karmacondon

This is a good point, but generally discouraging the use of cigarettes or alcohol through taxation only effects people who consume those products. If you raise the tax on carbon, that cost could be passed on by businesses in unexpected ways. If the cost of me shipping vegetables across the country goes up by 2%, I'm just going to increase what I charge for shipping by at least 2% and the cost could well be passed on directly to consumers. Eventually I might be outcompeted by someone who has a fleet of electric trucks. Maybe, at some point. But until that happens, people could end up paying slightly more than they do now for essentials.

Maybe this effect is covered in the policy details or by the term "revenue neutral". Either way a carbon tax is probably a good idea, but the chain of cause and effect isn't so clear.

The funny thing is that kickstarter's official policy is that they are not a pre-sale platform. But if they were serious about this, they wouldn't let campaigns offer the product being developed as a "reward" in exchange for money. It's like amazon saying that they aren't a book seller, but they will give you a $30 book as a "reward" for donating $30.

I'm not sure if I fully understand the title of this post, though. The author points out that Kickstarter funds are to be used only for production related costs and therefore should be considered debt (they must be repaid, unlike equity). But, in reality I don't think that there are any legal or even ethical stipulations placed on money raised from Kickstarter. The money is being donated, and unlike business debt can be used in whatever manner without having to be repaid. Wasting Kickstarter money may or may not affect someone's reputation for awhile, but it doesn't show up on a credit score.

For this reason, it's always seemed to me that crowdfunding is the best way to raise money for anything. If you can do a crowdfunding campaign, do it. Most certainly for hardware. Then get a line of credit if you can, and raise money from VCs as a last resort [1].

[1] Other than Bolt of course, because their blog is so awesome that I'm thinking about pitching them right now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip_coach

Not sure if something like that would be practical in this instance, but never count out human ingenuity.

"Improve compression technology X so that live video is technically feasible sooner than expected"...now that's a great idea. Likewise, "Use marketing technique Y to create an insatiable demand for personal web cams", also a great idea. Someone starting a company in a given space that think will take off doesn't really constitute a groundbreaking innovation, though it is a smart business move.

Many if not most people who say "I have great ideas all the time" are overvaluing the quality of their own thoughts. Plenty of people have good ideas every day. But truly great ideas, by definition, are rare. Not 1 in 100 rare. More like 1 in 1,000,000 rare. And it can be really hard to tell the difference between the two, especially when evaluating one's own ideas.

In terms of incentives, blackmail is generally a lower tier crime in terms of likelihood of success. Think about if someone tried to blackmail you. There's a good chance you'd think "Sure I can give in to their demands now, but they'll just ask for something else later and they never have to stop asking". Unless the crime being covered up involves significant jail time, most people would rather face the consequences than live the rest of their lives under someone else's control. Many former politicians have successful careers even after mundane scandals (Weiner and Spitzer come to mind).

And depending on the nature of the secret, most politicians would get some slack from the public for having the courage to standup to FBI blackmail. They might even be able to spin themselves as a flawed hero. In fact, having a three letter agency try to blackmail you right now is kind of a get out of jail free card.

As tptacek said, this is really fascinating fiction but it's just wildly impractical in real life. Blackmail is messy and has a lot of moving parts that are difficult to control. The FBI is better off doing exactly what they do now: asking Congress for money and getting it.

It might indeed lower pay for the people who have the most experience, but probably not by much. It's hard to believe that it will be a net negative for the company or its customers.

It seems like distrust of authority is just a part of some people's personality. Perceived wrong doing by the government in the past has caused them to distrust the government into perpetuity, even if that same government does exactly what those people demand. So why should the authorities listen at all? It's like a convicted felon who can no longer get a job or be part of society. Why not just go back to a life of crime? You're damned if you and damned if you don't.

So they used to detach cars from moving trains with passengers in them in order to keep the express running? Like, in real life and not in a cartoon? Hacker news, indeed.

Now sure, some people will look at pages of facts and figures about death statistics. But a lot of people will think "I had to wait in line for a long time at the airport while they did security stuff, so I must be safe." And that's the job of government, to deal with problems that are on the minds of citizens.

This doesn't add much to your comment, other than offering a potential explanation as to why women in technology can have a hard time. Unfortunately I don't see a solution to the problem either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

People seem to use those concepts interchangeably, which only clouds the issue. Someone from a small town might not mind sharing a living space, but object to online tracking. Or someone could say "I have nothing to hide" in regard to their daily communications, but still not want their showers to be broadcast. Or an exhibitionist could have no problem with public showering, but draw the line at sharing a bedroom with two other people.

So when people say that privacy is dying, which kind of privacy do they mean? "All of the above" is a valid answer, but the situation is probably more nuanced. This particular post provides an interesting view, but still lumps a lot of concepts together.

It's hard to tell if someone making a controversial statement is doing so to learn and participate in discussion, or if they're just trolling. And with ol' Common Joe the latter can be just as likely as the former. So sometimes people err on the side of caution, and prefer to avoid outright controversial topics that are difficult to discuss and articulate. I don't think it's an issue of anyone looking down on anyone else.

If someone says something unpopular on hackernews, ie "Edward Snowden is a traitor" they will be downvoted into oblivion. You could say that hackernewws censored the person's ideas, but I think the reality is that what they said wasn't very popular with the people they said it to. I think this effect is just as relevant and predictable with online communities as it is with college campuses.

Most sites do offer options to control the number of notifications, etc, but most people just stick with the defaults anyway. Even if there were an option for "Disable infinite scroll for me because I can't control my procrastination", how many people do you really think would use it?

Likewise, if Zynga et al did implement some kind of flag for users who play too much, do you think it would make a difference? If someone is willing to invest 5 hours clicking a Farmville button, then a popup that says "We noticed that you spent the whole day clicking a button, don't you have something better to do?" probably isn't going to be epiphanic for them. Casinos and some gambling websites are required to do this now, and it hasn't cured gambling addiction yet. Just like adding a perfunctory "Please drink responsibly" to the end of beer commercials has had a small effect.

What could work? In some parts of Asia, security officers will forcibly remove people from cybercafes if they're showing signs of addiction. But most people in the west use home internet, which would make physical enforcement cost prohibitive. Laws could be passed that outright ban certain types of games. But a politician would look pretty silly taking a stand against Mafia Wars on the floor of a legislative body, especially given recent world events.

There might be a great solution, maybe offered in your book recommendation (thanks for that, btw). But it's hard to see what can practically be done about this problem, other than people exerting more self control in a changing world.

On the scale of Bad Things Cops Have Done In The Last Six Years, pretending to be someone's boyfriend seems pretty insignificant. Cops in America will shoot a black teenager just for walking down the street (literally). That's the loss of someone's entire life, not just six years of it. In fact, police frequently kill innocent people of all races due to misunderstandings or with stray bullets. It is unfortunate, but we all understand that it happens.

It is possible that you would be equally eloquent in your deridement of police procedures if those stories were on the homepage of hackernews. But I doubt it.

I don't think there's a clear answer, like the "do you push one person in front of a train to save three other people?" question. It's unfortunate that this happened to her, and she should definitely be compensated. As to whether or not the police should continue these tactics, everything involves tradeoffs and most things are best decided on a case by case basis.

If the numbers show that poor people are more likely to respond to payday loan advertisements, then that's what the numbers show. If the businesses are truly predatory then they should be regulated. It doesn't make sense to show ads for them to people who are statistically unlikely to respond to them, nor does it make sense to show poor people ads for institutions that are statistically unlikely to grant them loans. Algorithms aren't the problem here, the nature of the businesses is.

And in fairness, I notice that when I watch certain tv shows late at night I'm much more likely to see payday loan ads than when I watch during prime time. I've long suspected that this is because the kind of person who is watching "30 Rock" re-runs at 1am is less likely to be employed and more likely to need a payday loan. So if it's fair for a media buyer to select audiences that are most likely to purchase a product, why is it unfair for an algorithm to do it?

The article makes the point that algorithms are opaque and people often can't explain exactly why a decision was made. That's fine, as long as the results can be shown to be accurate with out of sample testing. It's good to understand why, but it isn't always necessary. The point of using advanced statistical modelling is to expand our level of capability beyond what our brains can easily perceive. The ability to draw reliable inferences from tens of millions of data points is a very powerful and wonderful thing, quite a leap for evolved monkeys who use lobes of fat to perform calculations. It's new, it's different, and it's definitely worrying. But the sooner we can adapt, the better off we'll be as a society.

[1] in this case "large" probably means two or three orders of magnitude larger than you were thinking

From everything I've read about creativity, one of the keys seems to be thinking about things differently than one normally thinks about them. This can mean intense states of depression, mania, loneliness or relationship. Any state of mind that's different and extreme can shift perspective enough to cause some people to be exceptionally creative, at least for a time.

It's herding cats, though. There are no proven techniques that will make someone more creative, only strategies that will work some times for some people. The best way to be more creative is to constantly try to create new things. Social rejection isn't a prerequisite for that.

"Doubt kills more dreams than failure...but Random Chance is like, Grim Reaper for dreams."

Success in startups (and life in general) is not the linear function that most of us want it to be. It isn't related in direct proportion to the amount of effort, intelligence, work, time, love, energy, etc that's invested. It's more of a logarithmic function. There is a minimum amount of effort and those other things that must be put in to have any chance of success. But after that the returns diminish rapidly. It's comforting to think that if we just try harder or smarter we can triumph in the end. But the fickle winds of fate have the ultimate say, and any sense of control is probably an illusion.

Saying that a company failed due to lack of product-market fit is like saying that a sports team lost due to not scoring enough points. It's always a true statement, but it doesn't illuminate the cause of the failure in a way that would be instructive to others. Most startups that were successful enough to be included on this list probably did 80% of things "right". Some times "it just didn't work out" is all that you'll be able to say.

Despite all that, I think there is a lot of value in these autopsies. Being able to learn something, anything, from the experience of others is very valuable. Knowing more about what causes failure won't guarantee success, but it sure as hell beats knowing nothing.

[1] http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3506

In my experience, everyone who said "Don't do it" is in a better position than I was in. A person with a problem will eventually solve it, or not. A fundamentally flawed person will have only have more problems, generally of the same type, again and again, forever. It's easy to confuse one situation for the other. Most people are not deeply flawed, they're normal people who are temporarily overwhelmed by normal problems. Anything they say to you probably won't resonate. Advice from those who have plenty always has to be filtered through a lens of "easy for you to say".

The only honest thing that can be said in this situation is to evaluate your life with clear and unbiased perspective. Are you a normal person who is going through rough times, or are you the kind of person that, for whatever reason, genuinely has no hope? The latter group is very small and if you're in it, you'll have known it for a long time. Odds are that you're better off than the truly forlorn, and you don't need me to tell you that because you already know it. Count your blessings and try to picture a better life.

I'm sorry if my candor offends some people, but life is too short and we're too smart for platitudes. I hope that you get through this.

The current system isn't perfect, but it's more empowering to the common person than incentivizing anyone who has access to any information to sell it to the highest bidder, or to make unilateral decisions that affect everyone in society. At least I get to vote for someone I trust to make the right decisions.

There are plenty of people, especially in red states, who have complete faith in elected and appointed officials to decide what information should be public and what should be private. The personal beliefs of any given government employee aren't any more valid than anyone else's. I don't want to live in a society where any one person gets to decide what's in the public good and what isn't.

If you think the system should be changed so that anyone who has access to classified information can make it public on a whim, then vote for people who will implement that as policy. I don't agree with that idea, but it's a valid political belief and it's at least worthy of debate. But it isn't up to me, you or any other individual to make the final decision. Everyone should get a vote.

There is no one who can consistently provide a 10X increase to a company's bottom line, period. That might happen in rare cases when the previous setup was so catastrophically bad that any competent developer could have made a big impact with common sense changes. But no one can go from company to company and consistently have an order of magnitude impact on anything.

If the myth were true then a ”10X” developer would be able to go to Google, Twitter or Facebook and make their service 10 times faster or more profitable. Does that sound even remotely realistic to you? Sure, in a small shop one person can have a disproportionate impact. But there are no 10X developers, only 10X situations.

This adds up to a discount on the cost of BI. Increase taxes by X% and you get back Y% in increased spending. Of course everyone won't benefit equally, but there will be plenty of good times to go around. Don't worry about moral judgements regarding who is working and who isn't. As long as they're spending it will mean more for you.

If someone I trusted unilaterally decided that I was breaking the law and then used that as a justification to steal documents from me and give them to journalists, I would be very upset. That's just wrong, man.

Snowden was essentially in charge of doing data backup transfers from the pacific to Washington, DC. This means that the NSA trusted him like many of us are trusted every day. The world would descend into chaos pretty quickly if we all decided to start reviewing and passing judgement on the data that we're in charge of, instead of just making sure that it goes where it's supposed to go without incident. No matter how noble his intentions or how despicable the actions of others were, what he did was unethical, illegal and immoral.

It's not about heroes and villains. We have a system of rules that must be enforced equally, for the good of all of us. We can't make exceptions because someone is popular or because we agree with their motives. If a jury of Edward Snowden's peers are so taken by his celebrity and upstanding moral character that they find him not guilty, then so be it. But all of us should be hoping that he comes home to face that jury. Because it's the right thing to do.

The thing about pledge drives and member supported radio is that it's almost completely free and without obligation. No matter how much money a standout hit like TAL can make from underwriting, why would he ever stop asking people for money if they're willing to give it to him in record numbers year after year? I'm sure that WBEZ places some restrictions on their programming in return for using the public radio brand to solicit donations, but I doubt that it's anything onerous. FM radio, streaming, podcasts, it's all the same to the content creators of the individual shows. More underwriting will allow them to do larger things, but if that dries up for whatever reason they can just continue to make money directly from their fans.

Public Broadcasting is like an Eternal Kickstarter. People will give you "donations" in return for a product, not just once, but every year for as long as they use your service. And they don't ask for any equity or voting rights or profit sharing, and you can sell ads to make extra money if you'd like. It's the best situation for a business to be in.

There are only two levels of programming ability: "Bad" and "Good Enough". In all but the rarest of edge cases, everything else is a matter of preference. You think that someone's code is elegant, simple, clean, optimized, etc? That's great, but only other programmers might care about those things. The only question that the majority of people care about is, "Does it work?"

Obviously code can be written so poorly that it causes noticeable performance problems, or doesn't work at a scale past the initial requirements. But that falls under the "Does it work?" question. Basically if I'm using it and it isn't annoyingly slow, whoever wrote it was "Good Enough". I don't care if they were a l33t 10X rock star ninja or some guy who just finished a "$language For Dummies" book.

It is genuinely cool to see code that is well designed and well written. And doing that consistently does require the innate talent of a special mind. But let's not confuse elegance with doing the job. Doing the day in day out work of programming is like being a journalist: the most important thing is getting the facts straight, not writing something pretty. The truly talented can do it with the rhetorical flourish of a poet, which is awesome, but not required.

All that most people ask of code is that it's good enough to do whatever it's supposed to do. If we want to turn it into a poetry contest then it's definitely a bimodal distribution, and most of us will end up on the wrong end of the curve.

I would definitely do this whenever I wasn't rushing to meet a deadline or dealing with a full bug queue.