seigenblues

Very good point about the statistics. If you really try to drive a motorcycle safely, (e.g., not drunk, not too fast), the statistics practically describe a different cohort.

Motorcycling is easily one of the best things i've done, it puts a smile on my face every time i go out. Cheers!

I agree with your math but disagree with your conclusion :)

this is why Google is funding it -- getting an 11% return is great if you have giant piles of cash sitting around doing nothing. Those margins become substantially thinner if your cost of capital is 7%, 8%, 12%, etc.

edit to add: BTW, there's some great research that suggests when people "do the math" and figure out how much energy-efficiency/renewable energy technology will save, that they usually require ROI's of 50-100% -- i.e., "if your fluorescent bulbs/solar panels/low-flow shower head won't pay for itself within a year, i won't bother". It's sad, but it's a real obstacle.

bigethan -- that's not necessarily how it works. It does work differently in different state & local markets, so it's possible that there's a market that works that way. I don't know of any, personally.

Usually the deal is something called a PPA -- Power Purchase Agreement. It's usually set up that you agree to pay some fixed price-per-kWh, and that price escalates by some regular way over the life of the contract. That price could be higher, or lower, than the prevailing rates for electricity in that market, and that escalator could be higher or lower than rates at which energy prices increase -- but either way, they're locked in from the start.

Yes, we are. The numbers can work in a couple of different ways in a couple different markets. It's neither hype, nor press, but thanks.

I'm surprised Google is able to make residential PV contracts make sense: my guess is that the consumers here are either paying more than the prevailing market rates, or they are locked into a very long contract (20+ years?), or both.

By contrast, we target the commercial market, have shorter contracts (10 years), and guarantee a discount relative to the utility co's.

  > How many people in the world can run an organization of
  that size and scope?  Not many at all.

This is not actually self-evident, and I'd really love some (any) attempt establishing it, either rhetorically or evidence-based.

Personally, I think a great many people have the skills & abilities needed to run these companies, but that is not what headhunting committees look for/what is actually being valued. They are looking instead for choices that are defensible, i.e., no one ever got sued for breach of fiduciary duty by appointing the Harvard MBA who ran three other multinationals -- even if they ran them all into the ground.

(to clarify: i think that you're actually claiming that few people can run these behemoth companies successfully. I think that success is actually very difficult to measure: e.g., establishing what would've happened if you appointed an 'average CEO', vs. appointing someone from 'the factory line' who knows the product, vs. appointing a bum on the street. What trends were already in place for/against the company, etc., what cultural inertia did they inherit, etc. )

i believe it is a negative article, but it's very well hidden.

  And it recommends funding all this by discovering a “muse,”
  which Ferriss defines, as Seneca did not, as “an automated vehicle
  for generating cash without consuming time.” "

There are a number of other similar jabs in the article, in various degrees of obviousness.

If anything, i'd say the author was more than kind.

It wasn't the ease of install or simplest-case-deployment, that's for sure. I did install it and kick the tires.

This was around the end of 2009, and i don't think there were many clients available (i see pycassa dates to 2010-04).

again, ease of development is much more important to us than performance; it'll probably be a long, long time before our db engine is the choke point, at which point we'll have resources to use a heavier tool.

happily, this is not a synchronous application with tens of thousands of concurrent users, so "totally hosed" for us may have a very different definition.

What do you mean by "very large numbers of columns" ? I've seen some mongo users with very rich, i.e. large, document models.

glad you didn't like it.

Vertica was not free, HBase was really heavyweight, & I knew i didn't want RDBMS. The sensor data itself is plain csvs ;)

Cassandra still does look interesting, although it looked like it would take me much longer to get it going; perhaps it will get rewritten. (The mongo solution only took a week to get something usable.)

depends on your usage. The rest of the toolchain is all python, numpy, scipy, matplotlib especially.

This might be poorly titled: it's not just about the storage as it is about the aggregation of disparate sensor data into coherent, continuous data streams.

thanks, i'll try and write them up. any particular areas you'd like to see expanded?

sure, but what would counter that argument effectively? How would you do it? How do you say that all of the histories of all the other peoples touched by the British Empire would have actually been just fine, thank you very much. Many of lionhearted's plusses are assumed to have come from the Brits delivered as if into a vacuum. Who's to say that these plus' wouldn't've naturally developed, given enough time, or maybe in ways that don't end in millions of colonized peoples dying? All those other alternate histories are silent.

I would suggest that picking a specific example -- a whoppingly large example, in this case -- is a very good beginning of a counterargument.

Lionhearted saying "here is all the good that happened" needs to be weighed against a reasonable summation of all the good that would have happened. And a "here are all the bad things that happened" likewise should be totaled against the bad things that would have continued to happen.

They're both very, very hard positions to make briefly.

First, i agree with basically all of your logic & reasoning as you've laid out. However, you lost me at the conclusion:

  If you accept a) (which is not much of a stretch - sleeping with other men's wives 
  is definitely a risk-seeking behavior that increases genetic success for men)

The reverse is true as well: sleeping with people not your husband is a risk-seeking behavior that also increases genetic success for women. But the way you've phrased it is so loaded in "the way things are" that it's hard to see just how prevalent the cultural norms are ingrained.

For instance, imagine a world where it's all switched around: women are assumed to be the risk-taking, sexually aggressive gender, and society is organized in a pretty clear matriarchy, women make 30% more than men, etc. A woman who sleeps with another woman's husband, while certainly "more obvious" ("how is she pregnant, again!") could be just as 'culturally accepted' as men sleeping with other men's wives are here. There are certainly examples in the animal kingdom -- female dominant, where females maximize their genetic 'success' by successfully having children of many males. "female dominant animals" is a very rich google vein ;)

So a better question to ask is "why did that not happen with homo sapiens sapiens?"

Please note also the huge amount of cultural assumptions about behaviors, norms, & risks, in the tiny sentence fragment "sleeping with other men's wives". Which implied pronouns are the active ones there, which are the passive objects acted upon, etc.

as near as i could read, no one was attacking Noah -- just Noah's behavior, which seems out of line.

See the "i'm not calling you a racist, i'm calling your behavior racist" crucial line of distinction. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ti-gkJiXc)

Noah can be a sweet, helpful, lovable teddy bear, and still have behavior that needs to be called out.

do you have a vim colorscheme?

somewhere in Japan, someone has hardcoded GPS locations into their autonomous dishwashing robot, and is now wondering why it can't find the sink...

(btw, another version of the story with citations, attributed quotes is here: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/12/japan.earthq...)

"While it's likely true that people who sacrifice everything are rarely successful, I think that the people at the top of their fields almost always have."

Not to harp on my favorite old saw about randomness, but drawing generalizations like this -- by only looking at the successful end results and searching for common patterns after the fact -- doesn't really help. For example, say there are 10,000,000 who sacrifice everything, and of them, there are 1,000 who are at the top of their field. The other 99,990,000 are "silent evidence". ("silent evidence" is worth googling)

Moreover, the actual importance of "sacrificing everything" becomes further masked unless you realize the actual total size of your cohort. What are the odds that someone could become the top of their field without sacrificing everything? e.g., is there a one-in-a-million chance that someone can both be the best and sleep 8 hours a night every night? If so, for some handful of people in your sample, you'd expect them to have succeeded anyway (assuming you could estimate that prior, which is laughable :)

This argument can also be used when people applaud "genius investors" with a 100% success rate for any arbitrary finite timespan -- given a large enough population, it'd be expected that someone would pick right N times in a row, and nobody hears or cares about the failures.

Similarly, folks argue from the anecdote of a few rags-to-riches stories and say look, income inequality is nothing to worry about! But actually, given the number of people in the bottom 95%, you'd expect some number of them to be able to make it to the top 5% -- and a better metric might be to look at that rate across other developed nations. One in a million times x million = x bestsellers about "how my drive and ambition took me out of the gutter bla bla bla..."

Anyway, just pointing out that causation is a very, very difficult nut.

(Likewise, starting a startup is hardly irrational -- the host of 'intangibles', plus greater exposure to positive black swans, make it kind of a no brainer :)

to the contrary, some of the High-Net-Worth individuals i've had the misfortune to interact with have a much greater interest in succeeding more than once -- especially the ones who are more self-aware than usual. I think they want to prove that the first time wasn't a fluke, usually to themselves!

Yes, you're right. Esp your third paragraph -- having someone demonstrate that they can repeatedly succeed is the surest proof. On the other hand, you can try to analyze process, and guess at if that process can reasonably produce results -- but that's not really an easier problem.

Let me paraphrase a story from the book that addresses Buffet. Taleb compares people playing the market to people flipping coins.

If everyone in the US flipped a coin once a morning, after about four weeks, you'd expect to have maybe a thousand people who'd flipped all heads. You could go out and interview these people, find out what their 7 highly effective habits are, whatever, but you couldn't actually be sure to be learning anything about what's "really going on."

On the other hand, if after four weeks, you found that all the people who flipped straight heads were clustered around Omaha, and all reported taking their coin-flipping-lessons from one guy in the town, then it might behoove one to look a bit closer.

In both cases, you can study "process", but without an understanding of the phenomena, you might just be spinning your wheels, coming up with correlations rather than causations.

TL;DR -- causal mechanisms are hard to find.

You should read the book :)

Did any of the haters on this thread watch his TED talks? There's the one linked to in the article (from 2004), and another one Ze gave last year (http://www.zefrank.com/ted/2010.html).

Having watched "the show" back in the olden days before youtube, i'm convinced ze is a genius. He's incomprehensible to HN because he really doesn't care how it works, he only cares about how it's being applied.

It's all about the application of technology to make a human connection for him. His only metric is the quality of that human connection -- which is weird to people who care about clean design, or scalability, or neat javascript "fade" effects.

you should really read the book "Fooled by Randomness". There's a particular chapter: "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?" It points out how difficult it is to look at empirical evidence, esp. if you don't know the size of a given cohort. He makes his point with stock markets. Given the huge number of people who trade in a given year, it's basically inevitable that someone will pick nothing but winners. But if you don't see the huge pool of failures, you don't realize that someone's "stock picking skillz" are no better than what you might expect, given the size of the trading population.

E.g., you're looking at a rich MBA. Say 100,000 MBAs graduate a year in the US. You still don't have enough information to know if he was any good.

Worse, say you use a pedigree: You're looking at a rich MBA from Harvard. Say they only graduate 1,000, but, because any damn headhunter will put a harvard MBA into a C-level job, 90% of the harvard MBAs stack up a ton of money. Now, knowing that he's a rich MBA tells you even less. All you really know is that richness & a harvard MBA seem to correlate, which is kind of exactly where you started :) (on the other hand, if you had a poor harvard MBA in front of you, then you'd really have something!)

Anyway, yeah. it's a really hard problem -- just as hard as finding a good programmer, imho

Forgive me for playing devils advocate, but how is this different from the existing responsibilities of the SBA and the SBIC? It looks more like an expansion of the existing small-business incentive programs than some sort of nefarious scheme.

In this case, a private individual (e.g., Bob Smith) would be more likely to take advantage of the possible malicious asymmetries you point out than Uncle Sam.

Not that i say that from any sort of idealism about the government: Rather, i don't think the level of organization & complicity required for these panicky worst-case scenarios is present, not across the range of civil-servants who would all have to be "in on it"

I.e., yes, a private person could go in with a take-no-prisoners approach, but the government itself is neither so ambitious nor so concentrated. I think you're getting frothed up -- can you point to widespread, existing corruption in the SBA or SBIC?

Crossfit. (crossfit.com) You'll never get bored and it'll even take less time. One caveat: It works way better if you can join a group of crossfitters.

That doesn't actually change the thrust of the point at all. Go ahead and switch those two words around how you want and tell me how it substantially changes my argument.

You've made educated people supporting something both bad for educated people and bad for the something. Now, you're welcome to start arguing against the educational system they're immersed in (science), and that's certainly a line you can go down, if you want. It's a bit played out and i'd be surprised to hear you rally an enthusiastic offense there, but go right ahead.

Furthermore, your point about groups & party systems is still totally fatuous: you can be in A or in ~A. then, A can be in B or in ~B. You can say "all the A's are in B." or you can say "all the ~A's are in ~B".

Shorter: you can't make the not-too-menacing statement "ohh, all the scientists are democrats! how terrible for the democrats and the scientists!" without making the equally trite "ohh, all the non-scientists are republicans! How terrible for the non-scientists and the republicans!"

Yes, politics certainly puts humans at their most irrational indeed! It's quite some gymnastics you're turning here.

Somehow, you've ended up saying that when educated citizens overwhelmingly support one governing philosophy, it's not only somehow bad for the educated citizens, it's also bad for the philosophy! That's a neat trick.

(btw, that philosophy -- american 'liberalism' -- would barely deserve the name in any other 1st world country)

You started off almost saying something, but i'm not sure your thesis holds ('...in a two party system, any group...') Take the converse. I could also say that the group of anti-intellectuals has completely affiliated themselves with the Republican party, damaging themselves and the Republicans. Same thing, right?

Anyway, you reminded me of the 'everything that happens is good for John McCain' meme, which might be worth researching. One particularly egregious example is here: http://www.balloon-juice.com/2008/07/29/life-imitates-farce/

cheers, and let's try not to bullshit ourselves.

While i don't buy his explanation of the causal mechanism at work, he's almost perfectly described my work cycle: I'm most productive in the morning, get the usual post-lunch valley, and have a nice productivity rise after my (usually light) dinner. I'm also stick thin. It's so stark that i usually will put off lunch as long as possible, and try to schedule meetings/etc for the 3p-6pm area. I always assumed this was a side effect of being really involved, like pdx writes, but maybe i had causality backwards.

I know the plural of anecdote isn't data, but i'm volunteering to be a datapoint :)

Also, w.r.t. the eagerness to write off how half-baked Scott Adams is: There's empirical observations of a black box, and there's the attempt to explain what's inside. You might get causality backwards, or explain the correct behavior in the wrong way, but who cares if the real goal is to maximize the behaviors of the box, right? I mean, who cares if the explanation for putting off lunch is ridiculous, as long as the behaviors it explains really exist.

[edit to clarify -- i don't really care if his explanation is accurate. He so accurately described my mental cycles and my diet that it was interesting to read his hypothesis]

The defendant is also getting more time than the cop in Oakland who shot a restrained, unarmed man.

Maybe this punishment fits this crime and its the other that doesn't, but marcusbooster's indictment of the system as a whole having some skewed incentives still has some merit, i think.

Wow, cool! I take it back, then :)

Would i be correct in thinking that this probably makes it less useful? Current thermal collectors use absorbent coatings that are "full-spectrum," with a minimum of IR emission, which i have to imagine contributes to their really high efficiencies.

Not really -- solar thermal already is about 75% efficient. I.e., 100J of light => 75J of heat added to working fluid. My understanding was that this chemical toggles state at the addition of any heat -- not necessarily by the addition of solar energy. But that's just a guess, i'd never heard of diruthenium before five minutes ago either :)

As a dude working at a solar thermal startup, i would be really excited to see this work. OTOH, solar thermal is already about 30% cheaper than photovoltaics, so that diruthenium is gonna have to be replaced by something really, really cheap...

Our tank losses are nonzero, but in the scheme of things, not all that huge, either. So for it to become cost effective, this storage would have to compete with basically water and glycol in cheap, unpressurized tanks.