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bengebreon [dead]

I posted this after reading through a thread using PHP. This technique is significantly more simple-minded, but it's still been awfully handy.

bengebreon Strategic SEO for Startups

I think we all want to believe that because building interesting things is so much more fun than marketing them. Unfortunately, I think we're all wrong. White hat SEO and analytics seem like the most amenable techniques to the coder's way of thinking. Avoiding them because a large component of that world (marketing) is out of line with our view of how things should work will only hurt us.

bengebreon Ask HN: What are you working on?

http://www.deptofnumbers.com/nyc/home-sales/new-york-city/ - An analysis of New York's property sales records by borough and neighborhood.

I'm trying to build a openly defined price index for residential sales across the city.

bengebreon Zsync: Client side Rsync over HTTP (e.g. HTTP diffs?)

Whoops. Thanks for pointing that out. Funny it came up just recently. I just happened upon it randomly today.

bengebreon Zsync: Client side Rsync over HTTP (e.g. HTTP diffs?)

zsync uses the rsync algorithm, but runs it on the client side, thus avoiding the high server load associated with rsync...All that is needed is an HTTP/1.1-compliant web server.

although it does require one thing on the server side it seems:

zsync downloads are offered by building a .zsync file, which contains the meta-data needed by zsync. This file contains the precalculated checksums for the rsync algorithm; it is generated on the server, once, and is then used by any number of downloaders.

Interesting idea for reducing bandwidth on large, frequently polled files.

bengebreon Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

Agreed. Here's the same data in a scatter plot (second chart down). Far, far easier to grasp.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009...

bengebreon Hobbyists Use Etsy to Trade Day Job for Hard Work

It's interesting (if not terribly surprising) how most of these Etsy businesses simply don't scale. The thought of making the same thing over and over again is really quite foreign. I sometimes forget how much leverage we have as coders.

bengebreon Build to flip?

First, New York has become much more interesting in the tech world. I spent just two days hopping from rock to rock, and didn't land on most of them, but wow, there's something going on there.

That was an interesting bit. I'm a New York resident and have always felt the startup/entrepreneur scene here was strong, but I am of course biased. I wonder what it is he's picking up on recently? Is it just the total startup activity in New York or does he see something more fundamental happening?

bengebreon Living in a van - an inspirational story of frugality and achievement

He also has a blog (which is often excellent) here:

http://spartanstudent.blogspot.com/

bengebreon Bing now offers 3d street view (needs silverlight)

Doesn't appear to work with Firefox 3.5.5

bengebreon Do You See a Pattern?

I second the recommendation. A Pattern Language outlined a lot of the actual patterns (which was neat), but Notes on the Synthesis of Form did a better job of illuminating a broad conceptual foundation for designing systems. I think I need to re-read it now that you mention it.

bengebreon Murdoch Says Web Aggregators Should Pay for Content

It's not that I don't love newspapers or sympathize with their current plight, it's just that Murdoch seems so fully disconnected from reality that he's becoming dangerous. With all of his power and money he is perhaps dangerous even to those beyond the reach of his media empire.

bengebreon Cash for Caulkers: Home Weatherization as Economic Stimulus

The potential results are almost unbelievable:

"The bottom line is that cash for caulkers would be trickier than cash for clunkers — yet would have the potential to do far more good. McKinsey, the consulting firm, estimates that households could reduce their energy use by 28 percent over the next decade. In terms of greenhouse gases, that would be the equivalent of taking half of all vehicles in this country off the road."

bengebreon Ask HN: Alternative careers for a developer

Architecture has always stood out to me as a potentially good career for the technical/creative type. I have a few friends who are architects and while they usually enjoy the work, they do NOT get paid well considering the amount of schooling they had to go through. Developers do way better.

See this CNN article for reference:

http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/15/pf/training_pay/

bengebreon The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

It's the new domain squatting (kinda). Content producers are laying claim to keywords/searches that are under served but provide questionable value to those that they seek to reach.

Maybe eHow articles could serve as a flag to better content producers that moderately valuable yet under served "real estate" exists in a space. They might then claim some of that revenue by targeting the topic and providing higher quality content.

bengebreon SAT Scores And Family Income

Looks like a copy of the chart available here:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-...

That post created a lot of debate a couple of months ago which was summarized here:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/08...

The chart on that second page appears to show that "higher parental income predicts higher child income but only for biological children and not for adoptees."

bengebreon Does Economics Violate the Laws of Physics?

Reminds me of Albert Barlett's Arithmetic, Population and Energy talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU

bengebreon Ask HN: News Website without the 'Silly News'?

Thumbs up to the New Yorker and the Economist. For daily news I find that the New York Times does an excellent job. You'll never see something like 'All-male college cracks down on cross-dressing' there (I pulled that from CNN's "latest news" just a second ago). The top-left column (to the left of the center image) contains the current top stories. This is always serious news. The Business, Science and Technology sections (among others) are always worth reading as well.

For offline news I really recommend The News Hour on PBS with Jim Lehrer. Excellent in depth coverage of important happenings worldwide. Each night they focus on 2-4 issues and speak on them for 10-20 minutes each. I learn a ton from that show. They gave that boy in a balloon story the other day about 10 seconds of coverage in the intro update before they moved on and started talking about real news.

bengebreon NYC BigApps Competition – $20k In Prize Money

I'm guessing the most you can hope for is a bit of publicity and perhaps getting on the radar of a couple of NYC tech players. I don't think you lose any IP rights so you can always continue to develop your idea if there is some level of success.

bengebreon [dead]

This has got to be spam. The username has SEO in it and this is their only post. Not a good sign.

bengebreon Freakonomics: Read this if you believe in Peak Oil

This is so familiar. Smart economists tell us that something which seems so unsustainable is in fact sustainable. Remember when we heard that home prices had never declined on a year over year basis and that the extreme price appreciation from 2000-2005 was somehow rational? This argument feels exactly the same.

bengebreon Can't stand sitting in an office anymore. Suggestions?

Yes, no one wants bad teachers. But teaching seems like one of those things that you have to actually do in order to know if you could be successful at it. I know quite a few teachers who thought they were passionate about the profession and quickly burned out. Others came to it from other fields after some searching and became good teachers.

While I agree that you shouldn't just pick teaching as your career on a whim, like so many other things in life, sometimes you just gotta try things out to see whether you're good at them and enjoy them. The hard part is moving along when you know you need to.

bengebreon Older white males hurt more by this recession

"White men over 55 had a record 6.5% unemployment rate in the second quarter."

The overall unemployment rate stands at 9.5% today and averaged 9.3% in the second quarter. While I have sympathy for anyone involuntarily unemployed, it seems like white men over 55 are doing relatively well all things considered.