paul_houle's comments

Just to fill in come context, SIOC is an RDF vocabulary that describes web content and communities. In my mind, any site that's based on a CMS or a database should export a version of itself in SIOC: SIOC, for instance, makes it possible to separate comments from the rest of a page, so search engines can separate comments from "official text", so we don't need to put a silly nofollow on comment links.

The "private beta" is a web 2.0 trope that's going to disappear in web 3.0. It's something you can afford to do when you've got a rich sugar daddy, but when you're trying to make a profitable site on your own dime, you've got to start early.

Yes, I know about the testability problems of community systems -- I've lived them. Web 3.0 finds answers to them. Web 3.0 succeeds where Web 2.0 failed.

Class-D amps aren't a common project for the electronic enthusiast: although the theory of the Class-D amp is beautiful and simple, there are a lot of details in the construction that are hard to master. Using an evaluation board, as the author does, is a good answer to the problem.

I got a PhD but never found my voice writing as an academic. For a while I thought I was a bad writer, but I spent a year or two, a few years later, where the bulk of my income came from writing. I found it was more profitable to write software than to write computer books, but that was when I realized the problem was in academic writing, not in me.

Maybe it's the state I'm in, but whenever I've looked into high deductible plans it doesn't seem that they save much money.

Most of health insurance premiums go to pay for very expensive treatments, usually at the end of life. Routine medical bills don't add up to much: but bills can add up to $250k pretty quick if you get cancer.

How come people aren't looking at this from the other angle: a twitter client could pre-preemptively look up URLs from url shortening services and annotate the tweets with the full URLs?

For that matter, how about a twitter client with a memory? One that keeps dossiers on the people you follow?

How about a twitter client that isn't written in AIR?

Frontier DSL, which also serves communities around Rochester, NY has also been talking about a bandwidth cap -- at a ludicrously low 5 GB/month.

Frontier serves a number of rural areas where they're the only option people have for service: they've backed off on their threats when customers threatened to take their cases to their state PUCs.

That's very possible. No matter how I interpret it, Prozac made my life like a Phillip K. Dick novel.

Personally I'm not a fan of antidepressants. For me, Prozac had the side effect of extra-sensory perception: I couldn't do anything without having immediate karmic effects on people I knew who lived hundreds of miles away. I'd be sitting in bed talking to my wife about (essentially unpredictable) events that would happen to take place the next day. People think they might want those kind of powers, but you can count me out. I lasted about a week, but it took most of a month for the metabolites to wash out of my system.

One tablet of lexapro causes my interest in sex to disappear entirely for a week. Personally I think this simplifies my life, but three days of sleeplessness is quite a price to pay.

A friend of mine started taking Effexor, but then we found accounts of how it's impossible to stop taking Effexor: blood-curdling stories about pharmacists who'd dissassemble the pills and reassemble them to titrate the dose down, and who'd still be unable to get the dose to zero. He stopped in three days, before the damage was done.

Anyhow, all of those drugs affect serotonin metabolism, as do the 5-HT2A agonists that some people call psychedelics or entheogens. Alexander Shulgin did a 30-year research program on psychedelic phenethylamines (drugs structurally related to dextroamphetamine, mescaline and ecstacy) and found that certain drugs in that family have a synergism with alcohol much like what the author of that article describes.

This is ludicrous.

You might have been able to blame labor unions for the economic problems of the 1970's, but capital has been ascendant everywhere since the 1980's. Power has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the rich, and now there's only one part of society to blame for the economic crisis.

Yes, the UAW plays a role in the problems of the US auto industry. The financial services industry, which is at the epicenter of the current crisis, is not unionized. You can't blame unions for AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bank Of America, Merrill Lynch, CDOs or the housing bubble.

I'm sick and tired of the "Atlas Shrugged" fantasies that many people have. Most billionaires are billionaires because they own large blocks of stocks in public companies. These are worth billions because:

(i) People buy their stock in the (false) hope that they will grow in value faster than the GDP and finance a comfortable retirement () (ii) There's a large population of people who have money to spend on goods and services. Mass prosperity is the trunk of the tree that holds the rich up. (iii) People do work in their companies that creates a stream of revenue.

I'm no communist.

Capitalists play an important role in deciding where resources can be profitably used. The root of the financial crisis is that the financial system is no longer capable of performing this crucial role.

Capital and labor need to be in balance. The growth of capital's power over the past 30 years has destroyed the social infrastructure that it needs to create wealth: thus we've got a deflationary process that is making wealth disappear..

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() The stock market finances retirement on a pay-as-you-go basis, just as does social security. The number of dollars spent buying stocks has to equal the number of dollars made selling stocks. It's simple math.

The average return on investment across the economy equals the rate of growth of GDP in the long term: where can you get the returns from? from changing the way that wealth is partitioned in the economy. Some inequality of wealth creates an incentive for people to work and invest -- but the game ends when all of the money is in one person's pocket, just as it does in the game of monopoly.

We've managed to fool ourselves in the last decade by (i) taking on unsustainable debts, and (ii) stealing from ourselves as workers in the name of (imaginary) returns that we thought we'd benefit from when we're retired. Trouble is, the jig is up,

I'm in a rural area with monopoly DSL from Frontier. These days they use repeaters to service people that are more than 18k feet from the CO:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_houle/3340856649/

If you're far from the CO they use an ordinary DSL line card that communicates to the repeater, which itself contains both a DSL modem and a line card that talks to your DSL modem.

This strategy is good in the short term, but they'd be better off running a fiber bundle to the repeater farm in the long term.

Cable service terminates about 1.5 miles from my house: everyone who wants TV gets it by satellite, so Time Warner doesn't think it could get enough customers to justify further build-out.

The main trouble w/ Frontier is reliability: the ATM network that hooks up DSL line cards to the network goes down regularly, particularly on the weekends. They've been making noises about a preposterously low 5 GB cap, but haven't enforced it. I wouldn't mind having some reasonable way to pay $1 a GB or so past a certain point, but there's been no talk about that.

Perhaps white space would help, but I've got no faith in wireless broadband systems above 1 GHz. Our area is subdivided into narrow and long valleys that don't get cellphone coverage -- there's an independent ISP that offers tolerable WiMax service around the city of Ithaca, but they're having trouble getting a stable upstream connection and trouble getting high-performance DSL lines to support their infrastructure.

I don't agree with this.

Jeff's post had some thoughtful things to say about designing rules for communities. He's thinking a lot about what the rules should be for his community at stackoverflow, and comparing your rules to other people's rules is a good way to think about this kind of problem.

There certainly isn't one answer: there's an interaction between the rules and the actual bunch of people you have visiting a site.

Personally I'm losing interest in reddit, for instance, because articles about mainstream programming languages get downvoted immediately -- but articles about farting in Python or computing fibonacci functions recursively in an obscure LISP dialects get hundreds of votes.

As for attracting the "wrong" kind of people, I think you're taking the wrong angle. Atwood is trying to get more people to pay attention to stackoverflow -- if he's got any tactical aspirations towards hacker news, it would be using it as a way to promote his own ventures, as he's done with DZone and other programming sites.

My sites have done OK w/ advertising since Fall 2008, but I'm more weighted towards PPC and CPA.

Web advertising has it's challenges, but it's clear that advertisers are wildly overspending on offline advertising, and that much of that spending is going to disappear.

I used to work for the largest web consulting shop in a small town. My accountant and other small business people would ask how much a site from us would cost: I'd say that a site with custom design and CMS would start around $2k.

Often they'd be shocked... They'd expect to pay more like $80.

The same businesses have been spending $100 a day for tiny display ads in the local newspaper... Add that up for 365 days, and you could afford rent for a modest storefront or an extra employee. You could spend less than half of that (once) and have the beginnings of an e-commerce site that would bring in recurring and measurable income.

Businesses are wising up and pulling their ads out of the local daily: some of that money is going to get funneled into advertising models that work for advertisers, such as PPC and CPA.

There a lot of people chasing the kind of opportunities that he advocates: ones that have strongly superlinear scaling. That kind of investment comes with a possibility of an explosive gain, but there are many opportunities out there that are profitable but don't grow quite as dramatically. If investors didn't put money into them, they'd be (i) leaving money on the table and (ii) impoverishing the development of a wide range of goods and services that people want and need.

this is why i like hacker news: anything about PHP gets downvoted into oblivion on reddit.

I can't say if it's really "hacker" news, but it's definitely sugoi!

I like that article!

(1) have a really cool product that makes them say wow, for instance: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fusioinio-iodrive-flash,...

(2) pay 'em

I like the term "software developer" because it's vague about what you actually do: I mean, you could be doing software construction, project management or you could be the owner of the company -- one can be a "web developer" much like a "real estate developer."

Much of my extended family works in the construction business, where there are career paths that go between being an employee and being an owner: you might start out as a teenager putting in fenceposts and nailing shingles onto roofs, then you're working for a big contractor doing roadwork, then you and your brother buy a bulldozer and start digging foundations, putting in sidewalks and curbs and clearing snow at the mall. At some point you might end up owning a few rental properties, and if you make it big you might become the guy who does $20M contracts for roadwork...

Of course there are different paths: I worked for a startup founder who was an MBA -- we pitched an idea to venture capitalists, had it turned down, switched to a plan b we could do on a shoestring. We executed that successfully. I moved on to other things, but he sold the business at a profit a few years later.

I find myself engaging and disengaging from various services and individuals on social media. I think that's fine.

There are people who I'll talk with intensely on Twitter for a few hours... I'll talk with somebody else intensely the week after that.

The circle of people that I engage with a certain day will be small, but the circle gets wider the longer time scale that you look at it.

There are times I put a lot of energy into Flickr, there times when I'm doing something else. I like services like FriendFeed and the Twitter Facebook Application that bring these things together.