Alex_MJ

"n00bs"?

His facebook doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. It's full of vague availability-heuristic-targeting generalities.

"Virtue is when the income you wish to show the tax agency equals what you wish to show your neighbor"

"The problem is that academics really think that nonacademics find them more intelligent than themselves",

etc

I've read black swan as well, and there were parts I didn't quite grok at the time (You cannot predict a black swan! etc)

My take is that he's a Malcolm Gladwell with numbers and therefore less easily takedownable but has the same model of "hold prestigious academic position, appear wise, publish book with simple principle, be easily referenceable by people who want to sound well-read" except he has lots of math and charts to point at lest anyone call him out on it.

Is there some LGBT organization in the UK who could pull off publicly granting a pardon to the government for its' treatment of Alan Turing?

I totally agree. I've been playing around with Shopify and Merchify (similar "never touch a shirt" workflow) in the same way. For someone who mainly plays in engineering, testing ads on facebook and adwords and playing marketer for a while (without committing any meaningful amount of capital or attaching my name to anything) has been really enlightening and fun.

www.roguethreadsdesigns.com

For anyone who wants to set up a first business so you get a basic sense of selling things [online], highly recommended.

Out of curiosity, do you have anything more on what destroys the lenses? Heat/melting? Some form of radioactive dust?

It's a two way street - they're usually dramatically downplayed by authorities and anybody who would otherwise have to pay. If you're not loud and exaggerated, nobody with any ability to do anything listens and powerful people actively want you to not be heard.

For illustration, the official number of deaths attributed to the Chernobyl disaster is 31.

We already can make simple ones, it's a matter of radiation shielding. They don't have to be huge expensive humanoid ones. Robots were used in the Chernobyl cleanup 25 years ago although they ended up getting fried from the radiation. I haven't done much research on the topic of what exists today regarding workarounds for electronics in radioactive environments (if someone has domain knowledge, please tell!), but I suspect we could fix that.

For some interesting history, look up "Bio-Robots" to see how the Soviet Union dealt with the disaster. Basically they sent up humans in heavy lead suits for no more than 45 seconds at a time. Run up, get three or four shovelfuls (they were clearing radioactive debris from the roof), get out.

Out of curiosity, was there anything wrong with the two handed design (like intrinsically/ergonomically, not wiring-related) that caused you to switch back to a one-piece design after the Mark 9?

I've been wanting for years for the monitor-keyboard setup to be replaced by something that's set up to a human body and not a table. Screen is set to your head and not vice versa. Manual input devices are physically based on your hands and not to a table. You don't have to lean forward to look at a screen. You don't have to hunch over (or even tend to hunch over) to type and mouse. Ergonomics problems vastly go out the window because you don't have to conform your body to a machine built for compactness and manufacturability.

On the monitor front, once somebody mods the Oculus Rift for non-gaming [read: programming etc] use, I'll dance an embarassing unskillful engineer jig and then buy one immediately.

On the input (mouse/keyboard) front I'd love to have two devices attached to my hands instead of having to reach forward to a keyboard (dual myo bands? some kind of handheld gig?) so the two-handed keyboards are always intriguing to me and I'd love to hear more about your experience with designing them. (and in general).

Rock on!

Given that he doesn't seem like a soup-kitchen kind of guy (from reading his Medium), why not take a new approach where you try one thing, understand one person in depth, see what you can do, and work from there? That's how you learn and get in-touch with anything.

There's more than one way to skin a cat. People do methods A, B, and C all the time. This guy is trying method D, and doesn't seem to be gunning for repeatable or sustainable or "solve the homeless problem in one fell swoop". He comes across as arrogant and out-of-touch on his blog but he's basically got the dude's back. IMO, at the end of the day all of that adds up to a good thing.

Also, I've worked with some NGOs and I've found them to be generally ineffective at solving problems but great at making volunteers feel good about themselves so the last place I'd want to go if I wanted to understand homelessness would be aid workers, and the first place would be some reading, my own instincts, and working with one individual homeless person. I personally like the "ballsy n=1 experiment" approach he's taking - even though his language makes him come across as kind of a dick.

Also, he is making a real sacrifice - one in terms of time/effort teaching him to code, and two in terms of reputation/job risk. If Leo fails, or if the media twists it the wrong way, McConlogue looks like a jackass and he seems smart enough to understand that.

From your perspective, what should McConlogue do or have done differently? He's obviously going to benefit from the exposure but I don't see any evidence that he's throwing Leo under the bus in the process.

It seems like a mutual gain to me, compared to a do-nothing approach. If the news story were "Leo goes back to square one after software engineer ditches him after getting publicity" then it would be a different story, but for now, the cynicism feels pregnant but premature.

Thank you! Almost forgot that we shouldn't spend time teaching willing people in rough situations useful things because it's narcissistic and patronizing.

I appreciate your reminder that the correct approach is to keep a safe distance and loudly bemoan the problem as "a complex issue".

A lot of it is also the mental structures you form, so you understand what a computer can and can't do easily instead of thinking it's all magic.

You may not have the specific chops to write a program to do it, but you know that doing something to (x) files is just a loop with a if thingy inside of it.

I think part of the "learn to code" movement is also hope that currently non-tech-literate people will learn to help themselves. Once you've googled "how do I do this in python" and found answers enough times, you (hopefully) gradually replace "All of this computer stuff is confusing! I need someone to help me with it. My cousin is good with computers. I'll call him." with "I got this shit. What up, google."

This is doable, and it's done in the natural gas turbine world (look up combined cycle turbine, essentially you hook up a lower-power steam turbine to the exhaust of a natural gas turbine).

The main problem is that turbines are expensive and lossy, and when the main turbine is already going off of a relatively small amount of wind energy, the amount of energy you could produce from its' output is probably very small.

Also, the longer tube you build the less effective the system becomes because the pressure at the top has to move the entire column of [viscous, turbulent] air down the pipe. I haven't done any math on this but I'd imagine it would not take that much height to hit a point at which point piping losses become overwhelmingly large in proportion to the energy you're producing. The turbine and the inlet need to be close together.

There's less energy in the wind after it leaves the turbine (by necessity, energy is transferred into the turbine to make it turn). If you were to expand the air moving at 15mph to the same size as the inlet its' velocity would decrease in the same way that funneling it down increases that velocity. Plus losses from viscosity and turbulence.

Technically speaking, you could add a second stage turbine to it but you'd be getting a lot less energy out of it and it's probably not worth it. Something similar is done in the natural gas turbine world with combined cycle turbines, where a natural gas turbine is operated at very high temperatures and pressures, producing a lot of energy, and the exhaust (for comparison: the air/gases coming out of it) is still hotter and higher-pressure than atmospheric air. This exhaust is fed to a steam turbine which manages to capture some more energy out of it on its' way back into the atmosphere, where it leaves lower-temperature and lower-pressure than it did from the gas turbine.

Also, for any real-life physical system involving airflow, even if you had perfect turbines that cost zero dollars, everything creates viscous drag with the air that lowers velocity/energy/etc.

If hackernews was called "bored programmer" I would be reminded I was bored every time I visited. From a marketing standpoint, sounding cool and compelling is a thousand times more important than being literal and accurate.

My first reactions to: "Hacker News" = "Whoa, hackers! This is what hackers read!" "Bored hacker" = "What kind of hacker is bored? I want to go where the cool up-to-date hackers are." "Bored programmer" = "Man, fuck those guys."

Agreed. Also, in the name of "understand your market" - what did early HN readers get from reading HN that they wouldn't elsewhere and how does that translate to finance? Would HN be successful if some random dude had started it instead of PG? I admittedly wasn't around in the early days, but back then I would imagine that the expectation was "wow, generally people who post on here are legit" as a direct consequence of that association.

I'm not familiar with the author - is he/she someone baller enough in the finance world to draw quality discussion? Are people going to break away from WallStreetOasis and minesweeper for this? Is there useful industry-relevant information? (My impression from friends who've gone into finance is that technical skills matter for jack shit as long as you're competent, and relationships, positioning, and sounding like you know what you're talking about rule the day. Is that something you can vaguely convince yourself you're getting better at at while wasting office time on a finance hacker news clone?)

Unrelated, I've always thought it would be fun to hem up a corpus of SeekingAlpha articles, use some rudimentary NLP to look for clear short-term bullishness or bearishness on some specific security, and see if you can either (a)find anyone who's demonstrably worth reading and following (and maybe trading based on them), or (b) more likely point out that everyone is full if s, most of them are convinced of their own s, and in the end it's all clickbait with charts and important-sounding finance words.

Optimal Founder/CEO != Optimal Employee

I love Meditations. I actually use it as a journalling tool.

I have about four copies of Meditations sitting on my bookshelf. What I really enjoy about reading it is that at any point, I can pore through a chapter, find something that "hits" and is relevant to something going on in my life, and I'll process it in pen, on the page, whether I actually agree or not with the line. I write down the date whenever I pick up the book, so it's a kind of diarying reflective process.

In my experience, reading it more than a chapter or two at a time is a bit of a waste. Too many ideas going in one ear and out the other - I hit two or three and that's all that's going to stick in my head.