bsgreenb

I thought this post was going to be about the "Restart or Details" update dialogue on Macs

Hey, just here to recommend that you use or otherwise build a CRM interface around the SMS conversations. This will allow you to scale the number of messages without being overwhelmed by operator costs.

Technology could be used to solve the problems that it's causing. E.g. better utilization of existing resources (self-driving cars), alternative sources of energy, and perhaps even space colonization.

Question: how would this impact music piracy and the ability of every day people to rip audio off the web?

The law was called the Higher Education Opportunity Act, and the bookstores responded to it mainly by offering seperate, inconvenient search forms. If you found your way there, you you'd then have to copy and paste the ISBN.

The law was good in spirit but in letter it didn't require making the data available. A good law would just be that every school has to offer all the data they send to the bookstore to everyone for bulk download.

The author left out one major reason textbooks are so expensive-- course adoption lists (i.e. which books go with which courses) are kept private or disorganized so that students or businesses can't offer rival "Search by Course" type sites without scraping the local bookstore. As a result students go to the bookstore which knows their requirements unlike Amazon.com.

I open sourced a course data scraper a while ago to help solve this problem: https://github.com/bsgreenb/Open-Textbooks

This post is almost as good as your previous hits "Or", "Not, and "Xor"

oof, worst of both worlds

If anything, shouldn't apps that involve ratings and profiles reduce racism, because they allow you to judge the person by their behavior as opposed to just their appearance? Compare Lyft to taxis, for example.

In the case of taxis the driver only sees appearance-based characteristics when they choose whether to pick someone up. In the case of Lyft the user has a long history of ratings which indicate whether they're a good person to drive around.

I just realized how you could generate thousands of points of Hacker News karma without ever manually writing a post or comment:

Watch all major status pages (e.g. Google, Facebook, Heroku, etc.) and immediately auto-post the link to that page when anything goes down.

Nerds' general inability to sell isn't because they don't understand marketing lingo, but because they lack an intuitive sense of people/markets. Inconsistent and vague buzzwords do nothing to bridge that chasm.

Almost every term in marketing/sales is imprecisely defined and most writing in the field seems to be around making things more complex and vague than they need to be. Kind of like the postmodernists, it's as if they want to convince you that there's some extra layer complexity which only they can understand.

Asked on #startups as well and discovered two more from them: Google Helpouts and Airpair.

The need to label everything as right and left betrays a primitive binary mentality. A more accurate designation here would be distributed vs non-distributed systems. Then we can have an intelligent conversation about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches.

Also, it seems like this need to split everything right vs left is more characteristic of the older generation who are less familiar with technology. I think our generation thinks more in terms of solving problems with the best tool available-- be it the government, the market, or open source.

Haha, that's Ryan Singer https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ryansinger

Trying to identify the motivations of an action from the perspective of the perpetrator doesn't mean that one agrees with their actions. Rather, it's a way of getting a better understanding of the problem

For example, it's useful to look at the causes of various evil historical deeds because they shed light on how to prevent them from occuring. To say that exploring the causes of these deeds is tantamount to supporting them is to throw away any sense of rational discovery.

I prefer taking Lyft to Uber because with the former the default mode is friendly conversation. When you take an Uber the assumption is that neither of you will talk to each other, like in a Taxi or Limo. In this sense Lyft is more revolutionary than Uber because it fundamentally changes the social dynamic, not just the economics.

Would love to try this on Android. You should setup a mailing list to keep people up to date if that's ever released.

Yep, that's something that I definitely found. I think people are scared by Google/FB more because of their size/power than because their privacy policies are below industry par.

Good point-- I've updated the post to give an inline link to textyard.com. I'm not trying to promote TextYard anymore, but if this helps clarify to people what you can do with the data then it's definitely beneficial.

A twin study is just one form of (natural) experiment. It's common in medicine/epidemiology to perform double-blind trials with placebos, etc. Good medical research utilizes experiments rather than assuming causation from correlation like this study does.

I am a big fan of twin studies, though (my background is in behavior genetics). Take the example of smoking. The most solid demonstration that smoking was bad for your health (aside from maybe the experiments on other mammals) was comparison of twins where one twin smoked and the other didn't.

Even controlling for exercize wouldn't save this study.. Genetic and environmental factors will correlate with a sit-down lifestyle, confounding any possible conclusions.

You could rule out genetic and family environment factors by comparing identical twins who have different sitting habits. My bet is that a big chunk, if not all, of the effect here could be explained by that. For the remaining "effect", you'd still have the issue of non-family environmental collinearity, though.

Maybe you could find a job where people were randomly assigned to sitting vs. standing tasks. That'd be a nifty little natural experiment