Viewing profile — d2vid

Not exactly the clearest announcement from AWS, but the "instance limit" they are referring to is the limit on the number of server instances you can have running in your account a…

Transcript is a good idea, we've been looking into APIs & mechanical turk for that. In general we're trying to figure out how to present the responses in an interesting/informative…

Because Iowa farmers get to vote on federal matters, but they don't get to vote in SF and NYC. When I worked at Climate Corp, it was pretty interesting to hear the (nearly universa…

We paid for this as a test of instapanel, got respondents off of Craigslist for $10 each. In general, we're building a tool for startups to get feedback like this on their own prod…

If we think of soda like tobacco this makes sense. If tobacco companies are against it, then it probably is a good idea. But what if the book industry spent $15/SF voter to stop so…

It just feels too much like a symbolic victory rather than actual progress. I think it falls into the same category as the plastic bag ban - bags are a very small component of over…

As much as I think vice taxes are a good idea, the panelists raised a lot of great points about the holes in Prop E. It's only SF so people will just drive to Daly City to stock up…

Well that sucks, this post is completely delisted from the front page. How'd that happen?

We tax income, even though we agree that income is a good thing. Why not tax cigarettes, soda, pollution, and other bad things. The dead-weight loss from the tax is actually a good…

If you watch Jude's video, she says she bicycles to Daly City to buy her cigarettes because they're too expensive in SF, and threatens that she'll just start doing that for soda to…

I was really surprised by the results. When I created this instapanel I was a strong "Yes" on Prop E - governments need to raise funds, so why not tax vices. Watching the responses…

If tweens listen to 10 hrs/day of Justin Bieber on repeat using free accounts, Bieber shouldn't get money from adults who listen a few hours a day to anything but him using premium…

The sales tax agreements amazon has made with various states should provide a nice experiment showing how price sensitive their customers really are.

Choice with reasonable defaults sounds ideal to me. The suggestion that you HAVE to make all these choices is FUD. To bring a bit more consumer psychology into the discussion, peop…

"as we get older, particularly past middle age, we tend to grow happier naturally." Sounds like literal survivorship bias.

From an expected value perspective, being kept awake by a smoke alarm has robbed me of more of my life than [chance of fire]×[chance of death]×[crappiness of dying]

Climate Corp doesn't forecast the weather.

Former Climate employee here. Swiss Re reinsures Climate Corp, not any individual policy. So Climate Corp sets the price for each policy and pays out each claim. Swiss Re pays out …

"No," said the God button.

Submit your shortest sci-fi story in the world as a comment. Upvote ones you like. This is just for fun, nothing official.

COO

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy#Environmental_benef... Insects are far more efficient than livestock. Also, you can feed them things that humans can't eat (like rice stalk…

FTA: "notably, Russia bans handset subsidies"