Very cool! Have been trying to complete murph workouts in prep for Memorial Day, and this app would be a perfect companion for counting the reps, which get pretty hard to track in your head during the workout. So, feature request - please add squat and pull up detection!
Reminds me one of Michael Lewis' anecdotes from The Big Short. Something along the lines of one of the big Wall Street banks transferring tens of billions of dollars to the Fed by literally gathering up a set of bonds from their safe, putting them in a briefcase and giving them to a secretary and an armed guard to carry to the building across the street where the Fed had set up an impromptu office.
It's a great book, a classic, and it's interesting to know how highly pg respects it.
When I look at leaders, the thing that I see more and more is the ability to not stress out about situations. Coming up with solutions is less important; putting everything in perspective is the key. Much of this comes down to empathy and being a nice person, as you describe.
I think people's sense of personal safety is a bigger driver than revenge. In general, people want a hard line on anything that impacts their sense of personal safety. In order to feel safe, people want punishment to prevent others from committing the same crime.
(Of course the flaw in this thinking is that punishment does not always prevent criminals from committing a crime).
I think the flaw in this thinking is that it's emotional. An alternative would be to do things that actually reduce crime statistics as proved by evidence, rather than things that people instinctively think might work.
Unless it turns out that the statistics work out otherwise?*
I tend to think the answer is evidence-based reform. Check out what works and do more of that. As far as I can tell, the best results are had by rehabilitation type systems.
* What I mean by this is it might be a tautology that someone locked up in prison forever can commit no more crimes, but I'm not sure it's as simple as that. If you lock someone up:
a) You deprive their community of that person. Maybe their children will now become criminals.
b) You deprive their community of their spending power and work. Maybe it will become poorer.
c) They have the chance inside prison to share experiences with novice criminals and teach them how to become old hands, increasing crime when their cell-mates get out.
Now if that person is a negative on all the above values, maybe there is a point in not letting them out. Maybe they have broken homes, never work, and teach others about crime anyway. But that's not the person I'm comparing them to.
I'm saying the criminal in their community has a negative effect on society. Putting them in jail makes it zero. Actually rehabilitating them makes it positive.
If we could get rehabilitation to work, everything gets better. Personally, I think evidence from round the world suggests this is possible.
Making endeavors like this scale is an interesting problem. On the surface, this is inherently unscalable, but it does prove that a novel idea can spark latent compassion to create something truly awesome. The obvious thought is applying something like Batkid to third world cases, but it would end up helping out a few cases in the millions that exist. A cynical view is to look at this as an example of first world individualism triumphing over the greater need of larger populations, but I think it's worth thinking about it the other way round - how might it be possible to use compelling stories like this to solve a larger population of problems.
Those outcomes are likely. Although it's also possible that:
* next-quarter results are "less bad" than expected, and the large band of short sellers have to start buying to cover
* insiders feel that the stock is unfairly priced and are willing to hold on until it improves
* Facebook's IPO is a roaring success and generates a rising tide for all internet stocks
I think the first one has the most chance of happening. The stock is heavily shorted right now, any news that's not negative has the chance of sparking a rally.
Certainly possible that they would make more money, but I doubt it. Doing some (very) rough math, HBO has about 28M subscribers. Cable customers pay $18 bucks a month for HBO, of which HBO usually gets 50%. So an overnight change in the business model would require 28M subscribers at about $9 / month.
Just as a point of comparison, Netflix, with a much larger catalog of shows and movies, has something of the order of 25M subscribers
Obviously an overnight change would not happen, there would be a transition over several years and the streaming subscribers may well be supplementary to existing subscribers. But during the transition, cable company partnerships would be strained and existing revenue would be at risk. Not to mention the capital investment required to provide the content reliably, dealing with the multitude of streaming devices, providing customer support, marketing the product directly to consumers and all the other things that cable companies take care of (albeit badly). Netflix is making bold changes in its business model and it's certainly not an easy thing to do.
Ultimately, HBO's core competency is in creating amazing content. It's arguable if they'd make more money by changing their business model, but I'd wager that HBO execs simply do not want to have to deal with all the distractions from their core mission that would occur by doing so.
You're assuming that people would drop cable and buy through streaming as opposed to maintaining the same 28M subscribers and ADD additional streaming customers. If they charged $9/mn, I have a hard time seeing how that could be a net loss. Even if some subscribers switch from cable to streaming, they wouldn't lose revenue.
The only way they could lose revenue is if current subscribers dropped cable and didn't go with streaming, which seems unlikely to me.
You're not thinking of this from the perspective of a cable company.
Cable companies are already losing subscribers. They will do everything they can to discourage people from defecting to broadband downloads. One of the most obvious things they can do is to have exclusive content. Which means they would be smart to put immense pressure on HBO to stay out of the distribution business.
Depends to some extent on what the cable companies do. If they lose their exclusive relationship with HBO, they might move towards giving HBO a worse deal, in terms of bundling and revenue share, which could be a significant hit, at least near-term.
It's not that they wouldn't prefer to get their money earlier. It's that they are in bed with the cable companies, who have significant power because they provide a huge chunk of HBO's revenue. HBO don't want to risk losing that revenue by disturbing the cosy relationship.
Cable companies are fiercely protective of their status as content providers. As they see it, the biggest threat to cable is that it gets turned into a commoditized dumb pipe. Any move by partners like HBO in the direction of supplying content over IP is seen as a move towards marginalizing their business.
And that's just it: cable has already turned into a commoditized dumb pipe for a large segment of the population. Instead of recognizing this new reality and adjusting to it, the cable industry seems intent on sticking its collective head in the sand and pretending as if the world hasn't changed.
The industry isn't sticking its head in the sand, they are out there aggressively purchasing content creation to ensure that the most interesting content is only delivered through their pipes. They're going out with all guns blazing in order to protect past rates of profit. Shareholders aren't of a mind to let an industry peacefully adjust to a less profitable state.
I agree with your overall sentiment. But I still contend that this strategy isn't going to work out for them in the long run. We live in a world where content can be accessed directly, quickly, and on demand. The industry can try to "ensure" that the most interesting content is only delivered through their pipes, but given the ease with which this content can be procured elsewhere, that approach doesn't seem like a sustainable long-term strategy.
Having done some work at cable companies ... both are dependent on each other. HBO has huge clout at the MSOs of the world, and they like it that way. At the same time, HBO makes MSOs lots of money because they can bundle it with kruft (e.g., Starz) and charge more than for either alone.
Yes, initially. But as the manufacturing processes mature, these prices reduce dramatically over time. Price reductions of an order of magnitude are not unusual over the course of two or three years.
I meant this more as a data point for realistic mental comparison to an ASIC, or anyone thinking they might use one. It's cool that it's achievable, and saying "This (big-n) gate count part is available today!" is nice and gee-whizzy for the press release and trade mags, but divorced from it's cost doesn't mean much to someone who would put it to work, as I'd expect at least a few here on HN to be.
High-end Virtex 4 parts from 2004 still cost over $10k. These aren't the devices you design into products unless your market is low volume, high margin, and long life-cycle. This is the part you buy to prototype your own ASIC design.
