Yeah, but (and I'm only one data point) I always click the "Always display images from .." link whenever I open a legitimate e-mail that looks like it's missing images, so they get to track me and I get to see a complete mail ;-)
Seconded. Wouldn't the results of the prediction market be calculated into the current value of the DOW? I mean, sure, there could be distress selling right now, but even assuming that people are somewhat rational...
1) The stock market is a collection of all known information about the stock, including future predictions
2) You can see that in options, their value is tied to the value of the stock market at some point in the future, but you still calculate them based on the current value of the market, since that's what the current prediction is, giving the known info
3) Prediction Markets are just another kind of derivative. You are betting on a future value of the market.
4) That means, when it doesn't match up around the current value, there are inefficiencies in the market.
5) Why? Too few people? Dumb people?
6) Inefficiencies lead to arbitrage opportunities. Why not buy an option, and buy the other direction of the prediction market, and get paid either way?
They should be grateful that the Amazon Kindle, a complement good to ebooks is so popular. How many books were purchased because of the Amazon Kindle? How many books will be bought because of the extra usefulness of the audio feature? Instead, they are biting the hand that feeds them. Not only that, but they are also obstructing the advancement of technology and innovation by reducing their usefulness. First Google Books and now this. What a bunch of ungrateful bastards - hardly better than the RIAA.
Perhaps I'm biased because I'm a writer myself, but I think they're a little bit more excusable than the RIAA. Writers have an ancient history: as a group they are further behind the times than any other, and their world is extremely closed-door and high-barrier. Because of that, their love and joy has dwindled, decade by decade, and they haven't noticed that the people who are making their craft more loved are the people who are embracing the future (Billy Collins, former poet laureate, for instance).
The effect is that you have something akin to a group of old, uninformed, frightened people, who are all very bright but very ignorant regarding some things, and some of those people think technology means books have to die, and if that was the case then they'd be right in that something powerful and valuable was being lost. So I understand why they're so fearful, even if I wish they could comprehend how things have been moving forward.
Since when is ignorance an excuse to inflict harm?
The established players seek to maintain the status quo in which they exist as "established." This leads them to fight change. I for one, hope they lose that fight, but it's only because I'm not one of those established in this fight, so I will benefit from progressive methods to access media.
It's also worth mentioning that you'll find very few undiscovered/unpublished writers that would have a problem with someone buying their book and listening to it on a Kindle.
Since when is ignorance an excuse to inflict harm?
They see it as protecting themselves. They inflict harm in the process, but they don't see it as that, and that's why I feel sympathy for them: they don't entirely understand what's going on.
The established players seek to maintain the status quo in which they exist as "established." This leads them to fight change.
They think that the physical form of the book is an important part of literature. I agree with them, but unlike them I think the book is stronger and more lasting than they think. If the book was in danger, then I don't care what solution was being proposed, I would fight to keep the novel afloat for as long as possible. It's too valuable to risk losing.
It's also worth mentioning that you'll find very few undiscovered/unpublished writers that would have a problem with someone buying their book and listening to it on a Kindle.
Most of those writers aren't as dedicated as the published one. A few are, and they're the people who are worth reaching out to, but writing takes an incredible amount of dedication. It attracts an odd bunch of people.
Areca Palm is good for the day, while Mother-in-law’s Tongue works during the night. Money Plant helps remove toxins like Formaldehyde (from carpets and furniture) from indoor air.
I would argue that for most entrepreneurs studying machine learning has greater marginal utility than studying complexity theory, but to each his/her own I guess.
Depends what your niche is. Do you manage a petabyte cluster? All of a sudden, everything that used to be "complexity theory" becomes "complexity practice".
No, I don't think we are talking about the same kind of complexity here. Complexity Theory is exactly the opposite of real world pragmatism. It is about the asymptotic behaviors of algorithms and the resources need to solve certain class of problems such as Traveling Salesman or Min-Set-Cover.
Actually, that is exactly what I am talking about. The implication was that problems like that do show up in "real-life" coding, and while brute-force solutions for those problems work for very small n, you need to recognize the fact that those problems do not have reasonable solutions in general, and you should know how to approximate the solutions (in the technical sense of "approximation"), and furthermore know enough complexity theory to know the situations where even an approximation will not have a reasonable solution.
For example, I believe that the problem of creating optimal schedules for high school students is NP-Complete (optimal in the sense that it will satisfy all of the students' preferences for electives, and all of the teachers' preferences for the classes they want to teach).
Yes, I admit that the example will never involve petabytes of data. That doesn't invalidate my original point though.
I certainly do agree that for most entrepreneurs machine learning is much more useful than computational complexity theory. However, I figured there might be some people on HN who would like to learn a bit more about complexity, and hence I submitted the URL, not because it's extremely useful, but because it's very interesting.
How about if you allow them to import their postings from Craigslist and other places? Craigslist wouldn't like it but when you are small they probably wouldn't even notice. Just do it from multiple IP addresses or something.
CL postings expire, so I don't think that is a big deal. The way to do the import is to write a program that runs on the seller's desktop, that goes out to CL and logs in and snarfs the stuff, and then has them confirm / edit one by one as it inserts into menkle. That way the IP that visits CL is always the IP of the seller anyway.
Morality is an evolved adaptation. The ultimate purpose of morality is to maximize your own utility. There is no reason why any human being would care about a bunch of crystalline insect-like aliens. Practically, human empathy circuits would never span to such alien aliens considering how easy it is to turn it off for other humans whom we consider to be an out-group. From a game theoretical perspective there is no utility gained from sacrificing humans so that some crystal bugs conform to our social values. The correct move from a game theoretic perspective is to ally with the Babyeaters since they are friendly and could be of use in trade.
This is going to sound like an ad hominem attack, but it seems to me that a majority of the singularity/futurist crowd are more concerned with impressing others with shows of intelligence than any other goal. They sound more like a bunch of male apes strutting around vying for alpha status, perhaps not surprising given that they are almost all male. A comment very much like mine (about the pointlessness of feeling compassion for crystal bugs) was posted on the overcoming bias blog but it received no replies/rebuttals. Rather the comments over there simply accepted the premises of the story without question. I have a great deal of respect for Elizer but his followers are frighteningly cult like.
for instance: we adapted to an environment of scarcity. now that we live in an environment of plenty a lot of people get fat. they can't turn off the adaptation to favor fatty sugary foods just because the environment has changed.
similarly when encountering aliens adaptations that evolved to help us socialize with our own species may lead us to having strong opinions about the moral systems of said aliens. strong enough to take significant action.
They've been bio-engineered, not evolved. The bio-engineers presumably cared more about maintaining human morality than about fitness-maximizing. So they kept the "human morality applies beyond humans" value.
