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morrow

155 karma · joined January 13, 2011

terry.morrow [at] gmail
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morrow··on How does Hammacher Schlemmer survive in the age of Amazon?
I say it survives by providing the same benefit that Amazon does: a reduction in cognitive overhead.

With Amazon, the reduction comes from the streamlined buying process - you provide your name, address, billing info, shipping info up front, thereby eliminating the overhead of that task from future purchases. It's also a one-stop shop, you don't have to think if they will have an item you want, as 9 times out of 10 they carry a version of what you are looking for.

With Hammacher Schlemmer, the reduction comes from not having to do really any research about products before purchasing. They offer a limited selection of tested products, so you do not have to consider alternative products, sellers, shipping methods, reviews, and are not susceptible to accidentally ordering a counterfeit product. The catalog format is also approachable, you can pick it up and read it and "window shop" without knowing exactly what you want or need.

So I would say not really laziness, just a shift in cognitive overhead from the product purchasing process to the product research process.

morrow··on The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
I have done a few flash to HTML5 conversions without source code, and the method I've gone with is just to use the flash as a guide and write the HTML5 app from scratch. You end up with cleaner, more maintainable code that way than if you were to throw it into a converter and try to sort out what comes out, and it can end up taking the same amount of time as trying to fix whatever the converter came up with in the end. Do you have any links to the flash products? Might be worth putting what you have in a GitHub repo and see who can contribute. Maybe try https://www.codetriage.com/ as well. If you end up doing either, let me know and I'll try to help :)
morrow··on Money can be stolen from an Uber account
The exact same thing happened to Alex Blumberg in this episode of Reply All: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/91-the-russian-passenger/. They investigate and try to find out how his account could have possibly been hijacked with 2FA enabled.
morrow··on Instapainting Turns Your Photos Into Hand-Painted Oil Paintings On The Cheap
I'm in agreement with the parent comment - I was interested, but the examples were a little off-putting. I'd consider removing the baby one or posting a different angle.
morrow··on Man Supposedly Flies With Custom-Built Bird Wings
It's quite obviously fake -- given that we are 11 days from April Fools, it's probably either an April Fools joke discovered prematurely, or set-up for a bigger one. Maybe something similar to the tale of icarus.
morrow··on Aziz Ansari releases DRM-free standup special for $5
Disagree completely -- the world has plenty of office workers scared to try something so bold, we need better filtering tools and more people trying rather than believing that the current system works to capture, foster, and utilize talent properly.

I think we do way too much stifling as a society as it is, and a lot of that has to do with people who gave up on their dreams for a safe existence justifying their decision by ridiculing others who dare to take risks.

morrow··on Woz supports Mike Daisey's message and says you should too
I thought he did a good job too, but I think that lying at all, even about little details in order to have a more coherent, compelling story about an important topic poisons the whole thing, because it brings into question the author's credibility. You have to decide for yourself when he's finished lying and is now telling the truth.

In this particular case, I think it's safe to just take his story as fiction (even though some of it is true), since there are plenty of other journalists covering the same topic. It's just a shame that he felt he couldn't just tell Ira from the beginning what was storytelling and what was reporting, since his piece was so well done, and he really did not need to mislead or lie in order to be compelling.

morrow··on The House Y Combinator Should Have Built
Very nice design, the layout, with common areas below meeting areas, reminds me of Pixar's headquarters http://www.bcj.com/public/projects/project/39.html

I remember hearing in the excellent pixar documentary that one of the intentions behind this layout was to facilitate random interactions among employees, all sharing a common, open walkway.

morrow··on IPad Event Confirmed: Apple Invites Press to 'Touch' Something
I noticed that the bubbles had a unique-looking arrangement in the march 7 announcement photo, so I (crudely) compared it to an iPad 2 with that wallpaper in both landscape and portrait modes. Doing so seems to indicate that it is indeed oriented in portait mode: http://imgur.com/a/gbjyr
morrow··on Tesla responds to "bricking" issue
These (apparent) e-mails between an owner with the dead battery issue and Tesla seem to indicate that there is a a 'built-in notification system' for this, but it wasn't added for the first 500 cars : http://jalopnik.com/5887504/tesla-emails-gallery/gallery/1
morrow··on W3C Proposal from MS, Google, Netflix for adding copy protection API to html5
I think the penalties associated with using plugins is simply the price DRM advocates should have to pay. I don't think it's the job of the W3C to make it easier on them to maintain this practice. The short-term gain of getting large media players on-board is outweighed by the long-term prolonging of the life of DRM and delaying the advancement of social norms and business practices for media distribution, consumption and ownership.

Looking at the companies that control media today and trying to mold the environment of the web so that they survive is exactly backwards. Instead, I think the W3C should focus on creating the best environment for an open web possible, and let the companies that exist now adapt to it or be replaced by those who can.

morrow··on Show HN: Hackershelf. Community curated collection of legally free books
Okal, I added that resource, though you may want to consider truncating the author listing like you are doing with the description on the index page (this book had ~40 authors).

Great job on the site, and thanks for making it - I've already added several books to my shelf.

morrow··on Show HN: Hackershelf. Community curated collection of legally free books
FYI - I just added 'On Lisp', but the registration button is at the top right, called 'Signup'.
morrow··on "Small-claims flash mob" - Car owner takes legal fight away from lawyers
Google did this, but it wasn't recently -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=505255
morrow··on Show HN: 300x288 pixel clock using HTML5 canvas and Javascript
I too made a canvas clock (though with a heavier dose of existentialism) a little while ago if you're interested.

link: http://morrow.github.com/Life-Clock/

code: https://github.com/morrow/Life-Clock/

morrow··on Instant CSS, JS, HTML or DOM documentation
I created a similar project (CSS docs only) after seeing the original version of this posted here and thinking of some improvements (instacss I think it was called). My version uses the HTML5 history API and runs off of static files (scraped with ruby). If anyone is interested:

http://morrow.github.com/CSS-Reference

https://github.com/morrow/CSS-Reference

morrow··on Regretsy Issue Resolution
I've used stripe and it's definitely a breath of fresh air, but as I understand it, most people won't bother switching away from paypal to something without international support. Stripe's working on that: https://stripe.com/global but otherwise there isn't a good international alternative to paypal at the moment.
morrow··on Show HN: 300x288 pixel clock using HTML5 canvas and Javascript
Not to get too analytical or philosophical, but I think it's because clocks normally represent time cyclically, as a repetitive process counting and displaying a sub-set of an ethereal infinite time set. Whereas this clock visualizes time spatially in known, limited, diminishing quantities.

The depressing part is either that this forces you to realize or reminds you that time is, in fact, limited -- or that it tricks you into thinking time isn't infinite, depending on your philosophy.

morrow··on New Color.com
You have to wait to post replies sometimes, depending how many levels down the conversation is. This is a safeguard against threads full of knee-jerk back-and-forth responses, I suppose.
morrow··on Dwolla: transactions under $10 are free
Here's a screencast I found that shows how transactions go down between dwolla users (you enter amount, dwolla account id).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbf24_PTyx8

morrow··on Amit Gupta hasn't found a marrow transplant match; today's your last chance.
Good point. You could also realistically eliminate those who know they are infected from the potential false-negative category, which would give you an initial pool of 240,000[1] potential infected who don't know they're infected. Among them there is a 3% chance of non-response within 3 months to antibody testing, for a total of 7,200 false-negative potential candidates out there among 309,000,000 total Americans. Then consider the 1 in 20,000 odds [2] of being a match, and you end up with a false-negative match rate of 0.00117 per million people (according to wolfram alpha [3]).

I probably screwed something up, but in any case you are definitely right that the false-negative odds are very low among all potential applicants. Really makes the argument against seem foolish.

1) http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57333212-10391704/cdc...

2) http://www.organtransplants.org/understanding/marrow/

3) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%281%2F20000%29++*+%...

morrow··on Amit Gupta hasn't found a marrow transplant match; today's your last chance.
I'm also aware of the statistics - roughly split between gays and heterosexuals. I think the problem lies more with the epistemological side of things. As the marrow registry, how do you know whether or not someone is gay? How do you know whether someone is HIV positive? Only one of these questions actually matters for donors, and only one of them is scientifically testable.

I'd agree with people who are okay with profiling if there wasn't a reliable test for HIV, or if there weren't enough resources to test for it, but I haven't found any evidence for either of those potential claims.

morrow··on Amit Gupta hasn't found a marrow transplant match; today's your last chance.
From wikipedia: "The vast majority of people (97%) have detectable antibodies by three months after HIV infection; a six-month window is extremely rare with modern antibody testing."

So if the transfer can work with a 3 month delay (I'm not sure if it can, just assuming), and the HIV test comes back clean, you're going to have a 97% chance of a true-negative, 3% chance of false-negative.

At that point, comparing it to the odds that the "eliglble" donor is lying about their sexual activities or is simply HIV positive and heterosexual, the ban on letting gays register seems draconian, and a scientific test-based approach seems better all around.

Especially when you consider that if no donor is found, the patient could die anyway. So if the only donor is gay, test them, and then notify the patient of the 3% chance of contracting HIV from a false-negative patient versus the 100% odds of dying from Leukemia, and see what decision they make.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_test#cite_note-7

morrow··on Amit Gupta hasn't found a marrow transplant match; today's your last chance.
Well the STD test was only going to be able to rule-out donors who are positive at the time of sign-up anyhow. After submitting to the test and giving their sample, everyone becomes potentially infected until you test them again.

I suppose the idea is not to waste time and resources on ineligible donors, and it seems as though they've made the decision that profiling based on sexual orientation is the best balance between wasting time and resources tracking patients who are ineligible or will likely become ineligible and missing out on potential matches.

I just can't believe that an inclusive and scientific approach - don't profile, test at sign-up, test again at match - wouldn't yield more matches (and more positive goodwill, obviously). Then again I haven't seen the data...

morrow··on Happy Meal Ban: McDonald's Outsmarts San Francisco
I wonder if there is some political philosophy to describe my thoughts on this - but I never understood why government just didn't set up taxes on things it didn't like, and directly allocate the revenues from those taxes to the opposite side of whatever stance it took (versus going towards general expenses).

For example with this, tax the happy meal and other fatty kids foods, allocate revenues earned from that tax directly to childhood obesity prevention campaigns. McDonald's still makes money, kids still can get happy meals, and childhood obesity is reduced through funding effective programs.

morrow··on Amit Gupta hasn't found a marrow transplant match; today's your last chance.
I'm not sure why they wouldn't allow some form of in-person registration accompanied by an STD screen at a clinic for people who they are eliminating now for being too "high-risk"?

The marrow guys could even cover the cost of the STD screen for people who register for the program.

Seems to me this would be an even safer way of ensuring potential donors don't have HIV than just asking them about their sex lives...

morrow··on Amit Gupta hasn't found a marrow transplant match; today's your last chance.
http://marrow.org/Join/Join_in_Person/Recruitment_Centers.as...
morrow··on Amit Gupta hasn't found a marrow transplant match; today's your last chance.
Here's a start:

http://marrow.org/Join/Join_in_Person/Recruitment_Centers.as...

http://www.a3mhope.org/

http://www.a3mhope.org/index.php/donor/list-of-drives

morrow··on Amit Gupta hasn't found a marrow transplant match; today's your last chance.
"What am I doing to help any of those millions of starving children? Very little."

Feeling guilty isn't solving the problem, however. Guilt is just a pre-cursor to either resolve or apathy. If you don't do anything about it, you either get into a loop of guilt-> apathy-> guilt or you choose to ignore the problem (as you say your friends do).

Any action you take towards true progress for those in need, no matter how small, is good.

"The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step"

morrow··on Make YouTube better: preview ratings extension
I think the new youtube design that's still being rolled out looks better than cosmic panda, and this extension works with it.

If you want to try it, set the following cookie (and disable cosmic panda obviously):

    document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=ST1Ti53r4fU";
(From: http://www.redmondpie.com/heres-how-to-enable-the-new-youtub...)
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