http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/ways_of_thinkin....

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/krugmans_danger....

The actor model is for concurrency, which is when your threads are communicating with one another, right? What about the task that the API server does requires inter-thread communication?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2038663

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2142104

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2055867

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074079

How profitable are internet businesses in general? Would anyone be willing to share the site they run and the amount it makes?

And they let him keep the money? Damn, I should try insider trading some time--$1.4 million is pretty good for 20 months of "work".

Let's say what the article predicts comes to pass and the demand for degrees goes down. If degrees could be resold, then college graduates would start selling theirs. You might get a proverbial "bursting bubble" as more and more graduates started panicking and selling their degrees before they lost all their value.

But since graduates can't resell their degrees, we're more likely to see a gradual decline in their price.

That said, it still makes sense to make web surfing easier if that's possible. This Firefox extension looks promising:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4111/

There's definitely a lot of crap on the internet, so I'm thinking of doing something like skimming Hacker News at the end of each day, emailing important and content-rich articles to myself to read in the morning. It seems relatively safe to indulge in this distractable mindset right before I'm going to sleep, during which my mind will presumably be reset to its default state. And by browsing the web in different modes at consistently different times of the day, classical conditioning will be on my side. It'd be interesting to play with other ways of using classical conditioning for this. For example, always wear certain clothing or eat certain food during one type of web browsing.

>Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. “Everything distracts them.” Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”

Thanks. Actually I did everything but the design :-P

"1. Going off on many, many tangents before buckling down and focusing on the core product."

Yeah, if I had counted those tangents it would have taken me longer too :-) It took me a little over a month starting from scratch, but there were a few weeks of learning before that.

"4. Learning about, and implementing custom localization on appengine (needed because there are no filesystem writes for .mo/.po files)"

Nice. I actually initially built my site for App Engine, but I decided I needed to have control over my IP address (Amazon's Product API, which I will probably integrate with if I continue working on the site, throttles requests by IP address.) So I went with Linode, which gives you your own IP and the option of renting more for $1/month/IP.

I'll bet people would appreciate it if you open-sourced your app engine localization solution, especially if no solutions are currently available.