Ask HN: Has anyone on HN ever successfully arbitraged eBay? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> There are two proven ways to do this.

One is to pick a very frothy market. For instance, about 10 years ago I acquired a preorder for four Butterfly Labs Bitcoin miners shortly before they were to ship (months behind schedule but with the queue starting to ship). About a month later, received them. Sold them. Made a nice tidy profit. This was definitely speculation, but market timing worked in my favor. It could as easily have not.

Second is one of my side projects I call "grains of rice". Everyone's pretty familiar with the cost of a sack of rice, but consider if your customer wanted just one grain. One grain total. Not interested in extras, no room for 'em. Just want the one. That grain of rice suddenly gets pretty expensive, as in hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars per pound shipped.

There's additional packaging involved, and the frictional cost of shipping, and additional handling and listing costs involved, but it's pretty easy to buy things for $5 a dozen and sell them for $0.99 a pop. You can get an additional leg up by warehousing and shipping closer and faster than your source, meaning your customers paying your premium only wait the 3 days instead of the 3 weeks it took you to get it.

That's not pure arbitrage, as you are adding value by wholesaling, splitting things up, and repackaging, but it's not uncommon to have eBay on one or both ends of a successful corresponding transaction.

<comment><USER3> A classic example of that grain of rice strategy is splitting up replacement keyboards. Joe just needed a 'N' so he paid you $5 for 1% of a $20 keyboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In about 2010 I was selling refurbished Brookstone foot massagers on eBay. I could buy them in the outlet mall by my house (one of two in the country) for $200 and sell them for $300 on eBay. It was amazing how quickly the market adjusted; eventually, we were buying foot massagers by the pallet from the Brookstone outlet. Sometimes we couldn't buy any because someone else already bought the pallet! Eventually Brookstone raised their prices. :)

A year later I did a similar thing with "anti-snoring mouthpieces". The product was effectively a mouthguard, a popsicle sticks, and instructions for molding it. A few branded companies were selling this product for $80. I imported the _exact same_ product from Alibaba for $3 each and sold them on eBay for $15 each. I had a box of 300 of them and every day I would put one or two envelopes in the mail until the box was empty.

</comment><comment><USER5> When shopping for the things I shop for on eBay, there's a non-trivial arbitrage based on delivery time. Items from Chinese suppliers are marked up when shipping from US warehouses based on <= 1 week delivery within the US versus ~2-6 weeks typical for delivery from China.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> ...That is, has anyone here on HN ever bought an item on eBay, and sold the same item on eBay for a profit?

If so, that leads to such sub-questions as:

How did you know/learn that you could make a profit on that item?

What kind of profit did you make?

How long did you have to wait to sell the item, that is, what was the turn- around time, etc.

(Inquiring minds want to know! :-))

<comment><USER3> Done it a few times after 'organically' researching some fairly high-value item that I actually wanted.

After I've secured one for myself to keep, there's a short-ish period of time during which I feel like an expert on the market for that item, and my "Saved Search" with email notification remains enabled. Sometimes obviously underpriced listings(s) then show up. Not much more to it than that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! Thanks a whole lot for your responses!

</comment><comment><USER6> Desperately trying to buy and resell at a higher price? That would require some poor third party sap to pay more, right?

Sounds sad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's say hypothetically that I asked someone to buy a coin on eBay, and hold it for a year. The goal of that exercise would be to pick the coin that appreciates in value the most over that year.

So given those parameters, which coin would someone pick, and why? See, that's a form of arbitrage, because you're buying something on eBay and selling it back on eBay.

The idea that "some poor third party sap" is paying more is not correct, because the second buyer of the coin is presumably paying _MARKET VALUE_ for the coin, and presumably can sell it again at market value (no loss), and can possibly even wait some time for the coin to appreciate again.

In a free market people exchange goods for however much money they value the goods at. The prices (price = what people value something at) of some of those items are in constant flux, thus there become opportunities for arbitrage. People in the financial community already know this, although they don't apply those principles to eBay.

No single person is a sap, people just a) Value (assign price to) things differently and b) Have different abilities to pay, i.e., Bill Gates could pay a whole lot more for something than say, someone living in a third-world country...</comment></comment>


Fast inverse chirp z-transform found - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2019-10-year-old-puzzle.html <comment><USER2> Small explanation for people not introduced to signals theory: Fourier transform is the decomposition of an arbitrary signal into many sinusoids, such that their sum gives a signal identical to the starting one. Each of these sinusoids can be represented using Euler's formula as e^(i * omega * t). You can see that the exponent is purely imaginary.

There is a generalization of this transform (i.e. this transform is a particular case of a more general one): what if instead of a purely imaginary exponent we use a generic complex value a+ib? Then e^((a+ib) * t) = e^(a * t)e^(ib * t): the new term that appears is a real-valued exponential, so exponential curves can also be used describe the starting signal!

However, making a discrete-time, sample-based algorithm of this transform is tricky, and the corresponding inverse transform (the "sum" of the components to get the starting signal back) didn't exist before

<comment><USER3> Why is reversing the transform hard ? It's just about computing back values by following the transform definition, it should be even easier than doing the original transform.

Unless the hard part is doing that

1\. Fast

2\. with Discrete values

3\. inverse discrete transform( discrete transform( discrete values ) ) should be almost equal to discrete values with high accuracy

is that right ?

<comment><USER2> Each of these is certainly a complication, for example standard discrete-time Fourier transform is O(n^2) while the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm manages to do the same in O(nlogn), but I think the main difficulty here is that the direct transform is an integral (or series, depends if you're using continuous or discrete one) over time, which is a single real variable. The inverse is an integral over the complex variable, a+ib, and you need a whole 2D plane to represent it (the complex plane indeed), a single 1D line is not enough. So how do you take an integral of a complex value over a 2D plane? And here you start delving deep into theorems and convergence regions.. stuff that's quite difficult to grasp without having experience with complex calculus (and I don't)

The inverse fourier trasnform, on the other hand, is limited to the imaginary axis of the complex plane (the exponent is a purely imaginary number), so you're restricting it to be monodimensional, hence the relative simplicity in reversing the transform

Also, keep in mind that all of this assumes you have infinite samples, so you need to use some form of windowing which doesn't distort too much the signal

<comment><USER4> Could this be used to improve LoRa range or bandwidth?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Huh, weird that this is making such big headlines. A fast (O(n log n)) inverse chirp z-transform was described 16 years ago in Alin Bostan's PhD thesis [https://specfun.inria.fr/bostan/these/These.pdf](https://specfun.inria.fr/bostan/these/These.pdf)

Also in this more compact paper by Bostan and Schost: [https://specfun.inria.fr/bostan/publications/BoSc05.pdf](https://specfun.inria.fr/bostan/publications/BoSc05.pdf)

The new algorithm may be a different way to do it (I haven't studied the paper), but the authors ought to have cited previous work. Where does Nature find their referees?

<comment><USER6> The inverse chirp z-transform in that second paper is described as follows:

 _Let us now focus on the computation of the inverse chirp transform. The idea is to use the Newton basis for intermediate computations: first perform a Newton interpolation, then perform a conversion from the Newton basis to the monomial basis. Both steps have complexities M(n) + O(n), which gives the estimate of 2M(n) + O(n)_

The function M(n)

 _denotes the cost of multiplying univariate polynomials of degree less than n. Using FFT-based multiplication algorithms, M(n) can be taken in O(n log(n) log(log(n)))_

So they did not reach O(n log n).

<comment><USER5> That complexity bound applies to polynomials over more general coefficient rings which may not have roots of unity. Over the usual complex numbers the complexity is O(n log n).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For the uninitiated, what does this particular breakthrough enable? I understand the point it makes about being able to reverse a decomposition but don't get what the practical consequences are.

<comment><USER8> I have worked with it a bit in my time in physical layer test and measurement.

I'll cover some quick basics then explain why chirp z is useful.

Ohm's law: voltage = current * resistance. Resistance is considered a steady state value. Impedance is resistance across frequency. In the real world channels (cables, the air, etc.) do not have a flat impedance (the same resistance across all frequencies). Similarly, transmitters and receivers do not have flat resistance. If you try to send a signal through a channel that has too much insertion loss, then the receiver won't be able to decode it. If the impedance of a transmitter/receiver is different than the channel there will be reflections that damage signal integrity (there are good/easy physical analogs to explain this, but I won't. Think back to waves in physics class).

We can measure impedance over frequency directly using a vector network analyzer (VNA) or a time domain reflectometer (TDR). A VNA sweeps across frequencies and listens to the response. A TDR sends a pulse then waits for the response at a given delay. It sends many pulses and looks at many delays to build up an impedance over time plot. This impedance over time is very useful because it can show jumps in impedance at given electrical lengths. Like you can see impedance jump at 30 ns in where you expect to have the connector soldered to board, etc. However, TDRs compared to VNAs, are expensive, difficult to calibrate, and take data very slowly. So the industry has moved towards VNAs. However standards bodies (like the IEEE) are starting to appreciate the use of time domain impedance.

Now to why chirp z is useful. You can reversibly convert from the time domain to the frequency domain using a fourier transform. Great. You just have to assume that your signal repeats for all time. Hmm. Zero pad and don't worry about it. What do we not get from this assumption though? Low frequency information. So let's start with a frequency domain data set (a la VNA) and convert to the time domain. Well that missing low frequency information is very important. You can extrapolate the missing values. The error in the extrapolation will shift your entire impedance profile by huge amounts. In comes chirp z. It is able to handle the missing spectrum much better than the fourier transform.

To summarize: validating new hardware before mass production requires impedance measurement. Impedance measurement has two instrument options with large tradeoffs. Advancements in the chirp z algorithm reduce the penalties of one of those options.

<comment><USER9> _Now to why chirp z is useful. You can reversibly convert from the time domain to the frequency domain using a fourier transform. Great. You just have to assume that your signal repeats for all time. Hmm. Zero pad and don't worry about it. What do we not get from this assumption though? Low frequency information. So let's start with a frequency domain data set (a la VNA) and convert to the time domain. Well that missing low frequency information is very important. You can extrapolate the missing values. The error in the extrapolation will shift your entire impedance profile by huge amounts. In comes chirp z. It is able to handle the missing spectrum much better than the fourier transform._

So, it seems likely that you're right about the CZT being used in time-domain netowrk analysis, since I've seen documentation indicating that it was used for that purpose as far back as the HP 8510.[1] But I still don't grok why, and Rytting's brief explanation on page 13 of that document makes no sense whatsoever.

From a practical perspective, the chirp-Z transform just lets us use arbitrary start/end frequencies rather than the entire DC-Nyquist range that traditional FFTs encompass, correct? If I'm emulating lowpass TDR with a VNA, I'll have to extrapolate the DC response, as you point out... but what _specifically_ makes the CZT better suited to this extrapolation process?

[1]: [http://hparchive.com/seminar_notes/a-137.pdf](http://hparchive.com/seminar_notes/a-137.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> it seems they have reinvented the wheel. It was solved in 2003: [https://specfun.inria.fr/bostan/these/These.pdf](https://specfun.inria.fr/bostan/these/These.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> Hi, I tried to make an implementation of the algorithm in python. Need input. Can you validate it please?

[https://github.com/daedalus/math/blob/master/chirp_zeta_tran...](https://github.com/daedalus/math/blob/master/chirp_zeta_transform.py)

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone have a link to a non-paywalled version of the paper?

<comment><USER13> The link in the article was not paywalled for me (maybe it is for others?).

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-50234-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-50234-9)

<comment><USER14> The publication itself also seems freely accessible:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-50234-9.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-50234-9.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


Tesla Tripp Police Report Released - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/PlainSite/status/1197592445812232192 <comment><USER2> It's distressing that every time something negative about Tesla comes out, there is a knee-jerk reaction like "this is merely a ploy to manipulate the stock or destroy the company." Yes, news agencies are often wrong. And yes, there are occasionally manipulators. And although Tesla might be doing great work, it is unquestionable that they may, at times, be causing significant harm to individuals. To dismiss the potential of Tesla's wrongdoing immediately and out of hand feels deeply cult-like to me.

<comment><USER3> > "this is merely a ploy to manipulate the stock or destroy the company."

Well, the most favorable thing you could say about $TSLA is that Musk _hasn 't_ managed to destroy the company, in spite of his well-known and recurring antics.

<comment><USER4> Given that they're currently producing over 90,000 cars per quarter, and that their products have consistently been the benchmark EV for eight years, I think there are plenty of other favourable things you could say about them?

I'm not remotely a fanboy of that company but your comment does seem to be out of whack with the scale of their success despite gargantuan odds.

<comment><USER5> Their competition for those years has been companies that only producing compliance cars for the California market. Are you really the benchmark when no one else has been trying?

I do think the Model 3 caught everyone's attention though, but I'm deeply skeptical that Tesla has any significant first mover advantage. Car companies aren't exactly unique.

<comment><USER6> You don't think having much more battery production capacity or a massive network of superchargers is a significant advantage?

<comment><USER5> You don't think Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, Hyundai, or GM couldn't do any of these things too? They're some of the largest industrial manufacturers in the world.

<comment><USER4> It'd be nice if they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Headline (and the tweet) is inaccurate. Tripp's attorneys posted the police report in 2018.

[https://www.secwhistleblowerattorney.net/tesla-related- polic...](https://www.secwhistleblowerattorney.net/tesla-related-police- reports/)

[https://www.secwhistleblowerattorney.net/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.secwhistleblowerattorney.net/wp- content/uploads/2018/07/Police-Reports-highlighted.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't get what is "stunning" here? Maybe I am missing some context?

Someone called Tesla to advise that Tripp was heavily armed and coming at the Gigafactory. Tesla called the police, which then looked for Tripp and found the information to be false.

Subsequently, the police tried to identify who placed the initial call, and found that the caller was just "a concerned friend", as they knew Tripp to be unstable and shaken by his firing from Tesla and thus concerned he could do something like that.

Ultimately from the report we don't know who placed the call, either it is indeed from a "concerned friend" and there is nothing interesting happening here.

Or it is from someone from Tesla trying to harass Tripp as a payback for his leaks, as I have seen suggested on twitter, however nothing in the report even alludes to that, so what am I missing?

<comment><USER2> This is a reasonable, yet generous reading of the situation. But the situation stinks. Tripp raised what seemed to be sincere concerns, yet was retaliated against by Tesla in an exceedingly heavy-handed manner. Tesla's current claim is that he caused them over 100 million dollars in damage. The trouble in my mind is that Tesla escalated and has continued to escalate an incredibly unpleasant situation involving Tripp. This situation, and others, seem to strongly suggest that company that runs deeply on principles of fear, going so far as to use incredible amounts of energy on going after a low-level engineer with a possibly reasonable complaint.

A more enlightened response from Tesla, in my mind, had the complaints by Tripp been untrue, would have been to have been to quietly dismiss him, address his claims in a press release, and use gentle language to address him, identifying him, sincerely, if possible, as a genuinely useful member of the team with whom Tesla had an irreconcilable disagreement.

Tesla is not taking this route, however. Their handling of the situation suggests that they may have something more serious to hide or, at minimum, that they are not committed to deeper humanistic means of engaging with individuals that challenge them (though Musk must not be exclusively defined by this, is it so surprising given the terrible names he called one of the Thai rescuers?). Tesla has and are continues to attend to Tripp with tremendous force (legal, and perhaps otherwise -- as suggested by this link) as opposed to just moving on and letting things be. They are proactively seeking to proactively discredit and arguably harm Tripp as opposed to contending with his contentions head on.

<comment><USER3> > Tripp raised what seemed to be genuine concerns

Were they genuine concerns, though? The overall impression from available sources is that he was overreacting to a situation that, while perhaps unusual, was basically par for the course given that Gigafactory itself is a newly-built facility, and one that's still largely under-construction. Why would you expect things to be 100% perfect and with _zero_ unnecessary waste? Screwups happen all the time, most of the time it's totally normal and not a big concern.

<comment><USER2> Definitely, I agree that they may have been invalid claims and that screwups do happen. What concerns me is that may have been Tripp was truly sincere if not misguided. Tesla's 100 million dollar lawsuit, however, sends a chilling message that if you harm Tesla, they may go after you with incredible force.

<comment><USER4> Chilling? That's normal corporate behaviour. It would be more weird if they didn't react.

<comment><USER9> What a depressing attitude. Just because something is common doesn't mean it's acceptable.

<comment><USER4> I didn't say it was acceptable. It's also not acceptable for alligators to bite humans, but the appropriate solution isn't necessarily to kill all the alligators.

Like the biology of a crocodile, this is the natural behaviour of a capitalist corporate entity under current US law. We have this set of incentives for corporations and we're all surprised when they follow them to the letter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Little birds sing?" WTF is that, we're in the Mafia now? I'd call it self- aggrandizement by (I can't help but imitate the capitalization) GOUTHRO, were it not for the fact that they are apparently using literal mob-style intimidation tactics, now to include this SWATting attempt. Filing a false police report is a crime and so is retaliation against a whistleblower.

</comment><comment><USER11> Many of these details, along with other extraordinarily shady activities on the part of Tesla, came out in a longform Bloomberg article earlier this year: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when- elon...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon-musk- tried-to-destroy-tesla-whistleblower-martin-tripp)

</comment><comment><USER12> Ehhhh it's hard to say if there's really even a story here. Seems like some sensationalism going on.</comment>


What Amazon Really Means When It Tells Seattle: Not Everyone Wants to Live Here - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/10/11/25463964/amazon-tells-seattle-that-not-everyone-wants-to-live-here <comment><USER2> Too true. Seattle is an incredible city. Fantastic people, plenty to do, lots of opportunity but still livable. Except for the god damn weather. I grew up in the high desert in California and just couldn't deal with the constant overcast. I left my job, my career and my friends to move to Hawaii. Couldn't be happier.</comment>


What Happens to All the Asian-American Overachievers When Testing Ends? - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/index3.html#print <comment><USER2> It's not an important question as all the jobs will have moved to China</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to memorize for prorgrammers? - <AUTHOR>

If a programmer were to take courses that require a lot of memorization, what is the best way to go about it? <comment><USER2> The best method I've come across is writing code, constantly. Just keep writing and eventually it will stick. Maybe in your time away from the computer you can write some flash cards to help you remember function names or something.

<comment><USER3> I agree. For a non-coder like me, I've been working intensely with CSS and html and some PHP the last 4 weeks. Things that got used over and over again will gradually stay in your mind after a while.</comment></comment>


Lifting the Skirt (On NDAs) - <AUTHOR> http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2010/10/lifting-skirt.html

<comment><USER2> On the other hand, what if you refuse to do an NDA, and so the project goes to someone else, and it turns out to be really valuable, and they become the Microsoft of your field, and you become the Digital Research? That would suck.

A lot of times the company requesting the NDA isn't worried that you might steal their app idea, but rather are trying to keep other aspects of the project secret.

For instance, suppose Microsoft decided they wanted to make iPad versions of Word and Excel. If it became general knowledge that they were doing this, it could undermine their own phone platform, and also Windows tablet PCs. Such products would have to be introduced carefully. Accordingly their NDA would be aimed at prohibiting you to tell of the existence of their project or their involvement in word processing or spreadsheets on the iPhone. They would not be worried that you might decide to write your own word processor or spreadsheet.

</comment><comment><USER3> NDA's are a necessary evil, though those holding them have to be aware they need so share the basics.

NDA or Not, ideas can be stolen. Just don't show all your cards.</comment>


Start Up Life Lesson #9: You Will Get Fat - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lendingclub.com/2008/08/29/social-lending-and-push-ups/

<comment><USER2> I realize this is just having fun, but I'm often reading this-or-that to the effect that startups are bad for your health. And, I just don't get it. Or rather, I suppose, I expect that anyone who thinks startups are bad for your health has never worked for corporate america.

Working a _job_ was the worst thing I ever did for my health. Now that I'm at a startup, I get plenty of sleep and exercise and eat healthy, home-cooked vegetarian meals. And the stress involved in working for myself is so much less that that of working for a PHB... I could never go back.

In the last two years, I've lost 50 pounds. I recently completed my first century. I'm in the best shape of my adult life. I sincerely attribute all this to being my own boss and setting my own schedule. Am I really the only one who finds the startup life superior???

<comment><USER3> It's a balance thing. A lot of startup founders get into bad habits--all- nighters because they've just _gotta_ launch that new feature (which they rush into production, it breaks everything, and then they have to stay up even longer to roll it back, or fix the problems), eating nothing but ramen and cheap takeout, because they imagine cooking takes too long (though I've found making simple meals at home is more time-effective, generally), etc. Everything takes a back seat to working, which I think is counter-productive. You can't sustain that kind of thing, and when you burn out, you'll burn out hard. If you don't sell the company within the "candle at both ends" phase (however long you can maintain that), you'll hit a brick wall and slow to a crawl for a while (you'll also probably look back on your code and wonder WTF you were thinking).

In short, I agree. You probably should view having your own company as an opportunity to live right, rather than an excuse to live terribly. Maximizing health and happiness is probably not a bad way to work towards success, as long as "happiness" does not involve lots of vacations and living beyond your (probably very limited) means.

<comment><USER4> Those bad habits would probably exist for most of those people no matter where they worked. Startup founders are a tiny portion of the overall population and in my relatively small, unscientifically counter sample don't appear to suffer any more from obesity than the rest of the population.

Obesity comes from people allowing themselves excuses. "I'm not going to work out today because I have to get this code shipped" would just as easily become "I'm going to just eat at McDonalds today because I have to get home to take the kids to baseball practice" if they switched professions/lifestyles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I gained a few pounds when I moved from Austin to the valley and was getting a little soft in the middle. I stopped playing tennis and stopped cycling because I haven't met anyone out here who enjoys such things. But I recently took up running, as I already walk my dog every day and she doesn't mind going a little faster for a mile or two. And I've gone somewhat paleo in my eating habits: mostly raw vegetables and fruits, almost no processed grains and simple carbohydrates like breads and pastas, and lots of protein (I'm a vegetarian, so I've been eating more eggs and beans and nuts). I also got a Wii Fit, which didn't seem to have much impact on my weight, but I _am_ getting more exercise (and my pushup and situp count has increased under the kind tutelage of Miyamoto). Anyway, my pants are fitting nicely again. I've gotta fix the buttons on a couple of pair, as they suffered under the cruel tyranny of the Fat Joe regime.

I'd read about the hundred pushup challenge on reddit (and the many other "I bet I could X 100 Y" challenges, which are equally inspiring), but I figured since I don't actually like doing pushups I'd content myself with the 20 or so that I can do now, and do a bit more balanced workouts a few times a week.

<comment><USER5> _"... but I figured since I don't actually like doing pushups I'd content myself with the 20 or so that I can do now, and do a bit more balanced workouts a few times a week. ..."_

Sounds pretty reasonable.

The one reason these 100PU's have against them is the amount of work required to get to 100. Muscles take a long time to harden. A long time. To get to 100 a lot of people will give up. I notice this looks like a group activity. Nothing like group pressure to keep up. But a lot of hackers are in smaller teams or individual. It's also hard work. 20 a day no problems. It's not hard then to do another REP when the arms & shoulders are conditioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm no fitness buff but doing push-ups doesn't strike me as the thing for losing weight.

Push-ups are also horribly unergonomic - just see how guys in the video are arching their backs. Better to go to the gym and use a machine that isolates the excercise to the exact muscles you want while not straining unrelated muscles and joints in evil ways.

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry, I try very hard to avoid being the typical arrogant internet jackass, but I just can't not respond to that.

I'm an athlete first, and a technology worker second. And what you just said ("better to ... use a machine that isolates ... while not straining unrelated muscles") is the fitness equivalent of something that would be a top post on The Daily WTF.

That is almost exactly the wrong idea. I mean, so precisely opposite of correct information that I hope you didn't write that as a joke and I'm not getting it.

The only time isolation movements make sense is if you're already a very competitive bodybuilder who walks around with hundreds of pounds of lean muscle mass. Otherwise, isolation movements (especially when performed on machines rather than with free weights) are a genuinely terrible idea. At absolute _best_ they will make you gain muscle and lose weight vastly more slowly than you could. Most likely, they'll make you wind up with a chronic injury.

Please, please, please don't go to the gym and work on machines. Do compound movements instead. If you're interested in making physical improvements, go pick up Starting Strength. It's $30 and the author is an absolute genius.

[That was officially my first flame. I feel so hollow inside ...]

<comment><USER6> Push-ups give me a headache. I don't know if its the blood rushing to the head or the neck tension, but they are uncomfortable for me for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual excercise. Same thing for pull-ups, sit-ups or whatchamacallit.

Machines are comfortable while still maxing out my muscle capacity. They are the sole reason that I am now, after many years of repeatedly failing to start a weight regimen, enjoying gym excercise.

You are probably right in everything you said, since I know fuck all about fitness, but I know what I like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Jobs don't make you fat, not exercising makes you fat.

When I was overseas I went to the gym twice a day; when I got back to the states and started working on our Startup, I went a couple times a week. When we moved to Boston to take part in YC I stopped entirely. My decline was accelerated by all-nighters, a poor diet and stress, but the root cause of gaining weight is... not exercising!

Changing jobs can, in some cases, cause a fluctuation in weight, but if you exercise regularly and take measures to have a good diet, then it really shouldn't matter. Just because there's an abundance of food doesn't mean you need to eat it! We're moving next week and since I am thoroughly disgusted with myself now, it's time to start hitting the gym promptly after that.

Final note: Push-ups aren't conducive to weight loss. And somebody tell all the people in that video to _stop looking down while they do them_! Ugh.

<comment><USER9> A caloric surplus is the root cause of weight gain...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Start-ups are great for your health, or at least mine has been for me. I don't have enough money to go out to bars all the time, so I don't drink much, and I would really rather pay rent than buy cookies at the grocery store every week. On top of that, I don't have a car, and since it's generally just about as fast to walk as to take public transportation, I might as well get some fresh air, I tell myself.

But maybe it's the stress that has so positively impacted my health. Yes, you read that correctly: stress has made me healthier. Work can be frustrating, leaving me feeling like a caged wild animal, ready to run 100 miles, wanting nothing more than to get away and to get away fast!

To be fair, it takes me a full week to run that far, but I'm still at a start- up, so I'm sure it will go by faster in the future. In the meantime, I probably won't be getting too fat. You don't have to, either.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm a huge fan of CrossFit. Short high intensity workouts, if you do them right they will kick your ass and get you in shape, and they dont take much time.

</comment><comment><USER12> As somebody that used to be gym rat, i can say that the 100 pushups challenge is a bad bad idea.

You will just exercise only some parts of the body, and forget the rest. At some point, when I was working out a lot, i was obsesed with bench-pressing, and trained a lot of them. The result was an onverdeveloped chest, and triceps, while the rest was just more regular looking. It just made me look more bulky, but I don't think it made me anymore healthy.

I ignored my legs, and biceps, and at some point ended up injuring my knees, playing soccer, mainly b/c I just didn't exercise my legs as the rest of my body.

Lesson learned. You have to go to the gym, and do all the range of excercises, and not just one kind.

<comment><USER13> I got chills reading your comment - there's a relatively new "100 pushups" meme on Reddit that was precipitated by a comment very similar to yours:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6nz1k/got_six_weeks...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6nz1k/got_six_weeks_try_the_hundred_push_ups_training/c04ehte)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For me it really goes with stress. When things are running smoothly and I have a decent amount of free time, I sleep well, eat healthily, and work out regularly. When things are busy, and I have a huge to-do list, my stress level is way up, and there's tons of stuff demanding my time, I sleep less and poorly, I crave carb and fat rich foods when I'm stressed, and I have a much harder time taking breaks to workout, etc...

Right now I'm dealing with my first house purchase and a cross-country move on top of my normal work, and my health has taken a big dive. Hopefully once I move and things settle down, I'll get back on track.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sweet, I just joined giveme27.com after reading this. Haven't done push-ups for a few weeks, but I saw that the site's high scorers were only at 60 and 40. Couldn't quite hit the #1 myself, but seeing others' numbers certainly motivated me to try harder too!

Really, it's all about balance if you're running a startup, a regular business, or working a 9-5. We all need something to create/maintain/release some energy besides sitting in front of a computer, and it definitely gives you more energy overall.

My personal fave is mountain biking, and I'm looking to get back into kickboxing in the fall (maybe now that I've said so publicly I'll be more motivated not to poop out on that statement ;)

Joining a recreational sports team is another good option, plus you get out and meet/hang out with people that way, which can be tough when you're in startup mode.

Here's an idea: YC ought to try a sports night where the startup founders all get together and play a bit...

</comment><comment><USER16> I've probably put on about 60 pounds since starting up years ago. The ridiculous hours take it out of you and mean that you don't get to do the things you want to do.

I was very successful with the hacker diet years back, but even now I don't have the right combination of time and energy to successfully pull it off.

</comment><comment><USER17> The old 5BX plan worked wonders for me: <http://www.oakengates.com/5bx/>

Rather than get me fat, starting a company pushed me to build the body I'd always wanted.

</comment><comment><USER18> you know whats funny? I am actually now in better shape than what I was in when I started. Part of it is that, thanks to doing the startup I learned to multitask. And its fairly easy to get in shape if you multitask, we all need a break, so during the 1 hour I spend watching TV I also work out.

And I actually recommended that 100 push ups challenge(I'm up to 65 full fledged pushups, by which I mean you go all the way down hold, then go all the way up and hold), it really helps to get you into shape by getting you into the whole mindset towards working out. + its a huge confidence builder

</comment><comment><USER19> There's a good chance of gaining (or losing) weight in any situation where your whole daily routine is shaken up, really.</comment>


10xer – Become a 10x programmer now! - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SanketDG/10xer <comment><USER2> This is actually a good counterexample for people who think splitting code down into one-line methods improves readability.

<comment><USER3> I see this a lot from Rubyists. Thank Sandi Metz and the rest of thought leader (read: grifter) community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> tenx_me_right_now() // SINGLE RESPONSIBLITY PRINCIPLE, ONE FUNCTION ONE THING, NO ERROR CHECKS!

I'm in tears. HN late at night (pacific time) is so bizarre but beautiful. I'm ready to be a 10x programmer.</comment>


How Baby Boomers screwed their kids - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/01/04/how_baby_boomers_screwed_their_kids_%e2%80%94_and_created_millennial_impatience/ <comment><USER2> The Baby Boom was a birth cohort that spanned a lot of years, characterized only by high birth rates. (The Baby Boom is the only time in United States history when the long-term trend of ever higher ages of first marriage and ever lower rates of fertility was reversed.) A lot of thoughtful analysts distinguish the earlier part of the Baby Boom (parents who were part of the "Greatest Generation," which participated as adults in World War II) from the later part of the Baby Boom (parents in the "Silent Generation," whose earliest memories are of the Great Depression, and who didn't reach adulthood until after the war was over). I think that makes sense. Greatest Generation parents were about looking out for other people, as a group central tendency, and Silent Generation parents were about looking out for number one. (Silent Generation persons politically did well, gaining the greatest net surplus over the actuarial value of their Social Security benefits through taxation of younger working people, for example.)

In each generation, there are parents of differing core values. There are also children who either accept their parents' values, or react against them. That goes on throughout history. The one sure thing that demographers discovered is that during the Baby Boom there was a lower ratio of care-giving adults to minor children in the whole society than at almost any time before or since. Large family sizes spread parenting thin. So the Baby Boomers had less parental face time to receive parental influence one way or another than the preceding generations, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear (as we do in the opinion essay submitted here) that Baby Boomers, as a group central tendency, are less practiced in traditional parenting approaches than earlier generations, for better or for worse.

(Can you guess where I fit among the generations by what I write here?)

<comment><USER3> It's not just the parents, but the "boomers," as well. Some analysts see two groups in the "Baby Boom": 1946-1955 and 1956-1964. I don't know where the break should be, but one of my sisters was born in 1963 and has never struck me as a "Baby Boomer." She doesn't remember very much of the 1960s, the draft, Vietnam, etc. An article in USA Today, a few years back, on these "Shadow Boomers" mentioned a woman born in 1964 and both her parents were born in 1946 -- all three are Baby Boomers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > An impatience driven by two things: First is a gross misunderstanding that > things like success, money or happiness come instantly.

This doesn't jive with my experience. College grads these days very often start their careers working for free in unpaid internships. If that doesn't demonstrate delayed gratification or an understanding that success doesn't come instantly, I don't know what would.

<comment><USER5> Younger people should learn this long, long before they graduate college. By then they're already functioning adults.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know this article sounds a bit "spray and pray"-ish, using soundbites we've grown tired of. However, it might be because the article is reprinted from the author's book that covers an entirely different topic altogether. (Why Leaders Eat Last)

Incidentally, you can probably get a good summary of the book just by watching this author's talk. It also covers the OP's posted article.

[http://vimeo.com/79899786](http://vimeo.com/79899786)

</comment><comment><USER7> Born in 1981, I would be classified as a Gen Y person. Some sentences that caught my eye:

> _Many employers complain of the demands their entry-level employees often > make._

I asked my previous employer that I didn't approve of having a senior employer shout "Ah, fuck off" at me several times a day, or being called "thick", or having to put up with threatening behaviour. That was considered a hefty demand.

> _We would prefer that that air traffic controller check his e-mail or send > his text messages during his breaks. I think we would all feel much better > if access to the Internet and a personal cell phone were completely > forbidden (which they are)._

I usually don't have enough money to debit my cell phone (The other day I had my first go on a Samsung Galaxy). I rarely have access to these distractions because I lack the capital.

> _Generation Y thinks that, because they have grown up with all these > technologies, they are better at multitasking. I would venture to argue they > are not better at multitasking. What they are better at is being > distracted._

I didn't grow up in constant contact with these technologies. I've grown up being expected by Gen Xers and other Gen Yers to be able to multitask and be a tech whizz with said technologies. I would agree that I am better at being distracted than Gen Xers - having to endure abuse and threats is very distracting, as is being expected to know everything about how a computer works.

> _They seem flummoxed when told that things take time. They are happy to give > lots of short bursts of energy and effort to things, but commitment and grit > come harder._

I started practising programming in my spare time about eighteen months ago, and I'm still practising. I'll probably get proficient at it when I'm say, 36. I'm never told by my peers or Gen Xers that it will take time. I'm often told "you're wasting your time" or "stick to what you are capable of" (then I get turned down for minimum wage jobs). I was wondering how flummoxed a person from any generation would be if you told them that even dead simple programs often require at least 100 lines of code. One of the main reasons that I am able to do this is due to a small band Gen Xers (and some Gen Yers) who had the determination and patience to write free software, so many cheers for them.

</comment><comment><USER8> If I ever read another long, rambling screed about the failings of millennials, it will be too soon.

<comment><USER9> Man, I know! Look at this stuff. How many tendentious assumptions can we bake into one sentence?

"The economic systems in which they have grown up, ones that prioritize numbers over people, are blindly accepted, as if that's the way it has always been."

Right. For instance, when OWS, coherent or otherwise, camped out in half a dozen cities demanding radical change, that was the Millennial Generation's generational cry of Blind Acceptance of Status Quo. Likewise when they campaigned (naively or otherwise) for Hope and Change and spread-the-wealth- around.

And think! Just a couple generations back, our systems had a paradise of prioritizing People over Numbers. For instance: when the FDR administration took over the nation's agriculture sector and burned crops in the midst of a famine, then standardized the sector into a series of big-agribusiness factory-farm monocultures in the name of efficiency. And yet somehow when the author implies economic systems should be questioned, I don't think the Agricultural Adjustment Act - still on the books - was the sort of thing he had in mind.

<comment><USER10> Sssssh. Stop using facts. "Everyone knows" that things were great in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I tried to read this all the way to the end but I wasn't quite able to do it in a single round.

There are a lot of interesting points in the article, but you'd have more chance to drown in the Sahara desert than to find a single proof of any of the aforementioned points. _Best_ thing you get is a combination of weasel words and anecdotal evidence. Let's see a few of these brilliant examples:

> it's easy to see how the Boomers earned their reputation as the Me > Generation. Me before We. Putting the protection of ideas and wealth before > the sharing of them is now standard.

Fair enough. _How_ does the author know this?

> A New Jersey-based accountant told me that he sees a clear difference > between his older clients and his younger ones. "My older clients want to > work within the confines of the tax code to do what is fair," he explained. > "They are willing to simply pay the tax they owe. The next generation spends > lots of time looking to exploit every loophole and nuance in the tax code to > reduce their responsibility to as little as possible."

What a rock-solid argument!

But wait, there's more!

> Generation Y is said to have a sense of entitlement.

Ok... let's see some evidence of that?

> Many employers complain of the demands their entry-level employees often > make.

Could it _possibly_ be the same many employers who try to offer unpaid interships that last basically forever, or who are cutting up expenses by outsourcing work to India so that the board members can buy bigger boats? Obviously, not every employer who claims that the demands of _some_ entry- level employees are too harsh, but without any evidence of whether or not those demands are justified, the number of employers claiming that is no argument, for either side.

The apex of arrogance is, in my opinion, this one:

> According to a study at Northwestern University, the number of children and > young people diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) > shot up 66 percent between 2000 and 2010. Why the sudden and huge spike in a > frontal lobe dysfunction over the course of a decade?

An interesting point, why?

At this point, you would obviously expect the author to quote one or several serious medical studies which show certain degrees of correlation between the development of ADHD and various factors that have been prevalent during the 2000-2010 decade to a greater degree than before. But no!

> I would submit that this huge spike is not simply because more people have > ADHD than previous generations, though this could be true. Nor is it due to > an increase in the number of parents having their children tested, though > this could also be true. Though there are, of course, many genuine cases of > ADHD, the sudden spike may be the result of something as simple as > misdiagnosis.

Ok, ok, I'm still reading. _Maybe_ there's a yet-unknown study, or at least one that is in development because someone who's an expert on brain stuff has a hypothesis?

> We know that sometimes our wires can get crossed and the wrong behaviors can > be incentivized. Someone who finds the dopamine- and serotonin-releasing > effects of alcohol as a teenager can become conditioned to look to alcohol > to suppress emotional pain instead of learning to look to people for > support. This can show up later in life as alcoholism. In this same way, the > dopamine-releasing effects of the bing, buzz or flash of a cell phone feel > good and create the desire and drive to repeat the behavior that produces > that feeling.

Nope. What the author is proposing is, in fact, a personal hypothesis, based on a fairly superficial understanding of a complicated process ("our wires get crossed").

This wouldn't even be a problem, _if_ the author would at least bother to provide some test -- the hell with that, at least _some_ way to test this hypothesis. Who knows, maybe he got it right, in spite of an incorrect reasoning process (there was a time when reasoning by analogy was the dominant form of hypothesizing, but it wasn't exactly a period renowned for its intellectual achievements). But no.

I don't want to label the article as a load of useless rubbish. It's not wrong per se, I think it's just incorrectly titled, because it doesn't try to give a meaningful answer to the question in its title, just to present some of the author's prejudices. They _are_ prejudices only by virtue of their lack of arguments, not their value of truth. Perhaps Simon Sinek is right, but after reading the article, you are no closer to understanding _why_ he thinks he's right than you were before.

<comment><USER12> > _Perhaps Simon Sinek is right, but after reading the article, you are no > closer to understanding why he thinks he 's right than you were before._

What do you know, the top comment is a pseudo-intellectual tear down of an article, asking for evidence and proof, admitting that the original article wasn't even read to completion, but offering plenty of criticism.

> _Perhaps Simon Sinek is right, but after reading the article, you are no > closer to understanding why he thinks he 's right than you were before._

Guess what? This is a _book excerpt_. Maybe if you want some answers and notes you can buy and read the book? Of course, that would require you to read and synthesize something for longer than 5 minutes, fighting the urge to show how smart you are by instantly going to an internet message board to ask for line- by-line bibliographical references.

The fact that this community holds itself in such esteem is hilarious. Reddit redux.

<comment><USER13> Have an upvote. HN comments have long been a ghetto of a different kind. They're as constructive as YouTube comments, only instead of "ur a fagot", it's all "Not peer-reviewed, replicated, statistically rigorous science!"

<comment><USER11> I don't have a problem with opinions that are not based on peer-reviewed, replicated, statistically-rigorous science (not that there's any other kind of it). What I do have a problem with are opinions expressed _as if_ they were scientific opinions, but are in fact thinly-veiled prejudices.

If someone claimed Jews are formed as thieves by their culture because he knows a guy from San Diego whose Jewish clients are always behind on their payment, he'd rightfully be labeled not only as racist, but also as stupid, and with good reason. I see no reason to treat someone who claims, as a proof that people born in a certain period of time are more egotistic than others, the fact that an accountant told him so, any differently. That's not only as insulting as racist pseudo-science, it's as idiotic as racist pseudoscience.

There is probably sufficient truth to find among those as well, perhaps, but in my opinion, it's intellectually lazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And here you are writing this, you dopamine fueled junkie.

This is kind of sad because I use facebook more than anyone and I'm not depressed. Also humans evolve for a reason, if our primeval selves saw us today they would say the same thing.

ADHD isn't real, not everyone in the world can have identical brains, the CT scans and brain scans you use as evidence to prove people have ADHD is nothing more than propaganda fueled by the pharmaceutical industry, to push more pill sales.

What you suffer from is the lack of ability to understand youth, I know, I feel the same way about teens now. Except you took this to a whole new level of hatred and misunderstanding, as to almost call to put them all in camps, take away their phones and get off on them all being distracted while you show them how to live your 'ideal' lifestyle, and preach about what's wrong with them.

Times change, you're getting old and now you're filled with contempt and anger at the fact that humans will adapt to their environments.

This isn't because cell phones and technology. I fail to see any corellation with technology and school shootings.

Maybe we should ban guns, yeah, ban guns, and apples too, I think the shooter had an apple for breakfast.

</comment><comment><USER15> Regarding distraction, may I posit that the author has the causality reversed? What if many people are seeking dopamine, et al, because they're _already_ unhappy? There was a piece on procrastination which suggested that some procrastination is an attempt to treat one's unhappy mood, and it seems to me there are plenty of reasons why Gen Yers might be unhappy.

The economic outlook for many Gen Yers is quite bleak. Despite having attended college, many people end up working retail or otherwise low-wage jobs. After hearing that you're supposed to "follow your dreams" and that all you really need to do is "believe in yourself and you can accomplish anything," it's not unreasonable to imagine why this generation feels left behind or alienated. I know people who blame themselves even though, in one case, their job (environmental ecology) was vaporized by the housing bust.

So they're[0] "entitled" because they want what the consumer-driven economy tells them they deserve, what they've been told to demand from life, and what their parents had. But they ought to be happy with less than the previous generation had because, well, them's the breaks.

I'm sure I'm not the first, I predict Gen Y will become something akin to a lost generation. Sometimes you need to take a shit job to survive, but if you're interested in upward mobility, nobody wants to see shit jobs on your resume, esp not among the professional class.

It's ironic because retail jobs, for instance, _are_ often hard work! However there's little prospect for long-term gain. What's the point in thinking long- term when you're working a job deliberately engineered to make workers replaceable? There's nothing inherently wrong with such a job, but maybe it's not so mysterious wonder why kids seem more mercenary or prefer to live in the moment.

If I had to guess, I'd say this offers some explanation both for popularity of tech and finance. If you can afford a degree & can hack it in those industries, you'll probably do well. If you can't, your prospects (depending on where you live) are considerably more variable.

\---

[0]: I say "they" because I'm somewhere between X and Y. I remember a time before the Internet, ubiquitous digital media, and cellphones, but not before home computers.

</comment><comment><USER16> I am a "generation Y" and I can explain why I am a bit unhappy.

Honestly, I don't believe this shit that much. Sure there may be a lot of people that have a hard time to concentrate and big thoughts about themselves. But nevertheless I think there are more people today than ever before that works hard and still have trouble to pay for themselves.

But that's not me. I have good job security, I have a well paid job for my age group. But my unhappiness doesn't come from the economy or too large thoughts about my self. My unhappiness stems from the human society having a very dark future. Wherever I go and try to preach, no one seems to care. I see no action taken from any political leaders on this very pressing issue of climate change.

Looking at the recent typhoon in the Philippines and knowing that it was pretty much a baby of what is coming if we do not stop our lifestyle is what is making me unhappy. Because in my heart I do not believe that we're going to do anything to stop it from happening.

Knowing all these stuff, and looking at the society just walk it off makes me quite unhappy and I see no reason why I would be the only one.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am still expecting there to be an "Awareness Awareness" month. Are YOU aware? Buy your see-through anklet now.

</comment><comment><USER18> Similar arguments, but with more playful tone and drawings:

[http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies- are-u...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are- unhappy.html)

<comment><USER19> Equally terrible.

The fact that most people, all else being equal, will prefer maximal reward for minimal sacrifice is hardly news. It's nature. When my cats hear a can open at 7:00 am, they rush out and start demanding food. They also sleep 14 hours per day. Is it because they're Generation Z cats (born in early 2013) and the rising generation of felines has a massive sense of entitlement (the kitty world's going to hell / get off my litterbox) or because they have an evolved tendency to maximize reward and minimize caloric expenditure?

I really fucking hate this shit. I hate that the 90% of us who just expect fairness and decency are being lumped together with a few overprivileged assholes (who exist in every society and generation) who harbor unreasonable expectations.

Church's Law: people who complain about a sense of entitlement in others possess it themselves. Boomers who complain about us are really saying, "Why won't these kids slave away for peanuts, just to bask in our awesomeness?" I'm sorry, but if you think a job title means you _deserve_ reverence and sacrifice, well... isn't that the _literal_ definition of entitlement?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Gen X'er here. Not so sure about many of the points of the article, but this one was interesting:

 _The problem is that in twenty to thirty years, when our youngest generation grows up and takes charge of government and business, its members will have grown up using Facebook, prescription drugs or online support groups as their primary coping mechanisms rather than relying on real support groups: biological bonds of friendship and loving relationships._

This dovetails with my recent fascination/great unease at learning that Twitter uses Mechanical Turk (an Amazon service I didn't know much about) to program what appears to be a disposable, no-strings-attached human workforce, using an API, to do some categorization for it (a very clever idea I should say); and with my great unease with companies like IBM wanting to track metrics of every kind about their workforce. As the younger kids begin to assume decisionmaking responsibility, is their acclimation to living in this human/computer ecosystem going to open the floodgates to full-on human "programming" (to give the dystopian edge-case a name)? Are computers and the developers and statisticians programming them going to invade every corner of our lives?

Consider OkCupid (a fine Web site). Their algorithms are important for selecting possible matches. How much trust are we putting in those algorithms and in the implementation? These map-reduce jobs (or whatever they use) are now programming to some extent the reproduction of a portion of society. Are we going to see this trend go off the charts?

<comment><USER21> Lets take the Okcupid anecdote out for a ride. I'd say, from personal experience of myself, friends, and Okcupid's old blog posts, that these algo's do a piss poor job [1]. Not because the algo is bad, but because the person at the top is a capitalist. Their job is to maximize profits, not to get people together. Additionally, people are not honest in their profiles. So you get a case of 'shit in, shit out' for the algos. Also, men in particular, are blind to anything but the face[2]. Still, more and more people are meeting online and staying together. In fact, the divorce rates seem to be lower for online meetings[3], 6% vs. 8% for traditional meetings.

Ok, stats and anecdotes aside, this is straight creepy to me. I agree with you, it seems that the programmer is becoming the only real job left. If some dating algo can do a better job than yourself ever could, the only logical choice is to use that algo. But, dammit, its so freaking sterile to me! Yeah, I am old fashioned here, but having a computer say that I am a better match and will have, statistically, a better life with $person is terrible. I have no control of my life then! This person that I might have children with was not chosen by me. Rather, I chose to reject the algo or roll the dice again.

A recent video produced by "A studio on Fuxing Road" contrasts the Brittish, US, and Chinese election systems[4]. The piece is very pro communist. It glorifies the system of paperwork that insures good governance of China and says this is cheaper and better than the way the US does it. To me, it's bullshit. Even if the 'algo' they used worked and was not corrupt, hell, even if it worked better than democracy, it's still Bullshit. I have a right to say to whom I give my consent to govern me. Everyone has that right. Even if the 'algo' get better than I can ever be, I have to give consent explicitly. I have to know and be informed. I can't stand just rolling over to have the 'algos' determine my fate for me. I can see where it is better for society and for the planet that the algos get the control and we just ride along. But I really don't want that.

Sorry, that derailed there. But I hope you see where I was going. I, too, fear that the programmer, in their data driven wisdom, will step too far.

[1]Unfortunately, offline now: [http://contently.com/strategist/2013/08/19/whatever- happened...](http://contently.com/strategist/2013/08/19/whatever-happened-to- okcupids-oktrends-spoiler-alert-its-coming-back/#!r1LMZ) [2][http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-i-learned-from-worst- on...](http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-i-learned-from-worst-online- dating-profile-ever/) [3][http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/31/1222447110](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/31/1222447110) [4][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M734o_17H_A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M734o_17H_A)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is this fiction?

</comment><comment><USER23> Don't we need dopamine to just about anything? What is this belief amongst people that whatever they feel in their body is anything other than just chemicals?

</comment><comment><USER24> Dopamine my ass. They are simply spending more time doing what makes them happy over doing what others perceive is good for them.

</comment><comment><USER25> This article is utter rubbish :)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is terrible analysis.

 _"Don't let people get things from you if they aren't willing to compensate you for it," goes the thinking._

What the fuck is wrong with that? Why should anyone give their all (in the workplace) to someone who doesn't value them? Yes, for practical reasons, you should probably obey laws and basic courtesy without expecting compensation-- not littering is just what you're supposed to do, a part of the implicit social contract is using public spaces. But if someone's asking for you to commit serious energy or favor, you better make sure you're doing it for someone who values you. Otherwise, you're wasting your energy, and that's quite finite.

 _Gen X, growing up before the Internet, interpreted that lesson as putting your head down and getting to work._

Really? 20 years ago, the reputation (undeserved) of Gen X was that it was a lazy, shiftless, loser generation. Now that they're older and have proven themselves, their reputation has improved somewhat. Oh, and every generation for the past 50 years (maybe longer?) has been called a "Me, Me, Me Generation" when it was young.

 _First is a gross misunderstanding that things like success, money or happiness come instantly._

I blame that on the age discrimination culture in most careers (if you're not at level X by age Y, you're a perma-loser) and, in tech, we see that the get- big-or-die insanity comes from the VCs, not founders. Most Gen-Y's/Millennials would be happy to tread water and _thrilled_ to get rich slowly by, say, starting from a solid base, working hard, and improving their pay at 10-20% per year.

The impatience comes from the shitty time pressure imposed by age discrimination, volatile housing costs, and the fact that it's almost irresponsible to have children given the increasing importance of connections and the (directly related) obscene expense and competitiveness in educational positioning-- that now begins before grad school.

 _So if we take the life and death part away, why would we think that we can do our work, check our phones, write a paragraph, send a text, write another paragraph, send another text, without the same damage to our ability to concentrate? Generation Y thinks that, because they have grown up with all these technologies, they are better at multitasking. I would venture to argue they are not better at multitasking._

First of all, I know that I (and most people) am generally terrible at multitasking. There are specific kinds of multitasking at which people can perform (coming up with creative ideas while walking and listening to music) but, in general, context switches are damaging. I think this issue is environmental: open-plan offices, constant interruptions, and a social climate that just expects high availability. It's not one generation's fault; it's just the way people are becoming.

 _Cigarettes are out. Social media is in. It's the drug of the twenty-first century. (At least people who smoke stand outside together.)_

Silly. When smoking was at its peak it was socially acceptable to do it indoors. What, you think fucking Don Draper is going to stand out in the fucking cold of a Manhattan wind-tunnel January?

 _Where alcohol replaced trusting relationships as a coping mechanism for teenagers who grew up to be alcoholics, so too are the positive affirmations we get from social media and the virtual relationships we maintain replacing real trusting relationships as coping mechanisms._

Alcohol was (and is) used as a low-grade anxiolytic, which it is in low doses for people without a tolerance, that helps people overcome the social anxiety produced cognitive dissonance of a hypercompetitive culture. (Modern medicine offers superior anxiolytics, but those don't target social anxiety nearly as well, and physicians frown, for good reason, on recreational use of them. The most powerful non-Rx anxiolytic is probably kava, which makes you sleepy more than sociable. Anyway...)

 _I kept meeting amazing, wonderful, smart, driven and optimistic Gen Yers who were either disillusioned with their entry-level jobs or quitting to find a new job that will "allow me to make an impact in the world," discounting the time and energy that is required to do it._

Or they were getting fired/laid-off for reasons that weren't their fault and (well taught by their Boomer parents) spinning it to sound like it was by their choice, since young people are better to appear flighty (it's expected of them) than to suffer the status hit of an involuntary termination. There's more than meets the eye in this sort of thing.

 _What they seem to fail to notice, however, is the mountain._

Alternative theory: there are plenty of Gen-Yers scaling that mountain. However, since the eldest in that generation are only in their early 30s, none of those have had any prominence because they're still working their way up. Instead, it's the lifted pieces of shit like Evan Spiegel and Lucas Duplan getting the attention. Generations always put an unrepresentative foot forward first, because the "successes" are (with very few exceptions) manufactured by their elders.

 _According to a 2013 study by the Centers for Disease Control, suicide rates among Baby Boomers rose nearly 30 percent during the past decade, making suicide one of the leading causes of death in that age group, behind only cancer and heart disease. The biggest jump in suicides was among men in their fifties — this age group experienced a whopping 50 percent increase. With the increase of suicides among Boomers, more people now die of suicide than from car accidents._

Cars and roads are becoming safer (so the "car accident" comparison is not all bad news). Age discrimination is hitting single-income older (50-65) men the hardest right now, so that explains a bit of it. That and health problems explain most of the suicides, I'd bet. Also, while teenage girls may have the highest suicide attempt rate, men over 50 have always had the highest suicide completion rate.

 _The problem is that in twenty to thirty years, when our youngest generation grows up and takes charge of government and business, its members will have grown up using Facebook, prescription drugs or online support groups as their primary coping mechanisms rather than relying on real support groups: biological bonds of friendship and loving relationships._

Give me a break. This is ludicrous junk science. Most people using "prescription drugs" need them, and people get tired of Facebook fake friendship after, I don't know, two or three years. (And there are people for whom Facebook provides a real benefit; by age 60, most of your friends live far away from you, and online contact is better than what was common before the Internet-- dropping off completely.)

 _In 1960, the number of notable school shootings was one. In the 1980s there were 27. The 1990s saw 58 school shootings, and from 2000 until 2012 there were 102 school shootings._

First, those events are getting more coverage now. It's worldwide. If something fucked-up happens in Colorado or Connecticut or Norway or Japan, the world will know about it. It seems like violence is becoming more common, but all evidence suggests the reverse. (Also, the worst school massacres aren't perpetrated by school students-- see: Bath, Beslan, Newtown-- but by older people.) School shootings are horrible, but in the late 1960s, Americans started worrying about _the fucking draft_ as the Vietnam War ramped up. Does anyone really think that _Facebook_ is going to cause more "antisocial behavior" than an illegal and demoralizing war in Vietnam, into which people were sent involuntarily? I really doubt that.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's no surprise that Baby Boomers are a disaster in every way possible; after all, they were the spoiled children of the victors in a devastating war.

However, look to their parents and you may have some sympathy for the boomers. The Boomers were born in the 1940s to people born in the 1910-1920s period when social mores evaporated, the "Jazz Age" took over, and people basically became vainglorious self-important drama queens.

"I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited — they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission."

That's a fairly brutal and accurate condemnation of that generation and its social mores. It's worth noting that many of them, especially the East Coast elites, went on to become Communists.

</comment><comment><USER27> Generation X dropped the ball, which is too painful to admit, so now they blame Generation Y instead.

<comment><USER19> No one dropped any fucking ball. The failings of society are deliberate. Housing bubble? Consumer credit replacing Fordist/Keynesian wage increases? Tuition catastrophe? Those "incompetents" who make health insurance innavigable? The increasing social and economic distance between rich and poor? All intentional. It's the Haves becoming Have-it-Alls at the expense of the Have-Littles and the Have-Nots.

<comment><USER27> I'm not claiming it wasn't intentional. I'm saying that generation X either played along or didn't do anything about it.</comment></comment></comment>


Hundreds of 'pink slime' local news outlets are distributing algorithmic stories - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/hundreds-of-pink-slime-local-news-outlets-are-distributing-algorithmic-stories-conservative-talking-points.php <comment><USER2> There's nothing illegal about this, right? So currently, this one guy Brian Timpone is using his wealth to invest in auto-generated stories which have the potential for massive persuasion in any vote, all 100% legally, and no one will know the difference (Except those who read this CJR report).

God I love this country!

/s

<comment><USER2> I am mistaken. It appears it _is_ illegal, but the justice system does not care, as the case highlighted in the article "was dismissed." From the article:

The extent to which Locality Labs was involved in the business of LGIS and Newsinator is highlighted in an FEC lawsuit, filed for violating the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 by "re-publishing campaign materials in a format designed to look like local community papers." The respondents included the obvious suspects: the campaign (Khouri for Congress), the PAC (Liberty Principles), and LGIS (the company publishing the material). In addition, it also included Locality Labs. These entities were charged with violating the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 by "re-publishing campaign materials in a format designed to look like local community papers." The details of the lawsuit further stipulate that LGIS "contracts with various entities, including Locality Labs […], to prepare content for publications" including providing "local and state news in certain geographical areas in Illinois." LGIS, however, has full editorial control. The lawsuit was dismissed in July 2019.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So the digital equivalent of Sinclair Broadcast Group and their "must run" local TV conservative propaganda pieces masquerading as "news?"</comment>


Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour - <AUTHOR> http://www.scalescale.com/rolling-your-own-cdn-build-a-3-continent-cdn-for-25-in-1-hour/ <comment><USER3> Nice. For tutorials like this it would be nice to see more details on the "how" of each step. For example:

"We setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..."

That's great, but it would be nice to see:

"Using the geodns web-based configuration tool, we setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..."

or

"Running <insert full command line here including tool and all options used here> on <insert environment here>, we setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..."

or

"By editing /etc/<file> on the <some environment>, we setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..."

In other words specifics are always really great to include.

But still this was a really great writeup, not just for the overview it gives of one lightweight approach but for the comments it has kicked off.

<comment><USER4> I think Genius and DigitalOcean = a match made in heaven. The quality would go from "the best" to "untouchable", if the comments were value adding. Imagine being able to dive deeper into any piece of the tutorial you wanted.

<comment><USER5> not to sound like a n00b, but what is Genius in your context?

<comment><USER6> I think he means Genius the company (formerly RapGenius) which annotates the web. ([http://genius.com/](http://genius.com/))

<comment><USER5> oh ok thanks, I thought that, but I was also thinking maybe it was some tech stack like a docker container for a moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd recommend CloudFlare if you want AnyCast geo-DNS, and a free CDN. We don't charge for bandwidth or our DNS service.

Disclosure: yes, I work at CloudFlare but the previous details are simply facts.

<comment><USER8> Do you have a link to CloudFlare geo-DNS? I have multiple servers in multiple parts of the world, and didn't know that Cloudflare supported that.

<comment><USER7> CloudFlare uses AnyCast. We'll route any incoming requests to the nearest data center automatically. [http://blog.cloudflare.com/a-brief-anycast- primer](http://blog.cloudflare.com/a-brief-anycast-primer) No additional configuration required.

If you're referring to making different origin calls based on the geographic region -- such as when we go back to your origin for a request hitting our LAX data center if you happen to have an origin near LAX we'd use that origin specifically versus your other origin which might be located in let's say LHR. We currently only support that functionality for our higher end enterprise contracts. The functionality will likely to be available for other plan levels in the future though.

<comment><USER9> anycast does not route to the geographically nearest datacenter but the topologically nearest. anycast is great, but it isn't magic.

I get it: you have marketing folks that probably specifically told you not to delve into the details but let's face it..."anycast routes it to the nearest datacenter automatically!" isn't completely true.

<comment><USER10> Surely topologically closest is most often what you want anyway?

<comment><USER9> sure, 80-90% of the time you get exactly what you want. but depending on your application and use-case, 10% can be a deal breaker of sorts.

not that Geo location from notoriously inaccurate whois data is any better.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, if you're only controlling one side of the conversation you just have to deal with the limitations. We use a lot of data from RUM measurements to further tune things.

That being said, if you control both sides you can do some better stuff (ie: Aspera, Netflix clients, etc) you can really ensure accuracy. Please feel free to post any good links to this stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> rolling your CDN on VPS instances isn't exactly cost-effective, and is probably more of an exercise for fun than anything else. Unless you need features out of your CDN that you can't get from existing CDN providers, I don't really see the point.

also kind of unusual that this blog post is by the president of MaxCDN.

<comment><USER12> Actually, with DigitalOcean, you get quite a lot of bandwidth for the price. Additionally, their transfer limits are high (1TB for the $5 instances), and overage is only $0.02/GB. If you combine this with something like Route 53's anycast latency-routed DNS, it can work very well.

<comment><USER13> with DigitalOcean they ask you do not run a CDN: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/do-you- have...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/do-you-have-a-fair- usage-policy-for-bandwidth)

<comment><USER14> I'm assuming that's a paid CDN with clients like CloudFlare or Akamai, not you distributing your website to multiple datacenters in order to serve more clients faster. If you happen to use CDN like DNS features to route the client to the closest Digital Ocean datacenter, you're probably in the clear.

<comment><USER13> Good point. I wonder if they meant "we ask you don't run a CDN _service_" rather than just a CDN for your website.

Afterall, what is the difference between serving assets out of your webserver

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm more than a little bit concerned that the article doesn't point out the serious risk of running a single DNS server for the records.

I get that they're trying to keep things simple for their demo, but unsuspecting folks following this guide are in for quite a shock when their GeoDNS is taken out by a single physical server fault.

<comment><AUTHOR> added this to the article in the "Todo" section. thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER16> In similar efforts, I also really enjoyed the slides from talk at DNS OARC 2014 about Anycast on a shoe string:

[http://www.slideshare.net/natmorris/anycast-on-a-shoe- string](http://www.slideshare.net/natmorris/anycast-on-a-shoe-string)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is similar to the process I used to build [http://gcdn.org/](http://gcdn.org/) which I and a few clients + friends use on multiple projects. We used to use RR but GeoDNS has proven to be awesome and reliable. Full NS control makes it easier to do rolling upgrades or maintenance too. Excellent write up.

More notes on GeoDNS [http://edoceo.com/howto/geodns](http://edoceo.com/howto/geodns)

<comment><USER18> This returns a 404-not found for me:

[https://gcdn.org/jquery/1.8.0/jquery.js](https://gcdn.org/jquery/1.8.0/jquery.js)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would highly recommend Varnish using S3 as a backend origin. Add to that a few 100TB.com dedicated server and you have an extremely cheap CDN with pretty decent bandwidth and minimal maintenance.

CDNs have the advantage that they control more of the stack so can do more precise routing and have more edge nodes in more places. However, under the right circumstances, you can take the above quite far before a real CDN becomes necessary.

<comment><USER20> 100TB.com specifically forbids using their service to create a CDN in their ToS[0].

        9. Acceptable Use/Illegal Activity

        d. We strive to maintain a high level of service, and a lot of
        customers depend on our high standards of quality. As such, we
        will not provide Services to those that are using our Services
        for:

        vii Using the Services for a content delivery network or content
        distribution network (CDN). An authorized CDN network offered
        through 100TB is accepted. Special requests to use the Services
        to run an unauthorized CDN network may be approved on a case-
        by-case basis. Failure to comply with this policy will result
        in termination of this TOS, and you will not receive a refund
        of the Fees.

[0]: [http://www.100tb.com/tos.php](http://www.100tb.com/tos.php)

<comment><USER21> people forget the story of simplecdn

<comment><USER19> Just looked this up. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Now with libcloud ([http://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/compute/drivers/](http://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/compute/drivers/)) you can use multiple platforms in order to get all continents represented.

Including Africa ([http://kili.io](http://kili.io)) where I'm at.

<comment><AUTHOR> has anyone ever heard about these guys in South Africa: [http://www.teraco.co.za/](http://www.teraco.co.za/)? Any other recommendations for Africa and South Africa?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm wondering if it would be useful to plug groupcache into this. It's what Google uses for serving downloads (e.g., Chrome downloads). Inherently distributed and self-balancing. I might give that a try.

<comment><USER24> Looks promising, but might need to add Doozer to the stack as groupcache has an issue with maintaining a list of peers where the cached data is distributed. Definitely worth looking into though.

[https://github.com/ha/doozerd](https://github.com/ha/doozerd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Reminds me of this article about hosting a CDN on digitalocean for the dash documentation software.

[http://blog.kapeli.com/a-poor-mans-cdn](http://blog.kapeli.com/a-poor-mans- cdn)

<comment><AUTHOR> cool - <USER2>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Definitely nice to see a real-world example of how to use Docker.

<comment><AUTHOR> woot woot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Cool article for understanding the basics of a CDN. What sort of page load improvement can one get by adding geographically distributed servers?

<comment><AUTHOR> it can be quite a lot. you can test using a CDN or a setup like this and the tools over at www.webpagetest.org (from Patrick Meehan - who is awesome) from different locations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wouldn't it be better on Linode? Since they have wider selection of PoP. But i wonder if the port speed would be a problem.

</comment><comment><USER29> Thanks for sharing. Note that there's a typo in the link to Ewan's github profile (should start with https, not ttps).

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. will get it fixed shortly. this wasn't really scheduled for prime time but started taking off. appreciate the feedback!

<comment><USER30> "This wasn't really scheduled for prime time, but started taking off"

:) You submitted the link to HN and that comment makes it seem like the post accidentally took off!

<comment><AUTHOR> itchy trigger finger :-) didn't expect people to respond so well on a Sunday.

<comment><USER30> Just messing! :) Cheers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why is this page blocked by my UK work network?

<comment><USER32> The people doing the blocking can probably better answer that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> or you know, if your concern is cost, go with cdn.net and pay as you go for a kickass global cdn network

full disclosure, I have no business or personal connection to them

<comment><USER32> There's 6TB of bandwidth built into this home rolled solution. That's going to cost at least $350 at cdn.net.

<comment><USER33> you're comparing apples to oranges

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Excellent tut!

</comment><comment><USER35> that's awesome +Chris</comment>


There are things more interesting than people - <AUTHOR> https://lithub.com/richard-powers-there-are-things-more-interesting-than-people/ <comment><USER2> > Richard Powers: There Are Things More Interesting Than People

>Richard Powers hates the hulking white Chevy Silverado pickup he's driving. He apologizes after picking me up at the airport in Knoxville, Tennessee, on a cool evening in early April, that his Chevy Volt, an electric hybrid, is in the shop, and he has to maneuver this beast, with its 20 miles to the gallon, across winding country roads. He's pretty sure the service-department guy at the Chevy dealer, having identified Powers as a treehugger, is still grinning at loaning him a four-by-four. I laugh off Powers' apology, knowing he's a good environmentalist, but am a little concerned when he veers into the opposing lane. "Holy, crap, sorry about that," he says, nervously correcting an oversteer, as an oncoming truck whizzes by us.

>A few miles from Powers' home in the Smoky Mountain foothills, we stop at a scenic overlook. Powers strikes up a conversation with a Tennessee old-timer, who's standing beside an immaculately restored 1935 Ford pickup. He opens the engine hood for us. "Ford's early V8," he says. "Look at that flathead," Powers says. "A beauty."

Bringing the subtext to light: the journalist who wrote this piece disagrees with the assertion "there are things more interesting than people". He then goes about in advancing this view in a variety of ways:

1\. He writes in a way so that the most interesting subject in his article is a person.

2\. He creates negative emotions at the start of the article so as to emotionally color how people will read the tamer, more objective rest of the article.

3\. He shares his (negative) personal experiences with the interviewee so as to both create a sense of sympathy for the journalist and a sense of animosity towards the interviewee. That is, he brings up unrelated information so as to bolster his main subtextual argument.

Among other ways. I leave their spotting as an exercise for the reader.

<comment><USER3> An ingenious thesis but I'm not at all convinced. In particular, I don't see anything there that looks like the journalist is trying to provoke "a sense of animosity towards the interviewee".

Let's take the bit you quote. The first thing we learn about Powers, after the fact that he doesn't like the car he's driving, is that he (1) took the trouble to pick the journalist up from the airport, and then (2) apologized to the journalist for something minor that wasn't even his fault, (3) in a humourous way. We're told that Powers is "a good environmentalist". Most of us, especially readers of this sort of thing, are likely to feel good about that, but it might suggest a certain sanctimoniousness and car-hostility ... so the next thing we get to see is Powers appreciating a fine old motor vehicle, and making friendly conversation with his neighbours in the process.

I'm really not seeing what's meant to make me feel a sense of animosity here.

Here's another paragraph from the article, pretty much the only one that's wholly occupied with description of Powers.

"Powers may strike dissonant notes about his novels' public image, but in conversation he never resorts to fanfare. Still charmingly lanky at 60, with a boyish face just starting to pay a debt to aging, he articulates his views with an intelligence so free of self-importance that you wonder if there's something wrong with his wiring. He listens patiently and respectfully, then dazzles with quiet authority."

Charming. Youthful. Intelligent. Humble. Patient. Respectful. Dazzling. Authoritative. I guess you might describe someone that way if you were hoping to make your audience hate them _out of jealousy_ , but I really don't get that impression from the article.

Pretty much everything else there seems to me like it puts Powers in a positive light, too.

So I can kinda buy claim 1 and maybe claim 2. Claim 3, though? Not so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That the world exists only to satiate our appetites is practically a founding doctrine of consumerism. That kind of "human exceptionalism" actually degrades man and reduces him to a mere consumer and then corrupts him and renders him an obsessive, exploitative, perverse, and disordered creature, a voracious idiot and a pathetic disgrace. If you want to live the good life, you must respect human nature and its inherent end(s). Dismiss ends, and not only do human beings unravel and become unintelligible, but so does everything in existence. No bespoke delusion engineering here.

<comment><USER5> Opposite of Epicurus' philosophy huh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> And yet this article is about 75% human interest fluff and 25% substance.

</comment><comment><USER7> A point I agree with, though the article very much focused on people instead of the interesting bits.

Reminds me of when people criticize some sci-fi works for lacking in character development. My default response is: almost _every other literary genre_ is about character development. I read sci-fi _precisely_ because it's about ideas, about things more important than how people feel about each other. If I wanted to experience more of the interpersonal drama, I'd pick up a romance novel instead. Alas, I see enough of that in the real life.

<comment><USER8> I think that in a lot of Sci-fi the people still play a critical role in the story, alongside the ideas. Not all sci-fi stories are about the ideas. They can often contain how the ideas impact people, how people use the ideas to shape their world and so on.

<comment><USER7> I'm fine with that. I _like_ people. I guess my main objection is against critics arguing sci-fi should look like regular old human story, but with sci- fi flavour. For me, the setting is an important part of the story, not just some irrelevant background styling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It was only last night that I was thinking, assuming the eventuality of the emergence of a self-sustaining super-intelligance (doesn't matter whether it takes form a hybrid long living cyborg race or not ), what justifications would it have to keep around the human race besides the kind of empathy that drives humans to conservation for things whose absence would not affect the ecology? (IOW, is the only way a hypothetical superior lifeform will consider letting human exist be based on the the existence of empathy in the lifeform? Or is there any other rational reason that necessitates keeping us around?)... (IyOW, purely logical, uncaring children of the elite who'd have the benefits of longevity research as well as superior intellect may consider rodent conservation more important than human conservation... aka There possibly are things more interesting than people)

</comment><comment><USER10> I can't help but think that perhaps there is something in brain structure and genetics which creates one class of people focused primarily on people and another class focused primarily on ideas. I couldn't agree more that there are things more interesting than people, but obviously the author wants to sell us on the opposite notion.

</comment><comment><USER11> this is a beautiful piece of writing, thank you for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Was framing 20 mpg as if it were bad supposed to be facetious?

<comment><USER13> In the context of the hybrid that he usually drives, it's pretty bad (about half of the gas-only fuel economy for a Chevy Volt, and about 1/5 of the "MPGe" rating).

<comment><USER12> 20 is almost twice as good as what I apparently get, which I found out with an obd2 reader to be decently less than it's supposed to be, but I don't really mind.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Beautiful chord chart of companies engineers are moving from/to - <AUTHOR> https://netin.co/#filters <comment><USER2> It's difficult to tell from the visualization the direction the employees are moving.</comment>


Mike Arrington's Smartest Move Yet: Bailing On The CrunchPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/mike-arrington-crunchpad-ipad-2010-2

<comment><USER2> What a horrible deluded spin on reality.

Arrington didn't bail on anything. He got dumped, and cried foul for it to anyone who would listen.

He _may_ have gotten lucky, but it was blind luck, not skill or insight.</comment>


Zero-Determinant Strategies in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma - <AUTHOR> http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2012/07/zerodeterminant_strategies_in.html

<comment><USER2> This result doesn't seem all that impressive. In the end it's just an example of the advantage of being able to pre-commit to a strategy. The linear algebra parts are entirely unnecessary (although interesting).

For example, suppose we're playing the iterated prisoner's dilemma. I pre- commit to a strategy: if you've defected in the last 5 games I will always defect, otherwise I will defect unless I haven't cooperated in the last 4 games. In this situation your optimal strategy is to always cooperate, even though I'm taking advantage of you. Punishing me won't change my strategy, I've pre-committed to it. The rational strategy, and the one evolution would eventually settle on, is to always cooperate with me.

I think the main thing that bothers me is how the result is characterized as "theory of mind" beating evolution. As if evolution couldn't stumble on such simple strategies, and pre-commitment had no cost or associated risk of going extinct.

</comment><comment><USER3> How many links must we endure on this topic? People who care will research it and understand what the result is and isn't.

<comment><USER4> This is the first article i've seen that tries to explain the topic. It also is rather deep in not only explaining the paper in question (in a good way, i think), but also comparing it with work of Stewart and Plotkin.

<comment><USER3> This article was linked repeatedly in the comments of the prior posts. But hey, whatever, down vote me to oblivion, about what I've come to expect around here. Sorry for sounding like a dick but I really am sad about how meaningfulness has decayed around here. People expect opinions to be spoon fed to them easily, that's not how it used to be.

<comment><USER4> I didnt vote you down.

That the article was linked in comments is just another indicator it should be submitted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How To: Take Notes Like a Champ - <AUTHOR> http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/836560565/how-to-take-notes-like-a-champ <comment><USER2> This is mind mapping 101, only using an iPad. I've tried any number of mind mapping programs and they've all come a distant second to using a pen and paper (a whiteboard is even better). The one thing that would be better than pen and paper would be if it also did an audio recording at the same time and synced the handwritten notes with the recording (so that you can quickly find the audio that related to a particular part of the map).

This is an incredible killer feature in Microsoft OneNote but I'm not sure how it could work in a non-linear mindmap.

<comment><USER3> There is an iPad app called AudioNote that does what you describe:

[http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/audionote-notepad-voice- recor...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/audionote-notepad-voice- recorder/id369820957?mt=8)

I haven't tried it yet, but I think I'll grab the free version and give it a whirl.

<comment><USER2> That looks pretty interesting. It doesn't seem to give the 2 dimensional space that's needed for mind mapping, but it still looks like a possible alternative for OneNote.</comment></comment></comment>