jeffdechambeau

Absolutely, but we need a critical mass of votes to figure out what each offense is worth.

We'll start by directly sharing the feedback with the submitter and eventually letting visitors "browse morality" across a bunch of issues.

It's desperate but it's also the right move. If I were them I'd give devs 100% or revenue from apps too. Anything to get market share at this point.

Not only is this a several year old feature, this reads like a press release.

More top-notch 'journalism' from TC.

There's a difference between being honest and saying: "we fucked up, here's what we've done to prevent this from happening in the future, here's a credit for some free stuff" and posting pictures of yourself at the verge of tears. We're past diminishing returns and into theatrics.

I don't know anything about balsamiq or their product, but this seems to be another instance of "authentic apologies" becoming a standard startup tactic. In terms of one-upsmanship this is a pretty pointless arena. Don't do shitty stuff. If your product breaks, explain it and move on.

Stuff's always going to go wrong and break, it happens. Their site went down for 3 hours on a random tuesday and now this guy is throwing himself to the wolves. Come on.

There seems to be this idea that you can get away with anything, accidental or not, and so long as your rake yourself over the coals harder than the last guy everything will be okay.

This is broken thinking.

The iPad is for content consumption. So what? So are books. We survived them just fine. We survived TV, too.

Making content consumption easier is not a problem. You're just repeating the same hysterics we've heard time and time again.

More than ever before in history, people are empowered to create and share content. It stands to reason that it should have gotten even easier to sift through and consume this content. And it has.

They've come up with an economic way to homogenize the behaviour of community, this makes it really easy for people to fit in and feel at home. more here: http://jeffdechambeau.com/redditing-to-the-mean.html

You got my number bro.

Alternate submission wording was "Capitalism rewards understanding: Why your business needs Philosophers." But yeah, I thought I might capitalize on the CS worldview ;)

This guy has completely missed the point.

Shareholders like high margins. Amazon made some moves last year that depressed their margins, specifically releasing the kindle fire, which they're selling at a loss, and price-beating brick and mortar stores with gift cards over the holidays to lure away customers. These moves have nothing to do with a loss of efficiency in their EGM business, but they do produce the smaller profits we see.

What the author mistakenly sees as a loss of efficiency is actually amazon future-proofing their business. Knowing that the market would punish them for taking all this profit and reinvesting it in growth, they went all in and took all the punishment at once.

Amazon has bright days ahead.

This is an outstanding product. I can easily see it letting non-technical teachers have their own Kahn Academy.

Any plans to let teachers share or sell lessons/lectures with one another?

I experienced some bugginess submitting forms with the unit name clearing my entry.

Is it possible to embed videos on external sites?

Only thing I dislike is how dull and drab the sample lesson is. I'd actually use it to teach (or re-teach) some concept that the audience is likely to remember.

Fantastic job.

"One thing they could do is buy their way into Hollywood. Think about it for a second."

If only the author did, then maybe he wouldn't have written this post.

Why would anyone want to buy an industry in self-imposed decline when they can sit on their hands, wait for them to wither, then push them around with whatever terms they like.

People need to stop reading TechCrunch.

Real life is pretty hard too. We let so many people into university that difficulty almost necessarily has to drop in order to keep enrollment numbers up.

Did your school push you nearly hard enough?

More than that. Make it feel like I'm accomplishing something.

Outstanding job, the interface is as simple as it could be.

Something needs to happen when you fill the bar, otherwise, why is it changing?

Finally.

Whoops, ran out of bandwidth. Called my host and should be back online in a second.

That's google webfonts. Looks great on my mac but not so great on my PC :/

I went looking for it too but came up empty handed. I know it was said/written somewhere.

And yeah, it is depressing. And I spend my time thinking about what they're doing... not sure if that is better or worse.

Very interesting. I know what I'll be doing with my afternoon.

I lacked this language, but yes I think that's a fair reading of my position.

There's a broader argument that facebook really is providing a valuable service to us by making us aware of products and services that really will make our lives better. I'm unmoved by that claim, as I suspect most of us are.

Can't be certain, but I know that from a subjective perspective my brain feels the same way browsing timeline as it does when I'm doing math or reasoning intently. The experience of cognitive strain is present in both cases.

One example in the book is that even hard to read fonts can cause cognitive strain and make you judge the content of the text differently. I see that as being largely analogous.

What's the logic behind these pointless distros?

"I was given access to the most amazing tools and technology humanity has ever known and was born with an incredibly ability to use them. Now I'm going to go out of my way to make it harder for others to follow in my footsteps."

It's a massive shame that such a specific and high level skill-set is squandered doing something so completely useless.

When you're referencing siegler to make your case you took many, many wrong turns with your life.

If only the browser supported extensions so that this edge case user could fix their own problem.

Oh well.

Yeah, but how is this not illegal/in violation of the licensing/terms of service?

Serious question: why is MG Siegler taken seriously at all? So far as I know he has no credentials, is incapable of actual analysis, and takes forever to get to the point. Am I missing something?

Morality tends to be governed by two views: you can either judge an action by its outcomes (consequentialism), or by its motivating principles (deontology).

From the consequentialist perspective, Walt's pretty clearly a bad guy: meth is a brutal drug with very little social upside. Sure he's able to bring about good for his family, but I'm sure there's a whole network of people who's lives are worse off because of his work. Overall he's probably created more bad than good in the world. Because meth tends to tear you down in the long run, I don't think it's fair to say he's responsible for the goodness of the high that his customers feel, as in the end it's a destructive addiction and not a recreation.

A fair response to this is that if Walt didn't cook the meth, someone else would, so there's the same amount of "bad" whether he does it or not, so why not take the money and run? I think the simple answer is that something doesn't magically become not-bad if someone else is willing to do it. Walt can still cook meth, but it's hard to say it's ethical from this first point of view.

From the deontological point of view, it's a bit murky. If you boil this down the view to its core, it's a moral test that's summarized as: "I can only do this if I'm ok with other people doing it too."

So, has Walt acted in ways that he (or we) would be alright with people doing broadly? Here's a couple spins on what he's doing:

1. "A man should be able to do whatever he needs to to provide for his family." While I might feel like I should be able to do whatever I need to to feed my wife and kids (provided they existed), I clearly wouldn't want someone else exploiting my family to feed theirs. So this fails the test and is immoral.

2. "I can profit off of goods that are addictive and destructive." This one is tricky, unless you're a libertarian and think that everyone is free to make their own good or bad decisions and that they own the consequences. I'm sure people will advocate this (and I assume the linked article will too, given the line "rational decision to provide a product to people whom have voluntarily decided to consume it") but I think it lacks nuance and legitimacy. Nonetheless, what Walt is doing would at least be internally consistent so long as he's okay with other people selling equally bad goods, and making them available to, for instance, his son. The argument here is the generic one about why stuff should be illegal or not.

So where does this leave us? I don't think there's a strong case to be made that Walt is a moral guy. No matter which of the two lenses we use, his actions look pretty bad. But I think that's what makes the character and the show so compelling: Our morals are an abstraction that we've placed upon the world to make it easier to navigate, and he's moved into a darker world where these rules don't matter, and what's more is that he's thriving.

I think that's the hook, that somehow this meek and mild guy who played by the rules his entire life was able to shed them entirely and find himself completely at home--and the audience is along for the ride, assuring themselves that they could thrive in a world without rules just as Walt has.