A new study says services like Uber and Lyft are causing urban traffic woes - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/ride-hailing-sharing-services-uber-lyft-global-cities-traffic-26816575-fff8-44b0-a608-9dd86e8b5a10.html <comment><USER2> I don't understand why this study is receiving so much attention. It's not peer reviewed. It doesn't contain actual data collection (the estimates are all extrapolated in a way the author considers reasonable, not measured data from traffic detectors or surveys). Schaller is not a researcher or engineer, but a consultant mainly working for taxi regulation.

That doesn't mean it's wrong. But I'm surprised the study gets so much press because some guy published something on his personal website.

<comment><USER3> Wow, that's gross. Braess's Paradox says adding more capacity to roads can cause more congestion, I guess the narrative would be 'rip up roads to solve traffic' then? It really makes me sick to my stomach how often 'authorities' lack any background in formal reasoning, and see no need to apply it to decisions for the public welfare.

<comment><USER4> This actually happened:

The Embarcadero in SF was turned into a surface road after the Loma Prieta earthquake permanently damaged it: [http://www.preservenet.com/freeways/FreewaysEmbarcadero.html](http://www.preservenet.com/freeways/FreewaysEmbarcadero.html)

Chonggyecheon, Seoul was restored as a stream after the highway capping it was demolished: [https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2017/09/14/braess- paradox...](https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2017/09/14/braess-paradox-the- cheonggyecheon-restoration-project/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a simple solution to this -- buses!

We don't even need public tax dollars to pay for them. There were plenty of startups that wanted to run "Uber, but with a bus instead of a Car" and they all died because of regulation from the cities.

Hell, Google (and other tech companies) will happily pay for its own buses to reduce VMT, but taking away street parking to add bus stops is political suicide in San Francisco right now.

<comment><USER6> One of the major benefits in some cities of Uber/Lyft over public transportation is not risking interaction with thementally ill, inebriated, panhandlers, or otherwise dangerous people (like the dancers on the NYC subway).

<comment><USER7> Several people (mainly women) have told me that they're afraid to take public transit in the SF Bay Area due to the other riders. I'm not sure how we fix that problem without restricting civil rights in ways that would be unconstitutional and politically unacceptable. It's a real dilemma.

<comment><USER8> You set rules for society and harshly punish people who break them. Look at Singapore.

<comment><USER9> Or you make healthcare and education free-or-nearly-so and set up fantastic social welfare safety nets. Look at swaths of Europe, Taiwan, etc.

Kind of hard to fine someone that doesn't have the money to pay for it. Kind of hard to put a person in jail when the jail is already full of kids with marijuana sentences.

I don't think this "Singapore Solution" would work in the USA.

<comment><USER10> > _...make healthcare and education free-or-nearly-so..._

Free for who?

<comment><USER9> Literally everyone.

Imagine the tax income down the line if every citizen that wanted a high- training-required career could get that career. Imagine the burden reduction on welfare.

<comment><USER11> What about the people who are sub 100 IQ (namely about half the population) who don't really have the capacity to work in a highly trained job?

You seem to just assume if we give people free stuff they will all go get PHD's. That's just simply a fantasy.

<comment><USER9> Or the people that don't want to, don't forget

I didn't say "mandatory higher education," I said "free." It already is free for twelve years so it seems silly to think slapping on another 2-6 would be some massive burden against the expected returns.

For those that don't want it or can't test into it because they literally are too stupid (this is after fixing inequal access to early education), there's no associated cost. They just to to work, same as it was before.

<comment><USER11> > For those that don't want it or can't test into it because they literally > are too stupid (this is after fixing inequal access to early education), > there's no associated cost. They just to to work, same as it was before.

I think you will find the IQ benefits of education itself is not really that large. I could be wrong but it seems like scientists are looking more into diet these days as bigger influencers than quality education.

Which is to say, of course there is contrast between a child who never goes to school and is just left to leisure around the house until they are adults to one that goes to a quality school that are beyond simply a diet but that in western countries, diets could be a bigger reason for poorer socio-economic populations scoring lower on IQ tests.

I think though that you would have to rebalance the culture when it comes to higher education before making it free because in countries like the USA, you already have too many people going to university and then going into non- skilled jobs despite the insane prices.

Lowering the price to free is only going to increase that when many kids see college as an experience more than a critical education for a high end role.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A week ago, at the stop nearest me, the E train uptown was re-routed. The C train had an 18 minute wait (the next one after that -- 19 minutes). The station was somewhere north of 100 degrees F and packed. As the trains were one floor below the turnstiles, these issues were only visible AFTER swiping $3(A) to get into the station. The escalator was broken too, which is fine for me but bad for many others.

Meanwhile, I am already paying one of the highest state and local taxes in the nation. But I'm not complaining about the taxes -- rather, I'm complaining that these dollars don't go very far -- it cost 3.5 BILLION per mile of track(B) because of graft and poor city management.

For those in parts of Brooklyn, looks like the L train will take 15 months to fix. Would anyone take a $100 bet that it finishes on schedule (at 1:1 odds)?

The last time I was in a cab, the driver yelled at me for using an iPhone, accusing me of using Chinese children to assemble them. Somewhat confusingly, he also yelled at me for being Chinese and taking away jobs. I looked up how to report this and it involves showing up in person at a hearing during work hours.

Uber isn't perfect, but banning it doesn't magically fix the subway. Even if the ride takes just as long, at least it's quiet and air-conditioned, and I can read or nap. Rather, Uber's major fault seems to be not greasing the politicans' hands like the medallion industry is. The parent article references the book "The Power Broker" when citing traffic. Funny, because it sure seems that Tammany Hall is still around.

(A) The metro card fare is $2.75, but the machine prevents you from putting in exact change -- only $5 increments -- so anyone who visits town usually wastes some fare.

(B) [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york- subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway- construction-costs.html)

<comment><USER13> >> Uber isn't perfect, but banning it doesn't magically fix the subway.

There's no doubt there are issues with public transit, but letting the rideshare services run rampant, while being effectively subsidized by the taxpayers roads, etc is no solution either.

>> U.S. ridership is surging, he said — up 37% last year, to 2.6 billion passengers, from 2016.

>> It found that, in U.S. cities, 49% to 61% of ride-hailing trips would have not been made at all — or by walking, biking, or public transit.

Given these two notes from the article, Thats alot of extra demand added to road infrastructure. A medallion system makes the ride-share services contribute their share for the increase in wear & tear on infrastructure. Its not perfect, but letting them run wild isnt working either.

<comment><USER14> Ubers and Lyfts pay the $0.25 per gallon New York gas tax, _plus_ sales tax on top of both state and federal gas taxes (tax on a tax), so they are paying for road infrastructure, just like everyone else.

It's important to note that public transit agencies don't pay gas tax, and a large portion of the federal highway fund is diverted to public transit agencies.

<comment><USER15> Gas tax does not go nearly enough of the way to paying for infrastructure. Most road maintenance is paid for by property and income taxes.

$0.25/gallon is peanuts. New York (State) consumed ~135 million barrels of gas last year. That's 1.35 billion dollars of gas taxes. (Less in reality, because some commercial uses are exempt from these taxes, or can deduct them as expenses.)

The NY DOT's maintenance budget, alone is ~$4.5 billion USD. Not to mention another $7 billion earmarked for new construction.

Increase the gas taxes to $2.5/gallon, and then I'll agree that road users, in aggregate, are paying their way, instead of freeriding.

<comment><USER16> Is NY DOT known for frugal and efficient use of funds?

(I don't know, so I'm asking. E.g. MTA is known for the opposite.)

<comment><USER17> MTA has many onerous labor issues that the NYS and NYC DOT don't need to deal with.

They are reasonably efficient stewards of tax dollars. Most of their spending is at least partially federally funded, so they are subject to many layers of audit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I live in Austin, which for a period of time had basically driven out Uber and Lyft with regulation. Then, the Texas state government overruled the city, and Uber and Lyft came back. I can say from personal experience, our traffic did not get the slightest bit better when Uber and Lyft were gone. However, our drunk driving rates did apparently go up.

<comment><USER19> I live in Austin too. The reason you didn't notice much change is that several new services swooped in to fill the gap left by Uber and Lyft. There was even a very popular Facebook group where people (illegally) solicited ride-sharing services.

So, in a sense, ride-sharing never really went away.

<comment><USER11> I don't have a FB account but i use uber so that's just not a solution that everybody would easily be able to jump over to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The "build more roads, people fill them with more cars" is just a symptom of a huge problem that's existed for so long that people can't see it anymore- that there's orders of magnitude more demand for intra-city transport than there is supply. The problem isn't a law of nature; keep giving people more ways to get from A to B and _eventually_ you'll reach the point where you have more routes than people to travel them.

...But, in a car-based society, this won't happen until your entire city is a single level surface of pavement. There is _no way_ to get the required efficiency out of a system where one person usually takes up a full 6'-by-10' lot of street space, and where speed is limited by the inherent dangers of having multi-ton masses of steel and aluminum passing within feet of pedestrians. Self driving cars might up throughput by a factor of two; I'd estimate we need about a factor of a hundred before we can call the problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER21> >> .. when people use a ride-hailing company, they are opting to do so rather than take public transportation, walk or bike. They generally are not choosing between hailing and driving themselves.

This doesn't seem correct to me. If I can ride my bike or walk somewhere, I will do that pretty much every time. The only time I ever consider an Uber or Lyft is if the distance is too far to bike, and I would rather not drive for whatever reason. I know this is just one anecdote, but that seems like quite a bold claim from the article, and a claim that doesn't match up at all with the reality of how I and others I know use the services.

<comment><USER22> You left out "public transportation." There is very strong anecdotal evidence that here in DC a large number of people take Uber where they used to take Metro.

<comment><USER23> Many places, like in California, do not have good public transportation and Uber is the only decent option. That statement in the article is definitely a heavy assumption.

<comment><USER9> The counter argument is that you no longer feel pressure to kick the issue to your congressperson to push for public transit, because a "good enough" solution has been presented (a solution that isn't as good for the environment or city than a bus).

<comment><USER23> Maybe, but perhaps the politicians should automatically look out and plan for the public good instead of needing a line-by-line spec sheet for their job.

<comment><USER9> Now this is a form of optimism I can get behind :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One of the biggest issues that I see is where the cars pull over to pick up / drop off people. They almost always just stop in the middle of streets, double parking. Rarely do they pull over into an empty spot that's safer for them and passengers. This often causes traffic backup, at least in the Boston area.

<comment><USER25> Definitely the same in SF, Uber / Lyft notoriously double park illegally.

<comment><USER26> In SF, I see people double parking everywhere, Uber or not - and I mean _parked_, not idling. My kid's school literally spent 20 minutes last parents night begging people not to do that in front of the school (and it's _still_ a problem).

Going westbound on Golden Gate st around Fillmore is one of the weirdest thing I've ever seen. You can see entire lines of double parked cars with no drivers inside (sometimes on both sides of the road!)

Then you also have the way-too-small MUNI bus stops where the bus has to double park (e.g. along Fulton), the delivery vans and the random dudes waiting for a parking spot to hopefully free up somewhere in the block.

Even without considering Ubers, driving in SF is already a shitshow...

<comment><USER25> FYI many people double park on Golden Gate around Fillmore on Sundays because of church. I don't think it's technically legal but it's not really enforced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not sure if Uber/Lyft put more cars on the road, but I'm sure that Uber and Lyft drivers do things that cause traffic.

Many analyses of traffic have shown that individual drivers can cause huge downstream traffic effects. When you see an Uber driver just stop at a corner at a major intersection, there can be 10-15 cars slowed by having to wait or go around.

Biking around SF has made me very wary of certain car models popular for Uber. If I see a Prius I assume it could stop anywhere at any time.

Even with all that ... These services may still be a net positive. I use them a lot on the weekends and would never be able to get around the city like I do without them.

</comment><comment><USER28> Uber is worse for congestion than someone driving their own car, because in addition to making the same trip, the Uber car also drives considerable distances without a passenger.

<comment><USER29> Not necessarily. People also spend lots of time driving around looking for an empty free on-street parking spot. In some congested cities this can be a sizable proportion of overall traffic.

If the Uber is getting back-to-back trips, they're probably driving more efficiently on average.

<comment><USER30> Every uber trip also frees up a parking spot compared to driving yourself.

<comment><USER29> Also a good point. Parking accounts for double digit percentages of land use in nearly all American cities. It's such a huge waste of space, and the cities would be denser, more walkable, and way more pleasant without it. More info here: [https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/07/12/american-cities- are-d...](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/07/12/american-cities-are-drowning- in-car-storage/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't use ride shares that often, but when I do, it's almost always because I don't want to deal with parking downtown. If ride shares are increasing traffic, it could be that, to some degree, they are turning roads into "living parking lots". Where before my car would be parked at some lot near my destination, now "my car" is a Lyft that is out cruising the streets when I'm not in it.

</comment><comment><USER25> I like the idea of ride sharing but the problem comes when it's abused to the extreme. It's not out of the ordinary for someone to order 3-4 Lyfts on the weekend in a single evening. That is a ton of unnecessary driving to hang out or fulfill the social obligations people have. I sometimes wonder what San Francisco was like before ride sharing. I imagine people would just pick a neighborhood and hang out there.

<comment><USER32> People chose a DD and then drove -- I mean it's not like we need a historian to remember back that far.

<comment><USER25> I have a hard time believing a designated driver would be willing to go to 3-4 different neighborhoods in a night and then be willing to drive everyone to their own home. Who knows, maybe I'm just selfish.

I also wonder if people used to go out on dates and not drink in that scenario? Or would only one person drink? Double dates? Hrmmm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Doesn't link to the study. Why is there no mention of taxis? Clearly if people are ridesharing instead of taking public transit, that's less efficient. But ridesharing is vastly more efficient than how it used to be with taxi hailing. They'd circle the streets looking for fares and there was little to no pooling.

It's highly plausible that people are choosing rideshares over public transit / walking / biking, leading to an overall increase. It's believable. But to truly assess it we need to deduct the old taxi system. With no mention of that and no link to the source study it's hard to tell if they did.

</comment><comment><USER34> Well, I personally believe its true in India. In last 7 years, my time to office has increased from 20 minutes to 35 minutes to now 60+ minutes. The number of vehicles increased a lot but the biggest culprit is Uber and other cab services. These yellow plates (commercial vehicles) cut lanes a lot and make me break at least 15 times each trip just to get a few feets of advantage. And the worst part is other drivers seem to take them as an example and overall road traffic has become rowdier resulting in very high inefficiency.

</comment><comment><USER35> In NYC they cause woes because the public transit system has become a nightmare for those not in Manhattan, a la "The Outer Boroughs". Many Manhattan people barely register that there's an issue, and see more traffic than before. Oh gosh, the traffic is slow going uptown.

If only the trains weren't breaking down, signals weren't needing repair, there wasn't a mid 60 percent on-time rating at present. If only the train service wasn't cut so viciously weekends. If only subways themselves weren't filled with miscreants, behaving rudely by playing music on their phones, bringing bikes, etc. If the subway platforms weren't 100 degrees F during the summer, when the next train is 10 minutes away. If only the buses were an alternative, instead of being beset by slow traffic thanks to bicycle lanes, double parking that's not ticketed, construction vehicles, and parking on both sides of the street.

Then I'd be open to being concerned about the fact that I'm contributing to "traffic congestion" by taking Lyft and Uber (mostly Lyft) about 5x or more a week.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd be interested in reading more studies about this, but anecdotally I feel like this has to be true. I live next door to a large house with 8 college students, and two have them claimed to have ~never~ taken public transit in the city since living here, not ever (they've been here over a year now). When they have a party you can easily count a dozen Ubers rolling up, no one's walking to the train station anymore.

We're one of the most expensive cities in the country, and our public transit system is pretty decent. I commuted using it exclusively for over 10 years.

5 years ago it would be insane to hear a college student say they've never taken a train here. Maybe it's the combination of low Uber prices and high housing expenses? I feel like the local student population has been becoming wealthier (because they have to come from richer families to afford housing)... and Uber pool pricing is generally within $1-2 of a non-discounted trip on a train.

</comment><comment><USER37> Public transportation is totally unreliable at best and unusable at worst in the urban areas of the US. If it takes an hour or two to go anywhere then people are going to opt for something better.

</comment><comment><USER38> VIA is the answer!

        Via is an on-demand transit system that takes multiple
        passengers heading in the same direction and books them
        into a shared vehicle. Think of Via as a bus that's smart
        enough to come when you want it and where you want it...

[https://ridewithvia.com/](https://ridewithvia.com/)

and

[https://www.viavan.com/](https://www.viavan.com/)

<comment><USER39> The problem with this service is it needs tremendous amounts of capital to own all those buses. Is this company really going to raise billions and billions of dollars to own a large enough fleet to make a meaningful difference?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > Urban traffic woes

Isn't this what last mile inevitably does? If a part of town is walkable, it doesn't decrease street traffic; If it's bikeable - or scooterable, it doesn't decrease those vehicles.

Yes, this is induced demand; which is why this information shouldn't be used to make more highways or lanes. Indeed; a large part of the negative traffic impact from rideshare is probably lack of suitable drop off curb space.

</comment><comment><USER41> Uber/Lyft are taxi services. They need to be regulated. The cars need to be marked, have numbers, drivers accountable to the community (not just the passenger), for bad driving.

As a driver who's lived in SF for a long time I've seen first hand the terrible impact these services have had to the city. They clog streets and disregard any and all traffic laws. Just yesterday an Uber driver made a left turn from the middle lane on Hyde street. He backed up traffic as he refused to move until someone let him make his illegal turn. He was the recipient of a lot of honks.

His response? Gave everyone the finger after he finally made his left hand turn. Lovely. He should lose his license, period. In the days before these services existed cab drivers were petrified of getting in trouble. Many Uber/Lyft drivers are modern day lawless pirates.

A modern medallion system driven by traffic/ridership data with as little chance for corruption as possible would be the best answer to these problems. Uber/Lyft as they exist today cannot be allowed to continue if we value quality of life/safety.

<comment><USER42> Meanwhile in Canada..

The situation is exactly the opposite. The taxi licensed taxi cartel have no fear of blocking traffic, speeding, making illegal turns, parking in bus stops or anything else because they are a licensed taxi. They refuse to take any rides that don't suit their plans because there is more demand than taxi licensed so if you need a taxi from downtown to suburban neighborhoods you might wait 2-3 hours until you get a willing driver or just end up taking the bus.

Uber/Lyft drivers on the other hand are very respectfully following the rules of the road because if they cause undue attention someone will report them and they'll be fined, and they don't have the money of the taxi cartel behind them to pay the fine for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> One way to think of this, is that Uber and Lyft are transforming the impetus of parking-pain into car service. People pay money to avoid the hassle of driving and parking. This means that a number of cars will be utilized more, and a number of parking spaces will be utilized less.

The 1st question my wife and I ask with regards to Uber is generally, "Will we be able to park?"

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm confused. Taking Uber or a Lyft, that's like taking a taxi, right? Like someone driving their own car. People who use ride sharing apps are going to be in a car either way, why single out Uber and Lyft? That's like saying people going to work contribute to congestion.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'll be incredibly selfish and simply say, but I am not driving and being frustrated. Uber isn't a ride sharing platform, it's "I don't have to deal with assholes" platform. Also I no longer need to pay for the monthly parking.

</comment><comment><USER46> I love public transit, when I was living in the Minneapolis / Saint Paul area I all most never used ride sharing apps, and used the metro every day to commute. But those services aren't free. The MS/SP system is considered world class but they have a 30% farebox recovery ratio. It costs the public a lot of money to maintain that system.

In Cincinnati, the public transit system is terrible. The buses don't run on schedule, our light rail route is incredibly short. I use ride sharing services here a lot more as a result.

Even if we do move traffic into public transit systems, that isn't going to magically shrink the costs of DOT departments around the nation. We'll just be subsidizing something else.

</comment><comment><USER47> This should not surprise anyone.

As the price of a service decreases, consumption increases. So, we should expect that more people are taking taxi rides that would otherwise commute in different ways (e.g. walking or taking the bus). If we extrapolate to self- driving cars where the cost comes down by about 2/3, it is easy to see a tragedy of the commons situation where roads in major cities are saturated with vehicles.

This is where government intervention is required. This can be done either through limiting vehicle permits (which NYC introduced) or other forms of taxes (e.g. congestion taxes).

</comment><comment><USER48> It's extremely onerous and difficult to own a car in San Francisco (parking situation, street cleaning, meters, lack of reserved and available parking spots) but a bunch of Ubers and Lyft drivers can drive all day in the city causing massive congestion with plenty of drivers who not only don't reside in the city, but aren't even from the Bay Area paying nothing to maintain the roads or congestion or pollution or the fact that they don't know the roads and drive recklessly to maximize the number of rides per hour.

<comment><USER49> Please consult the facts before you post.

All employers within San Francisco pay a large amount of taxes to the city for each employee. Those taxes more than pay for the cost of road use of their employees.

Thank you.

<comment><USER48> Here's the thing though, every employer in the Bay Area pays taxes, but only Uber and Lyft also disproportionately congest streets and add air and noise pollution. It's not proportional whatsoever to the residents of these neighborhoods.

There are solutions which would better fit the problem: congestion pricing for peak hours or non-residents, pollution surcharge for non-EV ride share vehicles, surcharge for non-pool/line rides.

The status quo is to publicize the congestion and pollution and risk and privatize the profits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Yeah, it's a bitch when people can actually get where they want to go in a timely manner. Satisfying that demand might actually put more cars on the road.

</comment><comment><USER51> That's strange because traffic woes existed before Uber and Lyft. Did they cause congestion retroactively?

</comment><comment><USER52> make public transit suck less

<comment><USER53> I hope you meant that in an absolute sense and not a relative sense. Making public transit suck less relative to alternatives by making those alternatives suck more is counterproductive.

<comment><USER52> haha yes, i did mean in an absolute sense

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Don't these ride sharing services in urban centers just cause more people to travel by car? It seems obvious that this would increase congestion.

The only thing it seems likely to reduce is the amount of parking spaces and idle vehicles in storage, less vehicle ownership.

But now everyone, even those without cars or even driver's licenses, are just a smartphone app away from having a car shuttle them around for even the most trivial of distances. When you make something more convenient and accessible, it gets utilized more.

A funny thing about the prospect of self-driving cars: what about the people who used to be in the driver's seats? I suppose some percentage of those will instead be passengers in the future - oops, even more cars on the road!

</comment><comment><USER55> Need more tunnels. Call the Boring Company.</comment>


Arctic fox walks 3,500 km from Norway to Canada - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/02/fantastic-arctic-fox-animal-walks-3500km-from-norway-to-canada <comment><USER2> Suddenly, the theory of early human migration from Europe to North America becomes somewhat less crazy.

<comment><USER3> But still crazy like a fox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The headline is kind of misleading IMO. I knew what it'd be before opening but only because I have prior knowledge.

Svalbard is a smidgen less than 1000km north of mainland Norway.

I don't believe that the Arctic sea ice has reached the mainland in my lifetime and I'm not sure how far back you'd need to go.

<comment><USER5> I dont understand the problem. It seems that the arctic fox did travel the mentioned distance, apparently sea ice was also used as a means of transport. Are you saying that the article is false?

<comment><USER4> I'm saying that the headline would imply to me a fox walking from Norway to Canada.

Svalbard is Norway in the sense that Hawaii is the US. It's true, but the journey is completely different.

It's not too surprising to me that a fox would use the sea ice for transport - it would surprise me to learn that foxes could swim from northern Norway to Svalbard.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Become the Best in the World at Something - <AUTHOR> https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world-at-something-f1b658f93428 <comment><AUTHOR> One nice thing to share here is that a statistical model for success under such conditions is for there to be a collection of independent random variables that _multiply_ to form your overall success: people who lack any particular one of them, x_1 and x_2 = 1000 but x_3 = 0, see the product x_1 x_2 x_3 = 0, below people who have x_1 = 10, x_2 = 10, x_3 = 10.

Taking a logarithm, one gets a sum of independent identically-distributed variables, which then tend to sum to a normal distribution due to the Central Limit Theorem, meaning that success distributions produced by multiplication tend to be log-normal. This was argued by John D. Cook at [1]. Log-normal distributions are interesting because they have a long tail—usually the top people drawn are _way, way_ better than you might have expected; normal populations stick within several standard deviations of the mean but long- tailed ones see remarkable achievers many tens of standard deviations above the mean. This result has been long known for things like wealth and income and other measures of external success. So there is a lot of truth to this idea that, say, if you are a programmer, your time is worse spent on building that extra expertise with things that you are good at, like programming, and better spent on building new expertise with things that you are not good at, like perhaps digital art or negotiation/persuasion or accounting.

[1] [https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/09/29/achievement-is- log...](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/09/29/achievement-is-log-normal/)

<comment><USER3> This changes with the size of the firm you're part of. It's true for _individual_ pursuits like basketball, drawing comics, or entrepreneurship.

But a big corporation gets around a lack of any one critical variable by hiring someone for that variable. So if you're an excellent backend engineer, your time is wasted learning digital art, because _somebody else will be making the artwork_. Effectively the corporation becomes the organism and you become one specialized organelle in them. You're better off increasing your expertise _within that specialty_ than learning other ones - say by firsthand experience with all the ways distributed systems can fail.

The returns to being a top individual producer beat the top returns to being a corporate drones, but the _average_ returns are significantly worse (because the big corporation benefits from being able to swap out individual motivated actors to plug deficiencies rather than having to develop skills itself), so depending on your risk tolerance, this may or may not be a good strategy.

<comment><USER4> > _So if you 're an excellent backend engineer, your time is wasted learning > digital art, because somebody else will be making the artwork._

Tangentially, as a backend engineer, I've had to tell the people who made the digital art that the additional icon they supplied me wasn't quite the same color as the existing ones it was supposed to match and also looked misaligned because it didn't follow the same geometrical conventions.

So I wish what you're saying were true, but it isn't necessarily. This being a tangent, I'm not necessarily looking for a moral to the story here, but maybe it's something about having a certain minimum competence in an area so you can be sure you're working effectively with others.

(EDIT: What is a backend engineer doing with an icon at all? Sticking the URL where it's hosted into a config file and modifying the logic so that it shows up (or doesn't) as appropriate, then testing that by looking at the UI and seeing art that looks wrong.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An aside, but basketball is probably not the best example. A large amount of men 7ft tall or more have played in the NBA. over 17%. So basketball many of them have achieved elite height not skill.

[http://www.truthaboutit.net/2012/05/true-or-false-half-of- al...](http://www.truthaboutit.net/2012/05/true-or-false-half-of- all-7-footers-are-in-the-nba.html)

<comment><USER6> About 2800 people in the world are 7 feet tall or taller. 0.000038%.

Half are women. 300/400 would be in the age range at anytime. If 10% play basketball. That's only 40.

<comment><USER7> > There are 43 players in the National Basketball Association that are at > least seven feet tall. Fourteen of those players are seven-foot-one or > taller.

[https://gooddeedseats.com/tallest-players-of-every-nba- team-...](https://gooddeedseats.com/tallest-players-of-every-nba-team- heights/)

<comment><USER6> Interesting. I wonder how many all-stars vs bottom feeders. Sevenfooters need to rebound/block sometimes shoot but rarely are they the best of the best and suffer from more health issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sport is going this way. There's a growing body of evidence that early specialization produces less champions. Kids are encouraged to participate in other sports well into their teen years. Less burn out, lower injuries and this approach creates more athletes that can be described as "naturals". They have skills and abilities that seem magical and unexpected.

<comment><USER9> Some people are actually legit naturals though. There was this one kid I knew that didn't play sports growing up, but if you gave him a basketball in gym class you could nail every 3 pointer. He was asked to come out to compete in an important track meet because he was known to be fast and he ran a 400m hurdles race in 53 seconds with the worst possible form. For reference, in the men's World Championships earlier in the month the winner ran 47.4 with most others finishing before 49. He just didn't care for sports though ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Makes me wonder who else is out there with this kind of talent and what kind of records could be broken/made if they tried or had the opportunity.

<comment><USER10> You also have the case where natural ability is a hindrance. If the kid is used to not having to work at a particular sport, they will have trouble when they get to a point that they have to involve deliberate practice in order to get beyond their current level (something they never had to do before).

<comment><USER11> This applies to academics as well. A lot of people have stories of being the best in their class/school at something, but when they get to college they are average, or even below average because they never had to deliberately study.

<comment><USER12> I think this is a serious issue for intelligent people.

The curriculum is tailored towards people of average intelligence, so if you are one, two, or three standard deviations above that, you won't be under pressure to develop a work ethic because you can get good grades without it.

Of course, if your intelligence is above average, then you probably are interested in a career that attracts other intelligent people.

And then you are in a serious trouble, because now you are in an environment where everyone is of similar intelligence, so you don't have your competitive advantage anymore, plus some people have a work ethic that you lack.

And even if you are still a standard deviation above most people, there are likely other people who are at the same level as you, and they might have a work ethic.

I think this is something that people who have intelligent children need to pay attention to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think there is yet another path: hyper specialization in one ludicrously specific niche no one else cares about or has good reason for not getting into.

If you spend 10k hours perfecting something no one else even thought of trying, chances are you'll be the best in the world at it.

<comment><USER12> Can you give a specific example, though?

Because generally, no competition means no demand, so while it might be satisfying to be best in the world at something, an obscure skill might not translate into financial success.

<comment><USER14> In the world of signal processing there are a lot of technical areas that are super important/lucrative but few people have expertise in them. Often it takes not only technical competence but years of experience.

To make this example even more specific, maybe you are good at writing fast decoding algorithms for new telecom standards.

There is also a lot of now low-hanging fruit in compressed sensing for the mathletes/computer people who know what that's about.

Edit: Actually, just learn math if you're looking to get ahead and have an advantage over many people. This advice doesn't make for the best blogpost or YouTube video but it's effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Two of my greatest loves are tennis and photography. I've been playing tennis for over 20 years (nearly a decade competitively) and I started taking photography seriously about 7 years ago. In both of these fields, especially tennis, I'm comfortable enough where I can teach it to just about anyone.

In the first few years of doing both, there were plenty of times where I was intimidated by better people, where I'd ask myself "why can't I be more like X?"

At some point, there came a time when I became _comfortable_ enough in my abilities so that I no longer think that way. All in all I think I'm an excellent tennis player and that I take great photos. So what if Alice is a better tennis player than me? So what if Bob takes better photographs?

If anything, and this is especially true with photography, whenever I come across a better person I try to take away something from their skills that can use to improve myself.

</comment><comment><USER16> This seems to be an elaboration/rediscovery/variant of something Scott Adams[1] said a while ago:

[https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car...](https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career- advice.html)

Decent advice, imho.

[1] Note, this does not constitute an endorsement of Scott's political views.

<comment><USER17> Yep, I quote him in the article as such! "The solution is skill stacking, a concept popularized by Scott Adams."

<comment><USER18> I loved the article. I'll be sharing it. The visualizations make it much more digestable and inspirational. Also, the link you posted to Adams' blog has a messed up cert or something. I'm on Firefox on Android. I'll reach out to him as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a fan of tennis, I'm not a very good player though, and never will be - <USER2> don't want to play 12 hours a day. I've watched Federer many times and a couple of take aways I've seen from watching him - practice every day, if you're losing, just keep going, the other guy will eventually give up or make a mistake, or you'll lose today, the other guy will eventually give up.

I really think this is the only way to be the best at something - do it every day, some days you'll fail, but if you keep going, eventually you'll have so much expertise you'll wake up one day and be the best, or close enough.

The trouble is no one really wants to do this, all Federer does is tennis, he must love it, every day he gets up and plays tennis. Most people will stop at good enough though.

If Federer played basketball, would he be the best? probably not, so thats the other thing - pick something your body and brain is built for, and do it every day.

If there were any short cuts then the best would use them any way and add them to their arsenal, so any short cuts will be short lived.

I think PG said something the same about start ups - they don't fail the founders just stop.

I think this ties in with why so many start ups are made by rich kids, they can afford not to stop, everyone else has to stop at some point and get a job.

<comment><USER20> I concur, it also reminds me of this famous quote : "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. " —Aristotle.

<comment><USER19> I always find it surprising when so much of what we think and talk about today is the same thing that people thought and talked about a couple of thousand years ago, very little about people has changed.

<comment><USER21> See, I would be surprised if it was the other way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If the goal is to be the best in the world for the sake of being the best in the world at something, just pick something really obscure.

I'm the best in the world a tactical boomerang juggling in Breath of the Wild. A gamer with pro-level skills could probably show me up with a few hours practice, but until someone decides to do that, I'm the best.

<comment><USER23> I think the goal is to be best in the world at something that society will reward, that will enable you provide it with something it wants that it doesn't know how to get or doesn't know it wants yet.

In your case, making entertaining videos of popular games is a pretty profitable niche.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I know I'm not the best at anything I do, but when combined the overlap makes a niche for me that has so far worked out well. Pure luck frankly.

However that is _only_ because the skills I'm thinking of aren't in themselves hugely common. I'm not mega skilled at them, but the relative rarity of some means the overlap really is quite small - fortunately!

It's not going to be good advice if your key skills are, say selling things and being super knowledgable about cars. Oh look, an obvious union but that combination is popular already. So I'd say start by becoming good at a couple niche skills and then see where you end up.

</comment><comment><USER25> That sounds like a common idea the Dilbert author mentions from time to time.

He could draw a little, and he knew about the business world a little, but not many people could combine those things -- and be a business cartoonist.

<comment><USER26> He also started kind of early and managed to keep it going. Starting early is extremely important for...pretty much everything.

<comment><USER27> As is keeping it going.

<comment><USER26> Yes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> And here I was, expecting to read a 'hypothetical' plan to assassinate all one's competition... maybe it's time to put _The Prince_ down.

<comment><USER29> That's how masters (old timers) rowing seems to work. You just wait for whoever is faster to die of old age and if you die first it's not your problem anymore.

<comment><USER30> Start early.

Benchmark with the leaders.

Be prepared to work as hard as them, and actually do it for enough years to make a difference.

Outlive them. This is what you were planning to do when you started early.

For a pursuit where skill building is a function of effort over a lifetime.

In sports I guess that would be your athletic lifetime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "The easiest way to be at the top of your field is to choose a very small field." \- Simone Giertz, TED Talk, May 14, 2018 [https://singjupost.com/why- you-should-make-useless-things-si...](https://singjupost.com/why-you-should- make-useless-things-simone-giertz-full-transcript/)

</comment><comment><USER32> That's one of the questions i always wanted to ask the top people such as Bill Gates or someone like Dennis Ritchie. Being the top isn't something easy, but i feel like people overestimate it quite a lot, to the point that they quit thinking they want to be the best. I can say , the world is much smaller than the concept we draw on our minds. So many stuff that i looked into, especially in the programming world, is simpler than what's in my mind. The reason why we always think that it's big and hard thing to achieve is due to how we were taught in schools. We get taught about stuff that on the next grade they say it's more than we think. Take negative numbers for example, we start knowing that numbers are only positive and nothing such as 2-5 is possible, then we get taught that that idea is wrong.

Anyway, we tend to overestimate because of how we used to encounter. If we dedicate ourselves to something, it will pay off. If there is someone that's world class on something, you shouldn't focus on becoming him, but focus into further things. We are all alike at the end, it's our enthusiasm that drive us into pursuing our goals. The only difference between you and the other top 1 is that he had more interest.

Basically to put it in simpler words, don't think that there is a huge gap between you and your understanding of the world and your goal. It's much less than you think

<comment><USER33> > "The only difference between you and the other top 1 is that he had more > interest."

Wishful thinking. The most important component is genetic ability, which must be enabled by an environment allowing you to put in the required effort (i.e. developed or developing country, food and housing, minimal education). Interest and discipline is a tertiary concern.

It's way easier to be interested in something if you have natural aptitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > You will not be the world's greatest writer, nor the top chess player, nor > the most masterful public speaker.

> It's not about being great at any one thing — you just need to be pretty > good at an array of useful skills that, when combined, make you truly one of > a kind.

As somebody who was the world's #2 chess player for my age as a kid (okay, not the "top" but close enough) - I'd like to say that the advice in this article is terrible for anyone who wants to reach their full potential.

The part I really have a problem with is this:

> There will always be someone working harder... [or] someone with greater > genetic gifts, or more luck, or both.

The only way to get world-class at something is to work your ass off. To have discipline and apply yourself consistently to the practice, day in and day out, for years.

And yeah, even if you do that, you _still_ might not be best in the world at that thing. But you know what? The relationship with yourself that you cultivated while mastering that discipline will 100% translate over to any other endeavor you wish to pursue.

Similarly, if you always give up on things because you always see there's someone better than you, that pattern will hinder your ability to excel everywhere.

My competitive chess career was pretty brief in the end. I realized that staying at the top would require total dedication and no social life (home schooling etc), and yes, there were other up and coming kids who seemed to be at a level I couldn't reach. So I gave up the dream of being world chess champion and went to school. But I cannot even express how much the experience of devoting myself to one discipline helped me later on in my life and career. Peak performance in any area ultimately depends on how you deal with challenge, setbacks, and motivation for the grind.

Don't settle for being "pretty good". Push yourself to be the best you can be, you might be surprised what you learn along the way.

[Edit] To the people commenting things like 'I think he is giving "regular" people who arent gifted a path to massive success by being "pretty good" at a few different things':

The whole "regular" people argument is BS. I was a "regular" kid who happened to become freakishly devoted to chess, at which point people started labeling me as a "prodigy". But the label is meaningless. Nobody calling me a prodigy saw the thousands of hours I spent playing and practicing.

I hate it when people draw arbitrary distinctions like "regular" vs "gifted". It makes the so-called gifted ones out to be freaks, or whatever the opposite of "normal" is, and it is demotivating to all the so-called normal kids who wonder if they could ever achieve greatness.

<comment><USER35> I was pretty good at Chess myself growing up, consistently got trophies in tournaments. Ranked in the top 5 nationally (within the US) for my age group, the trophy I earned for that was bigger than me (I was 12 at the time).

Still though being top 5 in the US for that age group dosent mean very much, the US is one country out of many others. On top of that as you stack against other ages especially say when I became an Adult there is no guarantee I would have even made it to the top 10000, never-mind the top 5, because far more Adults play chess.

I dont think the author is discouraging people from doing that if thats what they are passionate about.

Far more importantly I think he is giving "regular" people who arent gifted a path to massive success by being "pretty good" at a few different things. He is mathematically trying to prove that it will lead to great results, perhaps maybe even better results, than being the absolute best at one thing.

There are diminishing returns to pushing yourself if you arent gifted, you may try your heart out and never ever get to be the very best at Chess. Let's say you hypothetically committed large chunks of your life to it, dont have any other skills, and now are broke and cant live a good meaningful life because you dont earn much for being great at Chess, you only earn if you are the very best.

His path is safer for most of us.

<comment><USER36> I agree, also this should have been called why to be pretty good at lots of things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Quick example of skill stacking: You won't be the world's best chess player or boxer, but, hey, being the world champion in chess boxing ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing))? That may well be within you reach.

<comment><USER33> This is gimmicky. Everyone knows they can be the best in the world at some random and obscure task nobody cares about. This sort of thing is a complete waste of your time. Better to focus on improving at one or the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Although I agree with the idea, getting good at a jack of trades might be equally difficult (e.g. depending on childhood influences or genetics). If A complements B and someone gets good at A, he/she probably HATES B to the point to avoid it as much as possible.

<comment><USER12> Another person in this thread pointed out that "skill stacking" boils down to becoming good at two skills, "X + marketing".

I think that's a good example of "Good at A + hates B", say "Good at software engineering + hates marketing".

But what are the other "Good at A + hates B" skill combinations?

<comment><USER26> Good tech skills plus hate human interation. Or vice versa. Some people just have the innate to get good at both. I think if you want you can definitely train very hard to be OK for sth you hate but is it worth it?

<comment><USER12> I think whether it's worth it depends on if the goal you are trying to achieve is worth it.

I remember reading about this couple of I believe software engineers who achieved financial independence at I think age 30.

If I recall correctly, she didn't have any natural aptitude for software engineering, she struggled to keep up with her classmates, she didn't enjoy her work, etc.

Still, she got her degree, got a job, made six figure salary, and retired at 30.

From what I understand, for her it was worth it.

<comment><USER26> I agree 100%. It depends on personal goals.

Another thing is we can train skill B by using a method that we enjoy, to remove half of the pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Author of the article gives one TedX talk, then goes on to proclaim that he's an "expert" at public speaking and ranks himself in the "90" percentile for public speaking. What a joke!

<comment><USER39> Fear of public speaking is consistently ranked the #1 fear of the average person. I would absolutely put someone who can do it confidently in the top 10%. That's the point of the article: "A bit of work can quickly get you to the top 10%".

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It has to be said that Steve Jobs great quality was learning from the best in a given field, what it is called now "modeling".

He had as a mentor, when he was kid, f*cking Robert Noyce: [http://online.wsj.com/media/NoyceJobs_digits_D_2011100715195...](http://online.wsj.com/media/NoyceJobs_digits_D_20111007151956.jpg)

Noyce himself was a genius on its own.

And then Markkula, and then the president of Sony(that launched the Trinitron and walkman), and so on.

He learned how to learn.

</comment><comment><USER41> Actually, getting to 90-th percentile of public speaking _and_ self- presentation make you little bit of celebrity regardless of any other factors.

</comment><comment><USER42> This should be taken to heart by every technologist, or to be precise, pure technologist. Being pure tech today is about as useful as being a typist during the type-writer era i.e. specialized skill that is in demand, but by itself (with few exceptions) is only secondary to the domain it is applied in.

Most so-called "tech" companies are not really tech, but more in (tele)communications, media, advertising, surveillance data businesses.

It is easy to see the time when everyone can do technology. This surely happened to typing, it would be ludicrous trying to get a job as a typist today. Same can happen to the pure tech: a) due to technology itself e.g. web- site builders, etc. b) education,- everybody learns to type today, its a bit of a stretch, but maybe everybody can learn to program.

Aside from job security argument, the value creation is happening in the domain where business is focused, not necessarily knowledge of technology. Technologists who understand the domain can deliver much more value, and command higher premiums.

</comment><comment><USER43> This seems kind of pointless, most people already are the best in the world at some specific combination of skills - knowledge of local geography, ability to cook a certain set of meals, etc.

Anyway, a related thought that I find interesting: Becoming a "polymath" i.e. learning a wide range of topics to reasonable depth requires less effort than most people expect. For example, let's say you want to learn mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and economics. I think that achieving 80% of undergrad knowledge would take much less than 80% of the time that people need to complete an undergrad degree. So let's say it could take a year to acquire a good foundation in each of these topics if you try to optimize the process by focusing on fundamentals and core principles, choosing the best books, etc.

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't know if Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, was the first person to really write about this concept, but he originally wrote about the concept he called the "talent stack" with the same exact arguments in his books years ago. I think this idea is really important: it's smart to combine different skills. Additionally, having experience in different domains like economics and design and business and technology and more gives you a lens to see the world through that not everybody has. If you combine a few of these lenses, you're able to make connections and understand things that most people wouldn't see.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's pretty simple

Don't be the first at what you're doing. You need the accomplishments of others to build on.

Have competition. You need to have someone else to keep your skills developing.

Have a supernatural amount of talent. It takes an amount of innate skill to truly be the best at something.

Spend WAY more than 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

A good example is Feliks Zemdegs, the on-and-off Rubik's cube world champion. He's got the above skills, and keeps getting overtaken by various people, but so far, has redefined his skillset every time and risen back to the top, breaking even more barriers.

</comment><comment><USER46> Isn't it strange that comments on medium are all very positive whereas on HN all are very negative towards this article. What I want to say is that there might be a bias?

<comment><USER17> Author here. It's the culture of the site. Like Reddit. Much more critical. Also, remember that Medium is the platform where the writer writes. Commentators mean in fact to address the author. That helps for civility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> "I'm the best in the world at something. I guess I'll write a Medium article."

<comment><USER48> This. I'm pretty annoyed with these Medium articles that keep popping up on this site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Interesting way to discover the curse of dimensionality.

</comment><comment><USER50> the graphs in this medium post make my head spin, but at least the 2nd one has words describing what the author purportedly means.

<comment><USER51> Thank you. They're staggeringly bad. I'm surprised no one else commented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Beware of low perskill grade, stacking would just be a new word for 'jack of all trades'

</comment><comment><USER53> many managers and directors at tech companies are like this, they have good skill at coding/understanding tech stacks, managing, marketing, writing, speaking, and understanding the business aspects

</comment><comment><USER27> Selling it helps too.

</comment><comment><USER54> looks like market segmentation - finding your niche.

find your niche by being top 10% in three areas and you will be top .1% in one niche that is combination of the three

</comment><comment><USER55> Is this why we go to colleges?

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm pretty sure I'm the best person in the world at combined Scrabble and coding.

<comment><USER57> Have you met Liam Quin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Medium forces a login. Is there a non-Medium link?

<comment><USER17> [https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the- world...](https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world-at- something-f1b658f93428?source=friends_link&sk=88d2ce6a8cdaacd47ae6a754fb96e9b5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I think this is a fallacy, its true that becoming 90th% in a few different fields would render you quite the unicorn. The issue is that its common for there to be very low demand for such an overlap of skill sets. Also, how would you leverage such an overlap? These positions and opportunities do not just appear as you are qualified, the job market is extremely inefficient, and not very good at correctly pricing ability. Whats more, being the best in the world at something generally makes that skill very recognizable to others. You are a standout and ascend extremely quickly. I would argue the true best strategy is to shoot for best in your city or country/world at some nascent niche skill.

As an addition, this kind of article is part of a group of articles aimed at seeming to be a "novel" or "clever" approach to life, somehow holding the key to outsmart others. Most likely it a complete waste of your five minutes. Its similar to thinking about the Dunning Kruger effect, a complete waste of time.

<comment><USER60> > The issue is that its common for there to be very low demand for such an > overlap of skill sets. Also, how would you leverage such an overlap?

The only overlap they really gave in the examples was "They're good at X skill.... and marketing themselves." Literally, the example people were good at both a skill and then marketing themselves as being good at that skill. Gary Vaynerchuk is both a good writer and good at marketing himself. Steve Jobs was good at design and also marketing himself. Tomas Pueyo is apparently decent at engineering and also ... marketing himself, with articles and TED talks like this. This is also why people can name Neil deGrasse Tyson but probably not a single other living astrophysicist. He's not the best in the world, but he's the best astrophysicist in the world at marketing himself.

So the advice isn't _really_ to be good at two different skills. The advice is to be pretty good at one skill and then be really good at marketing yourself as being good at that thing. Even though other people in the world will be better at it, if you're good at marketing yourself you'll still be in more demand.

<comment><USER12> I think that's a great observation.

One exception I can think of where you legitimately need to be decent at three skills is bootstrapping as a solopreneur.

You need to be able to code, design, and market your product.

Other than that, it does seem like "X + marketing" is what you need, though I guess "marketing" is an umbrella term (content marketing requires writing ability, public speaking requires public speaking ability, etc.).

<comment><USER60> Sure, and I'm sure there are actual cases where being good at 2 different skills (not one of which being some form of marketing yourself) is relevant. Devops pretty much requires being good at both development and server administration. You're correct that bootstrapping requires multiple different skills, including some amount of business sense. There are many cases where having multiple different skills could make you the best in the world at that combo. But those correlations aren't random -- so lots of different people will be trying to be the best at the same set of skills as you, since they're connected as requirements -- and despite the article's premise, that's not the case the author's examples make.

The article really just makes it clear it's important to be able to market yourself. However "people able to market their skills achieve more than people who can't" is not as interesting an article premise as "How to Become the Best in the World at Something (by being good at multiple skills)". And the author went with the latter because, well, it's important to be able to market yourself well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Why is it acceptable to submit an article which is selectively inaccessible to the majority of users?

All I see is:

How to Become the Best in the World at Something With skill stacking, you don't need to be at the top to be extraordinary Tomas Pueyo Oct 17 · 7 min read

It's better to have three okay tools than a single, perfect one. The axe is great at breaking obstacles, but not that useful to jump over pits. The grapple is great to jump over ice or pits, but not amazing for slaying dragons. The only way to win is by having both tools. Illustrations: Tomas Pueyo.

CConsider what it takes to become an NBA player. Most of them have been honing their skills on the basketball court practically since infancy. Years of countless practices, camps, and games have helped each player develop a skill set based around shooting…

Keep the story going. Sign up for an extra free read. You've completed your member preview for this month, but when you sign up for a free Medium account, you get one more story.

 __Flagged. __

<comment><USER62> I've been using an extension to avoid this common annoyance.

[https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox)

also for Chrome: [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- chrome](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome)

<comment><USER61> I use neither Chrome nor Firefox, nor am I installing extra software to access a website that doesn't want me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This is really incorrect advice in the world of software engineering. At least in FAANG companies and big name startups, no one cares if you read How to Win Friends and Influence people and have "social skills". If you can't pass the engineering interviews, you're fucked.

<comment><USER64> Where I work, leadership and people skills are severely lacking amongst programmers, so just a modicum of both makes one stand out pretty easily.</comment></comment>


Understanding Graph Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://irhum.pubpub.org/pub/gnn <comment><AUTHOR> Wrote this a few days back, would appreciate hearing other people's take on this</comment>


The best questions we got while raising venture capital - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/good-question-the-eight-best-questions-we-got-while-raising-venture-capital/

<comment><USER2> "7. What's your secret sauce? ... We hope to come up with Something Big in 2010."

Hmm. I harbor hope that he's kidding. I'm more and more a believer that the only secret sauce that matters is relentless execution and incremental improvement over many years. Sure, some companies will happen upon the magical product-technology-market puzzle piece that ends up being worth a billion dollars, but that's playing the lottery, not running a business.

<comment><USER3> There is a lot more secret sauce out there than you hear about. By definition you don't hear about it. There's rarely any incentive for companies to talk about it. Many people inside a company might not even realize what it is at their company!

A great example is PayPal. According to Max Levchin their custom fraud detection system was the only reason they were able to stay in business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great article, well above the standards of Techcrunch lately. I agree with the seven deadly sins being the best advice on there. VC's want to know why people wont stop using your idea not why they will want too.

</comment><comment><USER5> "6. What are the accelerating effects?" Roughly equivalent to "What makes you idea viral?" ?

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, seven deadly sins is one of the best pieces of advice I've read.

<comment><USER7> Which is funny, because my startup actually revolves around two of the seven cardinal virtues. I think he hits the nail on the head because he's talking about how anonymity has allowed people to embrace more and more of personalities they would not have been able to otherwise in meatspace.

But as your real identity and your social graph ties closer with your online persona, I think we're going to see a shift in a different direction. I'll let you know how it goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 75 points without a single comment? WTF

<comment><USER9> If anything, that's quite an indicator of article quality.</comment></comment>


Marc Andreessen: Series A investments still bread and butter of A16Z - <AUTHOR> http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/10/11/marc-andreessen-series-a-investments-are-still-the-bread-and-butter-of-a16z/

<comment><USER2> I'm posting on this topic at: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6530536](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6530536)

</comment><comment><USER3> As if this should surprise anyone.

It is pretty typical for an investor to pronounce one thing and then do something totally different.

Investors are driven by the "feel" of the opportunities they get to look at and any pronouncements "we are funding this, not this" are merely looks in the rearview mirror. Trying to read the investors' minds and predict their actions is a lot like Kremlinology, it is best to focus on building a solid business and not worry about their opinions too much.

<comment><USER4> > It is pretty typical for an investor to pronounce one thing and then do > something totally different.

They didn't do that. The original article was one of their partners saying they weren't doing as many _consumer_ Series As anymore, and were shifting toward doing A rounds for enterprise companies and B rounds for consumer.

A bunch of commenters on Hacker News misinterpreted the article as "A16Z isn't doing _any_ Series As", so Marc Andreessen jumped in himself to clarify their original point.

Now it's being misinterpreted again. Read the original article and Marc's comments--they've been consistent with this message the entire time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting how things change. 5-6 years ago I was working for an enterprise startup and our CEO reported that VCs were generally uninterested in enterprise products. Now they seem to be the higher probability bet. Does this reflect an increasing openness to new products among enterprises?

<comment><USER2> VCs as a group move as a herd just like every other class of investors. Enterprise startups performed very poorly between 2000 and 2008 (in large part because enterprises all but stopped buying new technology from new companies) and so they went badly out of fashion. This naturally created a shortage of innovation in important categories which started to get rectified by a new wave of enterprise startups starting about then, and then those startups collectively have performed very well financially including as IPOs, which now has VCs as a group all lathered up for enterprise startups.

We like to think that we are observing this phenomenon but still differentiated enough in our thinking and our network that we can pick a new set of winners now. Time will tell if we are right or if we are just part of the herd :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A16Z sounds so much more .comy than Andreessen Horowitz...</comment>


Anagram Scoring - <AUTHOR> http://blog.plover.com/2017/02/21/#anagram-scoring <comment><USER2> It's uncanny some of the acronyms you can find in "advanced mode" at [https://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html](https://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html) :

First find some good words in a couple of short phrases:

Y Combinator: Combat Irony, Romantic Boy, Acronym Obit, Bay Moron Tic, Not Bay Micro, A Brim Tycoon, A Born Comity, My Bacon Riot, Into My Cobra, Tiny Crab Moo

Hacker News: She Knew Arc, Knew Search, Whack Sneer, Cranks Whee!!! (emphasis added ;), Shaken Crew, Ashen Wreck, Answer Heck, Rewash Neck, Eschew Nark, Rakes Wench, Swank Cheer, Ark Wenches, Warn Cheeks, A Neck Shrew, Wrecks a Hen, Knew Re Cash

Then put them together and enter your favorite words into "Anagrams must include this word" (or manually remove the letters of the words you want to keep if it says the input is too long):

Y Combinator Hacker News:

New Mob Cash Racket Irony

I'm sure there are more, but I'm just going to stop right there!

EDIT: I just can't stop!

Tricky Wannabe Moochers, Cannabis Coworker Thyme, Cybernetics Nohow Karma, Wacko Minty Abhorrences, Betcha Wonkier Acronyms, Wacko Cerebration Hymns, Romantic Wonky Breaches, Beckons Worthy American, Inaner Worthy Comebacks, Chicken Anatomy Browser, Antiwar Cockney Hombres, Awaken Botcher Cronyism, Obscene Wonky Matriarch, Nonsmoker Raceway Bitch...

<comment><USER3> "Chicken Anatomy Browser" sounds like a really dull pedagogical tool, maybe a 90s CDROM...

<comment><USER2> It's like Uber for Haruspex!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex)

<comment><USER3> These are the days!

"Chinese Restaurant is not the only game on display in the "game emporium" explored by Pikul and Geller in eXistenZ. Other titles include Hit by a Car and Viral Ecstasy."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> The Internet Anagram Server at [https://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html](https://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html) has an "advanced" mode that you can use to incrementally refine long anagrams once you find juicy words, by entering the words you want to keep in the "Anagrams must include this word" field.

I'll bet dollars for donuts that nobody can find any worse anagrams for their own full name than I've found for my own, "Donald Edward Hopkins":

The "clean" runner up is:

"Dank Washed Dildo Porn"

But the winner is:

"We Shank Dildo Porn Dad"

<comment><USER4> I have a competitively bad one, but I don't want to reveal my name here.

<comment><USER5> (That's what throwaways are for!)

<comment><USER6> Next post: "Good idea, okay throwaway account but me here, result is ..."

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that train has sailed...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The last time this was posted, I scored his list with Levenshtein edit distance. It was, predictably, not as good at bubbling up the best anagrams. His winner scored 11, so still somewhat near the top, but not standing out as well.

[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/431b163b2a2d532bfd0a3bdcc7...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/431b163b2a2d532bfd0a3bdcc711f7b3)

<comment><USER8> Actually, I think you did alright, especially given you found

11 counteridea reeducation

Which is not only anagrammatic morphologically but perhaps conceptually in some way in that counterideas are "mixed" into reeducation?

It would be interesting to find other anagrams that also share some relationship semantically.

<comment><USER9> that's almost too good, even if there was going to be something this good just by sheer quabtity.. it almost sounds like the Newspeak stuff from 1984

<comment><USER8> I think you mean "double plus good" or "Debugs Loud Loop"!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This blog post inspired me to do a similar analysis using Urban Dictionary words instead: [https://medium.com/@carnye/the-funniest-anagrams-of-urban- di...](https://medium.com/@carnye/the-funniest-anagrams-of-urban- dictionary-583fdb89d8e6)

<comment><USER11> I enjoyed this a lot. Thanks for doing it.

Code for scoring anagrams according to my method is at [https://github.com/mjdominus/anagram- scoring](https://github.com/mjdominus/anagram-scoring) if you would like to use that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perl was the first programming language I learned. I spent about 2 years writing programs in it and studying it exclusively. Nowadays I don't use it at all. However, if I had chosen another language first then I never would have read Higher Order Perl -- truly one of the most brain-wrinkle-inducing books I've ever read, and loaded with examples of beautiful code (in Perl, no less!). Can't recommend it enough.

<comment><USER13> It gets even better, apparently!

[http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/](http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/)

> _This is the publisher 's own PDF proof of the second version, which was > sent to the printers in August 2005._

> _This is better than the bootleg copies available from download sites (...): > It is the complete text of the second printing, which incorporates many > minor corrections; the bootleg copies are all bootlegs of the first > printing._

> _Higher-Order Perl is not in the public domain and is not available under a > free license of any sort. I distribute it from this web site by virtue of > special permission from the publisher._

> _You may download the book for your personal use, but you may not distribute > it to other people, either individually or by uploading it to a file-sharing > service._

FWIW, IMO anyone who wants to build an EPUB has all the tools and data they need to make a perfect rendition, and from reading that web page I think the author would be very receptive (and make it available from his site).

<comment><USER11> I would like that, and if someone built an EPUB I would host it on my site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think it can be much more interesting if these anagrams are not just limited to single words, but whole phrases or sentences. Makes the search a lot harder I think, but the results are much more fun. I especially like authors who incorporate those linguistic tricks in their works like "Vivian Darkbloom"/"Vladimir Nabokov" or "Tom Marvolo Riddle"/"I Am Lord Voldemort".

<comment><USER15> Years ago I discovered "Britney Spears"/"Presbyterians" and it remains one of my faves.

<comment><USER11> My current favorite is "Cheryl Burke" / "huckleberry".

(Cheryl Burke is one of the professional dancers on _Dancing with the Stars_.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> fwiw, here is the discussion from the 2 months ago when this was submitted (renamed "Anagram Scoring") [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196)

</comment><comment><USER17> an·a·gram ˈanəˌɡram/ noun a word, phrase, or name formed by rearranging the letters of another, such as cinema, formed from iceman.

funny that the textbook definition of anagram is the word that is the basis of the winner here: cinematographer

</comment><comment><USER18> I think 'clitoridean directional' is a clear winner

</comment><comment><USER13> Some time ago I iterated through all the links at [http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2....](http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html) to get their Content-Length. All up it's 21TB _compressed_. Just US English comes in at about 9GB or something though IIRC (unsure, might be completely wrong).

With this being said, the data is very, very _very_ raw and unprocessed (contains things like "xxiv_DET", "X25.000_NOUN", "X1E", "X16_NUM" etc, just to give some random examples from the Xs). Would be a lot of work to sanitize it, but you might get some interesting results in the process.

So IOW this would be somewhere between "toy" and "interestingness from chaos".

</comment><comment><USER19> previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196)

</comment><comment><USER20> That is very cool. I am the type of person who enjoys anagrams, and started toying around in Python ([http://adamantine.me/index.php/2016/09/02/python- anagram-tut...](http://adamantine.me/index.php/2016/09/02/python-anagram- tutorial/)), but I never thought of rating the anagrams... My next step was to generate a list of names that are anagrams of other names, or take the corpus of The Dark Tower series and see if you can discover any interesting anagrams (as it is a motif in the series).

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice write-up, especially the comparison of rearranging letters and computing every permutation of a list to find d the one that is sorted.

BTW, my favourite anagram in German: Zitronensaft - Fronteinsatz (lemon juice - service at the front (mil))

</comment><comment><USER22> If you're interested in more anagrams I wrote a Twitter bot that finds anagrams in pairs of tweets from a sample of the Twitter firehose: [https://twitter.com/anagrammatweest](https://twitter.com/anagrammatweest)

It can be easier to see the pairs in the tumblr feed: [http://anagrammatweest.tumblr.com/](http://anagrammatweest.tumblr.com/)

The source is here: [https://github.com/bdrupieski/AnagramFinder](https://github.com/bdrupieski/AnagramFinder)

</comment><comment><USER23> It's worth noting that megachiroptera are _fruit_ bats. And they are adorable: [https://youtu.be/t26UZM70YzY](https://youtu.be/t26UZM70YzY)

</comment><comment><USER24> Whenever I walk past a sign in front of a house advertising that it will soon be up for auction, I rearrange the letters to spell caution. (Especially with the overinflated house prices in Australia currently).

</comment><comment><USER25> Another 14-pointer which was overlooked:

 _nitromagnesite_ <\--> _regimentations_

</comment><comment><USER26> My second-most favorite pair of anagrams after the movie-showing giant bat is _coprophagist topographics_.

Detailed maps of areas in which dung-eaters live? Worth buying just to avoid the neighborhood... :)

Edit: These anagram pairs would also make interesting Short Authentication Strings for ZRTP. Worthy of a Monty Python skit, if you ask me.

</comment><comment><USER27> Might be interesting to give bonus points to pairs of words with origins far apart on the linguistic taxonomy.

<comment><USER28> Yes. I think there are multiple scales to give words or pairs bonus points on:

\- there is also a moral outrage scale where you want at least one word to be on (if one word of the pair was about sex and the other one was about the church, that would be great and funny).

\- then there is also a boringness scale (boring: "habitat", not boring: "shebang"), where you ideally want both words to score highly.

\- then there is also a understandability scale. "cholecystoduodenostomy" is a bad word because very few people know what it means. Lower this down until you understand all the words and the result will be much more satisfactory.

<comment><USER27> I guess this is why people love the "Britney Spears" / "Presbyterians" one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So the best anagrams in English are actually Greek (?)

"Soapstone teaspoons" is 80% old English with a splash of Chinese.

Interestingly, most germanic words seems to be rather short. But I guess the reason for using long Greek, Latin or French words is to look important, so the longer the better.

</comment><comment><USER30> I still have this that I wrote years ago:

        for(<>){chop;$s{join'',sort split'',lc}.=" $_"}for(sort%s){/. /&&print"$_\n"}

Feed it a wordlist and it spews out anagrams.

</comment><comment><USER31> But who has heard of a megachiropteran? (In fact, as I write this my browser has a red squiggly line under it.)

I like some of the other anagrams the author has listed better. For example, an anagram of "negativism" is "timesaving".

That's deep.

<comment><USER32> Perhaps this is less known with the tech crowd but I'd expect most people who are familiar with zoology to understand what megachiropteran means. Though it might be more common to hear the colloquial term "megabat" and "microbat" instead of the official term.

<comment><USER31> thanks - that's interesting. so I suppose when you saw the 14-character anagram on the page, you were like, "nice."

<comment><USER32> Yup. And it helps that fruit bats are adorable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There were some comments in this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196)

</comment><comment><USER34> My alma mater's Ultimate Frisbee team were called the 'Earthworms,' an anagram of the school name(1).

Which was cool.

1—Finding said name is left as an exercise for the reader.

<comment><USER35> Swarthmore

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I feel like anagram quality should include other things as well, like how common the words are.

<comment><USER37> It says that near the conclusion of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'd skip the dictionary and scrape all of Wikipedia, then weigh words by frequency.

<comment><USER39> I tried finding anagrams from Wikipedia titles, didn't include the scoring yet, but just browsing the results I notice things such as:

Hilda Davies <-> Sadia Dehlvi

Hilton Young <-> Tony Holguin

Hilary Corke <-> Karoly Reich

I don't know who these people are, but this could be a way to uncover anagrammed pen names wholesale.

<comment><USER11> This is a great idea, thanks!

By my method, the top scorer is ACEEEFFGHHIILLMMNNOORRSSSTUV (25 points), which is the pseudonym of 17th-century German writer Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. See if you can guess where he got his pseudonym.

After this there are a large number of high scorers, some very interesting, some less so. I think my current favorite is "Atlantis Casino Resort Spa" / "Carter assassination plot" (18 points) but it might be "Sunrise celebration" / "lesbian intercourse" (16).

The score file includes 1,657,148 (!) anagram pairs of which 26,296 have a score of 10 or higher and 475 have a score of 15 or higher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Competitive Scrabble players know just about all the 7- and 8-letter anagrams.

<comment><USER41> I know most of the 5- and 6-letter anagrams from years of doing the Jumble puzzle every day. And I'm good at Scrabble, but not "competitive" good.

<comment><USER42> Try:

[http://playrollo.com](http://playrollo.com)

Only 5-letter words with no repeating letters. Made it about 5 years ago when I was learning JavaScript.

<comment><USER43> That's really fun, thanks! Makes me want to write a solver...

<comment><USER42> A guy I worked with did! Picking randomly from possible remaining answers, you'll always get it in 7 (I think) guesses or less.

I also did a slack version my partner and I play together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> >> 8 negativism timesaving

Negativism is timesaving? Mind blown :)

<comment><USER45> I found this the best anagram: short, comprehensible and philosophical all-in- one.

Longer isn't always better. Sure, a giant bat is cool, but that's about it. Clitoridean directional is funny for a few seconds, maybe longer if you're stuck in puberty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Wait, so what can cinematographer megachiropteran be rearranged to be? is it "GIANT BAT! DEATH FROM ABOVE!!!"?

<comment><USER47> There are no B's in cinematographer. Megachiropteran means giant bat (mega=giant chiropteran= bat presumably).

<comment><USER32> (And they don't actually mean death from above, unless you are a tasty fruit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The best anagram in English is definitely "tapestries" ;-)

</comment><comment><USER49> Hacker news: a never-ending festival of reposts.</comment>


Ask HN: What book did you read in 2016 that was so good you gifted it to others? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> "Deep Work" and "Traction". More here: [http://www.kirubakaran.com/books- read.html?utm_source=hnbook...](http://www.kirubakaran.com/books- read.html?utm_source=hnbooks2016)

<comment><USER3> I can second "Deep Work by Cal Newport" the man gives some great insights and actionable advice on how to consistently get into the zone as a programmer and produce great work.

I've gifted it twice already.

<comment><USER4> I also recommend it. Given two copies to people this year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds childish, but because a lot of people seem to be losing wonder and imagination: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy)

</comment><comment><USER6> In programming there is the concept of "technical taste".It applies to cookbooks too:

Every Grain of Rice by Fuchsia Dunlop.

[https://www.amazon.com/Every-Grain-Rice-Chinese- Cooking/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Every-Grain-Rice-Chinese- Cooking/dp/0393089045)

This is a fantastic cookbook if you are interested in cooking Chinese food and a great reason to become interested if you are not. The author is a fine thoughtful writer and has really good taste and recipe judgement. The result is an intriguing collection of simple but good to amazing recipes with almost no duds. I've made over 60 of the recipes this year and almost all were a success. I love food and cooking and have over 70 cookbooks but this one has given me the most pleasure.

</comment><comment><USER7> Neither are new books, but this year I both read and subsequently gifted

* 1491 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus)

* Stranger in a Strange Land (the "Original, Uncut version") [https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Strange-Land-Robert-Heinlein...](https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Strange-Land-Robert-Heinlein/dp/1442005831)

1491 is about the societies in the Americas prior to European contact. And if anyone knows of any books on the topic that have been written since then (and thus are even more up-to-date with the current state of the field), I'm very, very interested.

Stranger in a Strange Land is just... excellent. I really appreciate Heinlein and I like his world view. Though I've never read the traditional "cut" version, I've talked with people who have read both and I'm sold on the unabridged version. As an aside, if you enjoy Heinlein, then I also recommend reading "For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs." It was Heinlein's first book, but was never published (until recently, of course). It's not polished, but it is very interesting to see how he had already formed in the 1930s a lot of the ideas that would dominate his writing for the rest of his career. A good and enjoyable read.

\---Alex

<comment><USER8> 1491 is fantastic. Have you read the sequel, 1493? It's thoroughly enjoyable as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy

An incredible look into the lives of the working poor and what it actually means to try and get out of poverty in America. It's a beautiful book. [http://thenewpress.com/books/moral- underground](http://thenewpress.com/books/moral-underground)

</comment><comment><USER10> Daemon and Freedom by Danial Suarez

Some amazing insights in AI, Augmented Reality, and a distributed manufacturing society.

<comment><USER11> Daemon really needs some more recognition. It's one of the most interesting and most _real_ sci-fi books I've read in a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Infinite Jest," whose 20th anniversary of publication was celebrated this year.

<comment><USER13> Did you get the version with the new cover?

<comment><USER12> No, I just re-read my original hardcover from '96.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Two books:

\- John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education"

\- Carroll Quigley's "Tragedy and Hope"

</comment><comment><USER15> Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

</comment><comment><USER11> The Cuckoo's Egg.

I always say this if I can, but I reread it again, and it's still great.

For those of you who don't know, it's a story about chasing down a hacker at the dawn of the computing era (mid 80s, AFAIK). It's riveting, and absolutely true.

<comment> happy-go-lucky +1. It's a page turner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Several:

* "The Elements Of Computing Systems", by Nisan and Schocken

Accompanies www.nand2tetris.org and leads you through implementing logic gates, a CPU, Assembler, right up to a functional computer, with the help of simulator software on a PC. Fascinating, but requires 100-200 hours to complete all the exercises.

* "The Rosie Project", by Graeme Simsion

Easy to read novel about a man searching for a wife, as recommended on Bill Gates' blog

* "Island Of The Lost", by Joan Druett

A true story of survival after being shipwrecked on a remote island

* "River Town", by Peter Hessler

The experiences of an English teacher who spent two years working in China

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh, that's easy: Code, by Charles Petzold [1]. One of the best book I _ever_ read, that teach you about how computers work. The best thing is that it doesn't starts with any assumption and it gets you from the very basic - how a CPU works, how memory works - to fairly complex things (how video graphics work, how color video works and so on).

[1]: [http://amzn.to/2g6Lcfo](http://amzn.to/2g6Lcfo)

</comment><comment><USER18> Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal.

Fundamentally about being agile, adaptable, transparent, collaborative and decentralised. You could say it's about digital transformation but on a military scale. An excellent companion to some other books mentioned here, such as Deep Work (this book is a constructive counterpoint in many ways), Extreme Ownership, and Ego is the Enemy.

[https://mcchrystalgroup.com/teamofteams/](https://mcchrystalgroup.com/teamofteams/)

<comment><USER19> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy _by William B. Irvine_

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win _by Leif Babin and Jocko Willink_

</comment><comment><USER21> totally off topic, but what ever happened to "gave"

<comment><USER22> My guess is that gave just implies transfer of something, but gifted specifically implies giving something as a gift.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bingo. I asked a longer version of this question on Twitter but it was > 80 chars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Books I've give away this year:

\- "In the Garden of Beasts", Erik Larson: An excellent history of diplomatic relations between the US and Germany leading up to WWII.

\- "Dune", Frank Herbert: Most of you are probably familiar with this book.

</comment><comment><USER24> Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike Great founder story

When Breathe Becomes Air Story about the meaning of life. Not sure how anyone can go through this and not cry. (First book I've ever cried reading)

</comment><comment><USER25> An Empire of Wealth

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101341.Empire_of_Wealth](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101341.Empire_of_Wealth)

</comment><comment><USER19> Haven't gifted these yet but both Chaos Monkeys and Sprint should see action next month.

</comment><comment><USER26> The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

<comment><USER27> What were your takeaways from the book?

Also, Citizen of the Galaxy and Double Star are really good reads in the same sort of vein of political-minded science fiction.

<comment><USER26> How different we may seem to others. When they talk about earth they are talking as if we talk about other strange lands.

"Did you know..." applies to everyone, no matter how far they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande. It changed my outlook on life.

</comment><comment><USER29> All works of Carl Jung, great writings, I love them.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius

</comment><comment><USER31> Linchpin - Seth Godin

Pitch Anything - Oren Klaff

</comment><comment><USER32> Zero to One by Peter Thiel

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray

</comment><comment><USER33> Big Magic

</comment><comment><USER33> GO for NO</comment>


Steve Ballmer: The. Worst. CEO. Ever. - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/23/steve-ballmer-the-worst-ceo-ever/

<comment><USER2> Gross market cap lost during a CEO's reign is a poor measure of performance for a variety of reasons:

* stock prices often get de-linked from the underlying value of the business (and the starting point for Ballmer was the height of the stock market bubble)

* percentage drop seems far more important that gross amount dropped - quite a number of CEO's have led their companies to bankruptcy, and therefore a 100% drop in stock price.

* business forces outside of a CEO's control are responsible to a great extent for business performance. I would argue that Leanard Riggio (Barnes and Noble) was one of the top performing 50 CEOs in the last century in the face of very challenging headwinds but you'd never know that from the way the business (and its stock price) performed.

* dividends are another form of value returned to shareholders - and Microsoft has paid some over the years.

Also - it turns out that GE's Jeff Immelt presided over a drop of approximately $350 billion (601 billion Aug 2000 --> 246 billion today), and John Chambers even more (557 billion March 2000 --> $125 billion today)

So if the point of the article is to write about the CEO who presided over the largest market drop in U.S. history, the article should have been about Jeff Immelt or John Chambers.

Note: Intel's market cap also decreased more than MSFT during the same period but had more than 1 CEO.

edit: typo, added mention of John Chambers

</comment><comment><USER3> Kenneth Lay didn't do such a great job either.</comment>


Which Java framework for building social/collaborative app ? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, First, excuse my english, this is not my native language. I would like to get your opinion on this topic : I'd like to build some social/collaborative app : not much media sharing, but mainly tagging, collaborative text content (as wikis), user profile, tagging and some points system (digg/hackernews-like ?)<p>Thank you <comment><USER2> Seam, Tapestry, JSF. Take your pick.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the answer... I was thinking of a more elaborate packaged solution, not just the view layer... something with built-in features, a kind of CMS maybe.

<comment><USER2> There's an extensive Java contingent on StackOverflow that might be more helpful. Not much Java love on HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the pieces of info. It's not that much that I'm a java lover, but more that I'm not so a techie... and my very little experience as a developer is only Java oriented.

thanks anyway</comment></comment></comment></comment>