toby

I'm a bit confused by the reasoning here. It's clear that light users are subsidizing heavy users, but why are we assuming that light users prefer indie bands and heavy users prefer pop music?

I think what he's referring to is people who are proud of their ignorance, which it doesn't sound like you are doing. You've certainly encountered people who believe saying things like "Oh, I don't even know who Kim Kardashian is" or "I haven't read a book since college" is bragging.

My main use for C code is embedded / bare-metal programming, so I was curious if Rust could run directly on ARM boards. I found https://github.com/hackndev/zinc but haven't given it a try yet.

Is this what you mean? http://www.plos.org/

The current system rewards people who publish in the high-impact journals, which means they get the "coolest" papers, which means they remain high impact. The ones at the top now are not generally open access.

Agreed, I'm fascinated by this theory but I can't find a single reference to it.

Isn't that exactly what decriminalization is?

"The new law maintained the status of illegality for using or possessing any drug for personal use without authorization. However, the offense was changed from a criminal one, with prison a possible punishment, to an administrative one if the amount possessed was no more than ten days' supply of that substance."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal

If you're going to use the follow feature, it seems like it would be possible to run power cables down to a much larger battery in your backpack or something. Just an idea.

NJ has successfully sued companies that created bitcoin botnets in the past. This is clearly not the same thing, but I guess it's enough to make a court grant a subpoena.

http://www.wired.com/2013/11/e-sports/

Heh, I recently posted this on Facebook:

As I spent a sunny Sunday working through Project Euler problems in Haskell, I got a little sad that the word "nerd" has been re-appropriated to people who like video games ($100billion industry) or Star Wars (3rd highest grossing film of all time) or people who like phone apps (everyone in SF).

Is there a new word that's been invented to take its place?

This is interesting to me... how did you go about finding the space?

Agreed, you'd probably find that a lot of tech guys in a hoodie and jeans spent more on their clothes than DC staffers in "suits".

I'm an engineer, and I have several friends who are or were management consultants. None of the ones I met "lived to screw people over".

What are some advantages of OCaml over Haskell?

I have a few "home automation" items in my house -- lights, thermostats, outlets, switches, etc.

By far the most useful is the Z-Wave deadbolt on my front door. It means I never carry keys, I can give codes to friends or the contractor and get texted when they enter, I can set temporary codes for deliveries, etc. I never have to worry if I locked the door.

I was surprised at the hype around Lockitron, since these have existed for a while. The main different seems to be that people prefer WiFi (since they already have it) even though it's a poor protocol for low-power and low-bandwidth.

In economic terms, this is not a transaction (both parties agree to exchange things for their mutual benefit) which is usually considered positive. It's closer to rent-seeking, which is usually considered neutral to negative.

Serious question -- there appear to be common two ways of allocating scarce resources in situations like this: either through price, or through semi-random who-gets-through first (see also online ticket sales).

Why do people think the latter is "more fair"? Are there any interesting alternative methods of allocation that are equally lightweight?

"Many studies have sought to explain why there is a low incidence of heart disease in France, despite many of its inhabitants eating a high-fat diet."

It's funny that this is where this theory came from. It was unfathomable at the time that maybe we were wrong about dietary fat.

For a game this complex the evolution will be so slow you'll likely never see any progress. My experience with genetic programs is they'll go through hundreds of thousands of generations just to play tic-tac-toe properly.

I think that matches what I was trying to say. In the individual distribution, Person A prefers Artist 1 and his listens are worth more because he used the service less.

I'm not saying this is worse necessarily, I'm just not sure why it's better.

This is a strange proposal. Assuming everyone paid a fixed subscription fee and listened to the same amount of music each, the artist payouts would work out exactly the same.

In practice people vary in their usage of these services. Basically the artists you listen to would get paid more per play if you didn't use the service much. (i.e., if I only fired up Spotify once this month, listened to one track, then the artist gets my full $14 for one play)

I'm not sure if it's completely standard, but my royalties have always been 10% of wholesale (which usually works out to about 5% of retail). Amazon will pay out 5%-10% referral fees depending on the item and how good an affiliate you are. Also, you can often earn royalties for other items bought in the same session, so Amazon could well be a lot more lucrative.

There are also Journals of Negative Results in a few fields, such as this one: http://www.jnrbm.com/

Fair enough, I guess I was hoping for the satire to be a bit more original. It was just the first episode though so I have some faith that there will be some more subtle humor as well later on.

Those bikes do exist, but they're more of a Burning Man thing. I don't think anyone actually has meetings on them.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was really excited about this show (big fan of Mike Judge in general) but it feels like what someone would think SV was like if they based their entire impression on Techcrunch articles and 80s nerd / guru tropes.

Peter Gregory was clearly based on Peter Thiel

Thanks for pointing that out, I actually have used Max/MSP and think it's awesome, it didn't even occur to me.

Exactly, I'd be curious to see something that gives business analysts the interactivity of something like Excel but has ways to avoid the rigid, interlinked-sheets with ridiculous formulas that seem to be inevitable in a large model.

Yeah, I probably used the wrong terms there. I was referring not to flowcharts, but the way Excel is used as a "see-it-as-you-go" functional language.

It's arguable that Excel is the most widely used "programming language" depending on your definition. If you've spent much time around certain business professionals, you'll see that they really push spreadsheets to do unexpected things to solve their problems.

I've actually wondered why there hasn't been more exploration into visual / declarative programming since it has the appeal of being very easy to get started.