hammerzeit

10 ms·

31.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
On the ageism question, 18 is the general age where we welcome people into American society as adults -- not just voting but also army service and criminal liability. I'm not opposed to moving the voting age earlier but it should be in
32.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
Jonathan Haidt said it well -- we think our brain works like a scientist when it actually works more like a lawyer. Incidentally, your second point echoes one of the more persuasive arguments I've heard for cofounding teams -- if you c
33.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
Reading these slides, I'm trying to parse what these slides do or do not say. I'd like to leave aside the speculation about what the NSA is probably doing. First of all, XKeyscore seems to be primarily about the frontend query i
34.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
Epistemology is not my strong suit so please excuse me here, but how can you reasonably advocate for your positions in a worldview that specifically privileges personal experience? I tend to agree that we infer theory from anecdotes not dat
35.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
It's hard to comment on this post considering how many times we've seen the "HN-is-dying" meme, but for me this time it really resonates. What has made HN interesting is the fact that it was boring to the vast majority o
36.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
That sounds terrible, I'm sorry for your friend. Systemically that's broken and represents the potential for massive abuse. That said, I assume you'd agree that anecdotes don't constitute data, and that we shouldn't
37.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
I'm american as well. When TV news and viral videos and newspapers make us feel like terrorism or kidnapping is more prevalent than it actually is, we call it sensationalism. Why is this any different? Is it because it confirms things
38.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
I'm astonished by the total lack of conversation around the actual data here. Both the article itself and the discussion below are predicated on the assumption that this is a rampant problem in the USA, but not a single subthread on th
39.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
I read both of the original articles (also http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-data-mining-... ) -- there is still nothing in them that would cause this statement to be reliably true. You may
40.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
Don't you think if there was evidence that the government was still harvesting CCs,BCCs, etc en masse, that the article would have made this their central claim? The vast majority of the article is about how this stopped in 2011. One
41.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
This headline is misleading. It implies the program is still ongoing, where the original article clearly states that the program was shut down 2 years ago. Moreover, after a lot of cynical complaining about Obama not being meaningfully diff
42.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
In what world do PMs actually think the supposed thoughts in this article? Yes, it's important to document well, focus on why not how, and be a shit umbrella not funnel -- though these have been PM 101 everywhere I've worked. But
43.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
Can you elaborate on a few of your claims here? First, you seem to imply that a privately-owned public space is a bad thing. What alternatives do you envision? Wouldn't a space regulated and controlled by governmental entities or NGOs
44.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
I do think there's something to the argument that any reasonable implementation of "Do Not Track" would just further entrench the companies who already have large consumer traffic (Google, Facebook, et al), by virtue of the s
45.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
I fear a HN with more glenn greenwald articles is a HN with more political flamewars. I don't think this is desirable, even if he does good work.
46.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
I certainly don't, and I think these are important and fascinating questions. Do you have any evidence to suggest the definition of violent crime has changed at all? I'd be very curious if that were the case. In the absence of evi
47.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
My fundamental question here comes back to this: If the number of reported crimes in the country doubled, what would you expect to happen to the prison population? In the time period that the incarceration rate in the USA grew 4x, the numbe
48.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
One thing I'd think about: If Google is lying or misrepresenting the truth here, then it would be phenomenally foolish to put out a denial under Larry's name as it just did. Specifically, the personal integrity of the founders --
49.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
As a user, I think I'm excited by this, although a lot will depend on the core usability and accuracy -- this is where this kind of technology often founders. As an entrepreneur, this seems phenomenally relevant, given the relative penetrat
50.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
I'm willing to guess that GMail is among the top 3 most used products by HN's readership. This is a substantial change in the experience of that product, as well as deployment of what seems to be some pretty nontrivial technology powering t
51.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
My initial instinct was to criticize this. I think that's some combination of feeling like hackathons are often a coarse method of exploitation and the feeling that this kind of boosterism may be overstated or unnecessary. But the truth of
52.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
Cool! As someone who was pretty critical of the FRC post from yesterday I want to make sure I spoke out to praise this. This kind of data, rather than an index, is much more interesting to me. A few other jumbled thoughts: * How are you tra
53.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
I'm a big fan of first round in general, and this is a cool idea and great data. But this index seems to be extremely sketchy, especially for B2B companies. The article says: "This index is built on a weighted points system which considers
54.
by hammerzeit 13y ago
Eric Schmidt has a Ph.D. in Computer Science, wrote Lex [1], and just spent 10 years running one of the most important software companies in the world, while generally retaining the respect of the thousands of engineers in his company. His
55.
by hammerzeit 14y ago
Well said -- as you imply, it's much scarier to contemplate we have the government we more or less want than to think it's being imposed on us by shadowy forces. To add on a few additional points of evidence: 1) In the most recent set of na
56.
by hammerzeit 14y ago
Articles like this are toxic for a community. First, it's largely unsubstantiated, predicating most of its arguments on insinuations without much substance if any in the entire article. Without the usual navel-gazing about Journalism, it's
57.
by hammerzeit 14y ago
When they say video, they mean sites like YouTube etc -- spot TV is so negligible as to be pretty much a non-factor. As you can see from the 2012 report ( http://www.iab.net/media/file/IAB_Internet_Advertising_Reven... ) video is < 5% o
58.
by hammerzeit 14y ago
I think it's important to stress that this is totally incorrect -- the substantial majority of display advertising is still being paid on a CPM rather than CPC basis. Look at this data, for example: http://www.adexchanger.com/online-advert
59.
by hammerzeit 14y ago
A solid essay and a great set of criteria. When I was a PM at Google, there were a couple other critical traits I liked to look for, though they were not simple yes-no criteria. * How does this person deal with vast uncertainty? Are they ex
60.
by hammerzeit 14y ago
First, I find it's unproductive to make psychological diagnoses of people you haven't met before. Having met actual pathological liars there is not remotely enough evidence that Lehrer is one, unless you're just using the word to mean "a li

More ›