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The masters thesis is the first one, but the intercultural study was in my undergraduate thesis which is only available in person. Let me know if you would like to see it, and we can meet up in the real world.

magicsethon What is magic?

Recently, in the tech and geek community, I've noticed a backlash towards magic. I understand it in the contexts of the rejection of blind faith and superstition, but I think it fails to recognize the larger scope of the word magic.

I did a cross-cultural developmental psychology experiment on the way children think about magic. In brief, children in the USA showed an inverse correlation between their ability to understand something and their attribution of magic (i.e. if they didn't know how something worked, it was magic, and vice versa). In Mexico, I found that the correlation was not so mutually exclusive, children were willing to attribute things to magic, even if they knew how it worked.

Understanding magic not as something distinct from science, but as something that is the realm of things which you can explore to understand better is, in my opinion, a better way to frame the debate. Telling someone to stop believing in magic because no such thing exists is unlikely to change their belief system. Encouraging them to explore magic, and seek to understand it and find the magic in everything around them, has a greater chance of spurring them into a more inquisitive frame of mind.

The theory of Wonder I developed for my masters thesis posits that wonder is an emotional trigger that positively rewards us for finding things that we can't explain. The evolutionary basis for this is that the more things you find that break your world view, the more likely you will learn something to new that will positively effect your ability to survive. This could explain people's fascination with magic: we have an innate drive to find the things that baffle us, an internal reward system for experiencing wonder.

I could go on about this for days, so I'll just stop now.

magicsethon Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee weighs in: There’s Danger in the Filter Bubble

I think the argument is much more nuanced. The danger isn't inherently in the filters themselves, it is in the way they shape people's beliefs unknowingly. Understanding that these filters exist give you the ability to start to think about how your beliefs may be being modified. The next step is empowering users to change these filters, modify them, so that if they /want/ to, they can use these filters, or they could switch them, to experience the opposite side of the story.

Again though, the first step is to acknowledge and raise awareness.

magicsethon Automatic Login Links

If you can assume that your users will most likely use the same computer, you can make this technique slightly more secure. Have the random link only log you in if the device is recognized as one that has logged in with a password before. Combine this with two levels of "logged in-ness" and you have a pretty robust, easy to use system.

magicsethon Google’s Les Paul Doodle consumes record 5.3M hours, RescueTime estimates

I'm cross posting because I was late to the discussion last time, but the audio is stereo and is based on where on the string you strum. I found that a nice little detail.

magicsethon Google: Les Pauls 96th birthday

Talk about attention to detail: if you have headphones you can tell that the audio shifts from left to right, based on where your mouse is. Try different spots on the long string in the middle for the best effect.

magicsethon Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (June 2011)

Mountain View, CA: Bump Technologies really wants to hire YOU, but we're having too much late night fun at our hackathon to tell you more! Drop us a line, and we'll call you when we take a break.

http://bu.mp/jobs

magicsethon Poll: Should HN display comment scores?

Perhaps not showing you your own comment scores would help. Only logged in people could see scores, and you don't see your own. Sure you could sign in as another account, but if you are willing to do that, then there's not much we can do from stopping you being a troll.

magicsethon Javascript Bitcoin Miner

On my machine with chrome, I had to open it up in 4 separate tabs in order to peg all of my cores. It got pretty warm pretty quickly.

magicsethon The answer is π^2/6: What’s the question?

Here's one: How do you express the number of digits that exist in any given base, in that base?

magicsethon Tl;dr.js summarizes hn articles, and hn comments in your browser

This is just a quick hack that pulls out the "best" or most information dense sentences from an article and shows them to you. Any suggestions or forks are welcome.

magicsethon Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (May 2011)

Mountain View, CA Intern, Full Time. http://bit.ly/mP3WAh

Bump (http://bu.mp) is looking to grow all of our teams! We are looking for backend server and ops wizards, as well as front end Android and iPhone people. We've also got some pretty fun HTMLn projects (for some values of n).

It is a great place to work with lots of camaraderie, hard work, and lots of fun including quad copters ski trips and some awesome hackathons.

The team is still small enough that you will have an opportunity to touch any area you find interesting, and you are guaranteed to have a big impact.

Join us!

http://bit.ly/mP3WAh

magicsethon Log2 ( (distance to moon) / (thickness of paper) )

This makes me wish wolfram alpha were social. I'd love to be able to have a conversation about interesting formula and results.

magicsethon "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"

In the minds of many people, Amazon is the most well known, and respected cloud provider. Their outage is merely a reminder that the one big difference between cloud services and in-house services is, I can't control it. Of course the probability that Amazon will have better uptime than you is pretty high for most people, but you have no recourse when there is a problem.

magicsethon The Team

This is very reminiscent of "Spotlight" from Pattie Maes research group at the MIT Media Lab, a performance piece from 2005 (http://web.media.mit.edu/~orit/spotlight.html). They used a similar model to model interesting human interactions like yawn contagiousness as well.

magicsethon Show HN: I made an Android app that gives you an extra phone number to give out

Fantastic. It's really hard to come up with a good pricing scheme. I've found that simple is better than cheap. If you can figure out a flat rate, or some other scheme that doesn't make me have to do math, I'm much likelier to join.

magicsethon Caltrain July Proposed Service Changes

This is seriously disconcerting. As someone just considering moving into San Francisco, and using Caltrain to commute to work, it makes me have serious second thoughts.

magicsethon Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (February 2011 Edition)

Bump (Mountain View, CA)

Come work with me!!! I do iPhone magic at Bump.

We are hiring lots of positions in iPhone, Android, Web Dev (HTML etc), Systems Engineerings, Algorithms, and Designer positions too.

http://bu.mp/jobs

magicsethon Show HN: Pocket - my first app ever

How about replacing that image of the sign up form on your first page with... The actual sign up form? It should be simple enough and also reduce friction.

magicsethon SVG: The best way to graph quantitative data

Ironically, Adobe used to be the biggest supporter of SVG... before they purchased Flash. Their svg renderer was by far the best in the field at the time, and supported lots of wonderful features, including great ECMAscript (Javascript), had the ability to build AJAX-like interactions using remote requests, and was fundamentally awesome.

It never made it out of beta and got killed when Flash became Adobe's new sweetheart. Very sad.

magicsethon Bump (YC S09) Raises $16 Million Round Led By Andreessen Horowitz

Indeed, you can now share with any other user you are friends with, whether or not you are physically near each other.

magicsethon Bump (YC S09) Raises $16 Million Round Led By Andreessen Horowitz

In my opinion, as a Bump developer, a lot of the negative comments reflect our biggest problem: branding. In many people's minds, Bump is a nothing but a contact-sharing app. Long ago contacts were eclipsed by the many other types of things that Bump lets you share. The people who are downloading the app are using it in ways that we couldn't imagine when building initial version. The app's "gimmick" of bumping is still an incredibly useful, and admittedly fun, way of establishing a connection between two strangers, or even two of your own devices.

Obviously, my views are biased, but it is quite clear to me (and our users) that Bump is more than just a contact-sharing app.

magicsethon Bump (YC S09) Raises $16 Million Round Led By Andreessen Horowitz

Bump is YC09, for those who don't know.

magicsethon Use Scratch to Easily Program Household Appliances

Scratch is starting to take off. It is a pretty powerful paradigm not just because of its visual nature, but also because of the ease with witch you can "play" with your code, and see, in real time, the results. Here is an example used for design: http://designblocks.net/ .

Taking the fear out of programming, making it tinkerable, is hugely valuable. Not to mention the emphasis on creation and story telling that it is designed for. Breaking it out into the real world is a wonderful way to make the computer more than just software.

magicsethon Trimensional: 3D Scanner for iPhone

I tried it this morning in the pitch black. It worked pretty well. The effect was mostly comical with some distortion. The most interesting aspect is how people are taking all these things that at first pass would be considered "impossible," applying some ingenuity and hard work to them, and pushing the limits of this technology.

magicsethon Trimensional: 3D Scanner for iPhone

Might I suggest using the Bump API to share scans?

magicsethon Show HN our weekend project: an email based productivity log

It's funny how similar in implementation this could be to OhLife, and yet how different a feeling it has. It is really interesting to take the exact same technology, put a different story in front of it, and be amazed the entire new audience you have just discovered.

magicsethon Redis site now implements interactive examples with embedded live Redis cli

I just ran "MGET key1" and it returned "FOOBAR". Has this happened to anyone else?

magicsethon Google Latitude on iPhone became a competitor of my app, what should I do?

The best thing to do is to keep innovating. I assume you are not as large as Google, and therefore have the ability to move faster.

Think about what your assumptions are about what your software can and should do. List them out, and really critically re-evaluate them. I am certain you can come up with something everyone in this game is taking for granted, flip a bit, and outdo the competition.

For example rethink the concept of sharing your location NOW. What happens if your app instead tracks you over time, creating a heat map of your territories/areas, and can predict where you will be going based on past trends. Now you are doing something even more interesting with a much larger market. Involve the user in predicting/changing the location behavior and you may find a much larger audience than you were ever expecting.

There's a million ways to go, make your own way up if you want to!

magicsethon Programmer Competency Matrix: Do you use it when hiring?

There are several things missing from this matrix that I think are super important. One is communication ability, the other is learning.

I really don't care about most things on that list, as long as someone has the ability to grasp the concepts, the tools and experience to learn the things that are relevant, and few bad habits. Obviously someone down the left column is going to take longer to come on board, and it may be an indication of an inability or unwillingness/lack of motivation.