ecmendenhall

I work with a manual QA team who explicitly recruit testers on the autism spectrum. It's a great mission and they've done great work: http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-hires-people-on-autis...

The Harold McGee article linked on the right mentions that the alkaline ingredients in ramen noodles are slightly different from baking soda:

As for the particular alkaline ingredients that are added to noodles, Chinese and Asian alkaline noodles, in general, contain potassium and sodium carbonate, which are not the sort of things that we usually have lying around in our kitchens. They’re carbonate salts of those metals, sodium and potassium. They’re standard ingredients in Asia but not so much in the West.

However, you can easily make your own version of them by taking baking soda and baking it at a low temperature—200°, 250°F—for about an hour. You take baking soda, sodium bicarbonate, and turn it into sodium carbonate just by that gentle heat. Now, that leaves out potassium carbonate, but I’ve found that when I’ve experimented with it, simply using sodium carbonate gives you most of the effect that you’re looking for in an alkaline noodle.

Would it make sense to prebake the baking soda? I'll have to experiment myself.

You're probably using the right thesaurus. The default on Apple devices is the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, which is great at conveying little shades of meaning. I'm always delighted to find a "Word Notes" entry by an author I like. Try "bourgeois" for Zadie Smith or "feckless" for David Foster Wallace.

(Here's a list of all the word notes by author: http://lasersoptional.com/2012/08/21/it-was-wonderful-marvel...)

Ah, right. That makes sense. If only it was mentioned on the download page!

This bug was pretty serious. I'd better be extra careful and install and verify this myself.

Oh, good: there's a standalone installer available (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1726). But the download is served over HTTP. Maybe I can just try the same URL with HTTPS:

  $ curl --head https://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1726/en_US/OSXUpdCombo10.9.2.dmg
  HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
  Server: Apache/2.2.24 (Unix)
  Location: http://download.info.apple.com/Mac_OS_X/031-3279.20140225.Zzasf/OSXUpdCombo10.9.2.dmg

Okay, I'll follow Apple's instructions for checking the certificate fingerprint in the installer (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5044). But that page (Last modified November 2011) displays a different fingerprint (9C864771 vs FA02790F)...and that fingerprint was also served over HTTP.

Gives up and opens the App Store.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on an encrypted, backed-up, redundantly distributed hard drive — forever.

I wrote my undergrad thesis on conspiracy theories (in Turkish politics)[1], but it includes a section reviewing academic literature on conspiracy theories and a lot of resources in the bibliography.

Karl Popper wrote briefly about conspiracy theories in "Open Society and its Enemies."[2] It was part of a larger argument about emergent vs. planned orders, but I think it's a very good point: many conspiracy theories arise "from the mistaken theory that, whatever happens in society – especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike – is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups." It's simply hard for us to accept that improbable, harmful events are the result of lots of unplanned actions rather than one malevolent design.

[1] http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/14... [2]: http://ovo127.com/2011/01/24/sir-karl-popper-the-conspiracy-...

Money might buy "freedom from depression," but I suspect it does so by buying antidepressants and therapy.

I think Robert Sapolsky is on to the best explanation of depression: it's a disease rooted in biology and genetics, similar to (and exacerbated by) chronic stress. (Here's a lecture that I'm sure has been posted here before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc). Reducing stress can alleviate the symptoms, but really effective treatments treat depression as a disease.

This is interesting, but I think completion rates (and enrollments, to a degree) are bogus statistics. All the incentives are aligned toward signing up for lots of courses, with or without any intention to finish. I'm "enrolled" in 13 Coursera classes at the moment, but only active in two (and something close to this has been my moving average for the last six months).

The only cost to me is a few too many automated emails. And since course quality still varies widely, trying out lots of courses and sticking with the best ones is a good strategy.

Here's another ungated Henrich paper on ultimatum games across societies, if you're interested in the research: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/InSearchHomoEconomicus2001...

His book "Why Humans Cooperate" is worth a trip to the library, too. It combines some formal models, experiments, and an interesting study on the Chaldean community in Detroit (a less-WEIRD ethnic group in the middle of our WEIRD society).

The implications of this research are even more radical (and controversial) than the article suggests. The idea that culture shapes the way we think and act is interesting enough, but then the big question becomes "where does culture come from?"

Henrich (and others[1]) suggest that culture evolves through Darwinian processes of transmission and replication, and that biological and cultural evolution are coupled. Social Darwinism and sociobiology gave this idea a bad reputation, and the idea that our social norms have evolved from kin selection all the way up to impersonal market exchange is still a hard sell for economists and anthropologists alike. But it's a fascinating idea, and it's completely changed the way I think about economic behavior and human cooperation.

[1] "Not By Genes Alone" by Boyd and Richerson is another great book on this subject: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo361...

> Side note: Wouldn't it be awesome if composer supported composer.sexpr files natively, so that we would no longer have to write JSON?

If you, too, think this would be awesome, check out extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn.

I second this. But don't take my word for it. Here is 5.24 (one of my favorites) translated by Long:

  "Think of the universal substance, of which thou hast a 
  very small portion; and of universal time, of which a short
  and indivisible interval has been assigned to thee; and of
  that which is fixed by destiny, and how small a part of it
  thou art."

  "Remember:
  Matter. How tiny your share of it.
  Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it.
  Fate. How small a role you play in it."

Two of my favorite pieces of "other media:"

This Flickr photostream by "Moravius," who is some sort of humanitarian aid worker in NK. There are lots of photos from outside Pyongyang, which I rarely see elsewhere on the web: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kernbeisser/sets/

The Twitter account of James Dresnok, the last living US defector to North Korea: https://twitter.com/JamesDresnok

There's a great documentary on Dresnok called "Crossing The Line." His Twitter account is one of the weirdest internet artifacts I've discovered: he only posts every 2-3 months, and the first account he followed was a Kim Jong-il parody.

If you're sufficiently convinced by this, the 538 model, or your favorite electoral vote map, and you are willing to bet your beliefs (and you are in a jurisdiction that has not regulated prediction markets out of existence), Intrade contracts on an Obama victory were trading around $6.70 today.

Here is a short presentation with another perspective on the Cybersyn project which should be of interest to designers and quantitative visualization types: http://compscifi.com/

It argues that the design of the Presidential control room and its simplified visualizations of economic information created an illusion of omniscience and control over the economy by using visual cues from modernist design and science fiction. But behind the scenes, the project was mostly run by humans exchanging data over teletype machines and hand-pasting information to slides.

There's a wonderful example of the project's simplified model of the economy around 7:58. Do you think this captures the complexity of the Chilean economy with enough fidelity that policymakers could have made reliable predictions about the effects of their interventions? (I don't. This is why: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html)

I have great hope that agent-based modeling and simulation will become useful tools in economics, but they are only useful when we accept that they are wrong. We should approach synoptic tools like Cybersyn that promise power and control over complex social systems with extreme skepticism.

Technical understanding always determines ambition!

You've given me two excellent answers in the last few weeks. (The other was on Aristotle, inter-subjective selection, and N-dimensional optimization). Thank you!

This happened to me, too. For once, carrying travelers checks came in handy.

In Turkey, most ATMs accept my extra-long PIN, but very few have UIs designed to fit more than 4 digits. On many of them, the digits will continue outside of the form field and sometimes all the way off the screen.

Ichiro and Steve Nash are wonderful role models, but I don't think they're very good models, which this essay seems to overlook. "Black Swan Farming" is about the enormous, counterintuitive variance of returns to startup investments. Sports just isn't in the same domain: a batter with 1000x more hits than the league average is inconceivable, but 1000x variations in startup outcomes are quite common.

Sure. I use CRON-O-Meter (http://cronometer.com/) to track my diet and weight, RunKeeper (http://runkeeper.com/home) and Fitocracy (https://www.fitocracy.com/) to track exercise, Moodscope (http://www.moodscope.com/login) to track my mood, and YourFlowingData (http://your.flowingdata.com/) to track anything else I want to measure. My favorite self-tracking service was an MIT Media Lab project called Mycrocosm (http://mycro.media.mit.edu/), but it's pretty much dead. (I wrote a Python script to extract my old data. I'll clean it up and publish it).

Some of these services are completely siloed, some of them export data as .csv or XML, and some of them actively interact with one another (e.g. Fitocracy imports Runkeeper data, CRONometer can connect to a Withings scale). Each tool works well in its niche, but there's no easy way (yet!) to get all the data in one machine-readable place.

Here's the direct link to try it out: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report

As someone with a long history of incomplete self-tracking projects, this kind of automated collection and analysis is great. (If only I could get the rest of my data in the same place!) What I'd really like to see is a tool like IFTTT for self-trackers.

I have a question for people smarter than me:

This method differs from PageRank by excluding walks along the graph that repeat edges. I always thought it was an interesting property that PageRank represents the probability of reaching a given page by following links at random. Does excluding cycles change this property? (My intuition is yes, but I'm bad at math!) If not, what would DebtRank values represent? Likelihood of some unit of debt ending up held by a particular institution?

In-N-Out is an example of efficiency wages in action: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency_wage. In-N-Out starts new employees at $10/hr, well above other fast food chains, on the theory that higher wages improve worker performance and encourage efficient service.

This is a great tool! Along with Kicktraq (http://kicktraq.com/) and Kicksaver (http://www.kicksaver.net/ - I made this a while ago), there are now third party projects like this for every stage of a potential campaign, from the planning stages to last-minute rescues.

We're all lucky that Kickstarter's pages are so pleasant to scrape.

Interesting. I understand the value of keeping design simple and CSS readable, but are there performance implications (page load times, &c.) to using a large color palette?

From each according to his frequent flier mileage, to each according to his need!

I like this idea, but adverse selection is a huge unsolved problem and heavily subsidized loans crowd out the alternatives. If you're a talented student with reason to expect high future income (and your education isn't already paid for with merit aid), why would you choose equity over very cheap debt?

I wonder if this model could work on a smaller scale, much like a startup incubator: find talented students who would otherwise attend cheap state schools, pay for a prestige degree at an Ivy, and take a share of future income. Like an incubator, it would be in the investor's interest to provide mentorship and help students find high-paying jobs. But again, there's an adverse selection problem. Why not just offer the same students loans, and why would a talented student sell equity?

If anyone has $200m lying around, I'd be interested in running this experiment. Its success would also depend on whether college is more about learning things or signaling status.

Stuff is not growth, in the same way that money is not wealth (PG gets this. You have probably read the essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html). Growth is just increasing wealth, but we measure it in terms of stuff (GDP, factor productivity) because it's easy. There may be natural limits to the amount of stuff we can produce. But there are, in principle, no natural limits to the amount of wealth we can produce.

Growth—that is, more wealth due to better technology and higher productivity—is exactly what enabled the New York Philharmonic to play Beethoven's Ninth in the first place, instead of farm potatoes or work in a factory. It's exactly what enables me to buy a ticket and go listen in person, or spend nothing and watch the performance online, even though I'm not a king or priest or robber baron! Pronouncements that growth (read: wealth, innovation, technology, knowledge) must end are as silly as past pronouncements that we have reached the limits of scientific knowledge and all that's left is to look in the sixth place of decimals.

In fact, one path to more growth and better wealth is actually more productivity in the "caring professions" singled out here. Medicine, social work, and education all suffer from a similar stuff-growth measurement problem! (Here is one discussion of this argument: http://www.economist.com/node/21016577) We want better health, but we can't measure it very well, so we rely on healthcare spending. We want better social services, but it's tough to quantify outcomes, so we measure inputs like program budgets. We want better education, but we're not sure what works, so we measure number of teachers and test scores. Despite spending more and producing more stuff in each area, there has been little growth in the last few decades.

Professors of economics and sustainable development are both susceptible to this fallacy.

The discussion of formulas for pricing risk and forecasting methods is a great (if unintended) example of the problem with student loans: any government subsidy will distort price signals in unintended ways. Even if government tries to price in risk (which is a good idea), the signals will only be as good as the regression analysis, will still be subject to political pressure, and will still concentrate rather than distribute risk. A poor forecast of the future demand for philosophers, or the decision to train more teachers for the public good will still result in human capital misallocation, even if it's not as bad as the current system.

Compare this to private loans, which use the price system and mechanisms like futures markets to evaluate and distribute risk. Instead of one formula to price risk, many formulas compete and the information they contain is aggregated and summarized by relative prices. Risk is distributed among many lenders instead of concentrated in the hands of government.

The worst possible equilibrium seems to be the system in place now: price signals are distorted by subsidies that cover most of the loan market, while private lenders serve those whose educations are so expensive that they aren't covered by already-generous government subsidies. Private lenders encourage these students to take out risky loans, while strict rules on default shift the risk to borrowers.

There are all kinds of alternatives to student loans, but they will not be competitive while federal subsidies continue to distort the student borrowing market. One of my favorite ideas is human capital contracts (here's a good paper: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa462.pdf), which would work like equity instead of debt. Students could sell "shares" of their future earnings to investors in exchange for the start-up capital for an education. There are lots of potential pitfalls with this model, but I think it aligns the incentives of lender and borrower (or investor and future earner) in a much more positive way: investors would have strong incentives to help students succeed that do not exist under the current debt-based model. Unfortunately, big subsidies are a big barrier to entry: there's no reason to offer equity when one can easily obtain a subsidized loan.

I chose to attend a large state university on a generous scholarship and graduate without debt rather than attend one of the more prestigious schools where I was accepted and take on student loans. So far, I think it was the right choice. But if I had the necessary capital, I'd start a Y combinator for students: find students like me who would otherwise stay in-state and finance "prestige degrees" at an Ivy or other top university in exchange for a share of future income. The model would operate very much like a start-up incubator: providing mentorship and advice and placing students in well-paying jobs after graduation would have a direct effect on the profitability of the investment. It's just a matter of figuring out how to pick (or make) students who will succeed.

I've noticed this, too. Udacity's courses are clearly designed from the start to work well on the web, whereas many Coursera courses seem to be existing lectures broken into smaller chunks. This really sets Udacity apart, but I think it's actually the result of a much bigger advantage: Udacity isn't affiliated with a meatspace university.

It might not seem like an advantage now, since they're competing with more prestigious options from Stanford and MIT, but I think the decision to detach Udacity from Stanford will prove to be a very smart choice. I think we'll see real universities take a two-faced approach to online learning: they will want the attention it draws, but will for fear of diluting the prestige value of their brands. (See the protracted wrangling over the certificates in the original AI course. And can you blame them? The brand is probably the most valuable part of a modern diploma).

This is Udacity's real advantage: they don't have to worry about prerequisites, four-year graduation rates, department budgets, or the physical constraints of offline universities. They are already much more nimble and much less risk-averse than some of the other initiatives, and it will be difficult for the programs still affiliated with universities (institutions hanging on to practices invented in, like, the 13th century) to detach themselves from offline constraints and adapt to the web.

I've been teaching myself to program over the past year, and HN has been a great resource. I started with Python, but wanted to learn some Javascript, too, and settled on writing a browser extension as a first project. I wrote this simple Chrome extension to bug me when I browse distracting sites and keep one tab from turning into ten.

I'm a big fan of tools that help manage the total time I waste online like Leechblock and StayFocusd, but I wanted a tool to remind me to spend my daily distraction quotas wisely. This extension prevents quick visits to HN and other sites from sucking up too much time by providing a gentle reminder every few minutes. Open a distracting tab, and it starts counting down from your preset time limit. When time's up, it will prompt you to close the tab or restart the timer.

This is my first browser extension (and the first real thing I've written in Javascript). I'm sure you'll find some bugs, but I hope you also find it useful. It feels great to have the ability to build the tools I want myself, instead of hoping someone else will!