k. The intangibles definitely make a difference to expectations. I sacrifice both salary, and to some degree interesting work (at least at my day job) to live here.

Causation, Prediction, and Search by Spirtes and Glymour is much more accessible than Pearl's Causality, and they cover a lot of similar material.

Video lectures has a workshop from NIPS '08 with talks by Pearl, Spirtes, et al at http://videolectures.net/coa08_whistler/

The UAI and NIPS conferences are a common venue for this research to be published in if you're interested in the latest results.

I think the implication was that having any human drivers on the roads negates a lot of the potential benefits and safety provided by robotic cars. The drivers don't have to be bad to be worse than a robot. Driving a car yourself might go the way of riding a horse for transportation. You can still do it, and have lots of fun, just not down most city streets! Robocars would still have accidents, but hopefully more on the frequency of planes :)

S3 for data backups, storage. Bunch of EC2 instances with EBS for crunching data and running web crawler.

I think you'll find two major problems with a blackboard competitor.

1. Low value of products to users

Blackboard, WebCT, and other similar 'Learning Management Systems' are products of a standard response to new technology in an established area. Essentially attempting to copy the existing way of doing things into the new mode and thus make them more efficient. Moving from the existing systems to internet systems might reduce costs by half or so, if you have a really good system, but it isn't 'disruptive'. This isn't spreadsheets or email. It isn't 1000 times better than the alternative.

2. Institutional inertia

Mentioned by others already, you're going to have a hard time selling to institutions. You're competing against a bunch of giant vendors with existing relationships, and FOSS solutions which are backed by and used by multiple universities. My university struck a committee of a dozen people with little to no knowledge of eLearning and spent probably $50,000 in employee time before deciding to maybe try moodle, or just stick with WebCT.

If you've got an idea for how to meet the real needs of educational users several times better than blackboard go for it. Personally I'd love to see something blow the existing junk out of the water, but think carefully about what people actually need and how you can serve that need don't just make a better blackboard.

While corruption and error are certainly major factors in privacy, there are some things that are just private. I don't want people, even people I know and trust completely, to know about the details of my sex life. Not because my sex life is crazy and deviant, because it is private. I don't want to have clear bathroom stalls, not because I'm doing something wrong or worry about someone harming me, but because it is private. Voyeurism is an invasion of privacy, it doesn't hurt people in any other way, but it is illegal, and should be.

In short, privacy is import because of the instinct you mention. The desire for privacy is the reason for privacy. Privacy is like freedom, it is a basic human desire and requires justifications to violate or remove, not to support.

The author spends much of the article quoting things which are relatively innocuous, then claiming they mean something far more extreme, and far more easy to attack, than the original. A rather disappointing bit of intellectual dishonesty for a 'distinguished professor'.

Academic inquiry is a public good as is the news, done by people as a job as do reporters, and academic freedom supports providing that good as does freedom of the press.

The press tend to get quite angry at attempts to control them, and those who go against the interests of their employers are lauded by their peers. I don't think arguing for academic freedom is any more elitist than arguing for freedom of the press.

I think there is a more positive side to this in software than in other forms of automation because software has massively lower capital costs than robotically automating a manufacturing plant. Simplistically, when it requires a large amount of capital to increase productivity, the gains will go to the source of the capital not to employees. GM employees would be hard pressed to start a new car company, and Canfor employees are going to find it tough to start a new mill. But we've seen how software improvements have dropped the costs of running some businesses so low that many more people can run a business than before. If you can't get a job at a company because of software making things efficient, you can probably find a couple of people and compete with them, or do something completely new.

Lying politicians. I want all video of politicians to come with live fact checking, comparison against previous statements, and colour coding of statements for truth values. The comedy shows do it a bit, like The Daily Show's penchant for having pols debate themselves, but I want it everywhere all the time, so every time they lie, they get called on it.

The perceptions of the customer makes a huge difference. A friend works at software company which sells software to corporate and government clients. Their pricing varies from $50,000 to $300,000 with the size and type of the organization they are selling to. They originally tried to sell to larger customers for the same price as smaller, but they didn't get any sales until they jacked up the price.

One tactic I use is to consider things which are 1000 times better than something which already exists. You don't have to invent something completely new, if you make something 1000 times better its uses will change in transformational ways.

It's easy to see these in retrospect, things like spreadsheet software, digital photography, digital publishing, and email are all a factor or 1000 or more better in some regard than what came before. Hanauer mentions getting "1,000 times the surveillance per dollar".

In Founders At Work the guy behind PayPal describes their fraud tools which were probably 100 to 1000 times better than what their fraud investigators were working with and allowed PayPal to survive when their competitors died.

I've been in academia for a long time so I often wonder how to make education 1000 times better. If that 1000 times better is 10 times faster and 100 times cheaper (questionable math I know) you'd be able to do college in 5 months for a few hundred dollars. I don't know how to do it, but it forces a different thought process.

It's relatively easy to make something 1000 times better that is only useful for one or two people in a particular situation, and the more people it is useful for the more money potential there is. A simple script has been 100 to 1000 times more efficient for me in some situations, but isn't useful for anyone else. 1000 times makes such a difference though that it is almost always worthwhile.

I've been excited by the possibility of in wheel motors ever since I first heard of them because of the combination of simplicity of the motor, and the massive simplification of mechanical systems of a car. You no longer need all the bits which connect your inefficient internal combustion engine to the wheels, and those bits lose a lot of energy, somewhere around 50% according to what I've read. There is one company that makes buses with wheel motors which quadruple the fuel efficiency of the current best diesel bus, and of course there is the electric mini prototype which got a lot of hype a few years ago.

My biggest problem assessing the technology is my complete ignorance of the mechanical/electrical engineering issues involved. One engineering grad student argued that wheel motors were no good because they destroyed the control of the car by putting all the weight at the very bottom, and that the motors were going to be subject to a lot of shocks in real world use. I don't know enough to evaluate if that is true or not, but I'm hopeful. Anyone here know more?

We should be skeptical that any particular metric does what it claims to do, especially ones which are ad-hoc or based on intuition instead of evidence. I'm not suggesting that Gladwell is wrong about any of the examples he gave being 'mismatches', or that there are many of them, and exposing the misuse of metrics is certainly valuable. However, he seems to go further, suggesting that we can't find good predictors at all, which is a claim which I think deserves just as much skepticism. I doubt he would seriously make such a claim, and it is probably just an artifact of an early talk which won't be present in his book, but I have plenty of skepticism to go around, so I'm perfectly happy to deploy it wherever it is warranted at all.

I think Gladwell has a good point that trying to do a job is probably the best predictor of who will be good at it, and as a general principle moving that point up, via apprenticeships, internships, coop programs, and so on would probably be useful.

What troubles me is he seems to say that because people do a bad job of objectively identifying predictors of future success, that those predictors simply don't exist, or at least aren't strong enough to be useful. Did the "exhaustive survey" of law graduates he mentioned really find no correlations between something that could be measured before a career starts and eventual success at that career? Perhaps there are no good predictors in various fields, but I think I'd like to see some much stronger evidence before I buy that.

Chris Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning is a good recent book aimed at 'advanced undergraduates'. It seems to be 'the book' in ML right now. Norvig and Russel's AIMA is a good general AI resource. The twice annual machine learning summer schools get videoed and put up on videolectures.net. Really good introductory lectures from the basics on up to various application areas. Even better if you can go to one and pick the presenters brains for a couple weeks, they are intended for both new graduate students and interested people from industry. After that there are specialized books in the (many) subfields.

I haven't lived in the countries in question, so I don't have any personal experience to go on. The only measures I have are the various indexes of quality of life and other academic studies. According those we have the following rankings:

Economist Quality of life index (2005): Switzerland: 2 Norway: 3 Sweden: 5 Iceland: 7 Denmark: 9 Finland: 12 US: 13

UN Human Development Index (2007): Iceland: 1 Norway: 2 Sweden: 6 Switzerland: 7 Finland: 11 US: 12 Denmark:14

All of these countries are quite rich by international standards, but their GDP per capita at PPP varies from a low of 29,650 in Sweden to a high of 41,529 in the US. The Nordic countries do better in their quality of life rank than their GDP per capita PPP rank, and the US does worse, (as does Canada, my home country, at least in the Economist survey). So all of these countries are doing just fine economically, whether they have oil reserves or not, and being rich certainly helps with 'quality of life' but it isn't the whole story.

What matters much more than a quality of life index or a measure of economic strength is happiness. This is a much tricker question, since it is subjective, culturally dependent, and personal. Historically happiness has been disregarded as an area for academic research, but over the past few years that has changed. The studies are still in their infancy, but what they tell us now is that different cultures value different things for their happiness (wow, shock, I know) such as personal success in the US, and family ties in Japan. The other finding I know of, which I find more surprising, is that trust seems to be the most important element in happiness.

I apologize for the lack of a link in advance, this is based on memory of a talk I attended last year. In a study done by a UBC researcher in Canada, based on census data and surveys done across the country, researchers measured interpersonal trust on a ten point scale, and recorded other factors such as wealth, relative wealth, personal safety, and so on. They found that a one point increase on the ten point scale in personal trust in your boss at work had a larger impact on happiness than doubling your salary.

They also found that trust in your neighbors was essential to happiness. Here the results get more interesting, because things that provided trust in neighbors was basically length of time you'd been neighbors, and speaking the same language. Any location facing rapid growth by in-migration has a risk in happiness and trust, and if that growth is international immigration by people who don't speak the same language trust is further at risk, as is happiness. If these results generalize beyond Canada, which they might not, I would expect countries which are rich, non-corrupt, and stable in their cultural composition to be happiest, which makes Iceland a good candidate for a high rank.

Regardless of the overall happiness of a country, moving there if you speak a different language, and value different things, is unlikely to make you or anyone else happy, at least in the short term. So wherever your personal values match up with local conditions, given a certain baseline of wealth and security, is likely to be the best place for you and just as likely to not be the best place for me regardless of any particular ranking.

Regarding your final point, the article does mention it, though not in detail.

"I believe we have blended the best of Europe and the United States here, the Nordic welfare system with the American entrepreneurial spirit,' he said, pointing out that Iceland, unlike the other Nordic countries, had exceptionally low personal and corporate tax rates. 'This has meant not only that Icelandic companies stay and foreign ones come, but that we have increased by 20 per cent our tax revenue owing to increased turnover.'"

The article presents a pretty narrative, not a substantive account of different economic theories and their effects, but it does mention both the welfare state policies and the free-market ones, suggesting that choosing the best of both is what has improved Iceland. On the surface this seems sensible to me. The Nordic countries generally have better 'quality of life' than the US does, the US generally is stronger economically.

The CRA Taulbee Survey (http://www.cra.org/statistics/) has detailed info on CS faculty salaries in the US and Canada. 2005-2006 9-month salaries for a new PhD in CS with a tenure track position ranged from $70k to $99k with $82k median. Of course, you have to get one of those positions first. PhD production has been at record levels in North America for a few years now. It seems lots of people decided to go to grad school after the bubble burst. The survey has incredible detail including, for instance, how many positions opened up as a result of people dying!

I don't doubt that most competent self-taught hackers could learn to do CS research if they were interested. A passionate interest in the learning new things, without waiting for someone else to teach you, is fundamental to teaching yourself to hack, and that same attitude is the main component of doing research. imho the biggest difference between hacking and doing 'research' is the mental shift from building something to creating new knowledge, whether it is a way of solving a problem, or something more abstract.

The most valuable things I've gotten out of the formal process has been the built-in mentorship provided by a good supervisor, the community of fellow students, and the opportunity to work on something with no immediate economic value. If you have the time/money, and don't mind harassing strangers via email you can get some of that without going to school for it. Still, if that mentorship, community, and money wasn't valuable, no one would be applying to ycombinator.