Disqus - Latest Comments for rahul

Re: Why do smart people say such stupid things?

rahul — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 16:49:09 -0000

Sometimes I think this is a version of what I call the libertarian fallacy: "I made it, others can too, and you should listen to my ideas on this because I made it". Usually these arguments do not take into account priors: luck, institutional discrimination, existing infrastructure (or lack thereof).

These priors are not uniform either: indeed, one might argue that capitalism has a "positive" feedback loop. Take schools. If there is money in a suburb a school is better. A school is better so successful professionals and yes, even intellectuals, move there. Thus there is better property values, higher property taxes, better schools, better educational prospects, and rinse, and repeat.

Only government, or us in the large, and yes taxes that pay for subways and other such interventions change these things. And in the end contribute to his and everyone's success, or lack thereof.....

Re: Introducing Podcatch.com

rahul — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 14:27:20 -0000

Dave, I wonder if the twitter support you have (in Happy Friends and such) can be used to construct your podcast list partly from the friends you follow, and partly from your own. Such a structure reminds me of the World outline...

Re: Who's going to bring NYC together?

rahul — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 12:32:54 -0000

Beautifully Written, Dave! The Police doing this on "paid time" violates an essential tenet of our democracy (and any democracy..its the reason India hasnt ever had a coup despite a usually unstable internal security situation)..the leader of the union needs to be fired from the police force.

Vicious, you make a good point. And people generalize very poorly. Not just the police, us too. And in that sense this is a wider problem. Would more education help? Would more liberal education help?

Indeed even the chief justices who are paid to generalize better are bad at it. Witness last week decision on allowing "innocent mistakes" on the part of police stand (http://www.nytimes.com/2014.... Only Sotomayor dissented. In such a situation even education dosent seem to help. I wonder if its a situation of not having been in the "shoes of a minority", and that is why Sotomayor can see the possibility of abuse. One would like to hope it dosent need that, but these recent grand jury cases make me wonder if ultimately, we as citizens are not rising to the occasion.

Re: Life without a smartphone

rahul — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 11:30:26 -0000

Indeed! the iPhone will show me a screenshot of the last time i turned wifi on or off when i go to settings. Thinking i am at that screen, i'll move my finger on the slider. But its a screenshot, and i almost land up moving the slider to turn the airplane mode on on the main screen, which is exactly what i don't want to do.

The screenshots are completely useless!

Re: Design challenge: paragraph-level permalinks

rahul — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 13:39:15 -0000

Given these paras are coming of opml, could you use guid's for robustness? If you moved a node around, the guid moves with it...

Re: Two excellent mob films starring De Niro

rahul — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:12:08 -0000

once upon a time is fabulous! Very compelling, very raw!

Re: Where's the app?

rahul — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:58:24 -0000

There is bizzarely enough the possibility of running fargo on the desktop, writing to the local dropbox, on all the three desktop platforms, even. This is thanks to node-webkit(https://github.com/rogerwan... which basically unifies the event loops of node and chrome together into a chrome build which can then be distributed. See https://github.com/zcbenz/n... for a demo example. Now I believe your backend is in node, so more sexy stuff could be done, but even thats not relevant here. One could use just simple file IO to read and write from the dropbox folder to thus have an offline mode.

These days the possibilities are mindboggling, and it seems html and js make a nice enough UI no matter what the target is...

Re: A business model for movie theaters

rahul — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:22:46 -0000

You should check out the Cable Car cinema in Providence!

http://www.cablecarcinema.com/

Re: Dinner in Cambridge on Wednesday?

rahul — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 12:09:29 -0000

Would love to meet you! Last saw you at the Cambridgeside galleria in 2006!

Does CBC beer count as incentivization?

Re: Kids are scientists

rahul — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:08:47 -0000

I remember going to the NC studios at Rockefeller Center when i first came to the US 20 years back. I'd always wondered how the laughs happened on the sitcoms. Lo and behold, there was this hall with a stage with illuminated signs in front of the audience "Laugh Now", kind of like the exit signs above doors!

Re: Scripting News: Mike I thought I knew yuz

rahul — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:46:19 -0000

The notion that Fanniue and Freddie are responsible is far more prevalent than one might think, even smart economists like Raghuram Rajan have put the blame at their feet. Once again I wonder if its a saltwater-freshwater thing.

Krugman as usual has tons of stuff debunking it, but does put the other arguments up for view..

http://krugman.blogs.nytime...

and the great krugman-rajan debate:

http://blogs.ft.com/crookbl...

Re: Scripting News: Occupy Election Day

rahul — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:49:31 -0000

Agree on your idea to help people get to vote. For example, in Costa Rica, the election day is a holiday, and people are (socially) obliged to give others rides to the voting center...

Do think we need people like you and Fred (and not Huckabee or Dodds) that they are voting for though :-).

Re: Scripting News: Occupy Election Day

rahul — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:38:21 -0000

If you are right that this change has come, it is indeed big! I'm just afraid we are still a few election cycles (and given the current state of the world, thats few too many) away from that point where you can win without the money. I hope I am wrong?

How would we test this? Maybe someone needs to stand in a primary, to start maybe in a tech heavy place, and only use the internet to communicate with constituents, with no corporate contributions...

Re: Scripting News: Occupy Election Day

rahul — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:24:38 -0000

But the money-politics link is deeper, isnt it? You are right to say that communication is much cheaper now. And that eventually politicians will catch on to the fact that they dont need so much money to win elections. And if we are lucky, the de-TV'ising of us will happen fast enough. But in the meanwhile, we have the problem (very human) that money and power both corrupt, and that there will thus be military-industrial, indurstrial-oil, big-agribusiness complexes that will still exist. And the timeframe for some of the changes we need..climate change, education, etc will be too long. I hope I am wrong.

I will say I worry though that Fred and you are coming from a position of tech exceptionalism. But most of us are content to sell our life stories away on facebook (as opposed to the protesters using it to organize!) So I guess my question would be..how does one engage the otherwise busy and somewhat apathetic majority. I feel we need something of a bang..

Re: Scripting News: Occupy Election Day

rahul — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:58:27 -0000

I had this wierd notion that occupying the election could be an idea of a slightly different stripe:

We create a new political party, called OccupyGov.

The party has the following, and only the following, platform: end corruption by breaking the nexus between money and politics by:

overturning the supreme court rulling on FEC vs Citizen's United by removing consideration of corporations as individuals with first amendment rights

ban campaign contributions from lobbying firmsslam shut the revolving door between congressional staffers/white house employees and lobbying firms

limiting the contributions both individuals and corporations can make to campaigns

considering the possibility of public financing of elections if any consensus can be reached on this

OccupyGov only stands for elections for the house and senate, but not for president.

OccupyGov holds primaries, possibly con-incident with republican primaries in 2011-2012
to ensure that the plarform of OccupyGov is non-partisan, and that the party represents all
of the political spectrum.

Candidates on the OccupyGov ticket are bound to follow (2), but may caucus with Republicans or
Democrats or by themselves on other issues.

OccupyGov remains in existence until the aim of achieving the end of corruption as defined in (2) has been obtained. The party then votes to dissolve itself.

I put this up at (and bought :-) ) occupygov.org.

But the idea is to fundamentally break the nexus.
Lawrence Lessig in his book: http://www.amazon.com/Repub... indicates the way to go might be a constitutional convention. Apparently if 38 states agree on it, the people can force a convention to amend the constitution.

Either way this is something both grassroots liberals and conservatives can get together behind. The Occupy Wall streeters, as well as the tea partiers with their distaste for earmarks and such....Thoughts?

Re: A Test Post - Lair of The Inscrutable Gargoyle

rahul — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 01:30:07 -0000

And this is a first comment.

Re: Scripting News: A balanced budget amendment

rahul — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:30:46 -0000

Well, Indiana did try to legislate the value of pi, so...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re: Scripting News: Why Google's "circles" are likely to fail

rahul — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:23:53 -0000

There are other reasons why the circles will fail. A circle I create is not communicated to the members of that circle. In this sense its like a twitter list. But seeing the interface, I thought that this was Facebook done better. I thought I was creating a circle, i thought i was creating a unit of collaboration with co-wokers, or fellow skiers, or whatever. Its not. It turned out to be a unit of spamming for those not signed up, and a unit of creating greater noise in a friends stream.

As you said earlier, i have been trained to have expectations by facebook. If you create something that looks like facebook, it should behave like it. It dosent.

All that besides the fact that its entirely underwhelming. I added a spark for rock climbing, it sent me information about a pedophile rock climbing coach. This is not likely my intent. And they could do better. They have my reader, and my friends readers, where info is public. Collate those feeds for me instead of giving me crap from google news!

The huddle needs sms. Whatever happened to meldingit with google talk or other im to set upthe huddle?

As you said yesterday, one would expect a 1.0 product if you are competing with Facebbok. And dont be twitter if you are doing that. This does not even feel like a 0.1.

The sad part is, there IS a big opportunity to improve on facebook!

Re: Google Plus' Circles System May Not be Sustainable

rahul — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 16:15:16 -0000

Arent you using the wrong model? It isnt twitter, its more useful as facebook but with ski buddies in one circle, VC's in another, etc?

Re: Scripting News: Another year another Hey Pocky Way

rahul — Tue, 03 May 2011 16:01:39 -0000

Happy Birthday Dave!!!!!

Re: Scripting News: I need to learn jQuery

rahul — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 14:43:41 -0000

Dont forget the entire ecosystem around jquery, providing plugins like autocompletes, image scrollers, calendar/datepickers and stuff. Lots of these are very high quality, and makes setting up interfaces a snap. This is in addition to sliders and other doodads that come with jquery UI.

And there is two major concepts to learn. (a) All methods return the jquery object, and thus you can chain actions. (b) elements on a page are picked via a very simple CSS like selector syntax.

I was introduced to jquery by this article:
http://simonwillison.net/20...

It sold me and gives a simple idea of concepts to get you started.

I've used jquerify to play with jquery in existing web pages:
http://www.learningjquery.c...

Re: http://sustain.nareau.com/post/2367822104

rahul — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:26:52 -0000

test comment

Re: Scripting News: Humans are crazy

rahul — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 12:00:44 -0000

Great Article Dave! And love the usage of para level permalinks to attach feedback or tangents! Could perhaps be used for para level discourse or opml based transclusion in a twitter UI like interface too...

Re: Google & George Clooney Aim Satellite Surveillance at Sudan, Hoping to Prevent Genocide

rahul — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 14:30:40 -0000

Is this a ushahidi style project? It wasnt really clear from the web site. And I wonder if something like seti@home could be done to automatically detect changes to satellite images in such a case (or have users directly classify changes as in the galaxy zoo, which i think would be harder). e.g. the satellite images could be a screen saver being computed upon....

Re: Google is lost in location-based battle with Facebook, will it checkin?

rahul — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:52:39 -0000

Robert,
The kind of friends I might spend time with at a bar...its likely that they'd have called me or vice-versa. Facebook friends are a far less intimate group....
The question is, I think, what activities would be attractive to a larger circle...
Of-course deals are a different matter, as are recommendations from facebook friends...the former being time-limited but the latter being time shifted and even more importantly aggregated!