roin

This is a huge problem, and I think it's a good idea to legislate this (depending on the precise text of the bill) due to the positive externalities involved. I wrote a blog post making this argument:

http://andrewro.in/post/75915934983/forcing-antitheft-techno...

I actually think this is a good idea and requires government intervention due to the positive externalities involved.

I just wrote a blog post about it: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7198054)

Agreed, and this group as much as any should understand that just because the product is made of bits and can be distributed virtually free, it should not be free of cost.

Just like any good software company, the NYTimes should be thinking about their price strategy in a more complex way than cost plus. And I'm sure they are.

It's not about distribution. Much like ordering a book from Amazon, buying software, or going to see a movie, distribution is typically not the most relevant cost.

I think the NYTimes is one of the best bargains out there, and lucky for those who don't pay the benefits spillover to other journalism, especially the blog/twitter world.

No I don't, and that is a big pro of net neutrality. But that doesn't mean there are no cons.

That is not correct. You are looking for the intersection of marginal utility of the dollars earned through work, and the marginal cost (in utility) of giving up leisure (while hungry and cold, perhaps). You are arguing that the marginal utility of those dollars earned through work are lower than the utility of that final hour of leisure.

But both of those utility functions have sharp curves, and those first dollars generate huge utility (food, shelter, etc.), while the negative utility is very modest when you've already used 167 of 168 hours that week on leisure.

Mr. Stucchio isn't the first one to present this type of argument which is explicit in that people are choosing to be poor. That probably doesn't feel right to most of us, and that's because it's ridiculous. Jamming a complex social problem into a simple economic model may be fun and even valuable at times, but only if you don't buy your own BS wholesale.

I'm admittedly struggling to understand how he's drawing this conclusion, as I think he's equating utility with expenditures? If so, this is completely wrong. Your first few thousands of dollars are used for things like food, shelter, and basic healthcare, and they generate massive utility. It isn't constant.

But I also take issue with the first assumption, that each hour of leisure time provides constant utility. Is that true? Does a poor person get more marginal value from that last hour of "leisure time" on the streets? What about poor people who go to bed hungry, are they doing that because they're rationally basking in all these extra hours of leisure time?

There are many reasons people are poor, but people choosing to be poor as an economically rational decision sounds crazy, and that's because it is. Just measure the happiness of the non-working poor vs. people making 30k, and I think you can put this one to rest.

I do not see the flaw. The statement in quotes, while a simplification, is correct if a private company is making the decision. If a government is making the decision (typical with roads, not with broadband), there are a ton of other factors, although in an ideal world they would also try to do a similar NPV calculation. In any case, the government doesn't own broadband.

CON: The more money I think I can make by owning network infrastructure, the more I will invest to build it now.

That's not to say that net neutrality is bad or wrong on balance, but no cons at all?

I didn't cherry pick any example. I just used the example that the article was written about.

Not only is the slide from 2008, but it also says it requires "close access methods" and "remote installation will be pursued for a future release." In other words, they need physical access to your device. If we think that the NSA can't compromise a device after gaining physical access, well then I think we should be scared about the competence of the NSA.

I don't have the patience to watch Appelbaum's hour long talk, but unless he has something far more impressive than these documents then he's just another activist who will willfully mislead in order to advance his cause.

I have no idea how accurate the 60 Minutes story was, but this article is woefully unconvincing. Calling your rebuttal "the definitive facts" is childish.

My favorite line is: "There are as many red flags surrounding the BIOS Plot as there are in all of China." Who writes this?

This article paints SV with too broad a brush, but this is a big problem. There is a tendency here to oversimplify really complex problems. That's a good thing when you need to take a leap of faith and start a company to tackle those problems, but a bad thing when you lack empathy for less fortunate people around you.

Guess what, most of these people have struggles that we can't begin to understand. A lot are dealing with mental health issues that are more debilitating than anything you or I will ever have to deal with. I live on Market St., and I'm as guilty as anyone of becoming numb to the homeless living there. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that anyone can grab a Rails tutorial and become a six-figure engineer within a few years just because we've seen it done.

It's disappointing to read all this negativity around the drone delivery story. Who knows if this will happen as soon as they claim, but it is a cool idea with a lot of genuinely interesting implications.

The fact that Amazon is trying to generate good PR is a tangental story in my opinion, and I wonder if investing in a drone delivery program just to show it off would be the most cost effective way to get good press.

I am also very unimpressed with the challenges that Mr. Ball identified. He probably had fun fashioning himself as some kind of technology muckraker, but please go after uninspired technology instead of taking easy shots at interesting and bold ideas.

I realize your comment is snark, but the lesson I take is to build your app in Rails, then if you become multi-billion dollar IPO-level success, rewrite...

You may have some specific conditions for what you consider innovation, but Facebook is a service that dramatically changes how a significant percentage of humans spend their free time, and the implications are huge. Connecting with people, sharing information, etc. The fact that the business model is backed by advertising isn't relevant. By your definition I wonder if TV, film, or even the printing press is innovative.

American Idol was also innovative, and whatever group created the spectacle of the Superbowl and the NFL were also likely innovators. Just because it isn't hardcore technology doesn't mean it isn't innovative.

If I were running a company, I'd buy everyone a license of 1Password and make its use mandatory. Sure there are still plenty of attack vectors, but it's just too easy, and 1Password is such a cheap way to mitigate risk (not to mention you're doing your employees a huge favor by reducing their vulnerability outside of work).

I'll second this one, I spent five years at a major consulting company working in large banks and insurance companies, and there was NOTHING agile about development.

I'm not sure what a "male space" is, but it isn't software engineering. It is not a gender specific role, both men and women can do it, men and women excel at it, and men and women should be encouraged to do it. When we think of programming as a "male space" or a "male activity" we are not moving the profession forward.

Now what is a "male space"? The military? No, women are on the front lines. Finance? No, a woman is about to become the first Chairman of the Fed. Politics? No, we have 20 female US Senators and a viable Presidential candidate. Professional sports? No, women have their own leagues, and several men's teams have female execs. Software Engineering???

I'll be interested when someone breaks Touch ID in a real life theft. This is not a simple process, it's not clear that a determined thief is even likely to find a good enough print in a real life case, and you can't mess around because after 5 failed attempts it will prompt for a password.

Touch ID will likely cover the vast majority of security use cases for iPhone owners.

It sounds like you're trying to get to their enterprise value (simplified as market cap + debt - cash), but market cap is market cap (value of outstanding shares). They also own other large assets such as their building in SF.

With revenue of $231M last quarter their market cap looks pretty bad. But that's expected given their trajectory.

I remember when someone writing for TechCrunch published a takedown of the iOS 4 beta for ruining the iPhone experience with distracting features such as folders and wallpaper.

The unlikely day that Apple takes the approach that "you don't fix what ain't broke" would be a sad sad day indeed.

I'm glad that the author is having a good experience with his sit all day and frequently exercise plan. But his conclusion that standing desks provide very little benefit to your overall health is based on his sample size of one, never actually using a standing desk, and then extrapolating that "result" to the rest of the human race.

The only useful conclusion in this post has nothing to do with standing desks. It is simply that exercise will help you feel good and improve your health.

If "web apps are still inferior in every respect," why do we find ourselves using web apps more and more and desktop apps less and less? Should I expect to download the next gen of great applications from a cool shareware site like in the good old days of a decade or two ago? Web apps have won the desktop, at least for now. It's what people want, and it's what people are getting, mostly for the reasons cited above. Mobile, now that's a more interesting story.

Benefits or risks of vitamins is one of the most confusing medical topics to assess for an average consumer. After hearing about benefits of vitamin C, zinc, vitamin D, etc., only to later read that some doctors say it's going to kill you, I had decided to ditch them altogether.

But a year ago there was a large, randomized, double-blind study (not something most of these studies can claim) that measured a regular dose multivitamin, not huge megadose supplements that tend to focus on one or two compounds. The result showed 8% fewer cancers. The subjects were all men and were all doctors, so one could infer that they were much healthier than average. I've been taking a simple multivitamin since. I wouldn't be shocked to learn in ten years that I'm doing the wrong thing, but this is the most convincing study I've seen in any direction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/health/daily-multivitamin-...

Craigslist is the saddest example of a near natural monopoly formed in a two-sided market on the internet. Considering the pace of innovation over there, it's only a matter of time until they are disrupted. In the meantime we'll dread looking for apartments, buying/selling through classified ads, and anything else that we need to do on Craigslist.

For someone who hadn't done web development in ten years and then wanted to get back into it with Rails, this tutorial (for v3.2) was perfect. As others have noted, it demystifies the whole stack, even including tools such as Sublime Text as related plugins. Hartl is a great instructor.

The key point that is likely tip the scale in one direction or another is the positive externalities of converting a driver to a rider. This externality will differ by city, line, time of day, etc, and it would include external costs of traffic, parking, car accidents, among others. Economists can approximate this sort of thing. We are often really bad at accounting for externalities because they aren't immediate dollars in or out of our pockets and lack certainty (pollution controls, infrastructure improvements, etc), but this case may be a bit more straight forward.

There are so many contradictory stories and explanations of this program, I really don't think we know enough yet to pass judgement (or at least informed judgement).

Personally I'm going to give it a few weeks to shake out before determining how offended I am, either by the program itself, the fact that a Booz contractor leaked that deck without context or knowledge and the media ran with it, or both.

Should we infer that the NSA or some other government organization used a FISA request to read a German girl's Facebook messages about her upcoming au pair work in the US? This seems very unlikely, and I believe would be a clear violation of FISA unless they also thought she was a terrorist or spy.