Lacker Style

Gender Studies

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:44:00 +0000

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

Faster Mac Suspend/Resume

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:44:00 +0000

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"

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:12:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 03:25:00 +0000

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.

Pat Buchanan on Never Forgetting

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 03:14:00 +0000

Pat Buchanan playing against Republican type:

Be it BMW, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi or Hyundai, the South has become a sanctuary for foreign assembly plants, for which Southern states have been paying subsidies.

Fine.

But why this “Let-them-eat-cake!” coldness toward U.S. auto companies? General Motors employs more workers than all these foreign plants combined. And, unlike Mitsubishi, General Motors didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor.

5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 03:01:00 +0000

Here's a bunch of people who use "1234" as their password.

It's just not very hard to break into random accounts. Another method I've heard is to set up a website that promises something people want but that requires them to enter a username and a password. For example, post on Craigslist linking to your website and claim it has something like, pictures of your really cheap apartment you are offering in the Mission. When they actually log in you can just give them a message saying "site is temporarily down" - it doesn't matter. Once you collect a whole bunch of username/password pairs, just try them all on bankofamerica.com. Some reasonable percent of people just use the same password for everything. If you want to get fancier, you can even reject the first few passwords people use as an "insufficiently safe password". Recommend they add more numbers and punctuation - then you're likely to get the same password they use for their bank.

I am sad that I do not know the solution to this problem. Never ever using your bank password for other sites is a "personal hygiene" way of solving it - but it's kind of like a deer always running faster than the slowest member of the herd.

Best Use of Twitter Yet

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:07:00 +0000

This site StatTweets is running hundreds of different twitter accounts, all focused on a single sports team. So for example the BengalsStats twitter feed contains scores of games, a few articles about the teams, etc. You probably get a few tweets a day.

Previously, on my G1 I had been using a pretty lame NFL scores application that kept forgetting my favorite-teams settings because it apparently didn't understand the Android save-and-restore-state framework. I was also using Twidroid for Twitter access which is quite slow to update because they apparently don't understand the Android background-processes framework. And now I can just use Twidroid. Hmm.

Probably more useful for things I follow more loosely like Duke basketball, prevent me from being caught off guard and having nothing to say about the Duke game I ignored a couple days ago.

Anyway, I'm excited to see specific services being provided over twitter. They have a list of the team feeds they offer here.

And to be honest this is only the second-best use of twitter - my favorite so far was the election night live search feed for [Obama OR McCain].

CrapWrap

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:52:00 +0000

A new purposefully-bad giftwrapping option to make it seem like you did it yourself. Provided by "some tipsy bloke wearing boxing gloves and a sack on his head".

Last Minute Gift Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:28:00 +0000

Too bad my family isn't that into wine drinking - otherwise this handy gadget for closing up open bottles of wine would make a great present.

Coal Nightmare

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:36:00 +0000

From a WSJ blog:

Big Coal won’t be very happy if Dr. Chu gets confirmed as head of the DOE—he’s really, really not a big fan. “Coal is my worst nightmare,” he said repeatedly in a speech earlier this year outlining his lab’s alternative-energy approaches.

Job Opportunities

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:16:00 +0000

Apparently you can make $31 an hour for playing crossword puzzles. (Perhaps I should say one can.)

It Is What It Is

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:55:00 +0000

Gladwell article.

If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality.

Piling On

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:17:00 +0000

Apparently even Honda employees make more than professors.

(This post would include the chart directly, if Blogger hadn't claimed the upload succeeded, then published a blank post, twice.)

Should You Speak The Name?

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 02:04:00 +0000

From a Wired article which heck you might as well start on page 8.

Debra Chrapaty, the Microsoft exec in charge of the company's data centers, says that Microsoft's infrastructure is so efficient it can compete in cost even with a company she refers to by the letter G. (She refuses to speak its name out loud because "every time you say that word, it reinforces their brand," she says.)

Really? I guess that's the logic behind names like Google Page Creator and Google Image Labeler. Flip side is the Mapquest vs Google Maps effect, although it seems Google Maps is catching up.

Hannity Fires Colmes

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:07:00 +0000

Well allegedly it's voluntary. I've always wondered how Colmes saw himself, so I like this quote -

"We have a Democratic House, Senate and president," Colmes said in an interview. "My work is done."

An Hour Well Spent

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:41:00 +0000

IncrediBots is another game in the flash-physics-machine-building genre. Like Fantastic Contraption except you can bind motors to keys so you can control your machine while it's running. I promise you, if you play this you will get smarter. Here's me on the monkey bars trying to remember which of my 10 action keys do what.

TradeSports shut down!

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:48:00 +0000

Nooooo! The world has just gotten a little bit stupider.

TradeSports was the best prediction market for sports. You could also think of it as peer-to-peer betting, finding someone who would take the opposite bet so you don't have to pay the house 10% overhead. I never placed a bet, but loved the site. You could watch in real time during sporting events as the market updated. You could read the market prices in effect as "Currently the Bengals have a 30% chance of winning." Nice to have open while watching sports - if you ever didn't understand what had happened, you could check how it impacted the odds. Other cool stuff too - you could get implied odds after the fact for success rates of things like going for it on 4th down.

Sadly, gambling is illegal. TradeSports was run out of Ireland but since their users were mostly American I guess that caught up to them.

What gets me is that the stupidest forms of gambling, like lottery tickets and slot machines, are growing. (90% of the profit in Vegas casinos is from slot machines.) But these prediction markets, which actually help their users become more intelligent, are hated on by The Man.

For now, BetFair is still operating, and Intrade still has the non-sports markets of the old TradeSports. Check it out.

Nokia versus iPhones

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:38:00 +0000

All right, this doesn't explicitly mention iPhones but I still instinctively consider any cool new application for non-iPhones launched by a cell phone maker to be an iPhone-competitive maneuver.

From Venture Beat:

Among the topics of interest is “augmented reality,” in which an image seen through a camera-phone display can be augmented with things that aren’t there. For instance, you could point your camera at a street in San Francisco and the screen could present you with the view of the same location before the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. A number of companies, including Hewlett Packard and Intel, are looking at creating services or games that can make the real world more entertaining.

Similarly, Nokia’s Point and Find project will let you point your camera phone at a building, and it will fetch you information about it.

My guess is by the time this makes it from demo to real-world it'll have happened somewhere else first. I can't stop thinking Nokia != cool software. The real challenge may be a user interface that makes it intuitive enough to use this software even in the face of slow picture analysis times and inconsistent GPS data. I'm not sure it's possible.

Baby Mammoths For Sale

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:28:00 +0000

Regenerating lost species isn't really a "staple of science fiction". Just Jurassic Park, as far as I can remember. I guess there were three movies.

Anyways, good news for the pet industry, Jurassic Park technology is going to be real. According to the NYT you can get your own woolly mammoth for just $10 million. Pet mammoth, fly into space... so hard to decide how to spend that extra 10 mil you have lying around "just for fun".

The real genetic pet breakthrough will be permanent puppies & kittens. Worth billions. And almost as useful to society as another Viagra clone.

Balance

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:47:00 +0000

Let me even out my previous anti-Ted-ness by pointing to this really cool video. It's about automatically training real wild crows to make money.

I wouldn't be surprised if animals turn out to be much smarter than we think. One of those things that could cause people in 200 years to be shocked at the immorality prevalent in 2008.

Against Architects

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:00:00 +0000

I am bitter against architects ever since Building 43 opened. Celebrated by the architectural Metropolis magazine for innovative features such as walls made of unopenable doors. Annoying to me because it lacks sufficient conference rooms, and a quiet space to make a phone call. Ironically the building wastes space with pointless things like informal bookshelves. Bookshelves??!? We keep documents on the internet, thank you very much.

I was just watching a TED talk on the Seattle Central Library and got the creeping sensation that the architect didn't actually like libraries. Read the Wikipedia entry or just this excerpt:

The architects conceived the new Central Library building as a celebration of books, deciding after some research that despite the arrival of the 21st century and the "digital age," people still respond to books printed on paper. The architects also worked to make the library inviting to the public, rather than stuffy, which they discovered was the popular perception of libraries as a whole.

Although the library is an unusual shape from the outside, the architects' philosophy was to let the building's required functions dictate what it should look like, rather than imposing a structure making the functions conform to that.

For example, a major section of the building is the "Books Spiral," (designed to display the library's nonfiction collection without breaking up the Dewey Decimal System classification onto different floors or sections). The collection spirals up through four stories on a continuous series of shelves. This allows patrons to peruse the entire collection without using stairs or traveling to a different part of the building.

Good research guys! Because that's the point of the Dewey Decimal system, making it easy to linearly scan through every single book without all the bother of keeping a particular type of book in a particular place.

I find it hard to believe the function of a library dictates the form of a giant glass crystal. I find it easier to believe the main goal of an architect is some really cool looking powerpoint slides. They get their money before the actual users notice it takes O(n) time to find a book.

Xoogler of the Month

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:48:00 +0000

Congratulations to 1997-8 Sycamore High School Chess Team 5th Board Avichal Garg for getting his picture in the New York Times. Oh those innocent days when we had nothing more serious to worry about than the Vienna Gambit.

Seriously though his startup PrepMe.com is like Kaplan but on the web. I don't think I have any friends in the demographic to use this (or for their kids to use this) so I can't really be that helpful. Rumor has it they have a deal with the state of Maine so this sort of thing is likely to be around for a while. I got in an argument this weekend in Boston whether it was a good thing that via investment you can raise SAT scores... I find it hard not to be biased towards systems that reward people like me.

New Politics = Text Messaging

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:21:00 +0000

According to some interesting analysis at Slate, text messages more than the other newfangled media have the most impact on the Obama-McCain race.

Intentional I Hope

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:07:00 +0000

This Japanese company is trying to make this robotic suit that covers your whole body and gives you super strength. Some people are wondering, could this suit get hacked into and take over my body, moving me around how it wants? So in order to reassure people naturally they decide to name their technology HAL.

I think they use these guys to handle their shipping.

Subprime

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:37:00 +0000

A really interesting PDF about the origins of a bunch of this recent craziness. Focuses on what exactly is different about subprime mortgages.

First, when you hear subprime, think "Someone who declared bankruptcy a few years ago and has no money in the bank." I was thinking "someone with a bad credit score", but it's on average a good amount worse.

So the main thing is it's not like banks just gave subprime borrowers the same sort of loan they normally give. The simplistic talk-radio description is "they started giving loans to more people and they couldn't pay and it all blew up."

The question was, how exactly can you loan money to people with no credit or collateral. The general strategy is, give them a good rate for the first few years, then the interest rate becomes variable (which usually means it's a lot more.)

E.g. a 3/27 ARM might be, it's 8.5% interest for the first three years, then for the next 27 it floats at perfect-credit-rate plus 6.1%. Perfect-credit-rate is say 5.4%. So after the "jump" you're paying 11.5%.

This sucks, it's kind of like those cable deals where it's $20 a month for the first 6 months and then jumps up to $100 a month. But those make sense as an advertising ploy. They get you in, then you have kinda forgotten. But the problem with a mortgage is *can* you pay, not have you forgotten how much your cable bill is.

So the trick is, once you have spent a few years paying off the "good" rate on your subprime mortgage, then you have some equity built up in your house. Since you have some equity, you're a better credit risk now, and you can refinance at a better rate.

Everything would be just peachy if housing prices were fixed. The problem ends up being, if housing prices crash, then you can be underwater on your mortgage. Your first three years of payments don't make up for the net drop in house value. For a normal mortgage this doesn't really matter - you aren't selling your house after 3 years, so it doesn't really matter what the alleged "market value" would be. But it prevents you from refinancing, so if you were counting on that, you're screwed.

Why exactly does equity in your house make you a better credit risk? Well, if you are financially screwed in some way, you have a worst-case option of selling the house, paying off the (large) fraction that you still owe, and you still have some money in your hand. In practice you might refinance in some way that would give you some money but then you would have more on your mortgage to pay off. If house prices are fairly close (or higher) compared to when you bought in, the refinancing gives you some flexibility. Money paid off on your mortgage is closer to cash in the bank.

A final note - currently, about 1 in 6 mortgages are over 60 days delinquent.