Viewing profile — sethjohn

You have hit upon a key distinction, unfortunately the author is intentionally muddling these two issues of 1)scientific data is missing or being withheld and 2) global warming or …

Teach for America and Teach First (the British equivalent) are actually doing a great job at addressing this problem. They are able to recruit teachers from top universities to wor…

I thought through this with a friend a while ago. The problem isn't getting the bandwidth to upload the content, the problem is getting access to content in the first place. In ord…

There is something about the silver-blue glow of a Mac and it's zippy lines that seems to borrow from the hallucinogenic experience. Certainly, I've never seen while on halluginoge…

The engine just blew up on my old Beamer. ($4K seemed like such a good deal at the time!, its was a beautiful car with 160K) After another $4K in repairs and a blown headgasket...n…

I am a chemist, and I like it. I used to use webelements.com, which has the same information but is becoming more and more difficult to navigate with all the ads and subsections. I…

Should YC news empower 'super-users' too?

Major props, in advance, to whomever can manage a high-quality recording of the talks. The podcasts are a great service for those of us who can't make it in person!

So lets assume that the costs for a successful web company are a small fraction of revenue (maybe 20%?). That's profits of 100 million a year for last-year's-Facebook. So if this c…

I've been frustrated lately at humorous comments and the rapid rate at which they are upmodded. A quick bit of humour can be great at cutting to the heart of the issue, but it ofte…

Yes, in fact web advertising has proved to be deep enough to support all of Google! Of course there is a limit to the total amount of advertising dollars available and many half-go…

Don't make too much fun unless you know the numbers. For all I know they might be generating huge profits. What makes you think their valuation is too high?

Come on, the laptops are not being given people for whom access to food, water, and protection from the elements is a problem. The point is to provide the educated working poor in …

Laptops provide people the means to educate themselves and communicate with each other in new ways. Education and communication are among the best tools available to address proble…

To protect our valued customers from the dastardly practice of "Front Running", we engage in exactly this practice but do not refer to it as "Front Running" when we do it.

All this talk about the Terms Of Service agreements misses the fundamental point that it's what people CAN DO (technologically) and what they WILL DO (including breaking rules) tha…

Like a hot night spot, each social networking site will eventually fall out of favor to the next cool place. The business-arc of social networking sites will be much shorter than f…

What is true 'de jure' may not be true 'de facto'. With technologies available to suck your information back out of Facebook (the new versions of which will presumably evade detect…

Again, the future of the web is being written by petty acts of criminality. (aka civil disobedience, aka breaking stupid rules) Just as the entertainment industry will eventually h…

It's been interesting to notice over the course of this morning the modding activity on this subject. Seems like comments on both sides of the issue are being both up-modded and do…

There was no '5 year window', but the discount rate was a subject of much debate. Actually, to get climate change out of last place, they had to apply a much smaller discount rate …

This came out in 2004, but provides an interesting approach to thinking about which world problems would be most cost-effective to solve. Spoiler: AIDS is at the top of the list an…

Some of the most interesting writing on this subject was the Copenhagen Consensus (www.copenhagenconsensus.com), and the critical responses to the Copenhagen Consensus. The CC was …

"What's the worst case scenario" may be a valid question, but it's not a very helpful question...particularly not in a mass-market film where the caveat 'this is extremely unlikely…