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sedevon Great CEOs Must be Either Technical or Financial

I think that the article's still interesting, but I agree that there's a lot of room for the author to move the goalposts, which makes the article read as fluff.

I'd be far more interested in it if Mr. Rao had said "and now that I've said that, here's what my theory predicts about Steve Ballmer and Tim Cook, who are definitely both finance-oriented CEOs."

Also I'm fairly surprised to see this in Forbes: "In general CEOs are in an adversarial relationship with the investment community. If they are sincere about their jobs, they are in it to build long-term value in enduring companies that create real, as opposed to paper wealth. Investors generally want to simply create preferentially-predictable-to-them stock movements that they can take advantage of on their own personal wealth-building schedule, which has nothing to do with the fundamental time constants or market tempo of the company."

Did Forbes just notice that the financier class are parasites who are in an 'adversarial relationship' with people who actually create value? Pinch me!

sedevon Go to Trial - Crash the Justice System

History repeats itself: the tactic being advocated here worked pretty well for the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 20th century. Their tactic was to provoke authorities into arresting an IWW member (it helped that, then as now, the police are eager to arrest people who are insufficiently deferential, crime or no crime), then bring in hundreds of IWW members and others, flooding the jails. In the jails, they'd have a ready audience of other imprisoned activists to make contact with and could talk about the IWW's goals, tactics, and mission. So they won converts with every round of mass arrests.

sedevon Critical Google Chrome hole plugged in 24 hours

"To date, most successful attacks against Chrome exploit Adobe Flash, which is protected by a significantly more porous sandbox."

I notice that pretty much every time I read articles about Pwn2Own and similar. It's high time that Flash was abandoned as a ubiquitous part of the web. It is to web development as Outlook Express was to desktop software in the 90s - sure it's everywhere, but it's not doing much good by being so.

sedevon A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp

That right there: bingo - that's why I think that Yelp is coming out on top of this. They're delivering value to the website visitors/app users. Not that either company is a paragon of virtue, but compare Yelp to Apple and yourself to an iOS app developer and I suspect you'll have an accurate picture of who's where on the totem pole (cf Gruber: http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/nack_control ).

If Yelp were dedicated to making its advertisers happy, it would quickly become useless for its users.

sedevon A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp

Sure, disturbing if true. But restauranteurs keep saying that, and keep failing to prove it - critically, they fail to prove it under oath. [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp,_Inc.#Criticism_of_reviews is a good place to start digging, check their cites.

sedevon A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp

They're wrong not only for the reasons that I listed at the end of the post (the factors that make Yelp and Yelpalike business work, are not going their way) but also because they keep asking for the impossible. Yelp can't give venue owners the transparency they're asking for, because that means also giving them the information that they'd need to game the system. It's the same reason that Google only speaks in broad terms about its search updates: after a certain point, the information that you need to see to prove that the system is fair, is the exact same information that you need to see in order to exploit the system. So neither Google nor Yelp shows it, and I'm fine with that.

sedevon A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp

Yeah, I added a bit of a qualifier there to try to make it clear that I was talking about how humans read reviews - for all I know, Yelp reviews do algorithmically get less important over time. That'd be a smart thing to do.

sedevon A 1-star, unfiltered user review of Yelp

I wish the article headline had said that the piece was by a restauranteur. Most of what they have to say about Yelp falls under the heading of "more of the same."

I think that restaurant and venue owners are wrong to hate Yelp - but it's understandable that they do. The reasons that they do are interesting. My take on it is that Yelp is disruptive to a lot of the traditional restaurant practices. Restaurant owners resent Yelp because it feels like they're adding more work to what is already a job that requires 80-hour weeks. Previously, restaurant owners had more message control about their venue's location, because social information like "is the Foo Pizzeria any good?" had more friction, it spread more slowly, and it degraded over time.

A Yelp review has low friction because it gets automatically ingested into Yelp's data set, it spreads quickly, and it doesn't degrade over time - it stays around on the site. If you're a business with a small number of reviews, it doesn't take many one-stars to make you look unappealing, and Yelp's attempts to be user-friendly mean that you're presented among a crowd of your competitors unless you earn a clickthrough. Like being on a crowded shelf at the supermarket, you're at the mercy of the visitor.

One interpretation of this would be to say that restauranteurs' reaction is "Hey! Shouldn't my success be tied to what I do, not to what a stranger on the Internet inflicts on me?" That's a reasonable objection - and that's why Yelp has invested a shit-ton of engineer-hours into filtering reviews. Filtering reviews is something that benefits both restauranteurs and users - it's just that the former tend to be ungrateful pricks about it because "filtering" includes "removing algorithmically detectable friends-and-family five-star reviews." Which leads to the other big interpretation - that restauranteurs are reacting badly to their customers' newfound ability to hold them accountable. We humans are dumb monkeys with a truckload of cognitive biases: we hate being held accountable. I look at articles like this one and I see big parallels to other whiny people who suddenly are brought into accountability and are resisting it.

The thing is that the restauranteurs, like the MPAA or the newspaper industry, cannot win this one in the long term (at least not on the terms that they now use to define "winning"). There's no way to keep people from talking about your business. There's no way to keep people from talking about the things they enjoy. There's no way to keep people from taking the easy way - "I feel like pizza, I'll look it up on Yelp" - instead of a harder way - "I feel like pizza, let's see which of my friends knows where the pizzerias are around here, which of them are available, what their phone numbers and/or locations are, or I know, I could go get the huge inconvenient yellow pages and make a choice based on how much they spent on advertising!" Computing devices will get more convenient to use, not less, knowledge will get easier to share, not less, and the cost of querying the Internet's collective opinion will be cheaper, not more expensive. The restaurant and venue owners are never, ever going to win this the way they want to - again like the MPAA and newspapers, the cat is entirely out of the bag.

Basically what I think they should do about it is

* Stop whining

* Read Seth Godin

* Compete instead of sue

As an aside, I've found Yelp very useful over time with the addition of a few mental filters.

* Judge places by the review histogram, not by individual reviews

* Trust the collective opinion far more than individual reviews, especially for places with 100+ reviews

* Assume that anything at 3.5 stars or above is Good Enough, and use other sources when you want to have rarefied tastes catered to (Yelp started out as being mostly for foodies - I think it's moved out of that, and that if you are or desire to become a serious foodie, you should release yourself from caring about Yelp)

sedevon What HN users don't mean to be

I'd argue that "I don't mean to X ..." has actually fallen victim to the euphemism treadmill ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill ). It can still be used earnestly for its original meaning, but that usage has been overtaken by the usage where someone essentially says "I'm not racist but - " and then proceeds to make a racist remark. This leads to the situation that your parent comment points out.

Language, of course, varies, and we should keep in mind that some uses tend to crowd out others - but I definitely think that this is something like the euphemism treadmill at work.

sedevon How Not To Sell Software in 2012

I notice a lot of comments taking on Al3x's comments about the way things are, but almost none taking on his comments about the way things will be. It'd be a little to facile to just say "skate to where the puck will be, not to where it is," but I definitely agree with him that the demographics are changing, and that the benefits that (let's be generous) used to be in the Enterprise Sales Process, are not guaranteed to be there in the future.

If you assume that he's correct about the demographic changes and the consumer tastes, do you think he'll be right about the benefits of the Enterprise Sales Process evaporating over the next 5-15 years? I think that's a good bet.

sedevon Right versus pragmatic

On a personal note, I had a workplace bathroom once that was worse than this, also in trash bins. The one you were supposed to throw paper towels into after washing your hands, had a spring-loaded lid that required at least two pounds of pressure to open - and that was the least of the design problems.

More to the point, it fascinates me how the media companies' obduracy makes hackers in particular blindingly angry. It's interesting that from our side, they seem so insanely, self-destroyingly, offensively stupid that we just can't believe that they're really doing this. It's interesting on that cultural level as well as on the less abstract levels.

sedevon Best Practices of Variable & Method Naming

If you're feeling uncharitable, you can go look at the source code of PHP and see how many times they run afoul of these guidelines.

(not like the items in the article are Holy Writ, but they're sensible guidelines, and it's kind of sad that a widely-used programming language can screw up on nearly all of them)

sedevon Teller Reveals His Secrets

"Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians."

Does anyone else see a strong isomorphism between that and the advice Seth Godin usually gives? It definitely seems like something an entrepreneur or marketer could learn from - like a way to delight people.

sedevon TV is broken

Unfortunately, that's incorrect. The cable channels, as mentioned upthread, early on promised "since we can restrict access, unlike broadcast, we can just charge people and we won't show ads." That's not true in 2012. It is extremely, extremely rare to find television without frequent and intrusive advertising. HBO has less toxic advertising practices and better content, which is why you see them mentioned so often in this context.

Basically, the main television networks are all double-dipping (cf Marco Arment: http://www.marco.org/2011/10/27/double-dipping-ads-in-ipad-m... ).

sedevon TV is broken

Those are good, yes! But there's also a lot of survivor bias there. Sturgeon's Law still holds: for every individual Freakazoid! there's a posse of Dumb & Dumber (yes, real: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_and_Dumber_(TV_series) ).

sedevon Piracy and the Four Currencies

The author mentions this a little in the article, but I feel like they probably could have expanded on that point - the "$I" cost of piracy can change depending on the seller's track record. As noted recently in the Oatmeal comic about pirating Game Of Thrones (and Andy Ihnatko's response), the state of piracy is such that, effectively, all efforts to make piracy harder, make piracy more appealing.

I wonder how much pain these various industries will need to endure before they realize that the solution is to stop punching themselves in the face.

sedevon Her photo was the honeypot local law enforcement couldn't resist

I have strong opinions about the politics of this (i.e. giving people power without accountability always causes problems, whether it's on this scale or the Department of Homeland Security scale), but since we're on Hacker News, I think it'd be more interesting to consider what this says about auditing, data access, and privacy. I noticed some comments already about auditing systems.

Can this story tell us anything interesting about audit trails we'd like to see in other applications - or that we should maybe implement in our own work?

sedevon The town is no longer friendly for business

"My argument is that use of the word "fascist" itself prevents us from rational discourse of the trends and problems at hand by driving us to extreme positions."

I call foul: you say that now, but you're participating in preventing people from using the word according to its simple and straightforward meaning! You can't have it both ways there.

"Also, calling somebody on injecting the emotional baggage of that hyperbole is not making "rational conversation impossible"."

Like heck. You're derailing the conversation and quibbling.

sedevon The town is no longer friendly for business

Assume that the US is a fascist state and you're one of the beneficiaries: you'd see the same thing that you're seeing now. You would also see the same thing if we assume that the US is not a fascist state. So that argument is of null import.

sedevon Did You Hear We Got Osama?

"If you want to overkill, on November 1st you could read the election issue of The Economist cover to cover, whatever political posts are on the front page of HN, and the Wikipedia pages for the major issues. Then sit and think carefully for an hour. This would take about five hours, and I’ll bet $1 you’d vote for the same candidate you would have if you’d read five hours of political news per day for the last year."

I think I'm going to use this method - it's an interesting exercise, and it's a great excuse to get people to stop talking to me about bread-and-circuses politics (e.g. what's discussed in this blog post: http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000436.html ).

"Argument #1: Presidential candidates are noise. Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone. If you want to be a good citizen, your time is probably best spent on convincing your friends to vote in local races. Or doing not-explicitly-political work that contributes to justice, peace and prosperity. A small career choice can do a lot more than the most forceful checkmark on a ballot."

This is an uplifting and encouraging message - and a far better argument in favor of anarchism than torching a Starbucks. Thank you.

sedevon Microsoft’s Biggest Miss

"Those are content-consumption devices, occasionally branching out into cutesy creation."

Haven't we had this discussion way too many times before? How many HN stories have there been of "look at the feat of content creation this person pulled off with an iThing!"?

Specific varieties of work are best suited to the desktop computing UI paradigm. That's distinctly different from "iThings are just content consumption devices." It's insufficiently rigorous thinking; also it's bullshit.

Warren Ellis has written tremendous amounts of his serious work on a (non-iOS) mobile device. Mark O'Connor made an iPad his primary coding device [1]. Atomic Tom could perform a song off of just iThings as instruments on the subway.

Please stop repeating the 'mobile devices are just for content consumption' meme. It's bullshit.

1: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...

sedevon Microsoft’s Biggest Miss

"This is nothing but feel good linkbait for the Apple fans to lap up."

"After all, this is a site where Gruber and Sieger get top billing but Paul Thurrotts Winsupersite is shadowbanned totally from even appearing on the site, probably due to sensitive fans' excessive flagging."

Those are not substantial critiques, those are insults. Those are bad contributions to the discourse here and make you look like an asshole.

"They have been recently releasing apps for iOS and Android ... they released OneNote for Android and iOS"

Much better.

sedevon All Web Developers Should Stop Doing This Immediately

I really wish people wouldn't use "secure" to mean "laden with broken DRM and other misfeatures that serve publishers by antagonizing users." That's not "secure," that "broken."

sedevon Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

And-or get an SSD - the heavyweight disk-space users like movies and music are trivial to move to an external drive on a Mac, and with an SSD so much disk-thrashing pain just goes away. It's pretty great.

sedevon The Cold Reading Technique (How to Read Minds Like a Stage Magician)

Speaking of John Edward, I still hope someone tries this on him: http://www.pvponline.com/2002/04/04/thu-apr-04/

Of course, the subsequent strips probably have the outcome portrayed accurately. :(

sedevon The Cold Reading Technique (How to Read Minds Like a Stage Magician)

Ian Rowland's book is great stuff. I also recall a Malcolm Gladwell article that travelled some of the same territory and used Rowland as a source: http://www.gladwell.com/2007/2007_11_12_a_profile.html

Of course, that dealt with the possible inefficacy of FBI psychological profilers, which is less comfortable to think about than gullible office-workers.

sedevon BBC confronts Facebook troll

Or, more to the point, American culture finds sex far more obscene than violence, racism, or anti-semitism.

sedevon This is what 864GB of RAM looks like now

I'm in Arizona right now. I cuss out the static electricity about every other day, so, yes, around here I'd use an ESD wrist strap or something if I were going to handle DIMMs.

sedevon Google Android: The Accidental Empire

Why do you think the search volume on mobile is a hockey stick at Google?

I could take a guess.

"Google Exec Testifies Before Senate That Two-Thirds of Mobile Search Happens on iOS Devices"

http://9to5mac.com/2011/09/21/google-23rds-of-our-mobile-sea...

sedevon Google Android: The Accidental Empire

Well, I think that they currently aren't doing so, at least based on a track record of articles like this one: http://www.asymco.com/2011/11/09/mobile-games-the-denouement...