d2vid

Not exactly the clearest announcement from AWS, but the "instance limit" they are referring to is the limit on the number of server instances you can have running in your account at any one time.

Before the limit was quoted in a maximum number of servers, now it's quoted in a maximum number of total VPUs (virtual CPUs) that all of your servers contain.

Unless you're running a lot of instances, this doesn't change anything for you because you're probably not bumping into this limit.

Transcript is a good idea, we've been looking into APIs & mechanical turk for that. In general we're trying to figure out how to present the responses in an interesting/informative way without you having to watch ALL the videos.

Generally when you run an in-person focus group or user interview, you're combining the interview time with the "watching" time since you're there in the same room. With instapanel, it's definitely faster than doing the interviews yourself, but there's no forcing function to watch the videos.

Reminds me of how my dad stopped watching talks at Xerox PARC once they started webcasting them. Without needing to show up for the talk at a specific time, he could always say "I'll watch that later".

Because Iowa farmers get to vote on federal matters, but they don't get to vote in SF and NYC.

When I worked at Climate Corp, it was pretty interesting to hear the (nearly universally) Republican farmers argue for why there should be farm subsidies. About half wouldn't even try to justify it, and just said if the money's there I'll take it.

We paid for this as a test of instapanel, got respondents off of Craigslist for $10 each. In general, we're building a tool for startups to get feedback like this on their own products.

I went in strongly in favor of Prop E, I came out as convinced that obesity and soda are bad, but less convinced that this law was a good way to address the issue. I'll probably still vote "Yes" on Prop E, but it was fun to hear the other side out.

If we think of soda like tobacco this makes sense. If tobacco companies are against it, then it probably is a good idea.

But what if the book industry spent $15/SF voter to stop some law that applied to books? Perhaps that law would be harmful to book publishers AND to society overall.

It's amazing how soda companies have come to be seen as evil so quickly.

It just feels too much like a symbolic victory rather than actual progress. I think it falls into the same category as the plastic bag ban - bags are a very small component of overall trash, but they're highly visible so let's ban them.

As much as I think vice taxes are a good idea, the panelists raised a lot of great points about the holes in Prop E.

It's only SF so people will just drive to Daly City to stock up on soda. There are tons of other sugary products that won't be taxed - like milkshakes or candy. It's a tax at the distributor level, so small businesses will just get their soda from outside the city.

Well that sucks, this post is completely delisted from the front page. How'd that happen?

We tax income, even though we agree that income is a good thing.

Why not tax cigarettes, soda, pollution, and other bad things. The dead-weight loss from the tax is actually a good thing in these cases.

Agreed that there are always unintended consequences, I don't really know for sure, and democracy is unfortunately usually about feelings.

If you watch Jude's video, she says she bicycles to Daly City to buy her cigarettes because they're too expensive in SF, and threatens that she'll just start doing that for soda too.

Get people to bicycle an hour for cigarettes and soda? That's a public health official's dream.

I was really surprised by the results. When I created this instapanel I was a strong "Yes" on Prop E - governments need to raise funds, so why not tax vices.

Watching the responses, I've changed my vote to "No". The panelists raised a lot of great points about the holes in Prop E. It's only SF so people will just drive to Daly City to stock up on soda. There are tons of sugary products that won't be taxed. It's a tax at the distributor level, so businesses will just get their soda from outside the city. It's a regressive tax. On and on.

If tweens listen to 10 hrs/day of Justin Bieber on repeat using free accounts, Bieber shouldn't get money from adults who listen a few hours a day to anything but him using premium accounts.

I think it's quite reasonable to assume that differences in listening and paying habits between users would NOT average out, and a per user split would be fairer.

The sales tax agreements amazon has made with various states should provide a nice experiment showing how price sensitive their customers really are.

Choice with reasonable defaults sounds ideal to me. The suggestion that you HAVE to make all these choices is FUD.

To bring a bit more consumer psychology into the discussion, people love SUVs because they give them the choice to go driving off-road, driving in snow, etc. Those SUV owners aren't then suddenly overwhelmed each morning with the question "Should I commute to work or should I drive to Tahoe?"

Android is a flexible tool that allows you to make choices when you want to make choices.

"as we get older, particularly past middle age, we tend to grow happier naturally." Sounds like literal survivorship bias.

From an expected value perspective, being kept awake by a smoke alarm has robbed me of more of my life than [chance of fire]×[chance of death]×[crappiness of dying]

Climate Corp doesn't forecast the weather.

Former Climate employee here.

Swiss Re reinsures Climate Corp, not any individual policy. So Climate Corp sets the price for each policy and pays out each claim. Swiss Re pays out to Climate Corp if in aggregate all the claims are greater than the price charged.

Does that make sense?

"No," said the God button.

COO

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy#Environmental_benef...

Insects are far more efficient than livestock. Also, you can feed them things that humans can't eat (like rice stalks and husks) so they can be an environmental net win.

FTA: "notably, Russia bans handset subsidies"

Are international calling fees within the EU going away as well?

"Warren lied about being Native American to benefit from affirmative action."

Doesn't seem to be true: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/everyt...

Yeah, with all those freshly baked tracking cookies.

I really appreciated the end of this article where he argues that some users could appreciate a service more if they realized how hard a problem it is solving.

It makes me think of the first iMacs having clear backs so you could see inside and see how complicated but tidy it was inside. Contrast that with a modern iMac where you'd have a hard time even opening it.

I think most people on HN belong to a segment of the population that wants to know how things work, that is always asking questions, that grew up taking things apart to see inside. As much as I wish it was different, most people are not like us. They want things to just work, they ask for the elevator pitch, they want the milk not the cow.

If you're making something for the HN crowd, then by all means give them a peek behind the curtain. But if you're selling mass market, keep it simple and abstract away all the "messy" details.

To take your analogy further, an early-stage startup has a high cost of capital. You are expected to produce massive returns (or fail). You thus are explicitly required by investors to take risks. You have a duty to not invest in the software equivalent of CDs.

Thanks Matt, I appreciate it. What's so frustrating for me is that I want Google to be the good guys. I want to be able to recommend any and all Google products to friends and family. I hold Google in high esteem, which made this interaction that much worse because it was so far from what I think Google is capable of.

You could go the Zappos route of actually empower customer service reps. But at the very least, I would expect Google to build better in house CRM tools to feed helpful content to the support reps rather than making them repeat themselves.

From what I've heard from friends at Google, internal tools like this have a notoriously hard time getting engineering resources. I wish they could turn it into a sexy machine learning project and actually get some resources on fixing this issue.

You should probably contact their customer support.