shedletsky's comments

Depending on how cynical one is, you might view the real estate multiple listing service (MLS) as "community owned", at least from a game theoretic standpoint.

It is not a monolithic organization. There are actually 850 regional MLSs in the US. In some sense this is a P2P walled-garden marketplace. However, there is downward pressure from the national realtors association to standardize on things like listing formatting, so it is not entirely self-organizing.

I think owning the marketplace is valuable. Similar to various open source initiatives, once the free marketplace gets to a certain size, someone like Red Hat will come in, fork it, and set themselves up as gatekeepers. The resting dynamic of the system is a feudal kingdom.

My 2c

I am interested in what specific anomalies they've detected recently on Twitter.

"We present the first 3D algorithm capable of answering the question: what would a Mandelbrot-like set in the shape of a bunny look like?"

I have questions, Science has answers. Science!

This guy knows what is up.

Is this book worth reading?

Ew. Sourceforge.

I was excited to try it but I'm afraid of what crapware I'll get if I do.

Maybe its secure, but maybe a vulnerability is simply worth more than the amount of btc in the pinata.

The amount in the pinata should probably double every X days. In this situation, if two people know the secret, it is advantageous for one of them to act immediately.

I'm just imagining the subtle bugs that can happen if the developer can't assume a minute is 60 seconds and that each minute is the same length.

This seems like a feature for no one, as the people who really care about leap seconds are probably doing their own timekeeping already since computer clocks aren't exactly accurate to being with.

Has there been any serious quantitative research into the additive or multiplicative effect of tools on effective intellectual horsepower to solve hard problems?

For instance, if I put two groups of mathematicians in two different rooms and lock them up for three years, but one group has access to the internet and the other doesn't, how much more progress will they make on the same open problem?

What if I give both groups internet access but only one group gets to use modern search engines?

What about finer gradations of the same idea? Is a research team confined to using only Google to search smarter or dumber than a team that must only use Bing.

I'm wondering about how much IQ actually matters compared to tools. After reading Sapiens (which I highly suggest), I don't think the principle machinery for solving problems exists in our heads and hasn't probably since the middle ages, if not before.

The problem with Dropbox is that it is not locally encrypted. This means it will only ever be used for sharing excel spreadsheets at work.

Dropbox has a team of people whose only job it is to write AI software against the data being saved there. They have software agents rummaging through everything you upload (which is maybe not surprising, but also not a service I want to pay for).

I think if someone could combine the sharing aspects of DropBox with some of the more secure cloud backup products (like CrashPlan) they would have a winning business model.

The secret sauce would be figuring out how to do this without becoming a pure infrastructure provider, where the margins are a race to the bottom.