Another point that really stood out to me was this:

One of Khan Academy’s biggest selling points is that it’s free. For schools and districts across the country faced with budget cuts, Khan Academy sounds like a godsend.

Except it’s not really free. Just as corn subsidies allow the price of a Big Mac to remain artificially low, the millions of dollars that well-meaning philanthropists have donated to Khan Academy have distorted the market for educational resources. In the name of leveling the playing field for students, they’ve inadvertently created barriers for other organizations whose products may be better, but also more expensive.

I’ve been really interested in this idea in other areas as well. Android subsidized via Google Search revenue. (Long ago) Internet Explorer subsidized by Office and Windows revenue. Content licensing subsidizing hardware (consoles, Kindle, etc.). There seems to be a large “activation energy” required to enter a market when your competition is free. That is, users seem to be willing to put up with a lot before they are willing to pay to remove problems. Which seems to mean that it creates a barrier to entry. Or perhaps these are just natural market forces? The problems must not be worth much if people aren’t willing to pay for the better product?

But what happens if the product, which isn’t really free, runs out of philanthropic resources? Or what if the product, which isn’t really free, turns out to be funded by externalities or (unknown) deferred costs? Won’t that just mean that the product, which isn’t really free, will have caused a temporary stagnation in the market it was in?

What does this mean for philanthropic aid in Africa? It seems some types of aid may be worth a temporary stagnation; for instance, preventing/curing malaria.

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
– Christopher Hitchens

In some ways I went through a similar path. Growing up I was Christian and Jewish (and others). I see value in some of what is taught but found contradiction and hypocrisy to cause me to question the validity of it as a whole. Once I did that I think I was forced to dismiss the text(s) as dogma and especially the premises they asserted. Amongst the myriad of topics I wish to learn more about both Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and Sam Harris’ morality are near the top. I do not expect that either will be without flaw but the point is I am now in a mode where I am seeking the truth rather than “accepting” it.

Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
– Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
– Mark Twain (according to Richard Dawkins)

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it – often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

…

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win – not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

One “feature” I really wanted was to not have to think about whether tmux has a session open or not. I get this behavior automatically with byobu (Ubuntu’s screen profile + UI) and if you use vanilla screen you can just use the -R option. As far as I can tell this is not possible in tmux so I wrote this bash function:

function tmux {
    if (( $# )); then
        command tmux $*
    else
        if (( $(tmux list-sessions 2> /dev/null | wc -l) )); then
            command tmux attach
        else
            command tmux
        fi
    fi
}

If you execute tmux with no arguments then it will attach to your existing session or create one if needed but if you pass any arguments then they just get passed along to tmux as normal.

Also on GitHub, .bashrc.d/tmux.sh.

One issue I have found so far is that it doesn’t work if I `ssh somebox tmux. I suspect it’s because Bash is evaluating the function on my box not on somebox so I’ll probably end up turning this into a script instead of a Bash function.

function git-todo {
    OS=$(uname -s)
    local SED_OPT
    if [ "$OS" == "Darwin" ]; then
        SED_OPT="-E"
    fi
    if [ "$OS" == "Linux" ]; then
        SED_OPT="-r"
    fi
    local GIT_DIR=$(git rev-parse --git-dir)
    if ! (( $? )); then
        GIT_DIR=$(echo "$GIT_DIR" | sed $SED_OPT 's/\/?\.git$//')
        if [ -z "$GIT_DIR" ]; then
            GIT_DIR=.
        fi
        local TODO="$GIT_DIR/TODO.taskpaper"
        vim "$TODO"
        if [ ! -s "$TODO" ]; then
            rm -f "$TODO"
        fi
    fi
}

Also on GitHub, .bashrc.d/git.sh.

Continual Monitoring of Citizens

Instead, if you want to read articles on your Kindle you should take advantage of a service that sends a compilation of articles as one document. I’ve tried Readability, Klip.me, and Instapaper. So far, Instapaper has offered the best experience.

Instapaper: Rocks but (Sort Of) Lacks Micropayments to Authors

I started using Instapaper on my iPhone a long time ago. It completely changed how I read. Later I got an iPad thinking it would offer a better reading experience than the iPhone. In some ways it was better but in many ways it was worse. Then I bought a Kindle. Instapaper + Kindle is amazing for text. I still use the Instapaper app on my iPhone and iPad but my first choice for text content is my Kindle.

Instapaper has had to reverse engineer the Kindle periodical format but they have done a stellar job. It is easy to navigate between articles and it is easy to see how far along you are in the article you are reading. You can request a new copy of your periodical from within the periodical itself. You can Archive, Like, and Like & Archive (but not delete) your article from within each article. It really is an enjoyable reading experience.

I’ve had a few issues with the Instapaper web app but they were always brief and more importantly not very common.

Klip.me: Failed to Entice

I did not use Klip.me for very long so it may be worth exploring further. It has an interesting feature in that it will allow you to edit the article but I don’t know if this works with their compilation or only when sending immediately.

It also appears to have a feature that some may find useful. It looks like it can send a compilation of all your Google Reader articles as well. I tend to scan headlines in Google Reader and then select the most interesting ones to read in Instapaper so this doesn’t work for my workflow.

Readability: Flawed But Noble

I really hate ads. Specifically I hate irrelevant, ugly, noisy, obnoxious ads. If your site has anything that remotely distracts me from actually reading the article then I will either not read the article or I will read it in Instapaper or Safari’s Reader. Readability stepped in here to offer an alternative to ads by orchestrating micro-payments to authors. I think this is an awesome idea and I hope some day it replaces the need of many authors to submit to obnoxious advertising.

Unfortunately, I found the web app to border on being unusable due to the following issues:

• Actions (delete/archive) seem to be frequently undone or forgotten.
• Poor title detection which resulted in useless titles such as the domain name of the site the article was from.
• Duplicate documents received by my Kindle which have to be removed from my device and from Amazon.com.

I am not sure Readability deserves 30% of subscription fees simply for being a middle man. In the past I justified their cut by saying I was paying 30% for the reading experience, the ability to share articles, etc. but they now offer everything but the author contributions for free. So now if I am a subscriber I am not only giving a middle man a 30% cut of money I think authors should get but I am also subsidizing any freeloaders who use the service without contributing.

I subscribed to Readability for several months but have now reluctantly turned it off. Technically I could let Instapaper sync my articles over to Readability; giving me the better user experience from Instapaper while still rewarding the authors I read via Readability. However, at this time I am not comfortable with the 30% cut and, perhaps, more importantly there is no way for me to tell that the authors I like are even receiving their funds or that my contribtuions are even significant.