sedev

This is not to say that I like that state of affairs - I agree with Keynes when he says "Nothing corrupts society more than to disconnect effort and reward." The fact that in the average company, effort and reward are distantly and indirectly related, I claim is a major, major, social and moral problem. That state of affairs corrodes the rule of law and attacks the stability of a society. Stability is a prerequisite to entrepreneurs getting interesting things done - remember the recent article here about Argentinian entrepreneurs and the crippling effects of a currency that collapses every decade or two? Stability means, to pull from PG's essays again, that honest accumulations of wealth won't be plundered. Stability of that sort is a prerequisite to rewarding entrepreneurship - and that sort of stability is disappearing in the US, generally on account of the very same people who are responsible for disconnecting effort and reward at typical corporations. The financier class (and the political class that they have purchased - in this regard, the last four US Presidents are clones of one another) is eating everyone's seed corn. That's deeply harmful to those of us who want to have our labor judged by the market, because without stability and the rule of law, it is impossible for markets to operate efficiently.

As for filters - I admire the woman in the story, because she is a great example of the entrepreneurial mindset.

1: Attempt to achieve your goal by conventional means (call police).

2: Actually notice that conventional means will not get you what you want.

3: Come up with an alternate plan (DIY sting operation).

4: Execute fearlessly.

I argue that those four steps, broadly, are what a good startup founder does.

That narrative is usually an easy ticket to the front page of HN.

"introduced a significantly improved about:memory page with buttons that can manually trigger garbage collection (GC) and cycle collection (CC)... hitting these buttons repeatedly — or by hitting “Minimize memory usage”, which triggers both processes three times in a row — you can reduce Firefox 6′s memory footprint significantly."

Really? Really, guys? That is a wincingly strong code smell. Why is it necessary to press the button more than once? Why is it necessary to press the button at all? I appreciate that it's hard to get all of this working correctly, but that's a clunker of a design - it tells me that this feature does not actually work, but instead kinda-sorta-maybe works. Something like that should, pardon the cliché, Just Work - it is way out of the scope of things you should have to care about while browsing.

I mean, if they end up throwing out business-method patents, I'm all for it, but it's very sad that this is yet another political problem whose legislative resolution will be completely unrelated to the merits of the issue. One would prefer a resolution where the best arguments, not the deepest pockets, win an argument.

What I think isn't that 'the site breaks with JS off' is inherently terrible. Some sites actually do require JS - but that's far fewer than the number that think that they require JS, and completely breaking with JS off is a very distinct code smell. It says 'this person does not sweat the details.'

However, yes, it's easier to game the numbers when the volume of reviews is low. That's an ongoing problem - for everyone.

Also, I have to laugh that the UrbanTag folks approvingly cite the complaint that existing reviews sites are "giving customers “the upper hand” in determining an establishment’s reputation." Well, yes, they are. That's the point. That power has always rested in customers' hands, because that's what reputation is: what other people think of you. You can work on your reputation and "manage" it and "optimize" it, but if it's not what other people think, it's not reputation. Business owners neither need nor deserve control over other people's opinions - look at those asshole doctors that were linked here a while back, forcing customers to sign agreements that amounted to "we can sue you for posting a negative review of us on Yelp."

As for unreasonable customers: that's nearly as overblown as the threat of piracy, and if your business can't deal with unreasonable customers gracefully (not the same as caving and giving them what they ask for), you deserve to go out of business.

Android is certainly going to help Java remain relevant, but this is another example of how it isn't highly compatible with the entrepreneurial mindset. The Android app ecosystem isn't as good at rewarding independent app developers as the iOS app ecosystem is. So people who, in entrepreneurial fashion, want to be judged by the market, will probably make iOS apps because that's where the money is. I argue that that'll produce a 'brain drain' away from Java - Java will be the language a day job makes you use, and something else will be the language you use for projects that you care about.

The projects that people care about, in the long run, are far higher-quality code than the projects that they only do for a paycheck.

Think of it the way Bruce Schneier would: what could a malicious person accomplish with this technology? There's no effective way to keep it out of their hands, so you need to know what happens when someone tries to use this technique for malicious ends. The security implications of this are just nasty, nasty, nasty.

Never count on a reporter to act in good faith any more than you would count on that from the police or from a lawyer. They will disembowel you.

This advice is much less applicable, happily, to technical publications in your field, or to 'citizen journalism,' but you still have to be cautious there. The major difference is that with technical publications or citizen journalists, you may have some actual leverage, and they may have some idea what you're talking about. You have no leverage, as a specialist, over the NYT, so they don't care what harm they do to you - what the heck are you going to do to them? And the average reporter for, say, Fox News, doesn't know what the heck, say, Bruce Schneier is talking about. They are worse than laypeople, actually, because they have an incentive to misunderstand.

Don't talk to the mainstream media. They will lie to you, and they are not your friends.

http://www.apdaweb.org/guide/rules

There are other good points in this thread about PayPal's risk mitigation model. I think that this basically deepens the parallel to Google. When the service works, it's genuinely great - that's part of why they're such a dominant force. The problem is that when it breaks, generally it breaks in horrid ways. People like the HN crowd, who are strongly disposed towards trying to do new things that previous models may not account for, are the most likely to find cases where the system breaks, and to suffer the effects of the breakage.

* Banks are still shitty and unwilling to actually compete, so Paypal has its market all to itself.

* Because Paypal does not fear disruption or competition, it is not worth their time to invest in good customer service. They know you're stuck.

This is pretty much the same as the stories about trying to get customer service from Google. There are no effective competitors - so, their accountants and shareholders say, who the fuck cares if customers complain? What are they going to do, go to someone else? Doing so would harm the customers more than it would harm the company that they are abandoning.

I use the phrase "not worth their time" even though it implies things about the employees of the company which are not true - I use it because it is true of the company itself as an entity. It's a corporation - it's a sociopath. So it is basically incapable of providing good customer service as long as the return on investment of good customer service is negative, epsilon, or invisible. The employees, as people, probably do want to provide good customer service! But when it comes down to the human, humane desires of a corporation's employees conflicting with the sociopathic requirements of the corporation itself, we only need a brief look at the history of commerce in America. Put your money on the corporation's interests winning every time.

PayPal (and Google) will keep giving customers the finger until the thought of customers leaving actually scares them.

This is the tradeoff: "if you are willing to invest your time, mental energy, and vigilance into bending your device to your will, avoiding traps such as mention in the article, and doing upkeep, a Linux-based device will give you enormous and awesome capabilities, leveraging the full power of having a general-purpose computer in your pocket."

I am glad that that's available, because for some people, that's a great tradeoff! But it's important that there be another tradeoff available, which iOS is currently the flagship of: "if you are willing to accept more limited capabilities, you can have those capabilities in a form that Just Works and does not require your vigilance, time, and mental energy."

I propose that the market share of Android and iOS roughly reflect the number of people for whom each of these tradeoffs, is the one they want. Of course we may want different things at different times - but when we buy these devices, we are voting with our dollars as to which tradeoff, overall, serves us best. I hope that both retain vigorous market share, because different people are best served by different tradeoffs.