seigenblues

I like him much better after this interview.

That last paragraph seems far more damning of the author than of Mason -- they're so disappointed that he doesn't have any obvious status symbols and he's riding off on a moped.

Good for him, and shame on them, for equating consumption with success.

(he should really wear a helmet, though!)

seconded! I think i changed the wind variable.

I remember printing out the whole listing on our dot-matrix printer and unfolding it across the living room. I might've been 9 or 10.

No problem :) I think you're catching enough flak for your over-50 comments below, so I didn't mention that one ;)

BTW, shallow thought wasn't meant as a derogative. It's what we monkeys do best, after all. It'll result in a different profile of swings, hits, & misses than other approaches, that's all.

(also, the irony that the new yorker article also suggests how we're really good at seeing the faults in others thought processes but not in our own is hi-larious)

Best of luck!

No, it isn't.

I was writing a long post about how we think we're really good at detecting "important signals" like if someone's lying, but that we're actually terrible at it. But the new yorker article that was frontpaging yesterday should pretty much explain it, even though Jonah Lehrer is a bit smug for my tastes ;)

TL;DR- the OP sounds like a very shallow-thinking VC who's blissfully unaware of his own biases. It might work out ok for him -- these biases usually work most of the time, and that's why we have them -- but it will probably fail in some very crucial instances where a more thorough, data-driven approach might have worked better. In fact, that may be precisely how the great VC's are differentiated from the merely ok, but that's a different story...

(link: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06...)

You're completely right. Too funny -- i had written a comment about how there was probably some bullshit MBA phrase for the process of "correctly valuing passionate customers", but deleted it as overly cynical and offensive to the up and coming masters-of-the-universe on HN. Can't win! :)

I think it's still worthwhile to think about systems of people in terms of their aggregate actions as well as in terms of each being an individual.

This is dead on. It's a mistake to read this and take away some homey homily about how "every customer is a snowflake!" -- the point is that you should correctly value the passionate customer. Your marketing and outreach and customer service departments should understand the relative values of "bought it, loved it!" and "bought it, so?" Those relative values will vary from product to product/industry to industry

The comment below at this time ('survivorship bias') is also correct, but only if it's interpreted as a touching anecdote rather than as crucial customer-behavior information for his market segment. Understanding the dynamics of how your customers make their purchasing decisions seems like a better lesson to take from this.

(Not the same for every product, either! E.g., my being passionate about Cheerios does nothing for General Mills, really...)

yikes. These are impressive (and terrifying). I particularly like the "see if you use my return value and dynamically change my behavior" trick, I bet debugging a library that used that would be fuuuun.

I think it could probably be called "outbox" instead -- it might make a bit more sense?

MoGo is not 5d KGS -- there are some bots that are 4d/5d KGS, using the approach given in the article. The two best (that I am aware of) are Zen19 -- closed source -- and pachi -- available here: http://pachi.or.cz/

The author of Pachi has a paper detailing the major algorithm advancement beyond Monte-Carlo game simulations, which is sharing information across simulations in a way that is totally nonintuitive to me.

For me, a 3d/4d KGS go player, this is all very interesting stuff!

is that it? I thought it was about thinking you were going to build something Awesome and World Changing, and ending up ...being a bolted on web-layer on legacy Access databases, and not really liking that.

I totally agree. He even admits as such that this is the purpose of the question:

  "Instead the question ... taps something deeper and more
  closely held.  ... If I know what matters to them, I can
  right away tell if the same things matter to ...
  the organization at large."

In other words: "expose something tender and honest, so that we can exploit it as directly as possible."

Yep, sounds about right. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, 1% of the US is still ~3,000,000 people!

Did you just not look at the first graph in the NYT article? It actually shows where the projections came from.

And i'm not really clear if you understand the difference between recorded deficits, which are year-to-year losses, vs. the debt, which is the cumulative total of the yearly deficits and surpluses?

Your comments about whether Bush's tax cuts are now Obama's, and whether or not he hasn't "been powerless" in the face of the ridiculous obligations previous lawmakers have saddled him with (Medicare Part D) suggests a smidge of ignorance about the process of policymaking in our country.

Finally, i'll point out that your objection to these "projections" because they are just that, projections, calls this naturally into question: Look at the two sets of projections, the one issued in 2001 calling for eight years of surpluses and the one issued in 2009 calling for eight years of horrible deficits. In what way can you really object to these graphs because of their "rosy assumptions"? Yikes.

yes, doing all of the above is best :)

from speaking to staffers (i live in the DC area). They are generally young 20-somethings whose job it is to answer the phones, tally the e-mails & letters, and report on it to the congresscritters; they are generally unanimous on a few points:

1) that the congresspeople care and notice if an issue is getting a lot of attention from constituents 2) that this is something they usually ask about every day 3) that phone calls are generally more influential than letters, which are generally more influential than e-mails -- but it depends on how each office handles their inbounds.

you could be participating in your local elections. You could vote in primaries. You could be concerned about who's going to be your next local county sheriff, local zoning board officer, etc. You can get involved in the local political parties and affect them on a local level. (this is assuming that you already vote in all off-year elections, and already vote for president)

HN sees only the top level of the abstraction and assumes that the system is a lumbering behemoth incapable of change. Pushing the system from the bottom, it's actually quite capable of very abrupt change. Unfortunately, those methods of change require copious amounts of time, and will probably replace or supplant much more enjoyable hobbies you'd rather have.

In previous eras, this was considered the burden of citizenship...

For a simpler answer: Call your congresscritter. They're actually very responsive to phone calls and real letters. It's not hard to do.

Go is a great mirror; i'm glad it played a role -- even if an antagonistic one ;) -- in such a positive result.

real question here: Should it be obvious that the carrier controls the OS? Second question: is that acceptable? I mean, that assumption underpins your dismissal of an MITM as "pretty silly", which also seems totally correct.

I'm just curious if that's the way phones will be forever: with the OS controlled by the carrier and with no right to tinker/hack/modify the device you buy & pay huge monthly fees to use.

He's based his argument on the recruiter's statement, which is a poor choice. On the other hand, other material from the company supports, in fact, a much larger number.

I don't think there's any goalpost moving here at all: Hundreds of millions of keyloggers -- rootkits, really, as the article states -- are installed and unremovable. Whether they are being abused or not at the moment is irrelevant; it should be outrageous and unacceptable that such a datastream is going through a third-party without any kind of transparency, acceptance, or even tacit acknowledgement.

Likewise, your rhetorical refutation here (very thorough, in the abstract) would be a lot more damning if there wasn't, you know, video evidence of this rootkit collecting exactly this data and sending it back.

ah! Finally! Clear evidence of a meritocracy at work! </snark>

Actually, in all seriousness, doesn't this suggest there's a real imbalance or opportunity here to be exploited? Companies that hire like this surely must have some other systemic blind spots, no?

It collects measurements from distributed renewable energy installations and uses those measurements to measure & optimize the systems' performance.

I suppose you could have engineers drive around with clipboards, but the amount of data collected and the frequency its collected at would suffer. In other words, that job could never exist for a human.

Is that close enough to count for your "theoretically"? I don't think so, personally, as it could never make business sense to have that job be needed for the operation of the business, so...

It amazes me that so much writing on this subject is so reductionist. I read so many of these comments talking about the "return on your degree" and ROIs like they can be measured, and i'm kind of flabbergasted.

I have two observations: A liberal-arts degree gives you perspective, context, and judgement . Contrary to popular belief, these are not innate traits. Given that we just read a very well-received essay about how important judgement is to a coder (http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/the-number-one-trait-of-...), it amazes me that we could just sort of forget about other ways these things can be developed.

The other observation is that people talk about being well-rounded like its an inherent good. Perhaps we should spell out why: It increases your luck surface area and exposes you to positive low-probability events.

Being well-rounded means you are better able to place new information in a meaningful framework, because you have a broader and wider set of contexts in which to cross-reference and evaluate your new information. The broader you are, the more likely it is that you can make some useful association with new information. Unfortunately, for the highly-specialized, not only do they not make those associations, but they also don't even know they are available to be made... How do you compute an ROI when so many of the benefits appear to be random?

An example. My father majored in history and english. He ended up writing law and arbitrating disputes. His history background let him understand and contextualize the people he dealt with -- where did they come from? What did they want? What did they value & why? etc... His degree ended up being very useful, even if he didn't obtain his job because of it.

You're just describing one kind of programming. I write code that does things that literally couldn't be done by people. it's a job where there wasn't one before -- and it helps create other jobs where there weren't any before. I don't want to say our company wouldn't be able to exist without that code, because my code wouldn't exist without the rest of the company, either, but the point remains:

If your self-justification works for you -- great. But you're lying to yourself if you think it has to be that way or that that is the only way. Computers (& technology generally) enable new business models at the same time as they make other models obsolete, such is life. Whether you think that balance tips one way or another is your business -- but your blatant cynicism and "oh, the world has to work this way" seems like you just letting yourself off easy.

That said, i wish you the best putting those big-money financier jobs out of work :)

Very well. I thought it was suspicious and called it out as such, but I thought i had done it in a reasonable way. My mistake. He's since replied to me and i believe i've replied to him in (what i hope is) a civil manner below.

Yes. It works fine for a lot of people, and observing this does not invalidate your complaints.

Can you tell me about this? Previously, i had one-click share within Reader, and two click sharing from the web via a bookmarklet. I am genuinely curious about how this got easier with the new Reader.

What's your workflow now to share an article with a carefully curated group of friends?

that's fine, but your "only comment unless something really annoys you" is disingenuous -- this is the only thing that has annoyed you enough to comment on.

I'm sorry if my reaction seemed a little strong; you mentioned not being able to understand the sentiments you were hearing. I am suggesting that as my tiny online community vanished overnight, perhaps you could empathize with that and extend that to the other incomprehensible sentiments you were hearing.

I, for one, have resisted any sort of move towards pitchforks or torches or even (gasp) public condemnation, because I acknowledge that this is, indeed, how google operates, and also that as a user of a "free" service, that this is its actual cost. And i do still hope that the aspects of Reader that fostered such a good community can be rediscovered in G+; it's bugged me since G+ launched that the integration with things like Reader was poor.

And it may yet improve along those lines! -- Doesn't make me any less sad about the loss of my community, though...

(Likewise, you might not have used "Notes", but they could be both public or private, serving as both a vehicle for discussion or a bookmark-service for research, archiving, etc, a la pinboard or delicious. Again -- maybe not a feature that you used, but one that people who did use now need to replace.)

I notice your account is ten minutes old. Is this an astroturf? A PR troll? ...Can you really tell me it got easier to share now that it's G+ and not Reader?

One man's "community [they were] already involved in" is another man's "disconnected community." Speak for yourself

I had a carefully cultivated list of cranks, miscreants, and technologic misanthropes who found some very interesting content and had some very interesting discussions, largely by way of the "note in reader" bookmarklet.

That whole community vanished for me overnight, without even a head nod for how to get it back, and I'm a bit upset about it. Publicly "+1"-ing something isn't even a first order approximation.

I'd really love for a social network to correctly anticipate all the people i'd like to share something with, and to automagically categorize stuff like that. It'd be sweet. But it seems like the worst-case scenario if it gets it wrong could be pretty terrible.

He's absolutely right, though, that a key problem with circles and lists and other shit work is that it's very rarely well integrated into the clients.

(I also want disagree with the claim that "no one wants to do shit work". I believe the entire genre of MMORPGs -- even, dare i say, RTS' -- stand as testament against. They also suggest how high peoples tolerance of shit work is if it is well integrated into a client ;)

why did this get downvoted? it's a valid point.

This is actually the first time i've seen a downvoted comment that i just, really can't understand why it was downvoted. Anyone care to explain?

I can't give you an exact example for recruiting, but it seems like a very similar process in picking stocks. If you can imagine why lessons there might be applicable, you could look up the criticisms about mutual funds/"actively managed" funds vs. broad indices.