Sure, this strategy will work for him, but will it work for everyone? What if you're not an absolute idiot?

Perhaps you should hire one, put him in a suit, and give him a three letter title?

"Complete Idiot Officer"?

They make it sounds as if being an administrator is fun. Surely the best job in physics is to be someone who gets to spend nearly all of their time doing research and has job security and few responsibilities.

Prediction: Ron Paul('s botnet) will win with 99.94% of the vote.

I'd put the over/under at 70.

Edit: Never underestimate the Ron Paul botnet, he's at 87% right now.

If it doesn't make money trading, then it isn't better than existing algorithms, because that's what you're competing against.

There are probably some AIs making money out there but they try to beat the market by examining a variety of commodities at once and discovering their interdependencies faster and better than humans can. I have far more hubris, I'm trying to make it work with pure technical analysis on a single commodity. Which is a bit harder.

I voted this up because I agree with the first paragraph, but I don't like most of the specific big questions you list here.

I can't think of any way of saying this without sounding mean, but the type of big questions you list here are the stuff of pseudo-intellectuals. These are Omni magazine big questions (if anyone here remembers that). I'd prefer Economist big questions.

A question being permanently unanswerable or currently out of reach (or "too big") doesn't make it a poor question. I agree that academics focus on questions at the edge of reach with currently available tools, and that's fine and important from a practical standpoint. But I don't think that the validity of the question is determined by whether or not we currently have the tools to attack it. If you're interested in the important political and economic questions that face us today, that's fine, and I agree that in practice it's more immediately valuable to debate and resolve those questions. But I do think that the larger (and possibly unanswerable) questions are interesting to ponder. Maybe I picked a poor list as I wrote the original comment, but as the sibling poster said, the types of questions asked at edge.org are what I'd like to see more of.

I'm surprised that everyone is responding to my list of questions instead of the meat of the post. I just threw that list out there as an illustrative list, the real point I'm trying to make is in the body of the post. I also think that all of those questions I listed have mostly settled answers in academia that aren't popularly accepted by society. (e.g. people still cling to the idea of a "soul" separate from the information content of your brain)

EDIT: I also think that the most interesting work happens when asking questions that are at the edge of being taken seriously.

I highly recommend reading up on linguistics, if you're interested to know why people responded the way they did:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics

Writing is hard.

The answer lies somewhere in between. The problem with big questions is lack of traction, whereas the problem with small questions is lack of vision. The insightful questions latch onto the pivot points between these two realms, either reshaping the big questions in light of the small answers or visa versa.

I agree, but I'd prefer questions like the kind that are asked at Edge.org: related to technology, physics, mathematics, biology, logic, astronomy, etc.

Aren't some mutually exclusive?

Interesting. Sometimes you need charging as a design feature, not just as a business model.

That's not entirely true. Charging is an easy out for handling spam, but lots of companies handle that sort of thing technically. There's one of two things happening here:

1) Hot or Not doesn't have the technical chops to reign in the spam.

2) Hot or Not isn't comfortable with the free dating model anymore, but wants to blame the switch back on something people might have sympathy for.

I actually would bet on the latter, but if it's the former (as they claim), I might be more worried about their future.

Is there any free dating site with the 'technical chops' to reign in spam? So far as I can tell, none of them overcome spam directly via technology.

eHarmony - Subscription

Match.com - Subscription

Myspace - Gets spam; though it's less of an issue because it seems like spammers haven't been able to figure out how to emulate a typical real profile, and because many people use the site to connect with people they know already. In other words it's not technology or effort from Myspace, it's that the model is different.

Facebook - Pseudo-dating site, like myspace, plus it has additional restrictions on creating an account.

Any other dating site I've seen has spam all over the place.

OkCupid.com's pretty good about it. Maybe I'm biased.

Also, dating sites aren't the only sites susceptible to spam. Craigslist would probably be a spammer's heaven if they didn't have such great community filtering features.

You're right, Craigslist is a good example. But even there there's enough phishing going on that I'm not comfortable using the dating section. I've had success finding apartments though.

The difference with dating sites, though, is that they only work when members are active, aggressive, and open with their personal information. They work best in a way that spammers will rush to exploit, at which point everyone gets frustrated and stops using the service. This doesn't stop spammers, and pretty soon the ratio of valid profiles to fake ones is ridiculously small.

More importantly, Craigslist uses pay to filter spam in other ways: real estate and job listings.

In that case, it was "asked" for by the users.

plentyofish.com apparently does a pretty good job.

No no no.

Fake profiles are still a huge problem. Facebook handled it early on by severely limiting their audience but that solution simply would not work for hotornot.

You tell me how to effectively solve this without driving your users away... I found some decent solutions but it's not nearly as easy as stopping spam.

I kind of suspect 2) too.

As do I. James seems like a really cool person, but I feel like he's dishonest sometimes. The flimsy excuses for not sharing the massive profits with employees in the past and this case where they could easily require simple credit card verification to get the same effect. Very weird behavior.

> "The flimsy excuses for not sharing the massive profits with employees in the past ... "

Kind of a socialist sentiment, doncha think?

From what I know of the whole deal, these two dudes built the core of the business in 7-30 days, and layered in the payment/dating stuff later on. (pretty obvious/inevitable)

No one accuses Bill Gates of being socialist and he made more of his employees millionaires by sharing than almost anyone in business history.

He is obviously lying. This is not even a debatable point.

It's called spin. A representative of the business is giving a half-credible excuse for reverting to a process that will be unpopular but that will also generate more revenue. Politicians don't change their stances on abortion because of changes of heart...they do it because it will net more votes

For whatever reason it's taboo for a press release to say "we're taking this course of action because it's more profitable", unless you're talking to stockholders and not users, because 1. all business actions are taken with profitability, short term or long, in mind, so it goes without saying 2. you would piss off your users who care only what you give to them and rarely at all whether you're making money or not

credit card verification?

Sounds like a porn site. That's a terribly unmarketable idea.

Considering the competition, that's quite a statement.

... of the 769 companies in his study.