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Archive for October, 2008

NHN

Posted in Stupid Shit I Found On The Web on October 10, 2008 by themaroon

I’ve still been reading and contributing to Non-Hacker News daily. Being Moderator-In-Chief there has become harder than I thought it might be, even with only a dozen or so people contributing stories.

My goal is still to keep moderation light, so my philosophy is that when I think a particular story is borderline, I should leave it. I’d rather err on the side of not killing, as to do otherwise might enforce my own personal viewpoints onto the site, which I really don’t want. That’s what this blog is for. On the other hand, there’s a fine line at which discussion devolves into what we see on Digg, which has become little more than a P.R. machine for Obama and Apple.

Politics is, unsurprisingly, the trickiest part. On one hand, I want to allow political discussion, and there’ve been some fascinating links there about it. On the other hand, I don’t want it to become apparently pro-Obama (or McCain, though there’s little chance of that on a social news site).

So I try to keep it to articles that examine and report about trends and facts with little or no editorializing. Articles such as this one, pointing out that both campaigns are going negative with personal attacks, and this one pointing out that the GOP is filing a fundraising complaint against the Obama campaign, were easy. Two tough ones submitted in the last couple days were this one about recent McCain rallies and this one about CNN’s reporting on the Bill Ayers story.

Both I thought long and hard about. The first one could be seen as anti-McCain, but I really didn’t feel it was. It was just reporting on what’s going on with his camp. The second one (which is certainly anti-Obama) had my finger on the kill button for a few seconds mainly because it editorializes in the last paragraph. Up until that point, it was just someone reporting that CNN reported that Obama was lying about the Ayers connection. Ultimately I decided to let the votes decide in both cases, but I’m still not sure if I made the right call. At least if I erred, I did so once in favor of each candidate.

So far I killed one story that was outright racist, and in fact I think I waited too long to do so because I hadn’t fully read it. I killed another one too. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but I think it was a link to Daily Kos or Huffington Post or something like that, that I felt editorialized too much. And I changed a few titles to match the title of the article it was linking to, because someone had clearly editorialized there (or in one case, it felt a little too link-baitish) which I don’t want.

Either way, I think we’re at 2 kills out of 230 posts, so not bad. I really do believe that killing is discouraging enough that, when combined with outright bans of people whose posts are killed repeatedly (which I’ve not seen at all yet) will allow you to keep a site’s quality up with only a very small amount. Something like 0.5% moderation might mean the difference between Digg and Hacker News.

Slinkset, which I host it on, has been great. Setup was easy, and they even rolled out a couple nice features for me. The site is up and responsive every time I look at it, so there haven’t been any dependability problems. In fact when Hacker News went down (as it is wont to do sometimes) people commented on it on Non-Hacker News. Ah, the irony.

So I couldn’t really be much happier with them. I’ve used a couple similar services in the past, including CoRank and self-hosted Pligg, and this is far easier and better. There’s really no comparison. Ability to use my own domain makes them much better than CoRank (though in fairness, I haven’t used that in a long time and they may offer it now) and Pligg was just a constant pain to customize.

4 Comments »

I Love Blogging, But Blogs Aren't Replacing Newspapers

Posted in Uncategorized on October 9, 2008 by themaroon

One thing that makes me want to punch people in the face is when I hear “blogs are the new newspapers”. No, they’re not.

For one thing, there’s quality. Even the worst newspaper has pretty well-written articles. They mostly just buy the national stuff from AP/Reuters, but even the local stuff they produce themselves is copy-edited and fact-checked.

Blogs are just some guy who, if he’s bothering to give facts at all, probably just pulled them out of his ass. I generally try to cite where I can, but even that often is some stuff I found on Wikipedia (though I’ll often cite from the source shown there) or Google. That puts me way beyond most blogs (and I don’t do this for profit) but it’s not exactly New York Times standards.

Also, there’s just plain grammar. Here’s a quote from TechCrunch yesterday:

Compared to other onlne calendar’s such as Google’s. there is nothing novel…

That’s one of the largest, most profitable blogs on the net, they don’t even run a spell check. That sort of thing is not uncommon. I swear sometimes I think Arrington is hiring drunken, dyslexic Indian 3^rd graders in order to save money. What are these bloggers typing articles in? If you just used Firefox and typed it into the WordPress form, which nobody serious about blogging does, even that has a spell-checker. And if, like me, you type it up in Word (where it lights up with more red and green than a Wal-Mart in December) and then use Office 2007′s bad ass publish to blog feature, or in some program like Windows Live Writer, you couldn’t write that poorly if you tried. In fact, here’s that same sentence again if I just right click the things with squiggly lines under them and pick the default correction option:

Compared to other online calendars such as Google’s. There is nothing novel…

At the end, there’s even yet another green squiggly under the first part telling me it’s a fragment, so, unless I had recently been huffing Lysol, I’d realize that period should have been a comma. While I do realize that most people don’t feel it their life’s calling to protect the English language, as some internet quiz once told me mine was (therefore it must be true), that sort of stuff just makes you look hacky and amateurish.

Please don’t take that as some sort of hating on TechCrunch, it’s not just them. It’s every blog, even the professional ones. And until the quality of the best blogs at least matches the quality of the worst newspapers there will always be a place for old school writing. What the delivery method and revenue models will be is debatable, but the demand is not.

The internet has largely destroyed newspaper’s revenue streams, but it’s not due to blogs. They’ve killed classifieds with Craigslist and eBay. They’ve hurt advertising with AdWords. And they’re wrecking subscriptions and other content-based revenue with Digg, Yahoo News, etc. Why buy the cow when you can read the milk online?

That part is largely the newspapers’ fault for commoditizing the articles by purchasing most of their national content from large syndicates. Now news, with the exception of local stuff, is just something you compete for on price, and they’ll never beat the web there because the cost of serving up a web-page is a tiny fraction of the cost of a sheet of paper. When the big aggregators like Yahoo have all the same news as every local paper, there’s just no way for the little guys to compete.

So what do periodicals do going forward? I think step one is to make top-quality, original content. The Economist, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal are all great examples. They’re still spending the big bucks on star writers, giving them the time and budget they need to write solid articles, and mixing it with a little blog-style content online too.

I’m unsure if, in the long run, it will be best given away for free, or if subscription fees are ideal. I’m still unconvinced that the WSJ should drop its paywall, since it seems to have a ton of subscribers and no serious competition in the high quality financial news segment. The New York Times seems to be entirely free, and The Economist has some weird hybrid model where you can get the print stuff for free, but you can pay for something and they don’t really tell you what. That model might actually be worth something if, when you click on the subscribe link, all you got wasn’t a page that said This article is premium content. In order to gain access to it please either Log in, Activate your complimentary web account if you are a print subscriber, or Subscribe now, with “Subscribe now” linking you to that same page it’s on.

One thing I am sure of is that people will want high quality original content forever, and in its absence on free sites, which economics may enforce, even be willing to pay. Good content is expensive. It means paying good writers to pursue stories that often lead nowhere at all. It means paying fact-checkers (especially in the post-Jayson Blair era) and copy editors. Or at least a free spell-checker.

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When Is A Small Sample Really A Small Sample?

Posted in tech on October 6, 2008 by themaroon

Had an interesting argument on HN the other day. People were giving anecdotal evidence about Macbook failure rates, and other people were saying they were insignificant samples. I shared mine about having frinds who had 4 Macbook Pros total (one actually bought a backup because his first turned into such a brick, an experience I’m begging him to blog) and of course the discussion devolved from there into how it was an irrelevant sample size.

Now let’s say 3 of these had to visit the Apple Store for repairs. A sample of 4, at first, seems too small to conclude anything from. However, I remembered just enough from my personal studies of probability to suspect that 3 out of 4 failures was actually quite meaningful. So I did a little digging.

I talked to my friend Matt Matros, who is my go-to guy when I have math problems since he has a degree in it from Yale, and he pointed me at Baye’s Theorem, which is the correct way to solve it. It turns out the odds of observing 3 or more failures in a sample of 4 laptops, if you assumed the laptops failed only 10% of the time, would be on the order of 0.037%.

What that means, in plain English, is that if you see 3 out of 4 Macbooks fail, then they almost certainly have a much higher failure rate than 10%. In fact, if you had a 50% failure rate, you would still expect to see 3 or more fail only 31.25% of the time.

This isn’t entirely meaningful. Those four laptops were purchased in either 3 or 4 different states (I’m not certain) so it can’t be attributed to shipping errors. If they were all the same model, it could have been just one bad Apple (har har) or even just one bad production run.

Also, all problems are not equal, which has long been a problem with the JD Power IQS, which is often used as a metric for automobile dependability. All of the aforementioned problems required at least 1 trip to the Apple store though. And I think they may have all required at least 2, but that speaks only to the poor quality of the Genius Bar.

Just out of curiosity (and my own mathematical ineptitude) I wrote a quick PHP Monte Carlo simulator to goof around with the numbers, and it pretty much just confirmed Baye’s Theorem exactly. You can snag the source for it here.

And yes, I’m aware I’m an awful programmer.

10 Comments »

Gay Marriage

Posted in Politics on October 6, 2008 by themaroon

I was thinking about gay marriage a bit today. It seems to be the hot button issue of the last 4 years or so. When the Republicans needed to get George W. Bush reelected despite a low approval rating, their most powerful tactic (and the one that may ultimately have worked) was putting anti-gay marriage amendments on the ballot to drive the religious right to the polls.

Gay marriage is clearly the new abortion, the topic separating the red half of the nation from the blue. It seems that the social conservatives are more or less admitting defeat on abortion, at least as far as ballots are concerned, and moving on. They know they can’t do much about it other than to hope they can keep electing Presidents until they’ve stacked the Supreme Court in their favor, but that’s too long-term a plan to make much difference at the polls. So they had to go digging for another hobgoblin, and lo and behold, Massachusetts and then California dropped it into their lap.

When you really think about it, you realize that something like 95% of the population doesn’t have a vested interest in the outcome, so it’s clear that it isn’t the issue itself that’s bringing people to the voting booths. At least with abortion, there was a clear rationale for wanting it to be illegal. Many of us disagree with the premise (that life begins at some definable point, such as conception) and prefer to err on the side of civil liberties, but at least we can sort of understand where the opposing side is coming from. They believe, for whatever reason, that a fetus is still a human, and therefore abortion is murder, and that our government has a responsibility to protect unborn babies from murder just as they do born ones. Again, many of us may disagree, but we get the argument.

Not so with gay marriage really. The actual issue is a little esoteric, because it’s always being danced around. Separation of church and state forces those in favor of such amendments to come up with some justification beyond “The Bible says so” for outlawing it, but the ones they come up with are flimsy and weak, obviously a ruse to hide some deeper motivations.

The first of the big two justifications is that “marriage is between a man and a woman”, which is really nothing more than semantics. A lot of people say they’re ok with gay people having “civil unions”, which are just marriages but called something different, which essentially means they want the government to take over Merriam Webster’s job of defining words.

The second is that we need to “protect the institution of marriage.” That’s such bullshit that even most of the social conservatives I’ve talked to laugh at it. We have a 50% failure rate for first marriages, which climbs to 67% and 74% for the second and third, respectively. Any “institution” that fails more often than not doesn’t need protection, it needs life support. And nobody but Pat Buchanan could possibly blame gay people for the current state of affairs there.

So what it really comes down to, what really drives people to the polls to vote one way or the other, is epistemology. What we’re voting on isn’t whether or not gay people should be able to file a joint tax return. It’s whether we’re going to make our decisions based on science and reason or religion and fear of what we don’t understand.

As Bill Maher said in the first video from my recent post:

“It is two Americas. There’s like a progressive European nation that a lot of us live in, or would like to live in, and it’s being strangled by the Sarah Palins of the world. It can’t quite be born because this other stupid redneck nation won’t allow it.”

It’s pretty clear which nation I’d like to live in, of course. My heart lies with science. And scientists say that homosexuality isn’t a choice but rather a genetic disposition. And therefore, it cannot be wrong, any more than being tall or having brown hair can. (Science also says that there isn’t a black and white distinction between homo and heterosexuality as we tend to view it, but rather it’s a continuum and we’re all some shade of grey, but that’s beside the point I suppose.)

So that’s why I could never pull the lever for a candidate who was opposed to gay marriage. It isn’t because I care one way or the other about the outcome. It doesn’t really affect me either way. I only know a few gay people, and they don’t really seem to care. What does affect me is having leaders who base their decisions on 2,000 year old mistranslated folk stories, and irrational fears that if we let gay people be openly so, our moral fabric will somehow be ripped to shreds.

It’s a bad epistemology, and it’s one that’s threatening the very future of our country. It’s what’s allowing the redneck half to hold the progressive half back. And it’s why I find myself so often voting for a party that I consider the lesser, by far, of two evils, and lamenting that there hasn’t been a truly conservative candidate on the ballot since 1964. And don’t say Reagan or I’ll punch you in the teeth.

So the question is, where do we go from here? I really don’t know. I don’t see much of a way out of our current predicament beyond education, and that’s nearly non-existent in the red half of the nation. The differences in average wealth and education between the red and blue states are astounding, and it’s not a coincidence. It all goes back to the epistemology.

But the very policies of those kept in power by the religious right keep their base poor and uneducated. Our nation is already a statistical outlier in terms of religion, but it’s also very young, and it can’t stay that way forever. Nothing ever does. In the end, science and reason always have their way. It’s just a matter of time.

Perhaps if the progressive half of our nation wants the redneck half to allow it to be born, it should focus on educating them. Fear and religion are both predicated on ignorance. Maybe we should be donating to their schools and scholarship funds. Surely there are loads of intelligent people even in those states, give them the tools they need to stamp out fear and ignorance through education. It sounds a little counterintuitive to give money to the very people who are preventing you from fixing our nation, but it might build a progressive dynasty.

Or maybe not.

11 Comments »

Sports-based Pyramid Schemes

Posted in Startup on October 5, 2008 by themaroon

Every now and then a company launches that’s in your space, or sort of tangentially in your space, and you hear about it through a Google alert or something. And occasionally, one of those sets off scores of alerts, blog entries, and emails from friends. Enter OneSeason.com, which even got Reuters coverage when it launched. I really need to find out who their PR agent is.

At first, I got kind of excited, because I had heard about something like this not long ago. Except with one crucial difference, which was that you would be buying shares in the actual athlete. More on that in a second.

With One Season, you’re really buying nothing. Everything I read compares them to the stock market, but with the stock market, you’re buying shares in a company. In the short term, those share prices (for stocks that don’t pay dividends at least) might be determined largely by sentiment. But in the long run, they’re determined by some sort of real world value. Each share has an expected value, even if held on to, because it might pay dividends later, or the company might be acquired for cash by a competitor or in a leveraged buyout or whatever. There are actual ways you can profit from holding a stock beyond selling it.

One Season is, instead, selling a virtual good with no possibility of objective value. They’re basically digital baseball cards, except unlike with baseball cards, you don’t have a 20 year old piece of cardboard to justify the $500 you spent on it. And unlike many other virtual goods, for instance gold or weapons in World of Warcraft, you’re not getting something that has utility within the broader context of a game or activity you otherwise enjoy.

(I’ve seen a fantasy site that actually does something like that. It issues virtual cards, and you use those to build your team. That, I think, is pretty nifty.)

It’s also been compared to Tradesports, Betfair, and Intrade, though those markets trade contracts that pay someone when an event occurs and the contract is resolved. Holding shares in Obama will pay you $10 per if he wins. So again, there’s genuine incentive to buy the shares, a tangible return, and a clear, objective way to price them. They trade based on what the traders think are their odds of winning, and when they deviate from that, the smart money sneaks in and makes a profit by correcting it.

Really, what you have in One Season is a pyramid scheme. It’s a digital product that has no tangible benefits or even utility in a game. The only way to make a profit is if more people decide they want these valueless shares. And the only way for those new people to make a profit is if other people want them.

Which might happen, who knows? But much more interesting to me would be a site that actually sold shares in an athlete, and paid a return of some percentage of his salary and endorsement revenues.

That might be a great way for rookies to allay some of the risks of their job. The average career in the major professional sports is only a few years, and doesn’t pay nearly as much as most people think. And it’s somewhat unpredictable going in. Some players are overhyped (I’ve still got a stack of Chris Webber rookie cards from when I was in middle school. “Next Michael Jordan” my ass) while some players are under-hyped. Some are hyped appropriately but get injured or stab a stripper outside of a nightclub. You really just never know.

It could be sort of a market-based insurance for athletes, and a neat way to invest for sports fans. And beyond the IPO, there’d be a huge market for trading those shares as the athlete rose through the ranks. Imagine how much you might have made if you bought 1% of Kurt Warner when he first was called up from NFL Europe.

I remember hearing of such a thing once, but to my knowledge it hasn’t launched yet. Which is too bad, because that would be a market. If you think One Season, on the other hand, is a market, then please loan me $10. My friend Chuck Ponzi has an investment opportunity that will guarantee turning it into $20 in a week, and I’ll give you $15.

Oh, and tell your friends.

5 Comments »

Ignorance Is Bliss, and It May Soon Be Vice President Too

Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on October 3, 2008 by themaroon

I watched 10 or 20 minutes of the vice presidential debate today. For the most part, I was pretty ambivalent about it. The only thing that angered me was Sarah Palin’s statement (the same as in her Couric interview that “I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate”

First, it pisses me off because she keeps saying it backwards. She means she won’t attribute all changes in climate to man’s activities. Get it right. Nobody thinks that I went to the bank this morning because the ice caps are melting.

And the second, less anal retentive reason is that I get pissed off whenever anyone with no scientific knowledge disagrees with a scientific position that almost every scientist in a relevant field holds, because that’s the sort of celebrated ignorance that’s attempting to ruin our nation.

Unless Palin has a Ph.D. in climatology that the media somehow hasn’t picked up on, she’s clearly uninformed enough to have a contrary opinion. Just that fact that she’s willing to have one tells me that she’s not someone who makes decisions based on logic and reason.

Here’s what you find with just a little Googling. NASA says, “a majority of climatologists have concluded that human activities are responsible for most of the warming.” The National Academy of Sciences reports “climate change is happening and anthropogenic warming is influencing many physical and biological systems.” In fact, according to Wikipedia, “With the July 2007 release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate.”

So, not a single scientific body, even the one funded by the companies whose industry is partially causing the problem, disputes it. That’s good enough for me. And if it’s not good enough for you, and you don’t have a Ph.D. in geology, you’re either ignorant or stupid. Or both.

And yeah, you can find a scientist here or there who says it’s all a big hoax. But you can also find scientists that say 9/11 was a government conspiracy (for scientific reasons) too. There are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of scientists out there, so if you name any position, you can find at least a handful that will support it.

But the consensus in favor of anthropogenic climate change is beyond overwhelming. Someone with a B.S. in communications and journalism disagreeing with the vast majority of climatologists on a climatological issue is the equivalent of a mechanic saying “Yeah, Stephen Hawking says black holes give off thermal radiation, but I just don’t believe it, because I read on a blog that black-body radiation is all just liberal propaganda.” It’s a level of stupidity that surprises me, and that says a lot because I once watched an entire episode of Survivor.

So, the real question is, what does this say about her decision making process? Maybe I’m the only one who looks at a candidate’s individual stances for hints as to the quality of their decision making skills, but that makes her look pretty awful. How can someone who has no expertise in a field argue with the overwhelming consensus of thousands of scholars who do, and still call themselves fit to lead? Do you trust her, when a new situation pops up, despite her total unwillingness to listen to experts, to be able to come to the right decision reliably? And, are you as scared as I am that there is probably at least a 10% chance this person will one day be our President?

3 Comments »

Real Time

Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on October 2, 2008 by themaroon

Sometimes someone says everything you’re thinking, but better. Sometimes, that someone is Bill Maher:

1 Comment »

Mobile Growth: Don't Bet On It

Posted in tech on October 1, 2008 by themaroon

A thread today made me think a little bit about the future of the mobile internet. The person I was talking to (Dan from Ticketstumbler, an awesome YC-backed startup) mentioned that mobile was a good source of future growth for Google. I’m not exactly what I’d call bearish on the mobile web, as I think there’s a lot of potential there, but I’m probably not bullish either. Here’s why.

First, he mentioned that mobile devices outnumber PCs by something like 10:1. True. But not all mobile devices are created equal, and currently something like 80-90% are worthless for any web surfing beyond checking the weather even here in the US, and its worse overseas. That will change, but slowly because most phones are dirt cheap pay-as-you-go clamshells purchased by people in third world countries. I remember reading that the most popular mobile provider in China has more customers than there are American citizens.

China, India, Russia, Brazil, and the rest of the developing world make up the majority of mobile users (because they make up the majority of the world’s population) and are why those devices outnumber PCs by so much. Those countries are also worthless to Google (and other websites) because they have, per capita, very little money. (And because Google can’t seem to get them to use their product, but that’s presumably a problem the big G can solve, whereas their poverty is not.) That may change, but you better believe that if China grows as wealthy as the U.S., making their traffic worth real money, their ratio of phones to PCs will look about the same as ours.

I don’t know exactly what the ratio is in the developed world, but there’s no way it’s 10:1. According to a survey done by Seagate 3 years ago, 76% of Americans own a computer. It’s safe to say that 760% of the population does not own a mobile phone. According to this one survey I found, it’s 82.4%, making the ratio about 1.08:1, if you assume PCs have stagnated over the last 3 years. In reality it may be below 1:1, and even if everyone buys a cell, it will be somewhere around 1.25:1 in the developed world (i.e. where the money is).

Second, people will, until some radically new, currently unforeseen technology becomes available (and I’m talking way beyond Blackberry/iPhone here) prefer surfing on the PC over the web when both are available. The input devices are better. Keyboards on a PC are significantly easier to use than the one on a Berry, and the mouse is still a far better input device than the touch screen. And most importantly, even the smallest monitor is 4-5x the size of the iPhone, which itself is about the biggest screen you can feasibly have and still fit in your pocket.

Because people will prefer a computer over a cell-phone, they effectively spend more time around PCs than they do phones. Most people spend a third of their day at work (possibly with a PC handy) where they generally cannot use mobile phones, and much of the rest at home, where again a PC is usually available. Mobile devices are only useful when you’re not at home and not driving, and that’s just not much of average Joe’s life. Most of his waking life is spent either near a PC at home, near one at work (or, if he’s blue collar, near neither at work) or driving between those two places.

In fact, even if some currently unimaginable technology makes people prefer Googling from their phone, it’s not growth any time they do it near a PC. It’s simply shifting from one source to another.

Also people are never going to be too keen on, say, entering a credit card on their phone in a restaurant or subway. The Internet’s cash flow, at the bottom, base level pretty much involves someone entering a credit card somewhere. Buying something on Amazon, subscribing to a porno site, loading up the account at their favorite online poker room. Run any Google search and look at the paid links. It’s almost entirely to places that you buy stuff from, or (far less frequently) it’s to somewhere that makes its money by linking to places that you buy stuff from.

That’s probably a problem that is somewhat solvable. For instance, once you’ve entered your credit card on Amazon, you can order from a restaurant without having to do it again. But it’s still just another reason for some people not to use your site and is going to detract from overall profits. That means fewer people are going to want to advertise on the mobile web, and CPMs will suffer.

So, I believe that even in 5 years, mobile device traffic will be significantly lower than good old fashioned PCs, and it will also have lower revenue per page view.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s worth developing in the space. There are, certainly, some awesome things you can do on the mobile web that you can’t on a PC. For instance, a site that price compares items using bar codes would be worthless to a desktop user, but potentially great for the guy with an iPhone. I think there are some very neat gaming applications as well, and certainly lots of stuff we haven’t even imagined yet. But for the most part, the mobile Internet is just a crippled subset of the normal Internet, and people are too often near the good old fashioned web for it to be worth a lot in the grand scheme of things.

So it’s a growth area for sure, but I wouldn’t be buying Google at a 30 PE ratio because of it alone. It remains to be seen just how much people will use it as it grows in popularity. Hell, it remains to be seen just how much it will grow in popularity, since most people still use their cell phone primarily as a phone, with some SMS mixed in, and take the free (with a 2 year contract of course) clamshell.

I personally have had a smart phone since before anyone ever heard that term, and I’ve seen the mobile Internet grow from virtually non-existent to where it is today. And I have to say it’s so much better now than it was 5 years ago, and it will be that much better again in another 5. But it’s still got a long way to go before I’ll use it even 10% as much as I use my PC, and I’m on the cutting edge.

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