Travis

I'm not so sure it's so clear (in research) that some form of public commitment reduces the likelihood of completion.

In fact, Robert Cialdini found that commitment was an excellent form of motivation. "If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment because of establishing that idea or goal as being congruent with their self image. Even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the agreement. For example, in car sales, suddenly raising the price at the last moment works because the buyer has already decided to buy."[1]

Cialdini performed his original research several decades ago, but it has been continued by the Freakonomics/Kahneman/"Nudge" crew. To the best of my recollection, all of their experiments showed a strong positive effect when public commitment was added. It's the principle behind StickK.com, as well.

Perhaps there are certain types of improvements (vague self improvement was mentioned elsewhere in this thread) that are harmed by external reinforcement, but I think that's more the exception rather than the rule.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini (also check out his "psychology of influence" book for more on the topic)

Could you point me to a reference on why you want to record ambient audio to mix in?

Aside from the difficulty in uncovering the truth, I think this would be a clear example of criminal fraud. It would take a pretty large effort to cover up something like this, as well (disgruntled ex-employees would be hugely incentivized to speak to prosecutors).

So while you probably wouldn't know via technical means, my gut feeling is that a conspiracy in a company that large would quickly surface.

Gotcha, so it would just depend on what bits in RAM were corrupted (data versus process instructions)?

I am curious about a couple of specific use cases that I can think of where this might affect me (and, most likely, would be common points of failure for others):

1. data in the MySQL tables (stored in memory) is corrupted. Would mysql crash? Indicate table corruption, and I could just reload it from disk? Write corrupted data to disk, and permanently trash my data collection?

2. large process that's running data analysis (say a big python process with tons of data in RAM). Would one of my variables (say an int with value 4) turn into another number? Would it become unreadable?

I appreciate the effort to explain this. I know, in theory, why ECC RAM is useful, but I have difficulty visualizing real world scenarios.

What would be the downside to using non ECC RAM in a heavily loaded server? Would it cause processes to crash?

Am I off base to draw a parallel between this and a right to privacy situation? The folks who say, "the only people who worry are the people who have something to hide"? (FTR, totally against that argument...)

Off topic, the spirit of the internet never ceases to amaze me. We're on ostensibly a business focused board, and you make a compelling argument defending the protection of potential competitors. (I.e., your customers/clients will receive a tangible benefit due to your awareness of these issues, and non-reliance on less capable competition.) Yet, you seem interested in the overall good, rather than looking to exploit your advantage commercially.

What are the odds the you think any of your files could have a DMCA takedown while on dropbox?

I am concerned about the abuses of power under these recent events. However, i still don't see a likely problem for legitimate use (with dropbox), outside of an outlier.

The rhetoric on both sides of the argument has me a bit concerned.

With all threat assessments I like to know (appox. to an order of magnitude) the likelihood of any downside. With the M.U. -> dropbox/s3 analogy, I have no guess for an estimate.

I'm honestly curious -- what is the likelihood that you estimate your files being deleted from dropbox? It was always very clear to me that M.U. was shady, and I feel probably deserving of shutdown. Given a 5 year timelines, what is the probability that you guess dropbox suffers a similar fate (total annihilation, server seizure, etc.)?

Hey I shot you a tweet, I'd be interested in helping migrate the site. Email is in my HN profile, shoot me a message if you're interested.

If you haven't yet read it, I also highly recommend, "Nudge". It's similarly eye opening WRT how incentives shape outcomes.

The book does address the incongruity between the level of self-control required to rise to a high level of power and the shocking lack of self-control and forethought of a Spitzer type person.

It doesn't tackle corruption per se, but does address politicians and power. (although IMO, it wasn't the strongest section in the book)

Having just finished reading "Willpower", I wanted to comment here. The primary hypothesis of the book is that humans have a store of "willpower", which is depleted every time we exercise it (including making tough decisions) [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion]. When we avoid our favorite foods, we deplete our willpower. When that reserve is gone, it is much more difficult for us to make the "right" choice.

The really interesting twist was when they presented the brain glucose study results. The authors suggest that it's glucose levels in the brain that partially determine the size of the willpower reserve. Thus, when you diet, you not only deplete your reserve by making a decision to avoid fatty foots, but you also starve your brain of the glucose it needs to replenish the ability to make tough decisions.

They support it with some interesting and fairly compelling evidence. I highly recommend reading it.

I find the comments given as examples of the "blowback" against the post very typical of programmers and fairly revealing.

First, does anyone doubt the value of learning Ruby is much greater than $2,800? I imagine the course is targeted at someone without any programming experience[1], which only increases its value.

Second, not everyone can teach themselves to code. It's an easy trap for us programmers to fall into, since we can often pick material up on our own. But we do call it "code" for a reason -- this is difficult stuff!

Third, many objections focus on the high price of the course. That's absurd -- it only establishes a higher value on the skillset those programmers already possess! We clamor for managers and sales people to just learn to program a little bit -- one way of conveying that value is to capture more of it in the training programs.

Fourth, these courses are just an option. Their existence doesn't threaten all the awesome free Rails courses out there.

It strikes me as a little bit of trademen unions. As if we want new programmers to pass the "self taught" trial by fire initiation ritual.

[1]I also understand the objection to the forum in which this course was offered; however, the primary objections in the article seemed to be focused on the cost of the course, rather than the manner in which it was advertised.

(edit, formatting)

I have 2 pieces of information on which to make a decision regarding godaddy: my experience (including those people that I personally know), and the experiences reported in the "GoDaddy screwing over HN customers" posts. I've never had any problems. It's also impossible to know the overall customer satisfaction picture; customers with disaster problems are much more likely to be vocal than people with my experiences. I also have a full picture of my experiences; with the disaster posts, I don't know the full story.

Godaddy are such a small part of my concerns that I appreciate they're cheap and have always worked for me. Operating DNS/registration isn't exactly tough andI don't have too many requirements. GD meets those requirements.

Although I did not downvote you myself, I suspect the downvotes are because your comments appear unnecessarily confrontational.

Does your contract have a clause for non or late payment?

I would begin a paper trail of non-payment. Certified letter notifying that payment is late, and assess late payment fees if not paid by a certain date.

Asking for money, rather than equity, strikes me as a large red flag. If he doesn't believe in you enough to sign on for equity, how will he do a good job networking and putting together deals?

Investors like to see excitement. His connections are going to know that he doesn't believe in you long term (he's making a cash grab). How is that going to look?

I recently installed Piwik (self hosted analytics). In the visitor log, it will show me the ordinal position for that specific visitor. About 50% of my google referrals have this info. I guess sometimes google will send the click position in the referer. This is a useful way of tracking that information, for key phrases that you already receive traffic for.

The XServe line was shut down (although you can still buy the OS X server edition).

The Cube was a failure, although I'm not exactly positive it's exactly within 10 years.

.Mac (or MobileMe) hasn't been as successful as I think apple believed it would be.

A hybridized approach may work for you in those higher periods. Depending on your bottlenecks, it may be possible to spin up ec2 instances during your high load periods that will cover your necessary additional capacity. (Esp if you are bw or RAM limited, you can setup asset servers on ec2 and just change DNS pointers to enable them.)

One other advantage is your future scalability, as well: as your site grows, you'll need to "resize" your dedicated instances. If that is something you need, then that's another advantage (really, it's continuous ability to scale versus discrete scaling events, e.g. upgrading a dedi server).

That said, if you have a good dedi provider, upgrading those shouldn't be too tough.

What do you use as a replacement for terminal? It was freezing my comp for 2-3 seconds when I'd switch spaces, so I moved to iterm2, and it's not great...

I'd like to see something that does a better job allowing me to distinguish sessions to different servers (diff background colors, etc.)

Depends on the business plan ;).

If the plan is excellent, and actually describes the problem, solution, and route to profit, then it's probably worth a lot.

However, if it's like most business plans that I've written or read, then it's probably not accurately describing the problem. A ton can change in a market in 2 years, so I would guess that parts of that plan are pretty out of date.

I probably wouldn't ever assign more than 5-10% of a business' value (equity, here) to the b-plan. That would be for a world class, how-could-we-not-have-seen-this, b-plan.

I'm thinking of this more as a value add for corporate email, actually. I suppose there are already CRM systems out there that do similar features, but it would be interesting to do it in a more open manner. Via POP3 or something, rather than a proprietary vertical stack (which is what I mostly see at my target companies).

In my most recent experience, I had so many different tasks to do that were more important than optimization. By the time I had the bare essential stuff done, I had enough data to start to make decisions on.

Is the power of this the Gmail integration, or is the power in the list maintenance?

Thinking about the MVP, it would be trivial to write a program that would login to a user's specific POP3/IMAP account, scan for messages from specific senders, and auto-respond. But how would you maintain the list of PR flunkies?

I think I would prefer to pay off lodsys rather than selling my IP to Apple.

Not that I like either option, but I'd rather pay < 1% of my sales rather than let apple own it.

I understand where you're coming from, but not everyone has the same ethical sense that you do. I think you would be hard pressed to say that people without those things (art, science, productive work, honesty, etc.) are not surviving. Maybe they aren't thriving... but that's different.

I think Maslow's heirarchy of needs is pretty relevant here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs

Many web frameworks have these basic building blocks. I'm a PHP guy, so I'd recommend the standard options: Zend, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, etc. They will all do registration, login, profiles, etc., as well as get you security features and a platform for plugins developed by third parties.

Many of them have plugins for payment stuff as well.

Reminds me of the koan, "Wash the dishes when you are washing the dishes."

Broken windows theory has its share of criticism. In Tipping Point (or maybe it was one of his others, or freakonomics), they are able to connect the drop in crime rates with both the legalization of abortion and/or the banishment of leaded gasoline. Point being, it's nearly impossible to separate causality in sociological phenomenon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticism...

If you sign up for the google DPF (doubleclick for publishers) program, you get the option to tie in other ad networks. AFAIK, google's interface will manage your ad inventory for you. It says it even allows you to sell your own ads, and it will select the highest performing ones to display automatically (and adjust based on inventory).

In general, I figure that you should start with adsense (because it's the simplest to add in and get a lot of relevant ads). Then you want to look for more focused networks, as the general rule is you'll get better performance the more focused you are.