ramanujan

14 ms·

31.
by ramanujan 14y ago
jacquesm: As a "third world person", I don't think the West owes anything to us. It's actually a very Euro-centric and arguably racist model of the world to believe that only whites have agency and that everything hinges on what whites did
32.
by ramanujan 14y ago
Because it reflects the fact that Wikipedia is currently written by the kind of Comic Book Guy who posts endlessly on Hacker News and edits Wikipedia. We are all Comic Book Guys to some extent when posting on the internet, but there are qui
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by ramanujan 14y ago
The world wide web is filled with crap. That is why we have search. Search is the solution, not deletionism. Indeed, your tacit assumption is that deletion improves quality, on average. But (a) you don't consider the many false negatives an
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by ramanujan 14y ago
Legal startups are an important new trend, with Legalzoom, Rocketlawyer, Judicata, and quite a few others that have recently been announced: http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/20/legal-startups http://startupstats.com/legal-startup-2012-03
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by ramanujan 14y ago
Looks impressive, but a simple N x K contingency table would help understand the data better. Here, N=K=15 and entries of the table would be raw counts (e.g. number of major i in career j). You could color the cells by a few different crite
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by ramanujan 14y ago
Seasteading is about the frontier. It's not about any political system. Lest we forget, there's quite a tradition of utopian thought within the progressive worldview as well. I think it's wrong to dismiss ambitious idealism as unrealistic.
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by ramanujan 14y ago
For the kind of simple contracts that could be handled by software, people already use form contracts. And remember, you don't need a lawyer at all to draft contracts. I actually think this market is far bigger than one might
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by ramanujan 14y ago
Why do they continue to do this when lowering their standards for pedigree could cut their costs massively? If there was really an opening in the market you could drive a truck through, what has stopped anyone from taking a
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by ramanujan 14y ago
But at what cost? There is a tremendous opportunity for pretty-good, bargain-basement, automated legal services.
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by ramanujan 14y ago
The legal industry is perfectly suited to be utterly destroyed by startups. It's pure information work, it can be done from offshore, it is generally disliked by the public, and as a whole is pretty much entirely technologically inept. Cert
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by ramanujan 14y ago
It surprises me that intelligent people are so ready to take bureaucrats and politicians at their word when they claim that "your safety is our priority".
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by ramanujan 14y ago
Two thoughts for your consideration. 1) Opt-out. Allow anyone to opt-out of the FDA. That is, allow terminal patients/early adopters/test pilots to voluntarily buy products from companies before the FDA certifies them as safe and effectiv
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by ramanujan 14y ago
This is exactly right. Bureaucrats in general have lifetime employment, so the only check on their power is the press. In this case, they made the colossal mistake of attacking Coursera without thinking through the optics. Most of the peopl
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by ramanujan 14y ago
and other locations all over the world that could be sold to a new country My understanding is that relatively few if any countries will sell federal land. The interesting thing about international waters is that by definition th
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by ramanujan 14y ago
he actually wants to build a floating city where he can make his own rules Well, suppose just for the sake of argument that seasteading is technologically feasible (you might consider cruise ships a proof of concept). Wouldn't it
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by ramanujan 14y ago
How much are a few hours of your time worth? Even a one hour savings easily saves $40. Absolutely worth it for the convenience, would shell that out in a second if someone would come by and fix it while I coded.
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by ramanujan 14y ago
Yeah, it may be that your friend isn't properly thinking through why this will be such a big hit: it's fast and convenient for a large fraction of problems. Because the huge thing about car trouble is the logistical inconvenience of getting
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by ramanujan 14y ago
Absolutely. The term has a definite meaning. It refers to a software engineer with enough market awareness, copywriting savvy, and statistical ability to run a campaign full stack. There aren't that many people with this skillset, but they
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by ramanujan 14y ago
The numbers matter. Look at the article above ( http://mv-voice.com/news/show_story.php?id=5207 ). They were quoted a charge of $150,000 to add three wheelchair-accessible bathrooms. Do you think that is really the best use of money at ince
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by ramanujan 14y ago
Well, as I said, it always starts with things like fire codes and then goes from there to spending tens of thousands on traffic studies. $15,000 for fire alarms might be ok. $150,000 for wheelchair accessible bathrooms is, in my view, overk
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by ramanujan 14y ago
With all due respect, I don't believe it ignores it; see for example this snippet: In my experience, even the best design professionals typically have an inadequate knowledge of all of the accessibility standards. And local buil
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by ramanujan 14y ago
http://mv-voice.com/news/show_story.php?id=5207 The city also began pressing for more codes to be met. Weekly rattled off what appear to be significant costs: $150,000 to make three bathrooms compliant with the American Disab
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by ramanujan 14y ago
All regulation from the TSA to the local building officials is optimized to sound like a good idea. Who could be against health or safety? And that then becomes the thin end of the wedge, as the requirements and fees spiral from there. 1. S
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by ramanujan 14y ago
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/384590180/an-events-spac... ^ Chip in here if you are inclined to support fellow hackers. They need to raise $250,000: “If they can’t comply, they can’t use the building as they want to,” said An
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by ramanujan 14y ago
Well, if you've tried making a Gmail gadget, it involves unnecessary XML wrangling, many separate pages of documentation, and is nowhere near as simple as it could be. Stripe/Square vs. Paypal show how a good API can transform a category. M
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by ramanujan 14y ago
Re: Github, it'd be pretty interesting to allow one click deploys from github.com to a Yahoo app or widget. Millions of engineers would also see the Yahoo logo all day long.
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by ramanujan 14y ago
To clarify, here's my thoughts: 0) Embed apps on the frontend: The APIs you mention are good, but they are backend APIs or APIs for customizing (say) maps within a widget on your site. I'm talking about opening up the frontend too. A prosai
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by ramanujan 14y ago
One strategy for Yahoo: Turn Google's strengths into weaknesses by opening up all of Yahoo's products (Search, Mail, Finance, Maps, Sports, News) to developers to be maximally programmable. Allow developers to monetize in any way they feel
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by ramanujan 14y ago
Just as an observation, it is absolutely incredible how in just 25 years, the capital of one of the sternest and most ideological top-down communist states[1] has become a mecca for technology startups, the apotheosis of bottoms-up entrepre
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by ramanujan 14y ago
It's probably already on your radar, but Nest is a company that could mainstream home automation, if you are still interested in the area.

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