colins_pride

This is one of those ideas that seems so obviously good after the fact that it just makes one marvel

The Hustler - 1961 & The Color of Money - 1986

Both with Paul Newman.

Optically about pool hustling. Really about the processes through which the naive progress as they encounter the underbelly of reality.

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to be able to edit a comment that has a reply

Where's Ambani at?

Does showing a large subest of the pages that point to it, default ordered by something that's roughly equivalent to pagerank, with the ability to then search within those results capture the essence of what you're getting at?

You just have to remember which books you put the money in. Every now and then I open a book that I haven't read in years and there are five 20s pressed between the pages.

Doesn't changing only one metric at a time tend to lead to getting stuck in a local maximum?

I would read even more recent stuff. I agree on Che. How about reading about Kevin Kelly and Louis Rossetto? Bob Hunter created Greenpeace out of nothing. Petraeus revolutionized the most powerful military in the history of the world. It's through a mix of ancient literature, philosophy and political economics that one gains perspective on human nature. And human nature does not, has not, and will not change. But the structure of the world evolves, making modern revolutionaries much more interesting. When I know what Kolakowski had to say about Marxism, I'm going to go move past Marx and spend more time on Popper who hasn't really been rebutted (to my knowledge) yet.

Kolakowski -> http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...

It took a lot of self-restraint to keep me from downvoting-this-because-I-disagreed-with-it

Right, it is not tech focused, because his point is not so much Portland as the actual cultural distinction between good places for entrepreneurial people and good places for starting up.

I agree that filtering out the worst junk doesn't necesarily raise the overall quality to an acceptable level. It seems like there are two issues, which are related: [1] comments are too small-d democratic and [2] there doesn't currently exist a good mechanism for aggregating comments.

With the exception of a few places like HN, the best comments are treated about the same as bad comments. The absence of incentives leads to the absence of quality.

The other issue is related in the sense that if there was a good mechanism for aggregating comments across sites it would almost certainly serve to recognize and reward the best comments. Solve the fragmentation problem, and you get resolution on the first one for free.

Yeah, the timestamp right there next to BPC is 07-25

It's tough to feel sorry for the guy

But what if there are web-centric OSes and desktop-centric OSes?

In a world where the OS market is fragmented, centralized control and opression becomes even more difficult than it was in a desktop-centric world where one OS had huge market share.

Now that's not the case if we end up with one web-centric OS, but I don't see that happening any more than I see Bing taking over 65% of the search market without any response from Google.

He felt he had to resort to it.

You can be generally opposed to something, but accept it as the least bad option in a specific situation.

When 10% of HN really likes a submission, it goes to the frontpage. Then if 10% of HN really dislikes it, the submission gets killed.

That some stories then get un-deaded is testimony to the faultiness of the system.

One word: software

No, he hacked a very poorly designed system. In this case the moral responsibility resides with those culpable for the shameful system, not for people who need organs.

Expected utility is probably a more appropriate gauge for these decisions, rather than expected value

This is somewhat tangential, but I'm pretty sure that Google re-writes the search code ever few years.

Does opening the box kill the cat?

For now

I just did a totally typical thing (for me): wrote half of this, deleted it because I thought it sucked, went away for a while. But this time it really stayed inside me, so here it is.

The problem is not a financial one. Money is not the constraint. There are people with access to (for our purposes) unlimited sums, with good intentions, and a good track record at getting difficult things done, who have not made a meaningful dent in the problem.

The answer must lie in an approach nobody tries, which immediately eliminates throwing money at problems. It also means that it doesn't make sense to give money to an existing organization.

The problem is inherently informational. How many thousands of small villages have wells, but no access to clean water because some small, inexpensive part is broken? I've travelled extensively in the third world, and this is the situation in all too many places. The key is in knowing what is needed where, and what equipment and knowledge is required to redress the problem.

The right answer is some sort of mega-clearinghouse of such information; matching people who know what is needed where with people who are headed in that direction and can bring equipment and acquire the knowledge required to successfully deploy the equipment before they go.

Yet in a blog post last week on the future of newspapers, he concludes there may be only one way to save the industry

Hint: if you have to change the law to protect an industry, the industry is a dinosaur. You are not really saving it, merely delaying the inevitable at great global expense. The proper course of action lies in that eastern technique known as letting go

My environment shapes me far more than my genes. I know this because I'm not the same person who woke up this morning. Sure, my genes may predispose me to Alzheimers or Diabetes or cancer. They drive my physical characteristics, and maybe much more. But my essence is not pre-destined by my genes.

I love this idea; how does the sponsoring site ensure the quality of the user supplied data?

Why hasn't that study been done?

I think it's because this is something that is very hard to stick with. After the physical adjustment, one has to be willing to organize one's life in a way consistent with this, and that is tough when everybody uses this other mode of sleep.

Using an aggregation of the per-user lists to guide the evolution of the site-wide list would probably resolve that concern. It's also conceptually very similar to how submission flagging currently works here.

Yeah, it's a smart move; motivating the HN community to research your competitors for you is very resourceful

At least this is just an app, I shudder when I think of the guys who are trying build businesses around Twitter. Good for Twitter, not so good for them.