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Here is a simple one question survey that I’d like to get a hundred or so folks to answer. It is a surprisingly interesting question, and I have a bet with Bryan Caplan on it, but I won’t say more now, so as not to bias your answer.

This is his post. It sure is surprisingly interesting. I found the phrasing of the question really boggled my mind. *Should* suggests there is one answer, yet we can choose many. *Should* for some reason also pushes my mind to think of what people will adopt instead of what I’d like them to adopt. I really don’t think there’s any concrete reason for picking one over another.

Will we be comfortable reclassifying people?

Perhaps this is Hanson’s bet with Caplan. New category vs old category. If that’s the case, I’d bet people will be less scared of classifying robots as something human than classifying humans into some novel superset.

We will want to think there’s nothing different about ourselves because we won’t feel any different.

What a cool idea.

Video gamers can supposedly differentiate between tones more similar to one another than non-gamers. Perhaps, if you made a theme of very similar colors, you could achieve the same benefit from programming. Although I suspect it might not work because the difference in the colors has to have significance for your brain to really start paying attention to it. So you could have a color-sensitive language. Or maybe color could be the only significant thing, then you could just bind each character to a color in your text editor and use a normal language.

While walking in the wood today and looking at the detail on the ground and searching for ripe fruit in the trees I was thinking about how our brains are really good at picking out specific visual things from noise and how more complex visual things are sometimes easier to recognize than simpler things. Also its possible to get really good at picking out subtle clues from very complex input: think about a native American Indian’s ability to track moving animals over long distances.

So I think what would be really cool is to have a way of representing each function of a program as a visual form, ideally a 3-dimensional one. You could then look at these form and over time you would start to be able to see certain things about the function just by looking at the forms. I wonder if that might be a much faster way of searching for specific things within a large body of code such as you might do in a security audit than actually reading through all the code because it taps into the innate concurrency of the right-hemisphere.

There would be some difficulty would be in generating appropriate visual forms. The form has to be meaningful. The ideal would be if it were meaningful to the point where somebody well used to them could write the code a form represented just by looking at the form or, at least, infer the gist of it. Of course you don’t have to limit yourself to one form per function, you could have 10 different forms per function, each representing different properties, or forms generated from by dividing the code in lots of different ways (not just functions). Or maybe you could simplify everything I’m saying here and just have a lot more statistical static analysis of code then displayed with charts and infographics.

Here’s the intro and the reddit post:

Austin Chapman was born profoundly deaf. Hearing aids helped some, but music — its full range of pitches and tones — remained indecipherable. As Chapman explains, “I’ve never understood it. My whole life I’ve seen hearing people make a fool of themselves singing their favorite song or gyrating on the dance floor. I’ve also seen hearing people moved to tears by a single song. That was the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around.”

But earlier this month, that changed when Chapman got new hearing aids (Phonak’s Naída S Premium). Suddenly:

The first thing I heard was my shoe scraping across the carpet; it startled me. I have never heard that before and out of ignorance, I assumed it was too quiet for anyone to hear.

I sat in the doctor’s office frozen as a cacophony of sounds attacked me. The whir of the computer, the hum of the AC, the clacking of the keyboard, and when my best friend walked in I couldn’t believe that he had a slight rasp to his voice. He joked that it was time to cut back on the cigarettes.

That night, a group of close friends jump-started my musical education by playing Mozart, Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, Elvis, and several other popular legends of music.

Being able to hear the music for the first time ever was unreal.

When Mozart’s Lacrimosa came on, I was blown away by the beauty of it. At one point of the song, it sounded like angels singing and I suddenly realized that this was the first time I was able to appreciate music. Tears rolled down my face and I tried to hide it. But when I looked over I saw that there wasn’t a dry eye in the car.

After reading this article, I listened to Lacrimosa, not really recognizing the name.

Oh, THAT song?! Holy cow, what a choice. No kidding it brought tears to his eyes. It brought tears to MY eyes listening to it after just reading about the guy’s story.

That’s the nice thing about the scalable servers: they can handle 48MB per second.

In preparation for the IAMA, we initially added 30 dedicated servers (20%~ increase) just for the comment thread. This turned out not to be enough, so we added another 30 dedicated servers to the mix. At peak, we were transferring 48 MB per second of reddit to the internet. This much traffic overwhelmed our load balancers which caused a lot of the slowness you probably experienced on reddit. This IAMA gave us a lot of information on what we need to do next not only to handle the next megathread on reddit, but also to make reddit faster in general. We’re going to redesign our load balancer system to be more flexible under this kind of load, and we’ve got a bunch of things we need to do to make our code more efficient for giant comment threads. Both of these improvements should make day-to-day reddit use faster as well.

Read the rest of the post, which opens with this.

Without any fanfare ahead of time, The President of the United States spent 30 minutes answering questions from anonymous users with no mediation on a website run by 20 people, and in a forum that was organically created by volunteers. Tens of thousands of people actively participated by voting and/or commenting and millions watched, and The President even broke some news in the Q & A (by suggesting a new amendment for the first time). Did it go perfectly smooth? Nope. Is this the absolute perfect format for politicians to answer questions? Nope. But it worked, and it was a big step, not just for reddit, but for online communities everywhere. No matter how you feel about the IAMA, reddit, the President, or politics in general, we hope that what took place this past Wednesday will inspire other online communities and start-ups, and encourage other politicians to seek out more ways to talk directly with their constituents. We thank the President and his team for making this happen.

It’s true that the AMA is one of the coolest emergent phenomena on the web.

Pun intended.

The AMA is the usual Obama stuff. The interesting meta discussion, though, is on HN:

It looks like the Obama AMA has really caused some serious fires in reddit’s backend infrastructure. The site’s been down for the last 10 minutes.

I would’ve thought that they’d have brought in some additional computing power for such an event, should’ve been easy for them considering they have a cloud deployment. Maybe this gives them greater reason to hire more engineers. I found it impressive that they served billions of impressions with just 2 engineers a short while ago..

Also, it says a lot about the “Come Cloud with us, we’ll help you scale” marketing bandwagon. We’ve seen time and again issues with EC2s infrastructure and if EC2 doesn’t have issues right now (http://status.aws.amazon.com/) then it’s just sad that they can’t order a gazillion instances for this event and have it scale easily.

Definitely makes me think that we still have a long way to go to compute in a truly ‘elastic’ way.

reddit definitely does have some crazy infrastructure in place but this would’ve been one of the most important moments in reddit history (so far..) and I’m sad to see that their engineers are probably going to get blamed for this..

EDIT: Okay, they’re back in read only mode.. I wonder how they’ll hack in some write access for the AMA while keeping everything else read only. Time for some app server redeployments! Funsies!

EDIT2: And they’re gone again sigh

And this:

No, it’s probably due to the massive number of reads/writes pumping through their system. I’m pretty sure that their database isn’t able to handle what’s going on at the moment.
Also, if you were to use Varnish as a cache, that wouldn’t help you much with write access because every time there is a write (a new post..) you’d have to invalidate the cache. In a high volume scenario such as this (tons of posts coming in..), the page is as good as dynamic, even if you DO cache it for a bit.

And:

reddit’s backend could be written in assembly hand-tuned by God Himself, and having half the world hit it at once would still cause bottlenecks at the database.

Seven-year-old Jón Haukur Vignisson unexpectedly won the highest score among non-professionals in the annual national ram groping tournament organized by the Sheep Farming Museum in Hólmavík, the Strandir region in the West Fjords, last weekend.

More here. Amusing stuff. And the winner gets…

Ram gropers are of all ages and walks of life. Among the prizes is sperm from the Insemination Center of West Iceland, which is much appreciated among sheep farmers.

You go and do a few characters of your own and a few impressions, if you wanna do impressions, or you can do stand-up if you wanted to do that. But you do it at this comedy club somewhere in New York, and they all come and they sit in the back and they show up late and they watch it and they don’t laugh and you feel horrible. But if you do okay, you get called back and you go into 30 Rock and you do it on their stage at the real show. And they tape it, there’s a camera crew there. So you come out where the host does the monologue on SNL, and you do your audition right there. You’ve probably seen it, like on DVDs with Will Ferrell or whatever. I auditioned twice, one year I got to go in and do that at 30 Rock, but they really ice you out. They try to make it as scary as possible because it’s a live show, and in real life, I’m sure it is terrifying and things do go wrong, so they want you to be prepared.

…So, I went in and did it. And they sit in the back. At that time, Tina Fey was still the head writer. I was friends with Tina. I think Tina’s great, but I think they have this thing that they do where they don’t laugh at anything. So, you go in and you do [a] few minutes. It’s just a wall of silence, just no laughs at all. Nothing. No matter what. No matter who you are because everyone says this. Then, as I was leaving, I was like, “Bye, Tina.” She was like, “Bye, Rob.”

That’s Rob Huebel who I think is hilarious. More here.

the principle rule to remember: your number one job above all else is to make the leader sound good, look good and feel good. {read that again. we will come back to it over and over. we will refer to this as the rule.}

ask yourself, “okay..self….who is The Dude here?” most likely, it is not you. {depending on the size of the band, the odds are one in four, or five.}
who is the dude? who is the person that comes up with the ideas, signs the checks, negotiates the deals, writes the music, does the interviews, provides the credit for all the travel arrangements, keeps the books, collects the receipts, pays the taxes, mails the checks out, has likely spent years starving and building his scene before you ever got there, and as well takes the heat if things go in the crapper? that’s probably the dude. identify him or her and make sure they are happy. if they are happy, things stand a chance of going great. if they are pissed off or depressed, you are screwed. {you may be operating under a band name, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a dude. and just because the dude is mellow and easy going, or a zillionaire, that doesn’t mean the rule isn’t in place.}
if you want to participate in making some art, get along with other musicians, get other jobs, make some bread, travel with some like minded souls, learn something, contribute in the lifting up of the battered human spirit, and otherwise maximize your opportunity, figure out who the dude {or dudette} is, and apply the rule. it’s pretty simple.

More here. Outstanding piece.

Consider this joke:

“Martinis are like women’s breasts, one is not enough and three are too many.”

Let’s assume you found this joke funny. Now I’ll give you a task: you must tell this joke to three people: your best friend, your grandmother and a 6-year-old child.

I bet you your reaction to this task is surprise. Maybe your grandmother would think the joke hilarious or maybe incredibly rude. Maybe your friend is a woman who has had a mastectomy and would be really uncomfortable, etc, etc.

In most circumstances you’d choose who to deliver this joke to. But if you HAD to deliver it to all, you’d probably deliver it differently to each (“I know this joke isn’t funny, but just bear with me, this blog told me to do it”). If you understand those two points, you understand sales.

The key skill of a salesperson is identifying exactly how to deliver a message to an audience. And even the best salesperson in the world may not tell that joke to your grandmother as well as you could. That’s because he/she wouldn’t know her as well as you.

The greatest asset a salesperson has is *knowing the market*. Not the gift of the gab, not high intellect and not anything else. If you understand the people you are delivering your message to you can sell.

And understanding people is the most fundamental quality of human intelligence.