tapertaper

Producers do make money off the currency. Who will mine it if it's worth nothing? And who will hold it if its value will collapse?

Those goods are all highly unique with no easy substitutes. One currency can buy something as easily as another.

My impression of the wine biz is that supply is fragmented. In which case the network of relationships is complex (many-to-many) and so costly to maintain. In my business (insurance) disintermediation only followed massive consolidation on the insurer side. Many-to-many became Many-to-few. Cheaper to maintain, easier to scale.

Alternate title: the importance of peer review.

Spreadsheets are awesome because they let us organize analysis visually which more programming-based quantitative tools cannot.

This makes everything easier, including auditing. But someone's still got to do it.

Eliminate price gouging laws and give gas station owners an incentive to buy generators and this problem goes away. Also gives an incentive to truck gas in from afar. Obviously people view increased prices during a crisis to be morally repugnant, hence the laws. Just sayin' it would work.

I was in Toronto during the blackout and never looked up even once. I think about that missed opportunity all the time.

Maybe a silly question: do copyrights for games (art or whatever) ever expire?

Slick stuff. They clearly invest a lot of time/energy into each listing. Good photos, good detail on each building.

We want to move to a bigger space in downtown NY but we need to break our five-year lease. So we either moving within the building (no broker) or find a replacement for our space (broker simultaneously places us and fills our space). Hard to imagine 42floors helping us this time 'round.

For me it was a system for tracking errors in weather forecasts. I downloaded 400-odd forecasts from the NOAA twice a day and dropped them into a database.*

Figured out the following technologies on the fly: Python for the machine learning part, the backend and web scraping (after I finally gave up on SOAP), SQLite, HTML/CSS, PHP (after giving up on Django), Apache web server, FTP protocol (for backing up my stuff to my external drive). There are probably other things I tried and gave up on but forget.

I definitely went down a LOT of blind alleys and generally found out-of-the-box frameworks incomprehensible. The difference in the various communities was fascinating, too. For instance, try comparing forum answers to CSS or PHP questions against Python or, gasp, C. Holy cow.

*The result, if anyone cares, was that I figure they systematically overestimate High temps, underestimate low temps and overestimate POP.

EDIT: forgot javascript/jquery.

I taught myself programming last year (starting with Python from Google's course) and am incredibly jealous of this. I'd have killed for someone to explain what on earth Object Oriented Programming was in the context of the project I was working on. It simply did not make sense to me for a very long time.

This is more about slavery than plankton.

Fertile land does not equal Obama votes.

Another effect: prototyping is surely the most labor-intensive part of the manufacturing process. This will reduce the share of employment attributed to manufacturing while possibly increase output.

Like all other manufacturing technologies.

pg should just webcast a sample of ycombinator presentations.

The "search for the next Steve Jobs" is a pretty active market. I predict competition for this show.

Seems a bit of a non-sequitur here: 1. We think writing skills are great (fair enough) 2. We feel we were taught to write well in school (good for you) 3. We aren't happy with how our kids are being taught to write (that's too bad, but ok) 4. "For now, my husband and I have moved our 8th grade son to a private school where we hope he will be taught to write well." ("We hope"? huh?)

Any organization rewards its most productive members. If Apple's marginal dollar of profit starts coming from litigating rather than Innovating it's not just bad for consumers, it's bad for Apple (over a longer horizon).

Who do we want to have higher status, Jony Ive or Noreen Krall?

http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/10/apples_chief_couns...

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

-Carl Sagan

The feeling of competitive pride is possibly the most precious resource in the universe. Who can achieve anything without it?

Dragon moms all over the world weep with envy over this boy.

Excel power user here. Any plans for inter-compatibility?

If Grid can simply view other spreadsheet formats (even stripped of formulas and formatting), you'll get a lot of looks from the business world.

3.4 sigmas aren't enough. Call when you get to 5.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/13/the-large...

and...

http://trap.it/47HCqt

The font on that website hurts my eyes.

The deals in insurance don't come when an insurer follows its filings religiously. They come when insurers make a big move for market share and max out their deviations from manual/filed rates, which vary by state.

This happens infrequently, unpredictably and, sometimes, for short periods of time. Real shoppers are probably still better off going direct.

Michael Jordan would WANT to have been rejected.

What's the point of putting the tl;dr at the bottom?

Everyone who spends their day on a computer would get a productivity boost if they learned to code.

Great comment.

Probably also worth speculating on why this is happening NOW. Why is this breaking out of CS departments in 2011 and not 2002?

The datasets are new.

Bandwidth? Storage capacity? Computing power? All of the above?