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composer | 4 years ago | on: Always Multiply Your Estimates by π (2013)

> An estimation has two components: location and uncertainty

ReRe's Law of Repetition and Redundancy [5] could benefit from a refinement that accounts for the inverse relationship between width-of-delivery-window and certainty-of-delivery-date... maybe:

  A programmer can accurately estimate the schedule for only the repeated and the redundant. Yet,
  A programmer's job is to automate the repeated and the redundant. Thus,
  A programmer delivering to an estimated or predictable schedule is...
  Not doing their job (or is redundant).
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25826476

composer | 4 years ago | on: Why I Work on Ads

I like this argument and would like to strengthen it in sligthly diffent dimension...

Every time I hear/read a "net offset" justification like in the greatgrandparent comment my brain only hears

  I'm gonna sell heroin/meth/crack to fund a rehab clinic; 
  AND 
  if more persons are rehabbed than addicted 
  then the whole endeavour is a good thing;
  AND 
  I am a good person; call me "one of the good ones.
The point of the analogy is to share the perspective that "net offsetting" isn't automatically a good thing. Many times the fundamental nature of the initial thing to be offset, in this case advertising, must be given primacy over anything else.

Some see the nature of advertising as neutral, some even see it as good, some see it it as evil. I see it as too impractical to wield as intended; rare-times good, some-times neutral and most-times bad.

Although we can measure air water and noise pollutions, we still have wild disagreements over how much to allow. Given that we suck at measuring the mental pollution produced by advertising-based business models, it is natural that disagreement is even greater over mental pollution.

Where is the startup that shows folks the pollution-free mental spaces that they didn't know they wanted_needed, but that they will never let-go once experienced. Sadly, most minds are limited to imagining the same sad choices jefftk listed. I for one choose to believe that people exist who see how to "fund the web" sans advertising. To them I leave this future message: "Hurry up dammit. We need you. The jefftk's of this world are making the most ungodly of big messes."

composer | 5 years ago | on: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

> $2.5 Trillion every year

Actually it will cost $3T ONCE, one-time.

Actually the USA has already paid for a UBI from just its pandemic-related stimulus alone, e.g. CARES Act.

The way to achieve an perpetual ongoing UBI with just a one time expediture of $3T is... drum roll... Stipulate that all payments must be spent on basics & essentials. AND then issue the payments & handle collection digitally/electronically like with debit cards. I sit astounded that the country's best leaders have not proposed a "basics only" amendment.

composer | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: Recurring reviews to track the whole lifecycle of a product

That is also a good idea because people are motivated more to act when something goes wrong; and a close second is when they are excited to share a good discovery. The DefaultReviews [1] gist may offer some guidance:

"...rating by default is the equivalent of saying "everything is okay". That rating is made without you having to lift a finger. You only have to lift a finger to change it to "awesome" or to "sucks" or to add a elaboration for others to read."

Also, the final section of DefaultReviews [1] may also help solve your inevitable problem with faked reviews. Pull requests welcome.

[1] https://gist.github.com/iL3D/59df64947d42828d848ebfc1651a312...

composer | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

Similar to floatrock's proposol [1] of turning reviews upside down... Imagine being able to track broken-ness (when, how, why) in the field across all products of the same model. And doing so for each product you own. "Default reviews" [2] is one way to do it. Pull requests welcome.

1 upside down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24710832

2 default reviews - https://gist.github.com/iL3D/59df64947d42828d848ebfc1651a312...

composer | 8 years ago | on: Want to Be Happy? Think Like an Old Person (2017)

Giving is exactly what turned one blogger's bipolar struggles into something manageble [1]:

"I felt trapped, waiting for the descent, wondering how steep, prepared somewhat for its arrival because it had never not come. Now, though, here was a PhD telling me the altruistic acts Buy Nothing Bainbridge enabled me to perform spurred production of chemicals that actually helped heal my misfiring synapses."

Sometimes science and religion do converge around the same truth. Some form of meaningful (to the recipient) giving is one path that would restore the "lost direction and belonging" mentioned in the top parent.

[1] https://buynothingproject.org/2013/12/23/my-buy-nothing-expe...

composer | 8 years ago | on: A New Way to Tell Your Airline You Hate It

That's funny. But I like the idea of signaling the market some way. In a sufficiently competitive market even your opt-out signaling would would work. In the deaf market of the airlines however, scaled coordination enough to tip power back passengers, may be the only unfortunate answer. You would need to coordinate your "drive instead of flying" with enough people at the same time in the same geography.

composer | 8 years ago | on: A New Way to Tell Your Airline You Hate It

DHH posted about his bad airline experience[1] in 2013. An app for addressing both your experience and his experience is feasible for the HN crowd. Please steal this business plan[2]. tl;dr Today, getting issues resolved places the burden of effort is the wronged. This can be shifted. "Reversing" things does wonders.

[1] http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2013/american-airlines-ea... [2] https://gist.github.com/iL3D/59df64947d42828d848ebfc1651a312...

composer | 8 years ago | on: Scientists Reverse Brain Damage in Drowned Toddler?

I'm reluctant to say this...

But future generations will probably laugh at us. Our rule of thumb about deprivation of oxygen and brain damage is based on the idea that brain damage occurs on the "down" side when the brain is deprived. Actually, the damage occurs on the "up" side when a patient is revived under non-ideal circumstances for brain operation. It turns out the brain if you wake it "up" properly can stay "down" as long as other organs. Think kidneys frozen for 24 hours before being successly transplanted. And a proper wake up involves slow extracorporeal rewarming as mentioned in one of the top comments.

If we can accept this down/up inversion as true, then it means that rushing to revive a patient is what does the damage. It means applying CPR in the field as soon as possible does the damage.

If true, it means 20 minutes, or even 2 hours, of not breathing is nothing as long as the cold body is rewarmed slowly.

If true, it means it is better to keep the brain "down", body "frozen", everything cold as possible (but above the temp of ice crystals riping apart blood cells causing permanent limb loss) until --and this is the key part-- a proper wake "up" can be performed.

If true it means the current limits observed with oxygen deprivation exist only because we are still concerned with reviving as soon as possible. Leave that child passed out! (But keep 'em cold.)

If all this is true, it means that saving a loved one is best done buy applying ice over applying CPR.

Future generations will shake their heads in disbelief, at how many people we have needlessly injured and killed with the barbaric practice of rushing to revive. I look forward to the improvement in how we save/restore lives. I look forward to the improvement from the slow but steady diffusion through our collective awareness of of the idea:

Down-and-cold-is-okay/ Prematurely-revived-is-bad.

composer | 10 years ago | on: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

(Pardon the incredulous-sounding intro but...)

Actually you can pay for it. Exactly because any regular ordinary person can pay for it. Exactly because abundance is inherently free. (For the rest of the comment I'll redefine the label "you" to be one single ordinary person who wants to make a basic income happen IRL.) [0]

Abundance is free because it defeats the fundamental condition required for a scarcity-allocating market. That fundamental condition is: there is not enough for everybody. For example, try selling stray kittens in a neighborhood overrun with stray cats. No scarcity, no market price. In contrast, basic income requires abundance otherwise you have no business trying to universally share something you don't have enough of. Everybody can't have formula one race cars and red bottom heels. So just to be explicit:

With a universal basic income, you should only seek to share only those things you have in abundance. And since abundance is free, you are merely

  **seeking to share free shit**.

  **Abundance cycles**
A) Armed with the above perspective, you launch a form of self-sustaining loop called an abundance cycle. You take out a home equity loan for $25K. You use $15K of that $25K to build [1], or buy [2], a THOW ("tiny house on wheels").

B) You give the tiny house to a handy builder-type who redirects the savings in rent towards spending more time building, you guessed it, more tiny houses. You use the remaining $10K to cover materials for the initial THOWs that the builder builds from scratch.

  **Ride free**
C) The next THOW is gifted to a mechanic. The mechanic brings transportation into the abundance cycle. D) Y'all build, then sell a third THOW to buy requisite parts/materials for the mechanic's transportation phase. E) Mechanic personage, freed from financial shackles of keeping a roof overhead, begins spitting out reliable autos restored from $3K jalopies and hoopties found on craigslist [3]. They alternatively build electric bikes [4] and velomobiles [5] if requested over a car.

  **Gotta eat**
F) Your circle of three, all saving on rent and transportation, is now able to repeat the process to bring a grower into the loop. A house and car is gifted to a combination aquaponics [6] grower, diy soylent [7] mixer, mealsquare [8] baker and cricket powder [9] integrator.

  **Zap that**
G) Next, the self-sustaining circle does its amoeba thing to encompass a solar installer. The installer works with the builder to produce, or retrofit, THOWs topped with solar panels [10]. The circle goes off grid if/when desired. Now you've got food, shelter, transportation, and energy all covered.

  **Highly contagious**
H) You assemble the circle, affectionately calling itself the "amoeba initiative". It meets and decides to split into two organisms. I) The first organism focuses on gifting houses, transports, foods and electricities to as many people as possible as fast as possible. "Build two, sell one, gift one, repeat" is it's poorly-chosen motto. Gifts are first made to contagion vectors, namely giftees most able to produce more gifts.

  **Umm, water?**
J) The second organism does the research [11] and entrepreneur thing to find the best way to cover the last and most difficult and most critical basic need, water. Strategically selected expertises seek to bring to the masses a Slingshot-like [12] water purifier. Delivering clean water from polluted urban water sources-- think Flint, MI --means full grid independence. Kowtow to ~~immorten joe~~ the water MUDs only when you want unnaturally relocated grass species growing unnaturally green.

  **No fossils**
K) You assemble the AI ("amoeba initiative") again. You task them with extending arms to cover energy storage with air batteries the size of shipping containers, ala LightSail [13], which solves the weight and toxicity problems with time-shifting power from the solar panels. This in turn is crucial to weaning the last tenacious supplicants of the fossil fuel teat. You also task the assembly to polish cel-tower-obsoleting [14] laptops and mesh-connecting [15] smartphones, in order to deliver i) internet, ii) more importantly mobile data, and iii) most importantly carrier independence.

  **Better markets**
L) While the AI is still assembled, you reluctantly but necessarily task them with a PRA ("public relations arm"). The PR arm demonstrates and clarifies, in preemption of forseeable change resistors, how freer and larger and healthier private markets result from all the free and scary sharing of abundance. A market economy will always precipitate from the phenomena that is the human appetite. By design the human appetite, even when fed all essential nutrients, is infinite and will always find more to want beyond need. "Built to crave perfection", "continuous improvement necessitates an infinite appetite", "trust good instincts" are among catch-phrases tossed onto the annoyingly named ideate wall that triggers your early escape from PRA's first session. Exhausted, the assembly decides to table whether to engulf the tailors' guild; apparently folk suffering about naked isn't enough of thing.

  **Zero net cost** (nee Shit's free yo!)
M) One day, the AI throws a recognition ceremony. A sizeable surplus resulted from delivering requests for customization of the "basic" AI houses, transports, and recipes. From the surplus, the AI assembly symbolically pays back your original $25K loan. They hand you a wordy plaque that truthfully states "You did it for free" as the last line.

  **tl;dr**
Because of something called abundance cycles, even you can cover the world's basic needs, eliminate missed human potential and consequently bend hyper-exponentially the curve of human progress. The 13 "unlucky" steps are just an "off the top of the dome" illustration. A serious treatment can do much better exactly because a basic income focused on sharing abundance is free to do, exactly because abundance is intrinsically free.

tl;dr($tl;dr) Because abundance cycles

  *p.s.*
Seriously... imagine bending the curve of human progress for $25K. Recoupable. That is a fraction of the cost of 1 basic income trial or study. It's not my place to tell any advocates who do _actual better more_ work than myself to "Stop studying, Start doing", so maybe you can find a lesser hypocrite than myself to tell YC Research. ;-)

=====

[00] precedent https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/comments/3m8x3d/hey_guy...

[01] http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/pages/plans

[02] http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/products/amish-barn-raiser

[03] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2016/01/28/the-man-who-gets-h...

[04] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/08/31/electric-bike-revi...

[05] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobiles....

[06] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/10/20/aquaponics/

[07] https://diy.soylent.com/

[08] http://www.mealsquares.com/faq.html

[09] http://static1.squarespace.com/static/52524dbbe4b0b242f8ce4c...

[10] http://defyingnormal.com/blog/2014/08/26/tour-solar-setup-va...

[11] http://simonthorpesideas.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/science-and...

[12] http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/re...

[13] http://www.lightsail.com/

[14] https://myriadrf.org/projects/novena-rf/

[15] http://www.technologyreview.com/news/516571/build-your-own-i...

composer | 10 years ago | on: ‘Laws’ of Software Development

ReRe's Law of Repetition and Redundancy

A programmer can accurately estimate the schedule only for the repeated and the redundant. Yet,

A programmer's job is to automate the repeated and the redundant. Thus,

A programmer delivering to an estimated or predictable schedule is...

Not doing their job (or is redundant).

composer | 15 years ago | on: Webs of Trust and How To Decentralize Them (Bitcoin)

Wow. The article is significant because it identifies and proposes a solution to a fundamental problem everyone has (even if they don't recognize it yet). Craig Newmark concurs with the poster per a gigaom interview. "Newmark called some form of distributed trust system “the killingest of killer apps” for the web over the next decade" (http://gigaom.com/2010/03/18/craig-newmark-on-the-webs-next-...).

A giant multidimensional karma score, a peer-based FICO score for reputation, a PKI-like vouch system, an Advogato-like acceptance scheme to cover all internet activity solves so many things.

- Know who to trust on craigslist, airbnb, etc. - Astroturfing/trolling disappears on your favorite political forum. - Gamed ratings disappear from your favorite music discovery site. - Online referendums, with the assurance of only one account per unique person, are possible. - Promotional online giveaways with a one per person limit become easy. - Gone are account verification hoops like sms codes to a required cel phone. - The usefulness of consumer complaint boards is restored. - Trolls may finally become a relics of some ancient internet past. - Amazon-turk inflated rankings no longer can mislead ebay buyers.

Bitcoin solving it's own local problem may very well fix everything else on the intarwebs.

I would expand on the posters call for "decentralized peripherals: a decentralized exchange, a decentralized DNS, Namecoin, and also a decentralized web of trust." Open source R&D, with decentralized governance and distributed funding by the crowd, is what should be powering all this.

Hackers should crowd-fund a collectively beholden R&D outfit that churns out solutions for fundamental things like reputation and decentralized peripherals. Right now such a role is played out haphazardly?, incidentally by matured startups that donate or "give back" according to their narrow focus some other narrowly focused institution. A wider more comprehensive, more coherent approach is achieved when hackers cut out the middle steps and self-organize to solve the fundamental problems they face everyday. Open source R&D... what should we call it?

composer | 15 years ago | on: Super soaker inventor shooting for the sun

Why this is significant: Think outer space. In orbit, on the Moon or near Mars, a JTEC's sun facing side has a huge temperature differential than the shadow side.

And on a lighter note, think of all the unlimited energon. And maybe the inventor can also figure out how to the send the now limitless supply of energon cubes down to earth. And also figure out how to hide from Megatron.

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