seigenblues's comments

I like him much better after this interview.

That last paragraph seems far more damning of the author than of Mason -- they're so disappointed that he doesn't have any obvious status symbols and he's riding off on a moped.

Good for him, and shame on them, for equating consumption with success.

(he should really wear a helmet, though!)

seconded! I think i changed the wind variable.

I remember printing out the whole listing on our dot-matrix printer and unfolding it across the living room. I might've been 9 or 10.

No problem :) I think you're catching enough flak for your over-50 comments below, so I didn't mention that one ;)

BTW, shallow thought wasn't meant as a derogative. It's what we monkeys do best, after all. It'll result in a different profile of swings, hits, & misses than other approaches, that's all.

(also, the irony that the new yorker article also suggests how we're really good at seeing the faults in others thought processes but not in our own is hi-larious)

Best of luck!

No, it isn't.

I was writing a long post about how we think we're really good at detecting "important signals" like if someone's lying, but that we're actually terrible at it. But the new yorker article that was frontpaging yesterday should pretty much explain it, even though Jonah Lehrer is a bit smug for my tastes ;)

TL;DR- the OP sounds like a very shallow-thinking VC who's blissfully unaware of his own biases. It might work out ok for him -- these biases usually work most of the time, and that's why we have them -- but it will probably fail in some very crucial instances where a more thorough, data-driven approach might have worked better. In fact, that may be precisely how the great VC's are differentiated from the merely ok, but that's a different story...

(link: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06...)

You're completely right. Too funny -- i had written a comment about how there was probably some bullshit MBA phrase for the process of "correctly valuing passionate customers", but deleted it as overly cynical and offensive to the up and coming masters-of-the-universe on HN. Can't win! :)

I think it's still worthwhile to think about systems of people in terms of their aggregate actions as well as in terms of each being an individual.

This is dead on. It's a mistake to read this and take away some homey homily about how "every customer is a snowflake!" -- the point is that you should correctly value the passionate customer. Your marketing and outreach and customer service departments should understand the relative values of "bought it, loved it!" and "bought it, so?" Those relative values will vary from product to product/industry to industry

The comment below at this time ('survivorship bias') is also correct, but only if it's interpreted as a touching anecdote rather than as crucial customer-behavior information for his market segment. Understanding the dynamics of how your customers make their purchasing decisions seems like a better lesson to take from this.

(Not the same for every product, either! E.g., my being passionate about Cheerios does nothing for General Mills, really...)

yikes. These are impressive (and terrifying). I particularly like the "see if you use my return value and dynamically change my behavior" trick, I bet debugging a library that used that would be fuuuun.

I think it could probably be called "outbox" instead -- it might make a bit more sense?

MoGo is not 5d KGS -- there are some bots that are 4d/5d KGS, using the approach given in the article. The two best (that I am aware of) are Zen19 -- closed source -- and pachi -- available here: http://pachi.or.cz/

The author of Pachi has a paper detailing the major algorithm advancement beyond Monte-Carlo game simulations, which is sharing information across simulations in a way that is totally nonintuitive to me.

For me, a 3d/4d KGS go player, this is all very interesting stuff!

is that it? I thought it was about thinking you were going to build something Awesome and World Changing, and ending up ...being a bolted on web-layer on legacy Access databases, and not really liking that.

I totally agree. He even admits as such that this is the purpose of the question:

  "Instead the question ... taps something deeper and more
  closely held.  ... If I know what matters to them, I can
  right away tell if the same things matter to ...
  the organization at large."

In other words: "expose something tender and honest, so that we can exploit it as directly as possible."

Yep, sounds about right. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, 1% of the US is still ~3,000,000 people!

Did you just not look at the first graph in the NYT article? It actually shows where the projections came from.

And i'm not really clear if you understand the difference between recorded deficits, which are year-to-year losses, vs. the debt, which is the cumulative total of the yearly deficits and surpluses?

Your comments about whether Bush's tax cuts are now Obama's, and whether or not he hasn't "been powerless" in the face of the ridiculous obligations previous lawmakers have saddled him with (Medicare Part D) suggests a smidge of ignorance about the process of policymaking in our country.

Finally, i'll point out that your objection to these "projections" because they are just that, projections, calls this naturally into question: Look at the two sets of projections, the one issued in 2001 calling for eight years of surpluses and the one issued in 2009 calling for eight years of horrible deficits. In what way can you really object to these graphs because of their "rosy assumptions"? Yikes.

yes, doing all of the above is best :)

from speaking to staffers (i live in the DC area). They are generally young 20-somethings whose job it is to answer the phones, tally the e-mails & letters, and report on it to the congresscritters; they are generally unanimous on a few points:

1) that the congresspeople care and notice if an issue is getting a lot of attention from constituents 2) that this is something they usually ask about every day 3) that phone calls are generally more influential than letters, which are generally more influential than e-mails -- but it depends on how each office handles their inbounds.

you could be participating in your local elections. You could vote in primaries. You could be concerned about who's going to be your next local county sheriff, local zoning board officer, etc. You can get involved in the local political parties and affect them on a local level. (this is assuming that you already vote in all off-year elections, and already vote for president)

HN sees only the top level of the abstraction and assumes that the system is a lumbering behemoth incapable of change. Pushing the system from the bottom, it's actually quite capable of very abrupt change. Unfortunately, those methods of change require copious amounts of time, and will probably replace or supplant much more enjoyable hobbies you'd rather have.

In previous eras, this was considered the burden of citizenship...

For a simpler answer: Call your congresscritter. They're actually very responsive to phone calls and real letters. It's not hard to do.

Go is a great mirror; i'm glad it played a role -- even if an antagonistic one ;) -- in such a positive result.

real question here: Should it be obvious that the carrier controls the OS? Second question: is that acceptable? I mean, that assumption underpins your dismissal of an MITM as "pretty silly", which also seems totally correct.

I'm just curious if that's the way phones will be forever: with the OS controlled by the carrier and with no right to tinker/hack/modify the device you buy & pay huge monthly fees to use.

He's based his argument on the recruiter's statement, which is a poor choice. On the other hand, other material from the company supports, in fact, a much larger number.

I don't think there's any goalpost moving here at all: Hundreds of millions of keyloggers -- rootkits, really, as the article states -- are installed and unremovable. Whether they are being abused or not at the moment is irrelevant; it should be outrageous and unacceptable that such a datastream is going through a third-party without any kind of transparency, acceptance, or even tacit acknowledgement.

Likewise, your rhetorical refutation here (very thorough, in the abstract) would be a lot more damning if there wasn't, you know, video evidence of this rootkit collecting exactly this data and sending it back.

ah! Finally! Clear evidence of a meritocracy at work! </snark>

Actually, in all seriousness, doesn't this suggest there's a real imbalance or opportunity here to be exploited? Companies that hire like this surely must have some other systemic blind spots, no?