walterk

13 ms·

61.
by walterk 18y ago
Going into debt at all is bad? Since when has that ever been basic economics? The stimulus package is about infrastructure. If the resulting payoff is greater than the debt, then absolutely it makes sense to go into debt. That's basic e
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by walterk 18y ago
> Steve Jobs is not an exception. He met Woz in college. This means he benefitted from college. Jobs met Woz during the summer after his sophomore year of high school, when they were working at the same company. Jobs later went to Reed
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by walterk 18y ago
There's an excellent prototyping policy in effect at Maxis: In terms of time, they have a policy of permission vs. forgiveness. You need to be prepared to fail early – but that’s okay! If a prototype takes less than two days, don’t worry:
64.
by walterk 18y ago
I would just hide (not remove) karma entirely. Submissions, comments, and users. That removes the incentive to game for karma and mitigates against the bandwagon effect, while the karma system still determines placement of submissions and
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by walterk 18y ago
> From my experience the difference in ability stems more from culture than from genetics. This is actually his point: the chapter from which this excerpt is taken is from the second half of the book, which is all about how our behavior
66.
by walterk 18y ago
In situations like these, people often run to the "humor helps people cope with death" excuse. Except in these situations, nobody involved is actually doing any coping, because they never had a relationship with the deceased, not even of t
67.
by walterk 18y ago
I avoid TechCrunch as much as possible, but my impression is that most of the crap is coming from Arrington. That TC story about Loopt that had "Told you" in the headline? Yeah.
68.
by walterk 18y ago
Do you have a universal drop-in solution that you'd like to share? If so, then it renders the IE6 issue moot. If, on the other hand, you're expecting every developer to discover this solution themselves, then you're only proving my point.
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by walterk 18y ago
It's not a question of how good you can get. (You do know what a prisoner's dilemma is, right?) It's a question of many developers having to devote man-hours to (1) learning how to support IE6 and (2) implementing that support for every new
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by walterk 18y ago
This is a prisoner's dilemma. Individually, it makes sense to support IE6, because "that's where the users are." Collectively, however, it exacts major costs in terms of support and user experience.
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by walterk 18y ago
Gladwell's writings undermine Rand's beliefs justifying her vision of what could/should be.
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by walterk 18y ago
I'm not sure the gigantic speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged is merely about getting you to "wonder" if some change is in order. Rand wrote exactly what she thought you should think.
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by walterk 18y ago
Rand never made her sociological understanding of how people become productive explicit because she sort of didn't have any. That's what enables her to view the highly productive and the less productive (or unproductive or even counterprodu
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by walterk 18y ago
The article misses that Rand's books are romantic, whereas Gladwell is a journalist. Rand writes fiction; Gladwell writes theories based on anecdotes and statistics. For an analogy, that'd be a lot like saying "Pablo Piccasso, or xyz moder
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by walterk 18y ago
None of these distinctions would be necessary if people just called efficiency by its proper name. (That would be 'efficiency', by the way.) The use of 'lazy' as a synonym is pure marketing for the slacker/non-conformist programmer (whose
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by walterk 18y ago
I'm afraid that information transparency tends to be a lot more effective than admonitions. Also, it's considerably less hassle to me if I can check the calories upfront and order a meal I can eat in full, rather than make a series of evalu
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by walterk 18y ago
I've been talking about indirect effects. Direct effects are what you injected into the conversation by way of talking about epidemics. You are indeed indirectly affected by the poor state of health care in this nation as a result of the lo
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by walterk 18y ago
I don't really like the article's emphasis on the appearance of being intellectually honest, rather than intellectual honesty itself, but the latter is more or less an inward version of the outward former. And there's certainly no reason wh
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by walterk 18y ago
Nod. "Freedom from coffee and copies" should be replaced with "Bringing students and employers together". I'd also change "But you need a great internship, one that moves your career forward" to simply "A great internship that moves your ca
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by walterk 18y ago
> Somebody else's sickness has no effect on me in most cases. And in the ones in which it does, the CDC is there to help. Nobody would suggest that the government doesn't play an important role in protecting against epidemics, which is
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by walterk 18y ago
Logic is good, but in my experience, it's virtually impotent in the face of intellectual dishonesty (and this is a great list). If the person you're arguing against is so invested in their opinion that they're unwilling to seriously conside
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by walterk 18y ago
I compare public responsibility for health to public responsibility for fire control. Fires can wreak havoc upon many beyond the fire's point of origin. It's also unprofitable to run a fire department, so given the public benefit, the publi
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by walterk 18y ago
The answer as to when some portion of the economic output of the country became ours to decide how to allocate is when a majority of taxpayers approved of it, including some fantastically wealthy folks who earned their money. Those are the
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by walterk 18y ago
Just a couple talking to a salesman who too was figuring out how to work the new mobile phone which is powered by Google’s new Android operating system. This line in particular makes me realize something important: All of the media exposu
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Is Anyone Buying the Googlephone?(bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
19 points by walterk 18y ago|34 comments
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by walterk 18y ago
From the interview: The more I meet with entrepreneurs the less I think I can pick them. Sure, there are stereotypes: bright, aggressive, enthusiastic, young, etc. But there are many successful entrepreneurs that don’t come off this way. T
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The Care and Feeding of Entrepreneurs (Interview with Guy Kawasaki)(nytimes.com)
7 points by walterk 18y ago|6 comments
88.
by walterk 18y ago
Much thanks. I'll keep this comment bookmarked.
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by walterk 18y ago
I guess what I'm looking for are works with a strongly empirical basis (doesn't have to be popular). Stuff that, at the very least, deals with the wealth of research on collective action problems and economic psychology. I'm hoping David'
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by walterk 18y ago
Added to my wishlist. Any other works you'd recommend? With respect to the seastead societies, which I've heard about, I think it's certainly plausible that they'll "work", given sufficient diversity of available governments, and hence, app

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