foompy_katt

3 anni fadiscuss

There is no disadvantage to going second... in fact, in tournament games, the player to go second (white) wins about 2% more often than black does. All of black's first moves actually transpose, so white has the first real choice in the game, and also usually has the last move in the game, which can be an advantage.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

Right, I don't think it'll ever happen. But if it did...

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

"Assuming that "less than listed retail" is a bargain is false. "

By "less than listed retail" I mean a price less than whatever they would have otherwise paid at checkout (after coupons, package deals, whatever). I was thinking of "the price listed at the store counter", but "listed retail" is not the best phrase for that. My apologies for the confusion.

I'm well aware that the "listed price" isn't always the typical price paid. That's how I came up with this idea, by observing how much effort sellers put into trying to capitalize on the full range of potential buyers. There's still a lot of untapped potential there, like in purchasing music.

"The fact that someone has high income does not imply that they're willing to spend a lot of money for any specific product/service."

Yes, you are entirely correct. I screwed that up, I did not mean to imply that richer people are inherently willing to pay more. I was only focused on the concern over fraud (of someone getting a cheap buyer to buy something for them- a cheap buyer is not necessarily a poorer person).

What I was trying to get at is that if someone is spending more (especially a lot more), but not earning more, that is possible evidence of fraud. And the "heightened income" was meant to refer to the fact that they might be getting paid to buy stuff for others. Or, it could mean they really did have a lot more money, and weren't behaving in a frugal manner, which is probably tied with a lack of caring about price.

"Spending money on back debt or saving something" would not be a purchase, so it would probably not be relevant to what I'm talking about.

"Rich people aren't going to pay more. If you're building a system that requires that they do, it's dead." It doesn't "require" rich people to do anything. They don't have to sign up for the service. And they would not necessarily pay more for things, if they did- if the AI determined they probably aren't willing to spend much on something, even if they are a multimillionaire it would give them a discount.

"FWIW - I've never seen a decent plan from someone who disliked the domain in which he was working. Such people always think that their policy preferences trump facts."

First off, this is not a government policy I'm proposing, as you seem to imply. Nowhere do I mention the government being involved- this is a private solution, between credit card companies, retailers, and customers. I suspect your other errors may be related to this error.

You may have been confused when I refer at the end to "There is a governmental solution, also, which I will go into later."- the post you replied to is the potential private solution, the other post is the potential governmental solution. I originally wrote all my posts as one single post, and when I had to break it up to fit Y Combinator's text limit, that part got left in an odd place. I can see how it would be confusing, if you did not read carefully enough to see the complete absence of a reference to the government in the rest of the post. I'll take responsibility for that.

By the way, I don't "dislike the domain in which I'm working". Nor have I ever disliked any work I've done in a related field.

But, thanks for everything else. I appreciate you alerting me to those things I did not communicate very clearly. Other than my notes, I've never written these ideas up for a lay audience, and some things haven't translated well from my head to the page.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

I like it :). Good luck!

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

Yes, let's be friends :). I'm grateful somebody mentioned "trust relationships". That's a good start. My email address is ben dott seeley att gmail dott com. Email me some contact info, and I'll mail you mine.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

This has nothing to do with entertainment, or the kind of censorship the moral conservatives would be interested in. It's way off topic. It's not even full "censorship"- there's nobody stopping the creators of such an ad from putting it on Youtube, for example. It just can't be broadcast on TV.

To address your comment somehow- the law you cite is probably unconstitutional. It was struck down by the Supreme Court once before, before being modified and passed again. I doubt the present form is constitutional, since it obviously does restrict speech.

Ironically, you, me, and the far right are the ones who most agree the law is bad :). Conservatives hate that law much more than do liberals. The conservatives' argument is "money is speech".

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

I really appreciate your concern, and I'm with you on the anti-censorship bandwagon. But, widespread censorship is not popular with a majority of the public- if it were, it would have already been done. They can't even make pornography illegal. The O'Reilly's of the world could just as easily argue, "Our copyright laws make it possible for them to make money. Kill their copyrights!!!". But lately, the most they've ever managed to accomplish is getting meaningless "Parental advisory" labels on CD and game covers.

Anyway, it wouldn't really be "their" tax dollars paying for the music you like, any more than it would be your tax dollars paying for their Christian music (remember, there's no discrimination in what's purchased). Faced with also having their free Christian music taken away, I'm pretty sure they'll ease up in their opposition. It's better to think of it as your tax dollars paying for the music you like, their tax dollars paying for the stuff they like.

I hope that if ever a law like this were to be passed, you would continue to be concerned. But, I gotta say I always find it annoying when people criticize what might otherwise be a wonderful idea, by arguing that some people might be stupid about it, so we shouldn't do it. It's time to stop being so afraid of stupid people.

Government pays for and administers roads, the military, the justice system, and a host of other things that are much more abusable than our entertainment. They don't completely mess up all those other things, and I don't think it's likely to go badly when it comes to music. Given that the worst thing the government could do would be to not pay for certain things, meaning the artists would have to sell the music just like before, that's not exactly devastating.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

"I wished people again found their natural ability to create trust relationships, from scratch."

I completely agree with this. I don't honestly feel people of good faith need to deal with complicated rules or institutions. But not everyone is willing to go that route, so this is an idea which might serve the other 99%.

First off, it might be the case that anyone could be worth investing in (in time, money, energy, expertise, caring). I think if done right, it's true for everyone. I don't really have it as a goal that just the "talented" people are invested in. Just that that is the obvious place to start.

And I think that if someone who is talented is already well-connected or has a rich family, this would probably have little use for them. But, for someone who is ambitious and hard-working but starting out from a low place, this would be a boon- they need some kind of support, more than anyone else. If they could find others willing to create "trust relationships", presumably they would do it, since that is obviously a better deal. But few seem to manage it :/.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

Ok, objection noted. The name isn't important- you can call it "Pie Love" if you want.

In case you couldn't tell from the post, I was talking about investing in the talent people have. I'm not talking about slave labor, I'm talking about doing the kind of stuff Y Combinator does, and making it even more personal and supportive over the long haul. A real partnership, so that people are even more likely to succeed in the long run.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

You raise a valid point. Implementation counts for a lot, as it does in everything, I suggested the data be anonymized. So, the govt. knows how many people have downloaded something, but not who. If that is being abused or music is being censored, I'm obviously not in favor of that.

My argument for why nothing should be excluded or censored, is that it isn't presently censored, and since fans of every type of music and media pay taxes, it should all be covered. And I'm certainly not suggesting politicians have any influence over that; I'm suggesting putting that in the hands of judges or arbitrators.

But, the whole idea is really to figure out a rough idea of what the artist would have earned under the "old" (present) market. That might be doable simply by tracking radio play, pop culture references, BitTorrent shares, downloads, how many remixes get made, sales numbers from concerts, Youtube views, etc. That would not be very invasive at all.

By the way, government courts are already frequently called in to assess how much one company owes another for something, or the market value of a service, etc. So the government already does this- however good it already does it, is probably the baseline on how good it would be implemented without any unusual data.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

I was just going off of what Graham wrote- "But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem."

Since I have no specific familiarity with dating sites, all I could suggest was a vague, general approach. Of course a big dating site might have a lot of money to advertise, but a small one probably can't afford it. But that's obviously one possible way to get some users.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

The government would not have any role in producing or censoring media. Just paying for it, according to what is listened to the most, seen, read, etc. This would actually result in a flowering of original media; successful artists could get paid without having to rely on big businesses to distribute their work, and people would be free to remix music, re-edit video and text, etc.

And in a sense there would be no "censorship of the wallet"- when anyone can read science papers, books, etc., there's a lot more intellectual freedom.

Hopefully I've allayed your concerns, at least in theory. The government has a hand in almost every walk of life, and not all of it takes a fascistic turn. The Founding Fathers even used government to make patents and copyrights possible :).

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

IANAL, so if you say exclusivity would be unenforceable, you might be right. But it's not really crucial- the only important thing is collecting useful data, and there are myriad ways to do that.

You'll have to tell me how consumers would game the system. Declaring it doesn't make it so. I've thought on this idea for over three years- I could have missed something, but if I haven't seen it by now, I need someone else to point it out for me.

Retailers might lose control over the "perceived" value, but if they are making higher profits, what do they care? Bear in mind, retailers already have many ways they try to take advantage of the pricing spectrum, they're just really inefficient, by and large.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

28. Fixing email overload.

I have an integrated solution which might also fight spam, and which would relate to contact lists / social websites. I.e. if someone is in the contact list of one of your contacts, their email gets treated as not-spam, and if you had an automated ranking algorithm for email (emails with frequent correspondents go towards the top, email from contacts is second tier, newsletters go towards the bottom, etc.), it could go towards the top. Or, the email comes from the friend of a friend of a friend, it's considered to not be spam, and put in the middle.

I'm not suggesting you be able to see your contacts' contacts, but something akin to the six degrees of separation application in Facebook. This could get computationally intensive if you were checking for enough degrees of separation. But it's obviously doable, if the Facebook application can do it- and if it were too CPU intensive, maybe some people would choose to pay for the service.

This would also fight spam even if it were only applied in a small number of email inboxes. Because, if it sees that emails from an email address aren't in the first six degrees of contacts of any of, say, the first 10 receivers, it could inform ISPs that all future emails from that address are suspected spam.

This is the idea which is most off the top of my head, so be wary of it :).

Another idea- add a reddit-like button next to emails which lets you move stuff up and down in your inbox. This would serve dual functions- letting you sort emails and to-do items by priority (a right click on the button would let you move stuff up or down by 10, 50 places, etc.), and it would also tell your filter what you prioritize (which contacts, which key words, etc.- like, PG's filter might notice he likes emails with the SIP "Lisp" in it).

That wraps up my ideas that are relevant to PG's list, as far as I can recall. If anyone has any questions about any of them, let me know. I've fleshed out most of these much further than you see, I just don't feel like doing a 50,000 word writeup as a comment. If you want to contact me privately, my email address is ben dott seeley att gmail dott com.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

26. Better video chat. Skype and Tokbox are just the beginning. There's going to be a lot of evolution in this area, especially on mobile devices.

It's called "meeting people face to face". Oh, you didn't laugh...

But seriously, if you really want to take video/online interaction further, why not put electrodes on your skin, and use a USB port to feed the data into your conversation window, and the other folks can see how you are feeling in real time? OK, that might be a bad joke, too...

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

13. Online learning.

Well, if educational materials were either cheap because of my idea for #17, or the government were putting educational materials in the public domain (that would be a good place to start, in my opinion, before branching out), that would help.

I'm in the middle of an article about reforming the education system (how the institution could be restructured). It will be posted to anamazingmind.com/blog (a friend's blog) when I'm done. It would definitely create new educational markets, and online education would be a big winner.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

8. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear.

This problem falls under the classification of "critical mass" problems. I think any solution that works for one of these types of problems, is likely to work for the others. "Critical mass" is when the problem is not in coming up with a good alternative, the problem is that having a critical mass of users for your solution is going to be an important part of the value you offer to your customers.

I've never been able to flesh this out enough to the point where I was sure I had a solution that would definitely work. But here's what I came up with so far: make a website, and a company, whose focus is solely on building critical masses of users for those "new alternatives". It would consist entirely of methods and social software that could be used to build critical mass.

For example, users could state how many other users would need to be using a new service, before they would try it. Or how many of their friends were doing it. Then, you inform them when those numbers are reached- when the 100th user is there, the 1000th user, etc. (whatever they named), the third user after they posted, etc. Ideally, you would have enough people who've registered their herd-desire, that you could set off a chain reaction from 0 to the number needed for viability.

Unfortunately, that probably wouldn't work for anything but what attracts the most savvy users. I think you might have to pay people to form flash mobs. I.e. people go hang out on the website, and they get a notice of "if you're interested, go to this dating site and fill out a profile, and earn $5. Each other new user you find earns $1 for you". Especially the more social it is, the more it would work to have a flash mob thing going on, where there's only one opportunity at a time. Then you hope that a temporary critical mass sustains itself- that if it's good enough, people will stick around and the rest of the nuclear reaction can complete itself.

To some extent, what I'm proposing is the Mechanical Turk thing Amazon does, but for user bases. And you'd probably have to do a lot of user verification.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

2. Simplified browsing.

I got nothing on this, since I'm not in the target market. Btw, my pet theory is that smart people will have the best luck inventing commercially successful solutions, if they focus on jobs and activities that hardly any smart people do. Like, bagging groceries, and data entry. I've done both of those, and I had plenty of germinal ideas on how they could be improved or automated.

The corollary to this would be that it's hard to be a big new success in Web 2.0. Tons of smart people are avid Internet users, and they're interested in that. Unless you're towards the apex of that group, coming up with a market-shaking new Web 2.0 idea will be tough. This is also the reason I left quant finance- given how many smart people were competing with me, I could much more easily invent something useful for other people (which feels better and is less stressful), and make a fortune that way.

But here's the browsing idea I'd like (I don't know if this has been proposed already- I hope it's technically feasible): cluster links. This is where you click on a link, and it opens a whole lot of links at the same time. Like, a link to open all the links on the front page of Hacker News in new tabs or new windows. Or all the links in one of PG's articles. Or a link which opens all the links from the bibliography of an article. Or a link which opens Google's top 20 search results.

For someone with a lot of bandwidth, and not listening to music online, and browsing from home, automatically opening 30 windows at once is not going to cause any problems- just close whichever ones look uninteresting. I open an awful lot of links every day, and my fingers get tired. Make it easy for me.

If there was some sort of a risk (like a spam link that has 200 links), make it so a warning window opens if, say, more than 40 windows would open (or a number chosen by the user)- allowing the user to individually decline or accept links, or give a batch OK/reject to all of them.

Corollary: this might be a useful idea in, like, software help searches. A lot of times it's hard to tell which help page would be useful when I do a keyword search- why not be able to open all the results at once? I hate wasting time making a decision about "is this worth opening or not?" when usually it would be easier to make that decision when it's already open. If the summary is so great, put it at the top of each opened page.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

5. Enterprise software 2.0.

This might be partially solved by my commercial idea for #17. But, that idea breaks down for things which are only rarely sold. And it would be very difficult to apply to corporate buyers, who have varied and changing needs and behaviors.

This is where the government could take the lead. The govt. could declare all patents and copyrights, or just certain classes of them, to be public domain immediately upon creation. Then the government would (anonymously) track usage of all of them. It would then take that info, and estimate how much the creator would have earned in the typical monopoly market patents and copyrights have. And then pay that much to the creator.

Example: a company makes some enterprise software. Once released to the government, it can be downloaded by any company, from a government website. The government collects as much data about usage as possible. They find that, say, 50,000 companies are using it as their primary software. In a normal market, they estimate the company would have earned $25 million for the year for that many users. That's what the developers earn. If they think the data is undercounting (or the government thinks the data is overcounting), it can be arbitrated.

Advantages of this approach are myriad and overwhelming- the first country to adopt this approach will have a major competitive advantage over all other countries, because all their businesses and individuals will be using the highest quality software, health care drugs and devices, manufacturing processes, etc. The collective cost to society, paid via taxes instead of private expenditures, would be roughly the same, since the government would only be trying to pay the creators the same amount they would earn under the old market.

For the creators, while revenue would be the same, profit margins would go up, since their marketing and administrative costs would mostly disappear. Basically, they would get paid more for focusing on what they do best- creating useful things. No longer would they need to be experts on numerous other aspects of distribution.

For the taxpayers, instead of paying for one copy of software, and that's all they got, they would pay the same amount in taxes, but be free to try any software ever made. Apply the same logic to anything else that was covered by copyright and patents, and you will see that's quite a deal, don't you think?

For those crying "socialism!", well, yes, I am suggesting the government increase taxes in order to gain a valuable common good. But this would actually reduce the amount of bureaucracy people have to deal with- no more DRMs, RIAA after your butt, piracy warnings before movies, dealing with insurance bureaucrats (once prescription drugs and medical devices are public domain, there is much less need for insurance and other complicated stuff, because medical care becomes much cheaper (without creating more government regulation of healthcare. Yay!)), unnecessary business administration, etc. etc. etc. The government would only be monitoring usage, and paying money. That's a pretty light hand.

12. Fix advertising.

If "fix advertising" means "eliminate advertising" (OK, that's my definition), the idea above would eliminate most advertising. Once the content of newspapers, magazines, TV shows, online web content, etc., is free (the creators being paid by the government), advertising has lost its function- anyone would be free to publish an advertising-free version of something.

This would do wonders for the psychological health of humanity.

foompy_katt

18 anni fadiscuss

3. New news.

I think users of Slashdot/Reddit/HN/Digg might like this, especially those who are longing for an eternal September, since it's primarily an idea regarding keeping chat forums from degenerating: given that we can readily see the interesting, well-behaved, consistently high quality participants on other forums, why not simply invite them to a new forum or news aggregator site, and limit participation to those people? We can all think of names off the top of our head- byrneseyeview, for example. I'm guessing there are a lot of these great posters who would love to participate in an environment free of trolling and other bad behavior, which might be more easily maintained by controlling the population than in having lots of moderators and complex valuing algorithms. Just as important, make the forum public for viewing- I know that there are thousands of people like me, who rarely participate, but love to read great discussion.

To this you might say- "but what about those people who could chime in with something interesting, who are barred from participating?". For this I suggest making a "ghost forum", a mirror copy of the elite forum, but which allows anyone to participate in pseudo-tandem with the comments on the elite forum (i.e. elite posts show up there simultaneously, but anyone can write anything in response). This would further make it possible to see who would be a worthy addition to the elite forum, at the same time as the forum administrator could scour other sites for any new, consistently high-quality discussion participators.

This idea could easily be commercialized, with participators earning some money as well. People love to watch good discussion- just look at the large number of TV and radio chat shows, and magazine group interviews. Or, more direct to the Internet experience- the fact that there are generally about 100 readers for every 1 writer. Or, the number of times I have read on Reddit "what keeps me coming back to Reddit are the commenters". If the discussion is interesting enough, I am sure that there will be enough eyeballs that it must be worth something. Or the forum could simply be left standing as an excellent public institution- I believe something like this could be an excellent teaching tool, something to demonstrate "this is how you participate constructively" for the readers.

Ironically, I recently wrote the above paragraphs (except the intro), intending to email it to PG, since I thought he might be interested. Never got around to it. The idea could be extended to the news, and to submitting links. Some people are pretty consistent in their journalism, or their quality taste in links/news. My personal belief is that it all comes down to the people involved, more than to any set of rules, since no person is as simplistic as even the most complex set of rules ever devised. Useful people are self-regulating, and dysfunctional people are hard to moderate, no matter the number and type of rules, or how much authority you have.

My great personal hope for the forum idea, if it is ever implemented, is that we might finally see constructive dialogue between people of opposing political viewpoints (the same goes for any other subject in which few people talk to the other side). There are some people capable of debating constructively with their opponents, but on every forum I've ever seen, it all goes to hell because of trolls, or mob rule downvoting the dissenter into oblivion.

But if you narrow the debate down to the people who can manage to disagree without being disagreeable, there might be some hope for progress. I think that until average people can learn to debate opponents constructively, our politicians will never do it, because even if the politicians wanted to, their constituents will pressure the politicians to behave like the constituents would.