While the HN crowd mostly gets this right when framed as a math puzzle, my guess is that confirmation bias is alive and well in high tech just like in any other field. One example:
Young 20s entrepreneur vs. early 50s entrepreneur. Without knowing anything about either person, which startup is more likely to succeed? Even if you have the business plans for both, and you meet both - which one are you going to be more skeptical about as you evaluate which one of them gets funding?
Out of curiosity I poked around on your site and did some test searches using words similar but not identical to some of your titles. I did this just on articles I thought people might actually be looking for and that are over 1500 words. For example:
I'm not sure why you're ranking so badly for this article. The only idea I have off the top of my head is that you have a very wide variety of content. Google tends to prefer sites focused on one topic, or perhaps just a few.
I never wrote about youth baseball on my blog until last year. The first 2 articles I wrote got virtually no traffic from Google for 8 months. A couple months ago I started writing more in depth articles about baseball. I'm now getting a significant amount of Google traffic for those same two articles - one of them is over 10 visits a day. That's still pretty small compared to my blockbuster posts (my top post on best browsers gets hundreds of visits per day). But baseball is growing, because Google is (algorithmically) beginning to believe that I'm some kind of authority on youth baseball, based on a growing concentration of quality content.
So - my guess is that you would get more traffic if you wrote about fewer topics - or perhaps split into several blogs, each with different topics. I should probably do that as my various tech topics have nothing to do with baseball.
With all the talk of water running out in CA and the world, I am wondering why desalination is not part of the conversation. According to Wikipedia:
"Supplying all domestic water by sea water desalination would increase the United States' energy consumption by around 10%, about the amount of energy used by domestic refrigerators."
Is this true? If so, why isn't desalination happening on a massive scale in CA?
EDIT: The Wikipedia sentence I quoted was not clearly written. It should have said "supplying all household water" not "supplying all domestic water." Far more water is used by farming.
I'm one of those people who has approached content creation strictly "as a service to your users, not as an exploit of your users." All of my blog posts are very carefully researched, in-depth guides, sometimes literally taking over 100 hours of research and writing for a single post.
I made very little money for years and had just about given up until Panda 4.1 and Penguin 3.0. Since then, when I write well, Google is sending traffic my way, and my traffic and income have been steadily increasing by 20%-30%/month. I now have the incentive to keep adding more high quality content to my blog.
Prior to these Panda/Penguin updates (Sep/Oct 2014), I can totally understand why so many attempted to do what the author did. It made more money. Even if Google algorithm changes or Affiliate changes shut you down, jumping to the next thing seemed to work.
Hopefully Google is ahead of the curve once and for all, providing greater incentive to create great content than game the system.
Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Philip A. Fisher is the best book I've read about the process of getting to intimately know one specific company. It was written long before the phrase "focus investing" was coined. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger frequently recommend this book.
I wish Amazon had a "This looks fake" button above each review. I would click it multiple times per week.
Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test:
Could this review have been written about any other book in this category without changing a word?
I see fake reviews all the time for Kindle books written by indie authors. A mark of quality in a book is when there appear to be no 5 star fake reviews, but several written by real people, even if there are only 3 or 4 reviews.
Some fake reviews are harder to spot, though. For example, I suspect this account, which has been around for many years, is more than one person (perhaps a PR firm) hand writing unique reviews for each one:
All reviews are either 1 star or 5 star. There is content specific information but all stuff you can get from tech specs or descriptions - no sense the person actually used the product except generic intro paragraphs.
I think there is also fake voting on really good reviews. The review that I felt was the best review I ever wrote was downvoted more than any other review I've written. I don't really know if the downvoting was fake - maybe it wasn't helpful because I delved into too much technical detail:
However, most of the glowingly favorable reviews for this book have unanimous thumbs up, and the first 3 are written by "A Customer" which I'm guessing means the account of the reviewer has been terminated.
Those who routinely keep 10+ tabs open may be motivated to switch to Firefox or Opera due to slow browser start. The above 2 extensions solve the issue. I explain in more detail here:
Yes. Sandboxing makes sense when you think of browser as operating system. Isolate each process to increase security and crash-resistance. Makes sense, but it takes more memory.
The problem is using many open tabs with Chrome. If you use no more than 3 or 4 tabs, Chrome is generally fine. If you use more than that, Firefox has some built-in features to help with tabs such as delayed tab loading and tab grouping. It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Furthermore, it doesn't launch a new process for each tab.
In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I included a section for users who like to keep a lot of tabs open. Even Opera, which uses the same code base as Chrome, does tabs better than Chrome:
It's too bad that Barnes and Noble's ecosystem (free books, emailing books to your account, lending library, etc.) was and still is so inferior to Amazon's. Amazon has yet to produce hardware anywhere near as good as the Nook Simple Touch model created over 3 years ago. But clearly, the ecosystem matters more. I'm using my Kindle while my Nook gathers dust.
Agreed that online reviews are broken. That's what drove me to co-found a company that takes a different approach to reviews, one which stresses category over individual products.
Start with the premise that the person you most want to give you advice is someone who is passionate about a topic or at least has done a lot research on it. If you ask them for advice, first they'll give you an overview, which hopefully includes what attributes you should be thinking about. Then they'll recommend a small number of models to consider, based on what you seem to be interested in. If you're doing this with other people around, perhaps a few other people will pipe in with suggestions.
So - for example - if you're looking for 3-4 player board games more interesting than Sorry and Monopoly - so interesting that they have a decent chance of getting your friends and/or family members more into gaming - I prepared a guide on our site that does just that:
(Note: site styling is incomplete - we're not quite ready to launch)
The essential idea is that if you narrow a topic down enough (i.e. 7200 RPM HDDs that are very quiet and can easily survive a several foot drop onto a hard floor), there's probably somebody out there who's taken a great interest in that narrow niche and can write about it very well.
On the other hand, it's hard to write about the too-broad hard drive category as a whole, and it's also difficult to talk about one hard drive with little context.
Doing the first 2 lessons will not only get your a vagrant powered VM up and running, it will also give you a good feel for normal use. And you'll also be learning Django.
Gross market cap lost during a CEO's reign is a poor measure of performance for a variety of reasons:
* stock prices often get de-linked from the underlying value of the business (and the starting point for Ballmer was the height of the stock market bubble)
* percentage drop seems far more important that gross amount dropped - quite a number of CEO's have led their companies to bankruptcy, and therefore a 100% drop in stock price.
* business forces outside of a CEO's control are responsible to a great extent for business performance. I would argue that Leanard Riggio (Barnes and Noble) was one of the top performing 50 CEOs in the last century in the face of very challenging headwinds but you'd never know that from the way the business (and its stock price) performed.
* dividends are another form of value returned to shareholders - and Microsoft has paid some over the years.
Also - it turns out that GE's Jeff Immelt presided over a drop of approximately $350 billion (601 billion Aug 2000 --> 246 billion today), and John Chambers even more (557 billion March 2000 --> $125 billion today)
So if the point of the article is to write about the CEO who presided over the largest market drop in U.S. history, the article should have been about Jeff Immelt or John Chambers.
Note: Intel's market cap also decreased more than MSFT during the same period but had more than 1 CEO.
Safari was in need of an overhaul - Chrome, Atomic, and other browsers were so much better that I pretty much stopped using Safari.
From what I saw in this review, the new Safari offers much more functionality than the prior version, devoting substantially more pixels to content and offering the iCloud Keychain feature.
I do agree though that the functionality hasn't improved significantly for most of the other apps. I'd be way more excited if the Control Center offered customization. My two most frequent settings (Cellular on/off, Location Services on/off) aren't in Control Center so it doesn't really give me much.
Pinned tabs on demand (introduced early 2012) is Firefox's killer feature that got me using Firefox again after using Chrome almost exclusively for a year. When you pin tabs, and then restart the browser, the tabs are not loaded until you click on them (not yet loaded, pinned tabs, are visually dim).
Pinned tabs are not included in any benchmarks I've seen but have a drastic positive impact on memory usage and speed. I typically have 20 or so pinned tabs and only 1-3 unpinned tabs when I quit Firefox. A cold start takes just a few seconds and about the only time I restart the browser is when I restart my system (2-3x per week).
Chrome loads all tabs on start so it can take around a minute to load the same 21-23 tabs. And furthermore Chrome tends to operate sluggishly after a couple hours of use with so many open tabs, so when using Chrome I tend to close then reopen the browser every couple hours.
Chrome 5 had a similar feature called phantom tabs but it was removed in Chrome 6. I loved that feature and was very unhappy when it was removed.
While I share the author's frustration that Google Reader is going away, I don't get all the hostility toward Feedly. In just a few months' time, they've replicated by far the most important aspect of Google - serving as a backend for any front end reader that choose to use their API.
I too tried the Feedly iOS app and found it didn't suit my workflow and stylistic preferences. But I didn't need it. My favorite way of consuming news over the past couple years has been with Newsify, with Google Reader as back end. Now my favorite way continues to be Newsify, but with Feedly as back end. The transition was seamless.
My only 2 complaints are:
1) I was only able to import 1000 starred items into Feedly.
2) No search - but that's coming.
So - I wish I hadn't had to spend a dozen or two hours over the past few months evaluating alternatives to Google Reader. But I'm quite happy that Feedly stepped up to take Google Reader's place.
Chomksy's book, Manufacturing Consent, goes a long way to explaining how U.S. mainstream politics works in conjunction with the media, even though it was written over 2 decades ago.
20 word summary:
Carefully study incentives throughout every part of the system, and it becomes clear why individuals do what they do.
So - it's not that we have a small or even large number of individuals doing bad things. It's that we have thousands of incentives, some obvious, some not, that collectively produce systemic behavior whose end result is in many cases not desirable.
If your choice is between doing something that plagues your conscience a bit, or getting fired, which do you choose?
I liked the article but not the misleading title. A title like "Alien movies have so many implausible ideas" would have been more accurate and not get people so stuck on the one idea implied by the title.
Of all the implausible ideas in sci fi movies and books, the one which always rubbed me most wrong is not mentioned: How military encounters would play out. Consider:
Most naval battles in space are modeled after 2 dimensional naval war fare. Not only is space 3D, but there is no reason to suppose technology geared around combating vessels floating in water has any relevance to space combat.
However, the most important variable determining the outcome of first encounters with (quite possibly) hostile alien races has nothing to do with the military gear and tactics. It has to do with relative technology level. Greg Bear's "Anvil of the Stars" which looks at it from this angle and here are some notes I distilled:
In most sci fi movies and books, there are World-War-II-Naval-like space battles with weapons/ships/shields at near parity. I have always thought this to be highly implausible, and I thought the most interesting aspect of this book was to consider three possible battle situations in space:
1) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly higher tech level. If they detect you before you detect them, you are dead. Period. Your only possibility to win such a battle is to detect them first and destroy them instantly - and your chances of being able to do that are slim.
2) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly lower tech level. Using the logic above, all that matters is you being able to detect them before they detect you. The technologies of stealth, electronic counter measures, detection, etc. are therefore all extremely vital in order to never be defeated by aliens with a lower tech level.
3) There is a possibility that you encounter an enemy close enough to your own tech level that the battle could last more than a split second. It is only in these instances that all the other things often written in other science fiction stories might matter - amount and type of shielding, weapons systems, quality of personnel, etc. But such battles are very unlikely, because technological progress is so fast. Consider what it would be like for any of today's industrialized nations with a substantial military to combat the most powerful nation on earth from 200 years ago - there would be no contest at all. The universe has been around for billions of years, so the chance of two races encountering each other that are within a few hundred years of each others' technology level is very low.
The above logic also applies to planetary defense as well, though with even more emphasis on not being detected.
I'm a bike commuter, and in the past 3 years electric bike commuter. I had leg injuries and the electric bike I purchased enabled me to continue commuting by bike with light peddling. For the past 3 years my commute is 4 miles each way, with 1 mile of climbing on the way home.
I did not find the arguments laid out for velomobiles all that compelling. All but 2 advantages of a velomobile can be had with a US $1000 electric bike, such as:
* pedal assist for acceleration and hill climbing
* not arriving sweaty
* very low fuel/electricity cost
The velomobile could potentially give me:
* rain protection
* faster speeds
But it would also lose me:
* portability (can carry up stairs, take in commuter rail train, etc.)
* storage space (barely bigger than a regular bike so home: garage, work: office).
* multiuse paths
Even at the SAME cost these disadvantages would outweigh the advantages for my use case - it currently only takes me about 3 minutes extra to get to work and about 6 minutes extra to get home over a car. The roads to work are all 25 MPH with lots of stop signs and traffic lights so being able to slide by cards on the right is an advantage of a regular-sized bike. And it doesn't rain that much where I live - I commute via bus 5-10 times/year due to rain. I really don't like taking a bus so that would be a time I'd love to have a velomobile - but not at a cost of thousands of dollars so I can skip taking a round trip bus ride 5-10 days a year!
On the other hand, I can certainly imagine a use case for a velomobile: If you live in a flat area with lots of rain and snow and a commute that uses roads that go faster than 25 MPH - perhaps the Midwest of the U.S.
Young 20s entrepreneur vs. early 50s entrepreneur. Without knowing anything about either person, which startup is more likely to succeed? Even if you have the business plans for both, and you meet both - which one are you going to be more skeptical about as you evaluate which one of them gets funding?