ecuzzillo

Uh.

Well, we know there have been more-than-several high-profile moves from Google to Facebook.

How many high-profile moves have there been from Facebook to Google?

The idea with this kind of thing, as far as I can tell, is to be as nuts (i.e. risk-friendly) as you can possibly get away with. If you're never wrong, that's probably an indicator that you could get away with being a lot more nuts.

Moreover, if you do pump a startup and you are wrong, then to explain the situation is often to piss all over the work of said startup.

Toyota's stock is probably undervalued to begin with because of the stupid pedal thing, and this probably makes it extreme. Short-term traders need not apply, though.

Related: http://www.tlb.org/busywork.html

The point was that at that time the brand was in need of rejuvenation, as it had been neglected.

Nowadays, I think everybody would agree that the brand is quite healthy, so the problem is to remind people that there are new shiny things under this shiny brand, which they should buy right now.

So make it download by torrent transparently like (IIRC) Starcraft.

I think the last argument is misframed. If you want to sell software on a tablet device, you can do it through Android, iOS, or probably a couple other ways. Apple's claim, presumably, is that the quality of iOS, the App Store, and of the hardware that runs iOS, adds at least that much value over Android. And, given how much more money people make on iOS apps compared to Android apps, they're probably right.

The argument about subscription issues is related but more complicated.

Pieces of software basically never exist in a vacuum; they're always connected to other pieces of software and hardware (compilers, processors, graphics cards, phones, OSs, libraries, web services, ...). Other pieces of software and hardware always change, and if there's no one home improving this particular piece of software, it will invariably lose pieces of functionality, one by one, as they change to be incompatible with how they were before or disappear entirely because they lost to a competitor or turned out to be a bad idea.

Users know this instinctively, which is why a website that never changes loses users quickly.

I don't go on reddit often enough to have any idea about the uptime, but out of curiosity, do you think there's anything that could give someone the impression it was worse recently?

CS+math from CMU. The OS class there is transformative; the other stuff is often good, but I wouldn't evangelize to anyone to take anything other than the OS class. It's been rumored that people have been hired because they passed OS; passing might be an exaggeratedly low bar, but it's in that ballpark.

I agree with you that people are really bad at concurrency, but I disagree that it's that hard once you get used to it.

Once you deal with one large deep difficult highly concurrent project, you get used to the idea that when there are threads and mutexes involved you have to think REALLY HARD about how it should work, and you can't rely on just trying something and testing it like you can with normal code. And if you do that, you can get threads to work pretty reliably, not just by chance.

This made something click for me: I hear all the time about how a) technology makes people's lives better, but b) people's lives in the US seem to be sucking a lot lately. The sucking, this theory would predict, is due to people having their jobs obviated by technology, but then being screwed out of the good part of that technology, directly or indirectly, by phone companies with monopolies who conspire to charge by the gigabyte and therefore deny the wider economy the benefit of technological improvement.

(This is not to say that a 50-year-old who gets laid off would feel better if he had cheaper internet access. The effects of cheaper internet access overall, though, seem like they would end up producing cheaper food and other costs in the end, too.)

No, that's an example of stealing an object. Stealing an object is fundamentally not the same as telling someone something, even if it's something you didn't want them to say. This is why your example induces an obvious ethical reaction, whereas the original example induces a much more complicated one.

The better example is, you found out where her long-lost cousin lived, some guy eavesdropped, and HE told her where said cousin lived, and she jumped into HIS arms and drove off into the sunset. You are not now without an object that you formerly owned; you just planned to exploit a scarcity of information that no longer exists, and you're mad about it.

You also feel cheated because you were the one that did all the work to find her cousin, and he got all the benefit. That doesn't make it the same as stealing a car.

But in this case, the information was actually of little value, but because there was a scarcity of information in the first place, the FBI would have been none the wiser.

The ethics of spreading information are complicated. Oversimplifying them by comparing them to the ethics of stealing physical objects is wrong and bad.

Yeah, but the real flesh-and-blood human beings receiving the dollars, his point is, are not really people whom most people are all that interested in randomly giving dollars to, like starving people in Africa; they're government bureaucrats who often end up serving to make dollar-givers' lives more difficult.

Pioneered by TechStars? Really?

Er, sorry, accidental downmod from 4 to 3, intended upmod to 5.

Dangerous? Really? What is in danger of happening? A bunch of startups failing?

Seriously, I don't understand that part. I'm not sure I understand your main point either, come to think of it. Non-web software matters? I don't think that was disputed.

Web software doesn't deserve the focus it gets on HN because it almost always starts out sans business model, and then half of the population never figures it out, and the other half does, and of that half, 2/3 fail to execute? If anything, that's a description of a pretty exciting, if somewhat high-variance, domain.

This is not exactly true. Universities subscribe en masse to these things for presumably exorbitant fees, but the result is that everybody in the university has access and doesn't notice the evil in these institutions, and continues to publish in them. So what it ensures is that your work will be ignored by everyone outside the ivory tower, which is arguably worse, since it gives the impression that your work is important, when anybody who might actually do anything useful with it is screwed.

Probably the one vector that work does have from the ivory tower to the real world is via people, when they transfer from one to the other, or have one foot in each side, and can transfer ideas and PDFs from the ivory tower to the real world, and can transfer motivations for new ideas from the real world to the ivory tower. Bridge-people like these are some of the most admirable people in academia, in my opinion, and also in my opinion produce by far the best papers.

(I am therefore trying to be one of them, sort of, although I'm not really interested in actually writing papers, since to get it published (and therefore have it count officially as a 'paper' instead of a PDF talking about what you did) you have to write a variable amount of obfuscatory bullshit.)

I have access to probably everything you want through a university VPN; if you really want a given paper, email me a link to it and I'll email back the PDF. I can't scale this solution, but I figure I'll do what I can.

Iran's top people have been established to desire the destruction of Israel at minimum, and they can't fathom the destruction of the US, but if they could, I'm pretty sure they would want that too. So, at minimum, they would want to do shit like this to Israel if they remotely had the capability. My impression is that they don't have remotely the brain-capital to do so.

The Iran political situation is not exactly about to topple, but it's not the most stable situation in the world, either. Four-plus years is a really long time when we're talking about the CIA's/US's/Israel's ability to topple a potentially vulnerable regime.

It actually honestly depends. If you have lived in a given city long enough that most of your friends also live in said city, FB gets bonus points. If you extrapolate into the future for Google sucking even more than it does now, Google loses points. Yelp is crap in the first place (taking bribes etc).

So if plumbers are like mechanics and you have to find one that's happy and good and trustworthy, you might actually be more likely to ask your friends than Google, especially if Google is a corporate spamwhore.

I didn't actually intend it to be a stupid joke; I was actually trying to parse the word, and then it turned out I was in the middle of a redditesque joke thread. But, no, I doubt it, especially given the number of downmods.

My best guess is where you breathe "ultra" fucken tiny silica bits from a volcano.

Depending on demand vs. production, being first in line might mean a difference of weeks or even months in when you actually receive the phone.

Some clarifications:

1. Presumably you don't have to satisfy everything in each level to be considered satisfying that level; otherwise if your entire family dies in a plane crash, you can never achieve MH3 again, and if you never got MH5 before that, you're permanently fucked.

2. If you get to MH4, but then your town gets hit by a neutron bomb, killing your wife, family, and friends, you get your MH3 knocked out, but your MH1, MH2, and MH4 are all still intact (MH4 because you telecommute most of the time, so your career is intact). Are you immediately eligible for MH5, or do you have to regenerate your MH3 first?

3. Interesting corner case: Say you get to MH3 by virtue of being raised in a rich American family. At age 18, you fly somewhere to visit a college by yourself, and your entire city gets blown away by a neutron bomb. You now have no friends or family, but life insurance on your family pays off handsomely, so you are at MH2. You decide to become a soulless driven businessman, and you do fine; you get promoted, everybody respects your competence, you respect other people's competence, etc, but you have no friends and no companionship. It would appear that you have reached MH4, but you never got there while you had MH3; does this count as MH4? Or do you deny the possibility of this scenario? (I made it up, so that's perfectly valid.)

(These are not leading questions; I'm curious as to how the Maslow viewpoint deals with corner cases.)

This is not intended to exactly disagree: Many times when people cite the Maslow hierarchy, they often to take it as an axiom that the hierarchy is completely exactly how people work, and to lead better lives, people must go about fulfilling exactly these needs in this order.

As someone who presumably subscribes to the hierarchy, would you agree that you seem fairly certain that this is how it works? And, if so, can you say why?

At minimum, I'd say that it's not obvious to me that the order specified by the hierarchy is really in evidence. For example, I believe I've witnessed a fair number of people I'd say were self-actualized and esteemed who are fairly short on the friendship/family/sexual-intimacy front.

Nobody thought Google could control the web. That wasn't the claim. The claim was, Google was sufficiently badass in 2005 that for any given idea, you got asked if this is so great, why can't Google notice it and do it faster better stronger. There were reasons that it couldn't for some ideas, obviously. But for others, like Kiko, it could and did.

Yes there was. In 2005, when you founded a startup, you had to explain why Google couldn't smoosh you by cloning you and integrating with Gmail. And, moreover, they did exactly that to Kiko. Now that's not really the foremost question in people's minds.

I believe the normal use case is to stick a Hello Kitty sticker to any smartphone.