tigerthink

Krugman used to think like a typical economist, but abandoned this approach and subsequently became a celebrated columnist. Ironically this was years after he wrote an essay complaining how the economists who became popular were rarely the ones who had a good understanding of economic theory:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/ways_of_thinkin....

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/krugmans_danger....

"The main difference is that eventlet can’t influence the Python runtime, but actors are built into Erlang at a language level, so the Erlang VM can do some cool stuff like mapping actors to kernel threads (one per core) and preemption. We get around this problem by launching one API server per core and load balancing with nginx."

The actor model is for concurrency, which is when your threads are communicating with one another, right? What about the task that the API server does requires inter-thread communication?

Here are some Hacker News threads related to client side testing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2038663

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2142104

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2055867

Some days you want to smoke weed, other days you want to take modafanil.

Some hobbies are more dangerous than others. I think it makes sense for us to discourage people from getting started on the more dangerous hobbies. Also, people do blame alcohol.

How's that, exactly?

Possible justification for HN being biased:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074079

Does anyone know what kind of money MegaUpload makes?

How profitable are internet businesses in general? Would anyone be willing to share the site they run and the amount it makes?

"In 2001 Schmitz pulled off a huge stock market bluff which netted him a small fortune. After buying shares worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the almost bankrupt LetsBuyIt.com, he announced that he would invest 50 million euros in the company, but in reality he didn’t have the money. His declaration led to the biggest single-day rise on the German stock market which allowed Schmitz to sell his shares and pocket $1.5 million profit. He was arrested for insider-trading in 2002, sentenced to a term of 20 months and given a 100,000 euro fine."

And they let him keep the money? Damn, I should try insider trading some time--$1.4 million is pretty good for 20 months of "work".

Most of the private universities that actually have to market themselves cater to less intelligent folks who will take much longer to catch on to the fact that degrees are overpriced.

Since education can't be resold, there isn't going to be the sort of bursting bubble you see in markets for other goods.

Let's say what the article predicts comes to pass and the demand for degrees goes down. If degrees could be resold, then college graduates would start selling theirs. You might get a proverbial "bursting bubble" as more and more graduates started panicking and selling their degrees before they lost all their value.

But since graduates can't resell their degrees, we're more likely to see a gradual decline in their price.

Your brain makes you good at the things you do. So if the internet really is the best way to get the information you're looking for, it makes sense to practice internet surfing instead of book reading.

That said, it still makes sense to make web surfing easier if that's possible. This Firefox extension looks promising:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4111/

There's definitely a lot of crap on the internet, so I'm thinking of doing something like skimming Hacker News at the end of each day, emailing important and content-rich articles to myself to read in the morning. It seems relatively safe to indulge in this distractable mindset right before I'm going to sleep, during which my mind will presumably be reset to its default state. And by browsing the web in different modes at consistently different times of the day, classical conditioning will be on my side. It'd be interesting to play with other ways of using classical conditioning for this. For example, always wear certain clothing or eat certain food during one type of web browsing.

This seems close enough:

>Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. “Everything distracts them.” Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”

It's basically true. You only have so many hours in the day.

Even the life he describes is pretty damn good by historical standards.

Doesn't work with Vim as well though.

Holy shit.

"Yours is a beautiful site, I'm impressed!"

Thanks. Actually I did everything but the design :-P

"1. Going off on many, many tangents before buckling down and focusing on the core product."

Yeah, if I had counted those tangents it would have taken me longer too :-) It took me a little over a month starting from scratch, but there were a few weeks of learning before that.

"4. Learning about, and implementing custom localization on appengine (needed because there are no filesystem writes for .mo/.po files)"

Nice. I actually initially built my site for App Engine, but I decided I needed to have control over my IP address (Amazon's Product API, which I will probably integrate with if I continue working on the site, throttles requests by IP address.) So I went with Linode, which gives you your own IP and the option of renting more for $1/month/IP.

I'll bet people would appreciate it if you open-sourced your app engine localization solution, especially if no solutions are currently available.

So at what point did you know the publicity software was going to be a failure? What was the proximate cause of your doom?

Of course.

"I seem to remember an article claiming a similar thing on HN just a couple of days or weeks ago (by one of the Guru bloggers). They pop up every now and then."

Thanks!

Is Guru a blogging network of some sort?

OK, well it might be fast and powerful, but I don't much like how the code looks.

Are great products also greatly profitable?

To be honest I am mostly interested in making a profit.

Edit: If you're trying to give Microsoft as an example of a company that fails to make great products because it fails to use them, think again: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/62/microsoft.html It seems more likely that they just suck.

"The current consensus seems to be that asking people what they want doesn't really work."

Who besides you and Henry Ford is participating in this consensus? I'm not trying to be mean or confrontational. The fact that you're speaking of a consensus while sharing the opinions of only two people suggests that you have a lot of additional information you're not telling me about :o)

"Summarized in this quote from Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.""

I'm not suggesting that you exclusively pursue the strategy of asking people what they want for the development of your idea. More like guess what they want, then ask them if your guess sounds good. Or listen to a description of what they do now, suggest a change or improvement, and see how they react.

There are two stages to the development of a startup's product description. The first is (or should be) before any code is written. The second is after the initial product is launched. I think you can do both stages effectively without actually being much of a user of the product yourself.

OK, but I still want to hear what their strategy was. If I can't think of obvious ways to improve it then maybe organic really is the way to go.

Unrelated point, but this sort of evolution is expensive--you often have to throw away software and marketing efforts, and all you got in return was some knowledge about what users want. Might not it be possible to figure out more about what users want by thinking harder/interviewing them and avoid this waste?

"We were trying to make SaaS for PR professionals because it seemed like a good opportunity."

What was your strategy for figuring out what PR professionals wanted?

"It takes experience to predict what other people will want."

I'm pretty young. Will asking people what they want work?

Has there been any scientific research on the effectiveness of focus groups?

Hm, I'm inclined to think it would have taken me somewhat less time than that. I made this site in about one month:

http://deanza.campuseagle.com/books/

Then again, Django is an awesome web framework, I copied someone else's recaptcha integration, I worked my ass off, and the code is generally full of hacks, such as discarding all but the longest keyword when a user searches.

But I'm not the fastest:

http://r09.railsrumble.com/entries

I could use a forum dedicated to programmer professional development. I'm not interested in TopCoder because I'd rather work on my own projects, but I am interested in discussions of how long other people take to finish things, what the right place to be on the coding speed/code elegance continuum is for various project sizes, how to make fewer stupid mistakes that cost you 5 minutes, etc. It seems possible that some of the supposed 10x productivity differences in developers are due to trainable aptitudes, doesn't it?