weel

I think he just wrote a blog post. He can apparently work under these conditions.

Before I get to see the demo, I must look at two other screens.

The first has two photographs, one of an iPad running nothing in particular, and another of some people futzing around with iPads in a coffee shop. Do you sell iPads?

Also on the first page are a number of features of your product, but none of those tell me what the product is. Take the first phrase: mobile point of sale. Last I checked, "point of sale" was the way in which retail people refer to a cash register. So I when I see "mobile point of sale," I think "portable cash register." I have seen those in restaurants in Europe. The portable cash register is ready when I am -- I sure hope so.

Since I am going to "drive product sales with pictures and descriptions." But this is a cash register, no? Aren't those typically used in places where you can see the very product with your own eyes?

But then comes the confusion. Take orders from anywhere? Why would I want to take orders from, say, France while I have the cash register frob in my hands and I am talking to a customer? Ah wait, maybe you mean that I can take orders anywhere (as opposed to from anywhere) because, after all, I can be anywhere (modulo the cost of plane tickets and such) and carry your widget!

Then, I think some more, and I piece it together. Logically, what you are selling must be a device for traveling sales reps. Wherever the sales rep is is the point of sale, and thus the device is a point of sale device. And the sales rep carries a... catalog! An electronic catalog! I see.

So you're not selling a portable cash register at all.

The second screen, which shows up when I click the demo button, tells me that I can indeed view the demo, if I click another button.

And then comes the demo, which should have been first. Except when I try to do the demo, all I get is a countdown timer.

(I know the above sounds a little acerbic. I don't mean your idea is bad. It may very well be great. I am just trying to be up front about how you should not squander the eyeballs you attract to your site.)

But the other markets are in many cases easier to conquer! The US market has a lot more competition.

Oh, and in case anyone has things mixed up (I wouldn't expect it in this crowd, but you never know): no, trade deficits and budget deficits are entirely and utterly different things, no matter how often Lou Dobbs mentions them in the same sentence.

I don't want to spoil the fun too much, but if you are subject to EU law (and don't ask me whether that depends on whether the data is European or on whether you are in Europe; I am not a lawyer) you cannot simply grab data of the net on the theory that raw data is not a creative work and thus not copyrighted. Just in case anybody gets it into their head to do innovative things with web-accessible databases of facts, Brussels has given us the wonders of the EU Database Directive, which makes raw data copyrightable. Phone books, registries of commerce, postal code databases, train timetables, and other such things that cannot be copyrighted in the US do fall under a copyright-like _sui generis_ IP regime in the EU.

Not that there isn't a case for sometimes just ignoring the fancy details of the law and going with "do first, ask permission later."

But I thought maybe you should know.

I agree that computer displays suck for reading. But there is one important, very simple lesson to be learned from this about computer typography: while in print, serif fonts are always easier to read for long stretches of text and sans-serif should be used only for display (headings and the like), on computer screens it really helps to have very simple fonts with the minimum possible amount of embellishment. Some sort of Helvetica derivative is always easier to read, especially in small sizes, and even with the fanciest subpixel rendering, than a complex thick-and-thin serifed font designed with high-quality print in mind.

BTW, I haven't seen a Kindle yet. Somebody I know has one, but he doesn't live in the area and I'm unlikely to meet him for quite a while. Are they any more pleasant to read from than a computer screen?

The first time I used vi was in a summer camp while I was in high school. I had accidentally entered "view foo.txt" into a command prompt on a Linux box, and "view" was symlinked to "vi."

We couldn't figure out how to fix this, so we asked the instructor, who replied to us in a heavy German accent: "aha, you see, vi ees an edeetor, and weez everyzing eet does eet say beeeep."

Actually, he was speaking Dutch with a German accent, not English, but you get the idea.

This is an entirely sensible piece. I'm not sure if it is relevant to hacking or to startups, but it is entirely sensible.

If A sells to B sells to C sells to A, then they have just created three trade deficits. This is why "the trade deficit with China" is an utterly meaningless concept. Maybe China sells things to the US, which sells things to Mexico, which sells things to China, or any other transitive combination, and voila, a trade deficit.

The only trade deficit that is somewhat meaningful is the trade deficit of a country with the rest of the world, all of it. Now even that trade deficit needs to be taken with a grain of salt. If the US has a trade deficit with the rest of the world, you have to wonder for a minute why on earth the citizens of all those other countries would be so happy to send goods America-bound and not to receive equal value in return. Whence their charity? How come the free lunch?

When a good economist smells a free lunch, s/he smells murky accounting. And indeed, there's murky accounting in the trade deficit. Oftentimes, services are not included. Even if they are, then investment isn't. It just so happens that the US is a good place to invest, relative to other countries, because it has a very well developed economic and financial system that can take advantage of capital well and bring high returns in capital-intensive industries. China, on the other hand, lacks the institutions required to make capital-intensive industries quite as lucrative, but it has cheap labor. Thus both countries specialize, but the Chinese investments flowing into the US bought with the money that Americans paid the Chinese to buy their goods--those investments simply do not count.

Hey! A deficit!

Is it a big deal?

Mwah... no.

To be entirely honest with y'all, I haven't carefully read all of this article. But I already have my opinion ready!

The fact that MapReduce is a step back, in a sense, is true. But it's a step back from a dead-end alleyway, a step away from a particular very complex and bloated programming model--to wit the SQL-based RDMS--that is good as far as it goes, but requires so much effort to implement that it is unlikely to be a great model to use as the basis for innovative implementations.

If you're going to do crazy shit of the sort that google does, massively distributed computations on very high volumes of data, then in order to do it well you have to keep it simple. Such is life. There are plenty of RDMSes that can do the full whammy of RDMS features, but try to take, say, one that does not allow for replication and then implement replication. See you next decade.

Sometimes taking a step back can help put things into perspective, is all I'm saying.

More generally, somebody should arrange another Lightweight Languages day at MIT no matter what. Or maybe a Lightweight Languages days somewhere else. And wherever "they" organize it, it would be awesome if they could manage to webcast it and have people who cannot attend pose questions through IRC.

I attended Lightweight Languages once and it was awesome. Informal, a large variety of smart people, but each smart in their own way, that had a lot to genuinely learn from each other.

Sadly, conferences, even comparatively small and informal once, take some effort and some money to put together, and frankly it's not going to be me who is capable of coming up with either.

Jobs does often end up being in the position where he can sell some pretty awesome products, but he's also adept at finding reasons to find things awesome in the first place. If he'd sold OSX by dryly listing its features, you might think "ah, UNIX, yeah, probably good idea, failed before with AUX, though". But when Jobs described OSX to people, they came away thinking "wow, this is a major leap in operating systems design." Part of this is pure charisma and great delivery. Another part of it is just a knack for picking up on genuinely great aspects of a product that others might not think to highlight.

The points made are mostly quite sensible, which is why it's funny that the site itself looks a little jumpy...

The argument about what hiring or training focus is "the best" is a little silly, it seems to me, because different companies so obviously have different requirements.

Take Google, as a prototypical high-tech firm, and Getronics, as a prototypical business automation consultancy of the kind that tends to put hackers to sleep but that is quite profitable nonetheless.

Google tries to do things that are sufficiently technologically ahead that it will take competitors years to catch up. They'll work on problems before anybody realized they had them, and do things that might seem ridiculously speculative from the perspective of a Getronics executive, like statistical machine translation. Their hiring and and training seems to focus largely on finding, retaining, and developing intelligent generalists, and specialists in esoteric fields where there is no such thing as certification programs.

Getronics, on the other hand, deals with big business clients who are often satisfied with rather run-off-the-mill technology, as long as it's delivered predictably and uniformly. (Of course, that's harder than it sounds.) A typical big job for Getronics might be to help some organization upgrade from a mainframe with terminals to a SQL server with PCs, without interrupting operations. There's nothing particularly innovative about it (it's been done thousands of times before), and it will likely be tolerated if the resulting solution is a little clumsy, but it had better not go wrong.

Getronics has a long and detailed internal training program, and they like people with very specific experience. They have people who are specialists in, say, office printing systems, and who know all the little quirks you'll run into when you move from Novell print servers to Microsoft print servers. If you work there for a number of years, you progress through a system of internal certifications and ranks that begins to approach those of a military organization.

For Google to behave like Getronics or vice versa would probably be silly. If I held shares in these companies, I'd probably want them both to continue hiring and training much the way they do now, even though they're worlds apart in the ways they do it.

This talk is awesome. (Yes, I'm the same person who thought Danah Boyd's paper was a little wishy-washy. But this talk is awesome, because it has a lot of interesting observations and not nearly as many doubtful conclusions. In the Q&A, she does get into some conclusions, and it gets fuzzier again.)

"I always try to dress up because of my lower-than-average IQ."

I don't really have much to add to that statement, except that I appreciate the man's honesty.

In particular, you can hide a bounded stack in a State monad, so you could prevent the thing from leaking unbounded memory without any garbage collector magic at all. I guess it would be nice if you could bound the total heap rather than one particular stack in your program, but I don't think that in practice that would justify the added complexity in the garbage collector. It would be interesting, though, and that has been known in the past to be sufficient reason for people to try and extend Haskell...

Thanks for the background info! I never studied much sociology; all the social science electives at the college where I took them turned out to be about game theory.

I understand your point, but mine was that she fluidly goes back and forth between various definitions. I do think that she realizes this, and it is probably inevitable, but it makes it hard for me to wrap my head around exactly what she is trying to say. Danah writes: "I will attempt to delineate what we see on social network sites in stereotypical, descriptive terms meant to evoke an image." I think I understand why she wants to take that approach (it's easier), but the problem with it is that it makes it very hard for her readers to disengage from their own stereotypes and prejudices and evaluate her ideas on the merits. Basically, it works just as long as she's preaching to the choir.

As for the working class art fags (I dislike the term, by the way, but that's another can o' worms altogether): I'm not saying art is the way to riches, but rather just applying the cultural, rather than income-based, idea of class that is, it would seem to me, implicit in the words "all of my anti-capitalist college friends who work in cafes and read Engels are not working class just because they make $14K a year and have no benefits."

It is a major problem with reddit, and could possible over time become a problem for news.yc, but it is not necessarily an insurmountable problem. For instance, if you really get a lot of submissions, you could pre-select probably-interesting posts with a text classifier and shunt them into a probably-interesting queue. (A text classifier could be something like the ones used in spam filters, or, if you want, you can throw the whole machine learning book at it and use Markov chains, neural networks, &c.)

I just posted a comment saying that if, like me, you are skeptical about claims that "Wal-Mart Nation has destroyed many of the opportunities for meaningful working class labor", you should squint a bit and read the article anyway, because there is some truth to it.

Looking at it some more, I am still convinced that there is some truth to it, but there really is also a lot of very, uh, fluid logic going on.

Identifying those who can "play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm" with those who are expected to go to college, and later calling them "hegemonic", is simplistic. An enumeration like 'Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids' lumps together categories that are closely related to social class (Hispanic), categories that have nothing to do with it (queer), and even some categories that may be associated with higher social strata (when did you last meet a working class art fag?)

"as an example, recovering from a failed datacenter that was hosting a petabyte of data over a 10 Gb/sec link will take more than a year"

Does it really? What if you load the data onto some physical medium and physically move it from wherever it's backed up into the failed data center? The latency of vans with disks or tapes may be high, but the throughput can still way exceed that of networks.

"How long before the millions of people who have piled into Facebook stop checking their profiles every day or, for that matter, every week."

I think that Mr Evans is underestimating the human appetite for gossip. The reason people like facebook so much is not because of its novelty; if that were the case, with the average net user's attention span, the novelty would have worn out by now. The real reason is that seemingly trivial information about people you actually know is exciting to members of a species evolved to live in groups and use gossip as a means of establishing, assessing and maintaining relationships.

Also, I cannot resist the urge to play grammar police. Phenomenon.

There's probably some truth to this, but on the other hand, there are some good UI reasons for following conventions. Graphical conventions can make your application easier to use, because people already know them. The world of UI design is fulll of such conventions: red: stop, green: go, squares: check multiple, circles: check one. US light switches are easier to use than the European kind because they are more consistently mounted in the same direction. Designing UIs is all about finding metaphors that already make sense to people, either because they are used in the real world, or because they are used in some very popular systems people are already familiar with. (E.g., most desktop applications put "find" in the "edit" menu. Does it make sense? Not really. But by now, that's where people look, so that's where you should stick it.)

That said, there are some conventions in recently fashionable web applications that seem to be nothing but fashion. That's less of a UI design thing, and more of a marketing thing. Presumably, there is some sweet spot between total conformism and utter disregard for the contemporary norm that strikes the balance between attention-grabbing and comfort-instilling. Personally, I would say: when in doubt, keep it simple. (That's my personal taste speaking, not any kind of business experience.)

Whatever you use to automatically determine my location doesn't quite get it right; it thinks that I am in a small town that I vaguely recall as not being that far away from where I now live, so it's not the biggest deal.

Also, you may want to set distances to metric for people in countries where that's the standard. It's not at all impossible to get some users in e.g. Northern European countries without translating into the local language, but the size of a mile is not something people around here tend to be familiar with.

It's on Project Gutenberg, for free.

Neither finance nor law are of necessity zero sum activities, although both of them may end up dissipating some wealth in some cases.

Financial markets are what enables society to direct capital toward its most productive uses, and every time you find an arbitrage opportunity, you have just contributed a little to that goal; think of it as Gosplan, except that it actually works. This is perhaps easier to understand in the context of markets in physical goods. A merchant who notices that the difference in the price of widgets in towns A and B is smaller than the cost of transporting them, and starts doing so, is obviously realizing a net gain for society. Stocks and bonds aren't all that different from widgets.

Good laws make it possible for people to rely on contracts with complete strangers, rather than always having to laboriously build up bonds of trust, and they prevent people from imposing costs on third parties that never asked for them. While bad laws may be bad, good laws exist too, and lawyers do occasionally get involved in making them work.

It might be a friendly gesture to suggest a specific paper by Hayek that is to be read. I imagine you must have this one in mind:

http://www.econlib.org/Library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

If you want to learn a functional programming language that comes with a friendly on-line community, try Haskell. The people at the Haskell IRC channel and haskell-cafe mailing list will criticize you if you say something that just isn't right, but they are also relentlessly friendly to newcomers, they like to spend some time working on educational materials that explain their latest type system hacks, and there are always some of them around.

There is some famous example to do with classification of simple finite groups where a big theorem had been proved over the course of many papers by various people over the years, and then when somebody tried to write a big monograph about it, they found all sorts of holes that took years to close.

Facebook is not technologically primitive. Unlike some earlier, similar services, it scales. This is no accident, but has to do with clever things like Thrift (go google it). Also, I remember the current CTO of Facebook as being extremely smart even by the standards of the good CS school we both attended.