What's the practical difference between a government saying "You must sell your product for this price or we won't allow you to do business in this industry" and Wal-Mart saying the same thing?
You're right that there might not be much of a practical difference for the company making the socket sets, but they aren't the only factor in the equation. Your question addresses only the seller, and markets are made of both sellers and buyers.
If the government sets price limits, that means the company can't do business even if there's a willing buyer. You're removing the right of free choice.
When it's Wallmart setting a price that they're willing to pay, and it's lower than the price the company is able to sell for, that just means there isn't a willing buyer. Wallmart is in some sense acting as a proxy for the people who shop there, who are clearly saying that price is what's important to them.
To paint an exaggerated picture: if I'm trying to sell my socket sets for $1000 each, and no-one wants to buy them, that doesn't mean the market isn't free, it just means that there isn't a match in the buyer side of the market for my product.
A free market doesn't guarantee that you get to stay in business.
what good is a socket set for 15¢ less than the competition when the socket set company that used to pay you $35,000 a year moves to Indonesia and now pays you $0?
Over the long term and looking at the bigger picture, we'll hopefully wind up with a good number of people in Indonesia who are better off.
I agree, this is compelling for a lot of the same reasons as the anagrams problem. I spent weeks playing with anagram code at one point, and like you I felt an immediate compulsion to start writing code for Sling Blade Runner. So far my (ruby) code just does the obvious: builds the graph connecting up the movies and then uses brute force to find all chains of length two, then three, etc. Bogs down at chain length of about 11. Added some quick and dirty optimizations and pruning heuristics, and I'm geting chains in the mid-hundreds. I think this approach can be extended further, but isn't particularly clever :-/.
It's a fun project! I built one several years ago, after playing around with a bunch of different approaches. I wound up with a human-guided tool that seems to work pretty well for coming up with interesting ones:
If I had known about this 14 years ago I would have certainly tried it, I tried many things... the ones that I think were helpful for me are:
Ice bathes for my arms: I filled a sink with water and ice and submerged my arms up to the elbows; this was obviously useful for short term pain relief, and might have helped reduce inflammation over the longer term. It was important to wait until the arms were warmed up again before going back to typing.
Keeping fingernails well trimmed; surprising, but it made a big difference.
Massage; I think it was through massage that I started realizing that even though my symptoms were in the wrists the problem was probably more systemic, it's amazing how much pain a good massage can discover in surprising places!
Stretching; stretching the wrists felt immediately good, as did standing in a doorway, arms on the door frame, and leaning forward. Working on the hamstrings probably helped longer term.
Weight lifting, particularly exercises that strengthened the back; lots of people have mentioned it here, and I credit this for being the biggest long term help.
The "cylinder with accordion-like folds" looks like the business end of the toilet plunger I recently bought, so it's already mass produced and easy to source cheaply.
Photography is different from other fields in that the typical unit of work is quite small: one photo. That means amateurs can overwhelm the professionals by shear volume. There are so many more of them, and they take so many photos; so what if 99.9% of them are awful, as long as there's a good filter to find the gems.
This of course doesn't work if you absolutely must have photos of some particular event, so there will always be room for professionals even if they're squeezed.
I was amused to find this bit of awkwardly worded text in the article:
"...the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that scientists theorize gives mass to other particles and thus to other objects and creatures in the universe."
The Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers: a love story that touches on music, genetics, history, art... lots of themes that HN readers might appreciate.
Quite some time ago I wrote a little web-based note taking app, trying to make it as much like NV as I could -- I really liked NV, but wanted to be able to access my notes from multiple locations. I still use it myself all the time, though I never really polished it or shared it widely.
Well, scale can mean "spend time and money building infrastructure that supports lots of traffic" -- doing this before getting the traffic is premature optimization.
But, scale can also mean "get lots of traffic" -- this is growth, not optimization; in this case, trying to optimize revenue before the growth happens could be considered premature optimization.
The Aeropress is pretty good. It's cheap, easy to use, and surprisingly easy to clean. I used to use it to make mochas and faux-cappuccinos (pseudo-espresso from the Aeropress plus milk frothified using a whirly-agitator thing instead of steam) but these days I just make Americano-style coffee, which I like because it comes out rich and smooth. I'm not really a coffee snob, though, so YMMV.
Historically I’ve approached big projects with the nonstrategy of “let them overwhelm you in your head, then put them off till moment when the fear of not finishing exceeds the fear of starting.”
This is well put, and exactly how I handled all of college. It worked OK there because project size was generally reasonably bounded.
The "fear of starting" is pretty insidious. A project often looks hugely different on either side of "started working" line -- it can be a really quick change from "I'm not really sure how this is going to work" to "I'm in a groove, this is going great!"
The concept of a "risk thermostat" is interesting -- people seem inclined to maintain a more or less constant level of risk. I've noticed an effect that interacts with that: my risk inclination seems to have some initial static friction that changes to a lower level of kinetic friction once I'm moving. Example: some years ago I was feeling a little hesitant to try snowboarding because it seemed "risky" (I knew I'd fall a lot). The first time I tried it, I was having so much fun that I pushed myself well into exhaustion and took some crazy tumbles that didn't stop me from getting up and riding more. I suppose my initial response might just have been an underestimation of the "reward" part, rather than an incorrect estimation of the "risk" part.
The game he's writing about produced average revenue of around $4500 a month for it's first two years, and is currently making around $1000 a month. That's not enough data to plot a curve, but his long term revenue for a game seems quite respectable, particularly when considering he has a stable of 12+ games that are probably all still earning some amount.
What's the practical difference between a government saying "You must sell your product for this price or we won't allow you to do business in this industry" and Wal-Mart saying the same thing?
You're right that there might not be much of a practical difference for the company making the socket sets, but they aren't the only factor in the equation. Your question addresses only the seller, and markets are made of both sellers and buyers.
If the government sets price limits, that means the company can't do business even if there's a willing buyer. You're removing the right of free choice.
When it's Wallmart setting a price that they're willing to pay, and it's lower than the price the company is able to sell for, that just means there isn't a willing buyer. Wallmart is in some sense acting as a proxy for the people who shop there, who are clearly saying that price is what's important to them.
To paint an exaggerated picture: if I'm trying to sell my socket sets for $1000 each, and no-one wants to buy them, that doesn't mean the market isn't free, it just means that there isn't a match in the buyer side of the market for my product.