crystalis

I'll take mudslinging and rumor-mongering over harmful subsidies to e.g., corn.

Companies need to understand that they should seek revenue before customers and vanity metrics.

"It was officially adopted as a United States military bolt-action rifle on June 21, 1905, and saw service in World War I. It was officially replaced as the standard infantry rifle by the faster-firing, semi-automatic 8 round M1 Garand, starting in 1937. However, the M1903 Springfield remained in service as a standard issue infantry rifle during World War II, since the U.S. entered the war without sufficient M1 rifles to arm all troops"

Thanks Wikipedia, that was easy!

Few people truly understand the semantics of a language, but everyone knows why indexing from 1 is bad.

It's nice how you've written him off entirely because he likes one thing and not another! You completely disregard the possibility that some people are only ever fully engaged and in the moment when their mind is on and they are performing analysis. There's so little to what you're saying, you can mad libs your whole rant to paint you as the asshole.

It seems to fit better with "winner take all" instead of "first-mover advantage"

Oh yeah he asserted that question so hard. unf.

The Dyson ones I've seen have only ever shot cold air on my hands and pushed my hands against both sides of the dryer. Maybe they've been horribly misconfigured at all 3+ places I've seen them at, but in my experience they've just been less effective and less sanitary than both traditional air dryers and paper towels.

I don't think they allow, expect, or calculate an unbounded positive as t->infinity. I don't expect we'll get caught in a local minimum - we've done a decent job breaking out of them when the individuals involved haven't had nearly as much at stake...

The article talks about extending suffering, not life. Few people who think they will live forever expect to do so wheezing with every breath.

Shakespeare's sonnets are artfully composed, and I'd say we've done a decent job of keeping them around and finding uses for them.

I'm a hypothetical poor person, so I must feed myself on cheap subsidized carbohydrates, which leave me feeling hungry, or eat an amount that sates me after working one to two normal jobs and taking care of zero to more children, which conveniently is an amount that will contribute to my obesity. Helpfully, my busy schedule lets me eat one big meal a day instead of several smaller meals.

The problem is that personal responsibility is disproportionately more expensive for poor people - they don't have the time or the money to do it right, and when they do manage an attempt, equal results will cost more time and much more % income.

It might be clearer if you just said the first lifetime $500k will cost you $60k in taxes and your next $500k would cost you $75k in taxes.

A hypothetical situation where this works out:

Torrent site serves up 1000 pirated DVDs, making $20 in the process. Only 1 out of those 1000 pirates would pay the $10 required to buy a DVD [1]. Assuming as little as 2 cents of consumer value per pirated DVD, this scenario has generated $10 more income for 'businesses' and $10 more consumer surplus.

Zynga copies a game that would have had 1000 customers otherwise. They're Zynga, so they get 1500 customers and the original creators get 100. Unfortunately, this makes the game unprofitable for the original creators and the development dollars Zynga had to spend copying the game are not offset by the 600 extra players they generated. Furthermore, this game is seen as a substitutable good- no real consumer value is generated when Coke is drunk instead of Pepsi.

(Honestly, I think consumer surplus is the intuitive reason people support file lockers and not Zynga. They're probably right.)

[1] This is the only conversion rate I've seen people give actual numbers for. Citation available if requested.

The article's "At the end of one sprint, a QA dude was complaining about the drop rate of a specific item being absurdly insane, and therefore UnFun. I looked at the code, and tweaked some values, gave it back to QA guy, and fun was restored. Product Manager overrides this, goes for unfun, yet more profitable version." speaks against your "and users can be happy again."

Kept adventure gaming alive? There have been plenty of great adventure games since 2001, but this article was mostly about life support...

(It's also always worth mentioning the continuing interactive fiction, the precursor for adventure games. http://pr-if.org/play/ is a good starting place.)

So are buildings.

If there aren't enough startups solving problems, there's room in the portfolio for a few "$BCs".

On some level, yes, but companies don't magic employees into existence. It doesn't matter too much if the Go language comes out of Dogpile or Pets.com instead of Google, does it?

I can definitely see that Google is more likely to foment transformation than a Yahoo, but I think it's a lot harder to say that we're better off with fewer acquisitions. It seems like the only good metric is number of good employees at good companies, and it doesn't matter much if it's Google or a company that decided not to get acquired by Google. (Although I don't think it'd be that great if Google were the only 'good company' in this hand wavy metric.)

But what Valve is doing is an improvement over the status quo, and social games are a regression from the status quo. TF2, by and large, didn't get worse by letting more people play it for less money - lots of value was created, and Valve is content to only capture a small* amount that came along for the ride.

*Many games that have gone F2P (in a generally benign way) report increasing revenues, e.g., Lord of the Rings Online, D&D Online, etc.

There's a meaningful distinction between 'pay to play' "can't wait" farmville, 'pay to play' random drop, tradeable, gameplay-available goods a la tf2, 'pay to play' cosmetics a la tf2 hats and hon skins, and 'pay to play' in-game advantages a la a lot of Korean MMOs and HoN's early-access hero stuff. Valve is toeing the line, HoN is straddling it, and Korean MMOs and "social" games have thumbed their nose at it.

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."

Do the 10% of applicants you want somehow not fall under sales or development?

One of the benefits of being on a team is that you just need one guy to know how to do all of that and everyone gets the benefit.

Perhaps some modifications to /bestcomments would ameliorate the need for visible comment scores as a consumption guide. A tiny star or somesuch that linked to the /bestcomments page would seem to fit natural use pretty well.

Meta-comment follows:

Would you have replied if comment scores were displayed?

You should consider the timescale and degree as well. A billion generations of AI will pass in the relative blink of an eye, allow for no response, and in almost every failure case will irrevocably destroy everything humans value.

GMO happens slower and is somewhat more manageable.

The internet sales tax honor system is more of an oner system. You have to go out of your way to do all the bookkeeping yourself to reward unwarranted rent-seeking.

Forgive my statistical ignorance, but isn't this form of cheating easily remedied by substituting a different class of characteristic functions?

If a different class of functions doesn't exist, it seems like your classmates just had better study material.

(I'm thinking about a calculus test with a previously unseen e^x. Wouldn't knowing the answer from looking at a previous year's test be more akin to 'learning' than 'cheating'?)

I'm not trying to argue, I was simply trying to discover how much he thought popularity matters. If he figured van Gogh was unimportant, it'd be pointless to try to convince him that sometimes having companies doing interesting things is worthwhile.

(On another note, is Mac OS 9 valuable now? Will it become more valuable eventually? Should Apple just have closed shop since they had a small marketshare and a product that isn't valuable now? Could the lessons learned from the Newton have possibly been applied to make some other kind of consumer device?)