Ripoff

from Marginal Revolution: The Economics of the HDMI Cable Ripoff -

The second puzzle is, Why don't any stores stock cheap HDMI cable? Ordinarily, we would expect competition to push prices down but in this case it seem as if the mere existence of Monster is anchoring high prices everywhere but online.

My best guess is that this is an unusually strong version of the hidden fee model of Laibson and Gabaix. In that model, firms overprice one aspect of service--such as a hotel charging exorbitant rates for telephone service--as an idiot tax. Crucially, the idiot tax is matched by an IQ-subsidy; the price of the hotel room is lower than it would be without the idiot tax--so the idiots don't know to shop elsewhere and the high-IQ types are, in fact, drawn to stores with an idiot tax. Thus, buy your blu-ray player at places such as Best Buy which sell a lot of expensive cable as well as massively overpriced extended warranties.

Technical Difficulties

I doubt anyone cares but I inadvertently posted some slightly-more-boring-than-usual stuff here when attempting to send to some other quasi mailing list quasi blog via not understanding how to use Posterous. Damn you Posterous and your one-user, one-action model as opposed to the one-blog, one-action model.

(But I still recommend Posterous over Blogger.)

Thoughts from 25,000 feet

Interesting if somewhat random thoughts from Fred Wilson. This stuck in my head:

4) For almost twenty years, I mostly avoided the 'developers tools' sector. I always thought developers were too small a market to allow for the creation of large businesses. Of course there are exceptions to this rule. But in the past few years, I've started to look for investments that have developers as a core constituency. Services like Twitter and Boxee are succeeding because developers want to write for these platforms. These are not developer tools for sure, but success requires significant third party developer adoption. The role of viral adoption by consumers is well understood in web marketing but I don't think we've yet really wrapped our heads around the role of developer adoption and how powerful it is in ramping consumer web services.

Thoughts from 25,000 feet

P.S. Blogger/Firefox has terrible spell checking, missing both "ramping" and "blockquote". Me spelling better than the machines has become a pet peeve of mine recently.

Get Started

A recent anonymous comment on this blog -

Hey your dad's my doctor, and I attend sycamore junior high school. I'm in all accelerated classes with straight A's and looking at a future in computer science. Any tips on things I could do right now to get started?

Well if my dad is your doctor I feel obliged to help out.

Dear anonymous commenter, you are lucky that you have plenty of time before you need to make any important decisions in your life. I could be wrong but you sound very success-oriented. Since you are in junior high school, the next year of your life will probably be the least important year of your life, offering you plenty of time to goof around with no serious repercussions whatsoever. So first off, take advantage of that. See if you can still get straight A's while not turning in a lot of your homework. Try to play a lot of video games and learn how to do that thing where you spin your pen around on your thumb. Treat hanging out with your friends as a priority over all over things.

So on to the less important topic of preparing for your future career. Computer science is a weird subject because so many people pick it up outside of class. A few people will study hard and then be indifferent to computers in their actual life but it's pretty rare. It's much more likely for people to be good at and enjoy computer science if they are the sort who writes little programs for fun outside of class. If you are just picking computer science because it seems like the least bad class you're taking, remember there are a heck of a lot more things to study in college than in junior high, so you don't have to pick yet, at all.

Finally, the question you actually asked. What to do now? The easiest thing to do that will provide you with general background knowledge (and something that you might actually do after reading this) is to regularly read stuff on the internet about programming, the software industry, or academic computer science. For you, I recommend Hacker News, programming.reddit, and many blogs: Lambda the Ultimate, Word Aligned, Coding Horror, xkcd, Eric Sink's weblog, Gamasutra, Gabor Hits Send, Inside Social Games, Luis von Blog, Neopythonic, Stevey's Blog Rants, TechCrunch, and The Daily WTF.

For-reals finally, the most helpful thing is just writing programs. Learn Python because it is the best for casual programmers. Claim you are starting an open source project to get free subversion hosting from Sourceforge (trust me you want this). Then do whatever you find most interesting, because the bottleneck is not going to be your time, the bottleneck is going to be how long you can go without getting bored and quitting. Aim for something as simple as possible that will still entertain you. Like hangman. If that's too simple, how about mastermind. If that's too simple, how about superghost. If that's too simple, how about othello. How about a program to predict who will win baseball games, or a program to check the headlines every five minutes and email you whenever a famous football player gets injured for your fantasy league. I don't know how good you are but if you can, try out these programming contests like TopCoder or there are probably local ones for students. Write some stuff using something academicky that there is plenty of information available online about, like neural networks or alpha-beta.

If you have actually read this far (seems unlikely), start doing some stuff, and are frustrated because you are stuck somewhere, send me your code and I will give you feedback. Post it in the comments or just email it to me at (my last name)@gmail.com.

Customer development?

From Lessons Learned:

When I first got the 'listening to customers' religion, my plan was to talk to as many customer as possible, and build them as many features as they asked as possible. This is a common mistake. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. In order to do this, we have our customer development team work hard to find a market, any market, for the product as currently specified. We don't just abandon the vision of the company at every turn. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders' belief.

Thoughts on Twitter Search

Why don't you try out using Twitter. It's so easy, just go and tweet something whenever you feel like it. It takes like ten seconds.

Anyway twitter search is all the rage nowadays. The problem is that it's just a bunch of random stuff. Is it going to trend better as time goes on? It's not clear to me why, since once you have enough results it doesn't really matter whether they came in the last 10 seconds or in the last 10 minutes.

Although that's talking about the type-1 twitter search - the sort where you go into search.twitter.com and search for "wii fit" or whatever. Type 2 is when you actually twitter a question and then a lot of people respond to you. I'm not sure if that scales either; there is a certain effort vs reward tradeoff. But that might scale. The problem is that it is fundamentally harder to answer a question than to ask a question, so is everyone really going to want to answer as many questions as they ask? How do you prevent leechers, in a sense. Also it is annoying to have to wait a while for an answer. But that could scale. For the type-1 twitter search I'm not sure how they improve quality from this point.

Valentine's Day

I made Anna something for Valentine's day.

Allison-Lacker-blogging

I'm disappointed Google thinks that [my sister's name] is a misspelling. And on the day she buys her first domain! Oh the programmer-coming-of-age rituals. Not quite yet but in the future you will get all your Allison Lacker information at allisonlacker.com. But for now you'll have to settle for LinkedIn.

Synergy

The robots are figuring out how to control our emotions.

Not Last!

Good news everybody, computer science is not the least attractive academic discipline. Chemistry is last, CS is second to last.

From Crooked Timber:

Netbook Revolution

The NYT Bits blog (much better than the regular, typically inaccurate NYT tech coverage) claims that soon, "netbook" laptops will be given out free with the purchase of your internet connection.

The rise of netbooks, a type of cheap, ultra-compact laptop, has helped spur Acer’s growth. Acer and its fellow Taiwanese PC manufacturer, Asustek Computer, have led the netbook market, while slower-to-act rivals waited to figure out if the products would enjoy wide interest.

In its fourth quarter, Intel reported a 50 percent surge in the sales of its Atom products, which go into netbooks, hitting $300 million in revenue.

The strength of the Atom chips, which tend to generate fewer profits than some of Intel’s other laptop chips, was enough to lower the average selling price of Intel’s chips overall.

The PC makers tried the light, compact laptop idea before with so-called ultra-mobile PCs. But it took better broadband connections, more online services and much cheaper PCs to really make the idea take off. Now the PC market may never be the same.

Broadband providers around the globe are expected to start giving away netbooks in exchange for commitments to wireless network services, Mr. Richard said.

Dell and similar companies are afraid to sell netbooks because they aren't as profitable. Hmm, where have I heard of that phenomenon before?

Books

An interesting but meandering article about books and digital books. A part I liked:

In A.D. 1000, the Grand Vizier of Persia, an avid reader, faced a peculiar logistical challenge when he traveled. Unwilling to leave behind his precious collection of 117,000 books, as historian Alberto Manguel tells us, he hit upon a unique strategy for transporting them: four hundred camels trained to walk in an alphabetically-ordered caravan behind him on his journey.

Monitor Scarcity

Funny NYT story about someone's multiple monitor epiphany.

In the short time I worked with Aaron Iba (now at AppJet) he was the most extreme advocate of multiple monitors I have ever met. He would complain despite the Google standard of two 24-inch monitors.

"One day, we will look back upon the impoverished era of 2005, and think, those poor suckers only had 24-inch monitors? How did they live?"

In some sort of poorly-planned office move, someone left their monitors around to be Aaron-poached and he eagerly dove into configuring his super-non-standard window system. I can't remember, but I think it ended up the graphics card couldn't handle four monitors.

Even today Aaron is forced to suffer through a merely-three-monitor existence. The horror... the horror.

Seriously though, if you're a programmer using only one monitor, you can get an extra 22" flat screen monitor for under $200. Do it!

Name Your Favorite Scientist

44% of Americans cannot name a scientist. The top guesses among those who try to name a scientist are Bill Gates and Al Gore.

What is a spellmeleon?

This is a spellmeleon. More or less.

That's all!

New FCC Head

The new head of the FCC used to be a venture capitalist. Probably a good sign!

From the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Genachowski, 46 years old, is a former Harvard Law School classmate of Mr. Obama. He previously worked at the FCC during the Clinton administration. More recently, he co-founded LaunchBox Digital, a Washington, D.C.-based venture capital firm. He worked at Barry Diller's IAC/InterActive Corp. in various executive positions for eight years after leaving the FCC.

During the campaign, Mr. Genachowski served as the top technology adviser to Mr. Obama, putting together a detailed technology and innovation plan that expressed support for open Internet or "net neutrality" protections; media-ownership rules that encourage more diversity; and expansion of affordable broadband access across the country.

Gender Studies

Sort of the opposite of the traditional symbolism of rockets. Full picture here.

Faster Mac Suspend/Resume

If you have a relatively recent OS X laptop, the default when you close it is to save your current state both in memory (fast) and to disk (slow). This way you get fast startup from memory, plus if you totally run out of power the disk saves your state. This is generally okay but one problem is, if you open and close your laptop several times in fairly quick succession, while it still seems to be busy writing to disk, this sometimes beachballs the laptop for a minute or so while it figures things out.

So if you basically never run your battery down all the way, you don't need the slow disk suspend. You can actually shut this off.

Thanks to ongoing for the tip.

Tough to get a mortgage without a "Real Job"

No kidding. Why is the world so harsh on "affluent self-employed professionals such as doctors, lawyers, accountants and small-business owners"?

In the past, most self-employed people took out "stated-income loans," which don’t require borrowers to fully document their income. Such borrowers typically made substantial down payments, had strong credit profiles and paid a slight premium — around 0.25 of a percentage point — on their interest rates. Defaults were low.

That changed as the loans grew in popularity during the housing boom and expanded beyond their traditional market of affluent professionals. Stated-income loans eventually became disparaged as "liar’s loans" because borrowers’ incomes were frequently exaggerated.

Many banks have eliminated stated-income loans entirely, and Freddie Mac — which, with Fannie Mae, is one of two government-backed buyers of mortgages — will end its stated-income lending program designed for self-employed borrowers next month.

"If the market stays as it is, we’ve frozen thousands and thousands of good borrowers out of the mortgage market," says Peter Ogilvie, past president of the California Association of Mortgage Brokers. "People who’ve demonstrated they can pay their bills cannot get a mortgage — and that’s people who have homes."

This sort of problem is happening to a couple friends of mine right now, including a strong candidate for Xoogler of the month.

A Wikipedia Search Trick

Do you ever search for something wanting Wikipedia but get frustrated that it isn't there? (At least if you're too lazy to scroll down.)

On the other hand, are you sick of typing site:wikipedia.org to do a search when you didn't have to?

There's a compromise. Just use the word "wiki" when you search. Google will generally interpret "wiki" as meaning "wikipedia", although if you really mean "wiki" rather than "wikipedia" Google will usually figure that out too.