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What Happens Next Will Amaze You

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Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#241

Post by kbenson »

spdustin wrote: post #114
benihana wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The correct answer is to never Ah sweet, it's that one commenter who can prescribe the absolute correct answer to very complex situations with a couple of simple platitudes! Since you seem to be in a mood to drop the correct answer, maybe you can help me with some difficult decisions I'm facing: what programming language should I use? what should the next move of my business be? is she really the one, or should I m…

I won't speak to the sarcasm-as-argument response, but I will say that there is a sentiment behind it that I do agree with. I say - with differing commentary after the first 4-5 sentences - in every class I teach: "I don't like the phrase 'best practice'. I won't use it. It's presumptuous and condescending. What's best for me might suck for you. Who am I to know your business requirements? There is only one true 'bes…

Depending on how it's used, I find "idiomatic" to be useful. Built into the meaning is that it may not translate to other areas, and most people understand that while it is a useful shorthand to making something succinct and expressive, you fall back to other things when it doesn't match well.

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#242

Post by veritas3241 »

pconner wrote: post #219
osmode wrote: post #172

I'm so glad someone finally has courage to comment so poignantly on what San Francisco has become. This sentence will stay with me: "But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can't make our own city livable"

SF is pretty culturally hostile to outsiders. Maybe if more residents felt like it was "their" city, rather than just the place they live, they would feel a greater sense of responsibility to improve it. This problem probably affects most cities with a large transplant population.

> This problem probably affects most cities with a large transplant population.

I've been thinking about this a lot mainly because I live in Nashville which is experiencing its own growth challenges with a lot of transplants. I've been here since 2008 (TN since 98) and I'm really only just now being to take "ownership" of the city. Perhaps it's because I'm out of school finally and thinking more long term, but it's tough to consider a city "yours" when you know you're going to be transitioning (potentially) to a new job and a new city.

But since I've got a job here, it seems like it's more appropriate to put more effort into my own hometown. It's tough to get past that mindset that you're only renting the city and somebody else will clean it up. Part of it is there seems to be a stigma against having an opinion about how a city should be without a certain amount of time spent living in the city. This just encourages, in my mind, a bad attitude towards active civic involvement. But it has to be tempered with the understanding that a transplant does have less experience of living in the city.

I don't know where I'm really going with this. Maybe all I'm saying is young people, I think, probably view the city they study in as they do their student housing or an apartment: something they rent and somebody else's problem.

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#243

Post by krapp »

nine_k wrote: post #207
krapp wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Punishing people for gaming the system as it's intended to be gamed would be counterproductive, because the karma system itself is based on flawed assumptions. The expectation here is that high karma indicates high intellectual quality, but that's demonstrably false. It doesn't do what it's intended to do and even detracts from the value of discussion in some places. A better way to improve content quality would be t…

Karma is the worst known proxy to expectations of reasonable behavior, except for all other proxies that have been tried. It's basically a linear prediction model: someone who behaved reasonably in the past is expected to continue doing so. This is not always true, of course, but I beg anyone suggest a more precise model that can be realistically implemented. Another purpose of karma is preventing a bot from register…

A better and more accurate model of user behavior is probably in the comment history itself. It might take longer to read than an integer, but it does carry actual context, while a karma score doesn't.

If you have to have karma, you could attach it to comments (so indirectly, rather than directly, to accounts) and get a better overview of a user's behavior from the ratio of upvotes to downvotes. If it's necessary to have privileges like moderation be subject to some kind of test, surely some number of ok comments would be be better as an indicator than than an arbitrary karma limit?

Although given that Hacker News has literally no guidelines for voting, even that might not be a great predictor.

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#245

Post by elektromekatron »

Retra wrote: post #113
AlexandrB wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Vogue show an SSD ad at all? What does Vogue know about SSDs? Nothing. Why would I think that an ad for SSDs on Vogue tells me anything about the quality of the SSD they're hocking? It's non-information and communicates nothing about the product beyond the fact that it exists. Anyone who knows what an SSD is knows where they can buy an SSD - what I really want to know is which SSD should I buy and an SSD ad…

Your complaints have nothing to do with Vogue, but with the uselessness of an ad in general. Even if a site were talking about SSDs, you wouldn't need an ad to tell you about them, would you?

Ad networks at the moment seem to mostly provide the service of showing me pictures of things I have bought, just in case I forgot that I already own them.

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#246

Post by webXL »

I just have to take issue with his claim about privacy being a luxury good:

  In this world, privacy becomes a luxury good. Mark Zuckerberg 
  buys the four houses around his house in Palo Alto, to keep 
  hidden what the rest of us must share with him.
What nonsense! The neighbors still live there and pay him instead of a bank. He did it to prevent a developer from forcing him to move, essentially.

And no one forces us to give our data to him. Don't abuse language. Only the state can legally use force, and they often do it illegally as well.

I don't exactly have warm and fuzzies about Mark, but there's enough truthful appalling material out there to support your claims about the lack of privacy.

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#247

Post by JacobJans »

look_lookatme wrote: post #230
JacobJans wrote: post #211

> The losers are small publishers and small advertisers. Universal click fraud drives down the value of all advertising, making it harder for niche publishers to make ends meet. This is absolutely not true in my case. I'm both a small publisher and a small advertiser. I have absolutely no trouble making ends meet. Perhaps I will in the future, but it is very unlikely that click fraud or or privacy concerns will be to…

How many people do you employ and/or pay livable wages to produce content?

I work with around a dozen freelance writers regularly. I usually aim to set the pay so they'll earn a minimum of $25 an hour. Although, they're freelancers, so that really isn't up to me. I just accepted a piece for publication -- and I'm fairly certain the writer spent no more than 30 minutes on it. The call for submissions went out, and 30 minutes later I got the piece. I'm paying $65 for it.

In general, I'm always looking for ways to justify spending more money on producing better content. I work hard to build the trust of my audience and to provide ever increasing value to them. Fortunately, as my business grows, this becomes easier in some ways, due to economy of scale. A bigger audience generates more revenue, which means I can spend more on content. Better content means more readership, which in turn increases revenue. It's a gratifying business. :)

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#248

Post by dexterdog »

mizzao wrote: post #223
dexterdog wrote: post #154

"Apple alone has nearly $200 billion in cash that is doing nothing." Um, I assume they have it invested in some manner.

According to http://www.cheatsheet.com/features/how-does-apple-invest-its... : Cash, money market instruments, and other types of fixed income. Basically lots of things that can be turned into cash quickly without much volatility in their price.

But it's still invested in the sense that somebody is leveraging it.

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#249

Post by kbenson »

jonstokes wrote: post #119

Ok, this is a fantastic piece that says a lot of useful and thoughtful things, some of them critical about the priorities of the SF startup scene. And what are a nontrivial portion of the HN comments doing? Complaining that he was unfair to Elon freaking Musk!! This is exactly the sort of techno-douchebaggery that the author is writing about, so way to prove his point, nimrods. The one redeeming quality of such comme…

Because he is unfair to the the people he singles out, just to make a point. The tone shifts at that point from "get your shit together, prove you can fix some problems at a smaller level before moving to world issues" to caricaturing other people trying to do good in the world for not following his specific desired future, as if everyone needs to be focused on the same thing.

Musk is working towards something he believes has the capability to mitigate human extinction events. Whether you think that's likely or not, reducing that to "he plans detonate nuclear weapons on Mars" just so you can call it out is not exactly an above-board argument.

Maris wants to keep people alive longer, possibly indefinitely. By implying only billionaires will be able to do this, he's immediately separated Maris' goals from your own (unless you are a billionaire), and set this up as useless investment that won't help you. Let's not discount that his goal is actually to save lives.

I generally love the different talks by Maciej Cegłowski, but this one has an unneeded negative turn at the end. To put this in perspective, we can use the same tactics against this talk.

In 2012 38 million people died of noncommunicable diseases, and another almost 13 million died of communicable diseases[1], and this guy is worried about seeing shit on the streets of San Francisco? Seriously?

Is that fair to his argument? I don't think so, but it's exactly what he did to others in his talk.

1: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index2.ht...

Re: What Happens Next Will Amaze You

#250

Post by phaer »

vlehto wrote: post #227
keyme wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure this will work brilliantly, considering that no one who needs your money there has a bank account or credit card. Cash also won't work due to the tiny problem of all the warlords and corrupt government/police/military/paramilitary taking all this money away by force. The only way to make a shit place better for people, is if some rich guy finds an investment opportunity there, that as a side effect, might di…

>bank account or credit card Cash has been invented. They also don't have mail addresses but still some people suggest sending food. I supposed a way to give aid. No matter what way you choose the warlords and corrupt governments are going to be huge problem. The best way to help so far has been private investing. But it doesn't matter if the investor is single rich guy or bunch of average westerners. That's how stoc…

> We should start from a country that's relatively safe and where the locals can anonymously report if they got to keep the money.

Successful examples include Otjivero - Omitara, Namibia[1] and Madhya Pradesh, India[2]

[1]: http://www.bignam.org/BIG_pilot.html [2]: http://www.guystanding.com/files/documents/Basic_Income_Pilo...

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