shantanubala

16 ms·

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by shantanubala 14y ago
Amazon's main edge over the competition (in more than just the electronics) has always been two things: price and convenience. I know many people (myself included) who have changed their purchasing habits because of Amazon Prime. They're tr
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by shantanubala 14y ago
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others...
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by shantanubala 14y ago
So the question could be rephrased to a better analogy: is architecture art? A faulty building can kill people, but buildings can be expressions of ideas. In other words, there is a utilitarian form of architecture, which involves making th
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by shantanubala 14y ago
I'd also argue that it's also art, just with a smaller target audience. Open source software is a great example of this. A lot of open source projects are really just experiments in expressing an idea in a new way, or basically saying, "hey
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by shantanubala 14y ago
I think this is for people rapidly prototyping robots and devices that need RC-like functionality (hence the name "esplora") -- judging from that, this is meant to be a time-saver for a very specific purpose: creating remote controls for ve
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by shantanubala 14y ago
The simple fact is that many women feel uncomfortable going into a field that is dominated by men. Assuming you're a white male, do you feel out of place when you're in an area where everyone is a woman? How about when everyone is black? Ha
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by shantanubala 14y ago
There's nothing stopping a girl from buying "boy" Legos. In fact, there are plenty of solid generic Lego sets available, and stuff like MindStorms, which is an awesome robotics kit, is not really gendered. The problem is that Lego can't jus
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by shantanubala 14y ago
I'd argue that GitHub became really good 2010-01. It takes a certain number of early adopters to group together before the social features finally become useful for everyone.
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Somewhat. The person filing the lawsuit has to be able to convince a lawyer to pursue the case. In other words, that person needs to have money. In a situation like this, people should be publicly shaming PeopleBrowser (people publicly sham
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by shantanubala 14y ago
This lawsuit seems like crap, and it makes me feel really uncomfortable -- what if I don't have millions in VC funding? It basically means that a random person with enough resources can tie me down with a bogus lawsuit even if I have a lega
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is only easy to remember because you already have a reason to remember it (ie a strong brand, Disney, has already pushed it into your memory). If it didn't have a movie behind it, you'd say, "Super-what?
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by shantanubala 14y ago
That's a false comparison. It's not just that asdjflas... takes a long time to type, but it's also really hard to remember. DuckDuckGo is probably easier to remember than most names. It just happens to take a little longer to type than Goog
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by shantanubala 14y ago
You can take it a step further: until we can model human behavior mathematically, a legal system attempting to regulate that human behavior cannot be modeled in a mathematical way. In other words, by the time we have consistent laws (in the
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Ah, my bad -- the sentence was phrased a bit poorly. By "suitable" I meant "good for the job" -- ie there may not be a large enough pool of talent available to fill necessary roles appropriately. There's a common argument that, "maybe they
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by shantanubala 14y ago
This is certainly tricky, and obviously a judge is the one to make the final decision for the US, but I'll stick by my interpretation of the Civil Rights Act for now :-) Obviously, there is always the problem of having a profession where th
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by shantanubala 14y ago
> Meaning, what? I'm not "affected" because I have to deal with someone who, say, hates white people? The problem is mainly that a white person only needs to deal with racism on a personal level, and this racism is easy to ignore and "w
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by shantanubala 14y ago
> undo bad things that happened long ago with other injustices First, you are implying that affirmative action is unjust, which it is not . Affirmative action does not mean that an unqualified worker replaces a qualified worker because
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Although I agree with you, I get the impression that someone who doesn't think affirmative action should exist even after learning about the gang violence, intense poverty, substance abuse, neglect, and trauma that surrounds children growin
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Though I don't know of an article, this video from a while ago describes (at a high level) the "hidden classes" that represent prototypes. It was part of the original launch of Chrome about 4 years ago. Some of the related videos have more
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Usability involves more than one target audience: it also has to be easy for developers to integrate. BrowserID (Persona) took me minutes to implement. On a non-trivial project, it may take a couple hours. The beauty of this is the fact t
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by shantanubala 14y ago
I think for now it's just for the efficiency of making a solid alpha. I have no doubt they'll get some solid designers working on some of the UI (and UX people as well).
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Not to mention, college is one of the easiest ways for a person to meet other smart people. Not everyone can afford to be in the Bay Area. A smart student can get a full-tuition (and often more!) scholarship at a solid state university with
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Similarly, the people who buy games again and again are more likely to be playing first-person shooters or heavily-involved RPG games that don't lend themselves well to motion based control. Moving your whole body is simply too inefficient
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Although I wouldn't jump to assume that he isn't already an active person, I will share a bit of my own experience (as someone who recently turned 18): Try to limit your time working with computers. Really. I used to waste a ton of time ins
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Art may be massively funded, but I generally evaluate art based on two criteria: - Skill (how much skill did it take to produce?) - Expressiveness (how well does it convey something or evoke emotions?) Neither of those criteria will necessa
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Things only get a cease and desist when they become noticeable enough to warrant writing a cease and desist letter.
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by shantanubala 14y ago
But isn't that exactly why TED didn't feature the talk? TED only wants its best talks on the web site, because the web site is its way of broadcasting interesting ideas (I know many teachers and professors that regularly share TED talks wit
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by shantanubala 14y ago
There's also something to be said about the novelty of the information that is presented. TED is about exciting ideas (or at least, that's what I understand them to be). From the talk: "In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are c
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Of course we don't have enough entrepreneurs. People talk about the "tech bubble" all the time, and that's a debate you can have, but that's always related to social web sites. We really don't have enough entrepreneurs, because entire ind
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by shantanubala 14y ago
Quick question: if I want to start a company, why do I necessarily need an idea first? There are tons of real-world problems that can be solved through startups, and I'm very sure that just because the founder of a company doesn't come up

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