zach

From the article: "A handful of incidents involving SCOPs in Virginia and nationally have focused attention on the training and oversight of private police."

Well, many incidents nationally have focused attention on the training and oversight of municipal police too, to put it mildly.

Essentially, this is the way that Google sets the standard for acceptable web content.

It's subjective, it's vague, and sometimes unfair but that's the burden they have to bear. Defining the "quality" of a web page for a search has become as important a factor to web search as any other.

But "search quality" is a leaky abstraction like any other. When someone looks up a random phone number that just called them, they aren't looking for a blog post about it. They're looking for a very small amount of information.

Let's imagine we're determining the quality of a web page as a search result. Say we're looking for the combatants of the Second Boer War, so our query is "second boer war combatants". Now, if we had a page that listed only and exactly the names of those combatants, that would seem to be the "answer" we're looking for. But wait, isn't it better to see a page about the Second Boer War which has a lot of other information about the conflict? Or a page about the military history of the most notable combatant? Or even a table of major historical conflicts with their combatants?

Basically, although it would seem like a precise "answer page" is the best, there are a lot of other factors. The most popular kind of search results are often Wikipedia pages, so people seem to want that level of information on a subject. People sometimes search for something as a way to get to something else. The nature of the web indicates that pages with links to further information are more useful than those without them. And of course, as untrustworthy sites proliferate, the more well-compiled, organized and correlated information is on a page, the more reliable it is.

So ultimately, I feel like it's inevitable. As search has improved, Google has to make these kind of choices, in a quantifiable way, about the nature of a quality search result. And that ends up, in the tools-make-us stage of the web we're in, shaping the envelope of what web content is popular, even in some way acceptable. In turn, the web becomes easier for Google users to use by becoming easier for Google to index and search effectively.

But this is the more painful reality, as I also know. You get pushed out of the Google results not by sites with better information, not by sites that are more relevant, but by sites which seem like they can play the "Google game" better because they have the resources and profit motive to put together good metrics for the myriad signals that make you rise in the ranks.

For Clojure enthusiasts, I highly recomment Zach Oakes' environment in the same vein, Nightmod (his Nightcode IDE specialized with his play-clj library). It's an experimental platform that is a tidy, simple way to experience game programming in a functional style.

https://nightmod.net/

Also, here is his presentation on this subject at the last Conj (great talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GzzFeS5cMc

Ugh, the comments for this article are a disaster. I was trying to start a conversation in a creative way, my apologies.

The future of Silicon Valley: "This internship really sucks. Just when I think there's nothing left they can ask of me..."

Indeed, the entrance of Uber has made taxi rides a market for lemons. The most pleasant and least avaricious drivers are better off within Uber's higher-accountability system.

This is nothing specific to SF, either. This kind of nonsense is exactly what dysfunctional markets looks like, and it's everywhere, which is why Uber seems such a breath of fresh air to consumers around the globe.

Well, almost everywhere. You know where they don't pull this kind of flimflammery, right? That's right, in Japan, where Uber doesn't even try to replace cab companies, it just provides an easier way to book rides with one:

http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/08/08/in-japan-uber-...

We're slowly coming to understand that antibiotics are very unkind to our gut flora and are a prime suspect in subsequent weight gain. Post-antibiotic diet could be a critical intervention to keep patients from falling into the grasp of obesity.

A NY Times article earlier this year gives a background on how the rise of antibiotics has been accompanied by a rise in weight among animals and humans alike:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-dru...

Kids in particular seem to be at risk. A recent study of 64,000 kids has associated repeated antibiotic exposure before age 2 with early childhood obesity:

http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=19098...

It's good we're investigating diet-based therapy, so patients can someday hear their doctors say "after finishing this broad-spectrum antibiotic prescription, you [or your child] should eat like this for this amount of time to restore digestive health."

This is a great example of the value of test plans. This is basically technology to reconstruct missing test plans via the code. But of course someone already knew about the subtle "wall kick" feature since she or he wrote that code. It shouldn't be this hard, with some effective communication.

And actually, especially in games, test plans are still poorly communicated. In the old days, it was awful -- you would have the publisher doing all the QA, and barely speaking to the development team apart from bug reports. QA still often doesn't get involved until the last half of the project, before which time nobody has been thinking much about testing.

As studios improve their production, this is getting better. As a programmer, I've had more collaboration with QA as I work, at its best including having our QA liaison talk out a test plan with me while I'm working the feature. With enough communication, hopefully this kind of detective work to figure out what to test can be avoided.

And essentially all adoption in Sweden is international - only about 100 adoption cases a year involve Swedish births. Foreign adoptions are troublesome enough to make a womb transplant look like a reasonable alternative. Now you know why this would happen in Sweden.

So since you're curious, wyager, it seems a little hand-wavy to say "she could have used a surrogate or, gasp, adopted." Combining sarcasm and hand-waving makes for poor commentary.

Yes, this also describes me - I have tried alcoholic drinks just twice (on my 21st birthday and champagne on my honeymoon), and thought them astringent and unpleasant.

More to the point, I've never even sought out, uh, non-sobriety, certainly the world's most popular avocation. I am apparently a mutant, and I definitely feel weird about it. I grew up in LA with no religious background, so it was decidedly countercultural.

Although when I went to Harvey Mudd, there was a definite teetotaling contingent among the self-experimentalists. There, if you brought up the Super Bowl, some would simply say "Spectator sports don't interest me." It was like that.

Including this page which should make things clear: alcohol consumption is just a placeholder for socioeconomic status, which everyone knows has a major effect on longevity.

http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcohol/Controversies/Drinking-Alcoh...

I thought Experiment 2 was a great example of the pain of trying to fit your users' feelings into an "ideal" model.

When we started LALife.com, it was with the idea of making a real estate site with lots of great statistics and quantitative data. We gave grades for how safe things were, how good the schools were, multiple heatmaps, assessor data, census data, nearby amenities -- a buffet of data. And sure, people who also fit in the mold of trivia collectors thought this was amazing.

But the more we talked to people, the more we found out that they really didn't use this data, even when they said they appreciated it. We had really overshot the market -- users almost never delved into the statistics, yet took our grades as absolute authority. What people wanted first of all was just insight about whether it was a "nice place" or not, a maddeningly vague concept.

Ultimately, we trashed countless tables and statistics and scaled it back to one number. Yes, one 0-99 number that shows you, well, how "nice" a place is to live. We were so afraid of generalizing things like this because everyone is different and has different priorities and so on. But trying to make things custom for everyone is a losing game, and it turned out "is it nice?" is something everyone already knew intuitively.

So insanely, we went from having 50 extra data points on a home for sale to having one "superscore". But a funny thing happened, which is it became much more successful in the site's actual mission, to help people understand a home's neighborhood without having to visit in person. And now we're providing an insight that is compact enough that we can put it everywhere and people can digest it instantly.

So although we would ultimately like to give people a more data-conscious mindset, the tool and the user need to agree on that commitment. So we're accommodating the user's actual mental model while we work towards expanding it.

PS: We have our scoring model working nationwide, but as you have seen from the Zillow thread, it's hard to get nationwide home listings. We're working on getting homes for rent on http://www.padrank.com/ so you can sign up there if you want to see how it works throughout the US.

True, the top 0.01% is not going to work, but Los Angeles has a public school program that explicitly focuses on the top 0.1% (although recently they have rounded out their admissions with those in the top 0.5%):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_Gifted_Magnet

I attended this program in elementary school and it seems to have spoiled me socially, since the students in the program were so much more interesting to me than other kids.

I suspect the reason the school district chose to create the program is because of the notoriety of the Mirman School, a lauded K-8 private school which also has top-0.1% admissions requirements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirman_School

So at least in some areas, education tailored to the 99.9th percentile has a long track record. But sadly, I have no idea if the practices and knowledge of that experience are available to inform highly-gifted education in other parts of the world.

The Los Angeles school district has run a program since at least the early 80s which, I kid you not, focuses on the top 0.1% in "intellectual giftedness". I attended this program in elementary school and met the most interesting people I knew before going to college.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_Gifted_Magnet

We do have a lot more leisure, but it is distributed at the tails of our lifespan, the times of lowest productivity. We sure don't start full-time work at the age that kids on the farm do. And even a century ago, most kids outside of big cities did live on a farm. On the other side of a career, many of us will spend a decade or two in retirement and good health.

But inbetween... well, the typical young upper-middle-class couple (as usual, the real point of fascination here) has committed themselves to huge expenditures of interactive time with their kids. That's really where the time went.

Today, highly-educated parents bring their kids home from soccer or tae kwon do practice, pick up dinner on the way home and read to each of them for a school-mandated half-hour after helping them with homework. This is crazy different from a few generations ago. Ask even your grandparents how much time your parents spent in a "play pen" as toddlers, or roamed their neighborhood after school when they were older. Now there's a competitive cultural expectation that you need to invest in your children's development daily, so they become socially self-realized and not economic roadkill.

It's a good sign that there are no comments yet (less than 44 minutes after posted).

I've seen the video version before, but it never fails to inspire me, so I think I'll go watch it now as well.

Really gets you to think in terms of the impact you could have and what intentional steps you could take to get there.

Maybe even reading less Hacker News. I can't think of a more appropriate place for this message. As the monthly Who's Hiring posts are effectively automatic, I suggest this talk should appear regularly as well.

Transcript of the original version of this talk: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

Not everyone is so sanguine about the effect of the FDA's action. For example, NY Times food writer Mark Bittman:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/opinion/bittman-the-fdas-n...

In California, though, there is much stronger action stirring in the state legislature, although it will need far more public support to become a possibility:

http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Ban-sought-on-animal-an...

Can you even autoplay HTML5 video on a page in, say, the platform I'm posting from, iOS 7?

Honestly, me too. I grew up in the Valley and used to live in Burbank and commuted to Hollywood and (of course) Santa Monica — which is, yeah, a harsh drive. It would be awesome if Disney could effectively bring technology startups somewhere beside the Westside.

However, I have to think that Techstars, of anyone, has the data to back up the arguments in favor of accelerators being located near a region's startup ground zero.

Even if Disney was insistent, what would the first advice be from every advisor? Put the central location on the Westside or you're a B player.

And I don't think Disney would necessarily be insistent. For example, Grantland's offices are off on their own in downtown LA. Especially since they can just do a deal with one of the many tech office spaces that operate on the Westside.

Still, perhaps there can be a compromise, like two demo days (one in the studio area, one on the Westside). But I've seen the Westside win too many times to hold out much hope...

I'm totally in on this. This is an amazing development for the LA startup community.

As an LA native (it made the radio news here on Wednesday), I'm very curious where in the Los Angeles area this is.

Santa Monica/Venice is the startup juggernaut of this area, but media startups tend to run farther afield and I don't know if Disney even has any offices there (maybe ESPN?). I would think, given the realities of the startup world, advisors and investors in particular, not to mention LA traffic, it would have to be on the Westside, right?

Also extremely curious how the IP access works out. Time from, say, a Disney Consumer Products artist to create new art is a big deal (and not cheap). And could DA companies put Disney characters in the iPhone app they're going to sell or is this just to make an effective demo?

This is probably referring to "SOD tips" or "SOD tip-offs", where intelligence-community information is "laundered" through a source that provides a tip to investigators, as discussed in this Reuters article from last year:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...

Fortunately, the United States appears to be at a two-decade low in new prison admissions:

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/01/chart-lead-vio...

This seems like a great business to develop in the college market. The options students often have are overpriced and inflexible laundry service or schlepping their duds half a mile into town. Any college you can get access to will be a great testing ground at least.

The economist who helped Walt Disney's theme park dream become what it is today[1] said that the most important thing he learned through it all was the profound difference between a "no, because" person and a "yes, if" person.

If you ask many people an audacious "Can we do X?" their response is usually along the lines of "No, because [valid reasons]". They're not wrong, but the basic attitude is to shoot down what doesn't seem to fit with one's own view of the world. These are "no, because" people, and big companies are often full of them.

Much rarer and infinitely more valuable, especially for an entrepreneur, is the person who hears "Can we do X?" and responds, "Yes, if... [possible solutions]". Their response is one of problem-solving instead of confrontation, seeking to find a synthesis of the new perspective and their own. It seems like a small thing, but it is a very significant shift in mindset. Thinking like a "yes, if" person can unlock so much potential.

A friend of mine, one of the most talented and knowledgeable game programmers around, could easily have shot down many of the ambitious ideas that came his way. Instead, he greeted them with enthusiasm, often saying, "It's software! We can do anything!" Wouldn't you like to set out to do amazing things with that person on your team?

[1] - https://d23.com/harrison-price/

Good point, and it is a long game, although Google doesn't yet seem to be incentivizing people to move to Kansas City. And the buses are a good testbed for an autonomous vehicle fleet, like how Uber dispatches human-driven cars today in order to grow the market for 3-7 years from now.

In the post-WW2 era, suburbs like Irvine here in the LA area built up a large economy by providing growing industries with land use they couldn't find in the metropolis. And the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System provided an infrastructure that citizens appreciated and trucking companies were able to use to diversify goods movement. Maybe forward-looking municipalities or larger government entities have an opportunity to enable further economic progress by providing superior access to high-speed connectivity.

Honestly, I'm surprised Jason Fried and DHH haven't picked up on this news trend to point out how bizarre it is that these companies still bus people around at 40 MPH instead of their communication at the speed of light.

Isn't this just another argument for the innovative promise of remote work? That both the old centralized model of the company town, and the hub-and-spoke suburban campus model, impose all kinds of costs and limitations on employees and the community as well as the company? It's surely impressive that certain companies have become cultural forces in their region, but it's not always eventually a good thing (see the Great Lakes area), and the inevitable cultural conflicts are bloody and never-ending.

Also, I wonder if other parts of the continent (whom would probably buy Google the buses to transport people in or out of their city) laugh or cry when they read about these first-world-economy problems.

Penalties are blunt instruments.

The whole point of this penalty is that Google cannot trust the signals that are in its index when it comes to Rap Genius's site. And it sure isn't Google's fault that they can't.

Can Google subtract out all the "naughty stuff" and decide if Rap Genius deserves to even be on the front page for "rap genius" anymore? I doubt it.

If Google's search had a category for "obvious searches" then yes, maybe they could apply a penalty as delicately as possible. But delicateness is not really the point. Dropping them down 50 spots is blunt and simple. I think everything about this approach makes sense.

So it's hipsters versus nerds now? Has it come to this?

Well, of all places, an early version of the character of Doctor Who appeared on, The Canadian Howdy Doody Show (whose guest stars included a young Bill Shatner).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_in_Canada_and_the_Un...

Wow, what a list. So... if it's the "Private Internet Company Conference" what are companies like Facebook and eBay doing there?