ajscherer

Regulatory capture is THE problem.

This is difficult for me to understand. Are you suggesting that if nuclear power were completely unregulated, Tepco's behavior would've been more virtuous (as I read it, totally virtuous)?

Or is the claim that regulation made the problem somewhat worse, and this margin (between how bad the problem would've been without regulation and how bad it was with regulation) is the only part that would even be humanly possible to rectify?

Because if I owned the plant and I didn't have any regulators to deal with, I would think it in my interest to behave even worse: to lie more, to hide more, to be even less concerned about doing a thorough job of preventing the public's exposure to regulation.

The media is the reason for this.

I don't quite follow. It's not like there is some naturally occurring flow of newspapers, radio and television broadcasts that discuss with the correct, important issues in an intelligent way, and some sort of cabal (the media) has come in and suppressed all that so they could force toddlers and tiaras down their throats.

There are plenty of news outlets that are spending their money to broadcast the details of the NSA scandal as accurately as possible, and if people happen to find those outlets on their TVs, they change the channel to toddlers and tiaras as quickly as possible. Which goes back to the original (I think correct) point that most people don't find this particular issue as dire as many people think they should.

The author said it himself, these errors were caused by humans, not excel. I don't think making excel "smart" enough to prevent people from making dumb mistakes is a good idea. In fact I think that would transform excel into microsoft word, which is the only thing that could make life worse for your typical competent office worker.

Excel already has a lot of this crap. It already requires an act of god to prevent excel from changing your string of digits into a number or date. It already shows you little exclamation point icons when your formulas omit adjacent rows or are different from other formulas in the same row/column.

A tool will never make it possible for dumb people to solve hard problems easily. It's like trying to design a knife that makes it impossible to cut yourself. Nobody with any kind of a clue would want that knife.

A tool should be straightforward and intuitive, but it shouldn't aim to be smarter than it's user.

When politicians say "small government" they really mean "low taxes", and when they say "liberty" that is measured as 100% minus the top marginal tax rate. Restrictions on people's behavior or privacy aren't really part of the discussion. When they say "spending" you can safely suffix that with "on someone other than me".

Seriously though, the Republican party isn't a libertarian organization and never has been. They've been marketing themselves that way lately, since they are a bit closer to the libertarian ideal than the Democrats (I guess not in this case though!).

I prefer we not go back to any oversimplistic analogies. That's part of what makes these debates so insufferable. A nation's economy isn't a household budget. A company isn't a person. A nation isn't a person.

I don't really see much value in someone's axiomatic understanding of all of economics premised on the belief that they are smarter than people who study economics (even if they are; probably they are!). I'd much prefer to hear from someone who is less smart, but who admits the subject is too complex for them to fully understand and who can be bothered to go out and actually attempt to measure something (rather than telling me what it must be).

I guess I'm saying I think I can learn more from an honest person than a smart one. Now I'm questioning why I am wasting my time reading hacker news again.

2009 and the internet? This has been the dominant conventional wisdom in all fitness media for at least a decade. If you open any fitness or "men's" magazine in any given month you will find at least one article telling you that: strength training is better than cardio, free weights are better than machines, and lifts that use multiple major muscle groups in coordination are best. The funny thing is that every one of these articles acts like it is the first time any of this has ever been written down.

It's the exact same way with articles advocating diets relatively higher in protein and fat. An assertion of novelty seems to be a mandatory element of any attempt to market anything fitness related.

On one hand I think this comment makes a fair point that this isn't a very useful app. The app's creator himself admits that. He didn't expect it to be downloaded much.

On the other hand, I think this comment and Apple's rejection have both made the app creator's point very well. Not only do people want to ignore drone strikes, they actually resent the idea that other people would want to know about them. In Apple's case they state that customers would find it "objectionable." In this comment's case, the only conceivable reason anyone would want to know about drone strikes is so they could feign interest in order to feel enlightened or worldly.

This is fascinating to me. If we'd had a referendum at some point about whether to grant the U.S. military the power to kill anyone, anytime, anywhere with no checks & balances, no oversight, and no due process, according to it's judgement about what best serves the interest of national security, who do you think would've voted for it? I can't think of any significant political coalition that would've thought that was a good idea. Yet now that it is a reality, you're crazy or a traitor or insincere if you want to make it an issue.

I feel that it's related to peoples' perceived inability to do anything about it. If somebody powerful does something bad, blame the messenger for troubling your mind with it, since there is nothing you can do about somebody powerful.

I'll meet you halfway. It's a terrible comment about a terrible article. I agree that it's laudable to try to invent an improved version of online ratings, but this article wasn't effective in convicing me that they've succeeded.

Their argument that historgrams are just.awful. (I didn't care for the extra periods) seems to have two components: 1. asserting that historgrams are bad 2. showing us 3 histograms and saying they tell you the same thing about all 3 movies, when in fact there is a very clear and important difference between the histograms.

Its completely obvious from inspection ("people are really good at seeing patterns") that Starship Troopers has a much lower percentage of 5 star ratings than the other two, and a much higher fraction of 0 star ratings. It also appears to me that the Fifth Element has a higher fraction of 4 or 5 star ratings, and is probably the most apprciated of the 3 films, although Blade Runner is fairly close.

If you are going to cherry a set of 3 specific films to make your point, you should be sure to at least pick 3 films that support your point instead of refuting it.

We then learn about their hypothesis that while 5-star rating system sucks, a system that relies on two correlated 5-star ratings is great. They demonstrate this by using the two question system to draw the exact same conclusion I drew from the histograms of the 1 question ratings.

I would've liked some sort of objective attempt to compare the two rating systems. Perhaps it would be possible to measure how frequently the two question system leads people to make a better choice than the one question system, or at least some sort of statistical wonkery that would purport to show me that the two question system in practice draws more distinctions than the one question system. Unfortunatley we only get this one rather uninspired example ("watch this if you’re in the mood for something really good").

They also didn't address why "would you re-watch this film" is a better choice than any other second question. There are attempts to justify it being a good question, but no real evidence that other questions were tried and didn't perform.

Finally, the thing that really irked me was that this proposed system doesn't seem to do anything to address most of the actual problems with the regular 5 star system, namely that people who feel really strongly about something are more likely to rate so that most ratings tend towards the extremes, and that without context we have no idea why someone rated something a 5 instead of a 1. Those problems now exist along two dimensions instead of one.

I see this less as an article and more as an advertisement hitching a ride on an xkcd comic.

Well the three reasons that the author is hating on FB comments are bulleted in his 16 sentence blog post, so it should be relatively easy to figure out why he is hating FB comments.

Your counterpoint only addresses the first of his three reasons.

This statement makes no sense to me. "Being sexist" encompases an absolutely huge range of behaviors. It could mean something as small as making a dumb assumption about what type of aesthetic preferences someone has, to something as large as making hiring decisions that can permanently stunt someone's career growth. It could even mean promulgating laws that legitimize violence against people.

Sexism is thus a category of bad behaviors, some of which are worse than anything I could imagine stemming from being accused of sexism. I am not saying that being falsely accused of sexism is nothing. It certainly would make me angry and frustrated to be so attacked. I just think false accusation of sexism is worse than the least severe forms of sexist behavior, and better than the most severe forms of sexists behavior.

Asserting that false accusations of sexism are always worse than sexism seems obviously false.

The claim is that if Apple had to pay the sorts of royalties on Samsung's (and others') technology patents that Apple is asking Samsung to pay on Apple's patent on curved lines, Apple phones would be so expensive that they wouldn't sell like they currently do.

People are interested in sports as a demonstration of skill, not of raw physical prowess. That is why golf has it's own channel on TV and distance running is more or less completely absent from TV.

There are some interesting facts in the article, but the only absurdity is the idea that animals being able to run fast has anything to do with professional sports.

No definition of entrepreneur that I've been able to find says that the business needs to be sustainable or provide value to customers. So I would answer that the definition has never changed from A to B, because it's never been A.

The definitions I've looked at do tend to say the entrepreneur takes on financial risk. He may not have done that.

Software is not analogous because it has been developed from the very start with the knowledge that the bits would be easily copy-able, and has been designed accordingly. I remember being asked to type in phrases from a game instruction manual at least a decade before anyone was consuming commercial audio or video on their PC. Furthermore, software is an interactive medium, which makes copy protection easier, and copying riskier. It isn't clear to me how you could make copy protection inherently part of music (without ruining it). Even if you fully controlled all the hardware and software used for playback, you wouldn't control the link between the speaker and my ears.

As to ACH information, it depends on what you mean by "use those numbers," since they have no inherent value. If you mean reading them for fun, I would be OK with that. If you mean using them to drain money from people's bank accounts, that would not be okay, but it also wouldn't be copying (since the original would be destroyed). If you knew of a way to copy money from one account to another, I would be completely fine with you copying my checking account in full.

I know you would probably prefer that people think about stealing and unauthorized copying as the same thing, but there is a difference and it's important. One is completely physically undetectable to the victim, and the other isn't. How can you tell the difference between your CD selling poorly because people are pirating it, and it selling poorly because it sucks? Without widespread snooping on other peoples' electronic communications, you can't. If someone drained your bank account it would be trivial to detect.

For the past couple years I've been using a multiple monitor taskbar tool called Actual Multiple Monitors (http://www.actualtools.com/multiplemonitors/) which I think is superior to the tools he recommends (at least it was at the time I tried the others). It allows you to have a fully functional taskbar on every monitor (start menu, notifications area, aero preview, the whole 9 yards).

After becoming accustomed to this tool, I'm convinced this is the right answer for how an OS should do multiple monitors, and I find Windows 7's out of the box support for multiple monitors offensively bad.

It's a common idiomatic expression and I'd be willing to wager that everyone who read it understood what it meant. I'd also wager that most people could really give a shit if it offended a few language prudes.

I disagree. This comment supports Dave's argument about as well as any comment I could imagine reading.

While I am as dubious as the rest of you about how likely we are to actually see this, I appreciated learning that adhesives are one of 3M's 46 core technology platforms. Does anyone know what the other 45 are?

"You learn that the average new customer brings in $50 in profit over their lifetime"

How do you know this figure is independent of your marketing efforts? If I start out paying $1 per customer, or people are just walking in off the street for free or whatever, and find those customers are worth $50, is it okay to just assume that the customers who cost me $20 to get through the door are also going to be worth $50?

I'd think the more it cost to get someone to do business at all, the lower the expectations for repeat business should be (interestingly, I'd think the same thing if I were a merchant considering doing a Groupon).

I've read it twice in it's entirety, and his main point is that he believes we would be better off changing patent law to create an explicit category for software patents and have different rules for those patents, rather than simply abolishing software patents (or all patents). This strikes me as not a horrible idea, but his argument sucks. (Primarily because it is predicated on the idea that everyone who disagrees with him is essentially a retard, but also because a lot of his points are hand-wavy or just don't make sense).

I particularly disagree with his between-the-lines assertion that nobody other than Larry Page would've figured out the Page Rank formula by 2018. If that assertion isn't true then he fails to establish that patents have any value to society, and there is no reason (provided by the article) to think we shouldn't just get rid of them.

So, you knew your troll post would be downvoted, as evidenced by your prediction, and yet you still post it and complain about it when it happens?

It's not just that your post contained no thought other than "Government bad!"... your post had absolutely nothing to do with the article.

From TFA:

"In a controlled setting, the researchers asked medical students to choose the quantity of medical care to provide to hypothetical patients enrolled in either fee-for-service (FFS) or capitated insurance plans"

Capitated and fee-for-service are two methods used by private and public entities to pay for health care. The article was about how doctors behaved (or at least how medical students said they'd behave) under each of those two systems. I don't find the experiment convincing, but I can read well enough to know it had nothing to do with whether the payment was publically or privately funded.

An anti-Obama bumper sticker would be a much more appropriate forum for your opinions than this thread.

Real names enabled facebook users to quickly realize the "real world" social network within facebook, rather than building an entirely new network.

I don't know email addresses or commonly used online aliases for even 10% of the people whose names I know. I'm fairly confident that I could find just about any of my cousins or high-school classmates on facebook in minutes. Without them having put their real name on their facebook profile, I don't believe I would be able to find them at all. Surely it's clear how that leads to facebook having a much bigger network much faster than a service that doesn't use real names. Real names are the key my brain uses to identify people.

I also think there is a psychological impact of constantly looking at pages filled with names that you recognize. If you swapped out all the names on my facebook feed with random hn usernames, I think I would feel different while I read it.

All that said, I do agree with most of what Fred Wilson is saying. I hate the impulse to "civilize" or "sterilize" the web as well, and I'm especially concerned when politicians start with that sort of talk. Real names make sense only for facebook or a facebook replacement (good luck with that), because in my mind the definition of facebook is "the thing you use to communicate online with people you know in real life."

Maybe I am misreading your argument, but it seems like you are saying the cause of the US deficit problem is that the faction that trades entitlements for votes has gained control of the system. If that were true, and this faction were really just concerned with entitlements, there would be an obvious solution to the deficit: raise taxes. This may be every bit as horrible as you imagine, but it wouldn't involve a debt crisis.

The problem as I see it, is that the faction that trades entitlements for votes and the faction that trades tax breaks for votes are both simultaneously in control. The low taxes people win all the fights about taxes, and the high spending people win all the fights about spending.

The bug in democracy that led to our deficit problem is the lack of anything to prevent us from voting to have our cake and eat it too.

That doesn't really explain why the groups with 100% women did so well, or why the groups that were 50/50 did worse than the groups of all men or all women. Maybe I'm trying to take more information from the chart than is really there.

"my windows-using coworkers" would be a better fix.

As sick of paying a premium for antiquated goods as businesses may be, they aren't going to make a decision that has costs far in excess of it's benefits.

The benefit of abandoning COBOL is greatly increased programmer productivity. The cost of abandoning COBOL is completely rebuilding your system from scratch.

I could go on for days about why it's dumb for an organization to undertake a massive project for which it is horribly ill-equipped in order to replace something that works. Instead I'll just note that I used to work (not as a programmer) at an organization that tried this. They ended up spending 8 figures for nothing more than the realization that they should hire more COBOL programmers.

I agree that the percentage has dropped (due to organizations that use COBOL dying and new ones avoiding it for obvious reasons), but I doubt it has dropped that much.

I agree with you that people can get pretty worked up about the topic of free software, but I think you need to be a bit braver in the face of downvoting and disagreement. I can't ever recall seeing a respectful, well-thought post getting downvoted below 0 on hacker news.

One tactic for this situation is to post your truth then never look at the thread again. It might be rude to people who want to engage in honest discussion on your point, but if your post was a good one it will still benefit the hn community more than not posting at all, and you won't have to stress about troll replies.

Just be respectful. Assume the people reading your post are as smart as you and your post won't get hammered.

A visit to the wikipedia entry on the National Association of Scholars may help you understand the author's perspective.

The first half of this article makes a reasonably convincing case that Mr. Khan is a much worse history teacher than math tutor. The second half of the article makes a totally convincing case that the author understands the Internet worse than Khan understands anything.

I guess in his nightmare scenario the "algorithms of the Internet" will one day cause everyone's web-browsers to redirect every request to one of Mr. Khan's fizzy history lectures where he just glosses right over the moral infallibility of the US, the inherent superiority of western culture, and the fact that Jesus died for your sins. The same algorithms will doubtless prevent the author from creating his own history videos clarifying those topics for people. After all, Mr. Khan appeared on Charlie Rose!

It's wonderful that your parents stressed the importance of an education. If only your education had stressed the importance of actually reading a piece before responding to it! Perhaps then you would have noticed that this piece: isn't in the new york times; doesn't talk about outreach programs for poor poeple; only mentions race via quoting a 1999 Malcom Gladwell piece

The post argues that the income-boosting effect of going to a top college isn't due to the education one receives, but instead is due to the possibility of inclusion in a network of people who are all more likely to find success. In other words the friends you meet at a top college are a much better influence than the friends you meet in the hood, and having a good network of friends is more beneficial to your career than what you learn in the classroom.

Of course if you escaped the ghetto to do well you probably know everything there is to know about how poverty works. Other people's thoughts are just sort of a speedbump on your way to let the truth shine here on hn.

It seems like everyone is determined to give you a legal answer to what what I interpreted as a moral question. The overwhelming response has established that legally she still owns the copyright to the photo. The quesiton that's worth discussing, in my mind, is should she be able to go after people for damages for using her photo in ways other than attempting to plagarize it or just straight up sell copies?

When you post a picture to twitter you are essentially saying Hey everyone look at my photo!. In my view it is then impossible to justify later freaking out and saying Holy shit everyone is looking at my photo!

After reading the article, I think the "victim" here may even agree with me. Her quotes didn't give the impression that she felt particularly wronged in the whole affair.