Alex_MJ

Seconded.

I'm a relatively experienced lifter - heavy squats 3x per week is brutal for the first week or so and then your body adapts to it.

I've found that I'll actually stick with a ~hourlong workout, 3-5x a week that I believe in and have goals for over anything quick with no discernible aim. And it's amazing how time magically appears to actually show up at the gym when you prioritize it.

A "scientific" 7 minute workout with no discernible goals is an admirable thing but honestly it's a cheap novelty at best - I've never heard of anybody actually sticking to one, "doing the bare minimum" is just not motivating at all. Scientific according to whom? To what end? Why am I doing this?

Exercise science is inherently a little bit voodoo. Motivation and consistency are much more important than the time requirement.

If somebody's had any success with vague goalless 7-minute workouts, or has even stuck with them consistently, I'd love to hear differing opinions.

Sikuli is freaking great, though not sure how this is news, it's been around.

Super useful for automating things that are easy to handle by looking for patterns/things on screen and hard to handle with APIs (or lack thereof)

Both of these posts have been educational and I now understand the debate in far more detail than before. Thank you!

Also, will books that aren't on Amazon cease to "exist"?

There are a number of books I enjoyed in the paper era that I flat out can't find on Amazon now, and I tend to think of Amazon as "ALL THE BOOKS".

WRT Executives interests not necessarily aligning with their parent - absolutely true. And yeah, I probably should have been less abrasive.

Can you double-check your link? I tried following it but it just links to this thread.

TIL Comcast isn't in it for the public interest.

I'm not missing that at all. The fact that we expect corporations to further their own interests over those of the public (and that people who are cunning enough to get into powerful government positions often come from industry) is exactly why the law is lettered that way in the first place.

If you think you get to a position anywhere close to where these guys are by being a jeopardizing valuable relationships in the name of doing-things-in-the-spirit-of-selfless-public-service, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'm looking to sell. Good price, too, shoot me a PM.

As much as I hate Comcast and occasionally say prayers that a cement truck accidentally crashes into Tom Wheeler's house, and I'd love to see a massive scandal here - these emails don't seem incriminating at all.

A high level official got invited to a party, and declined because "the rules folks over here tell me I can't". They know each other (makes sense, they're both working at a high level in the same industry) and they have people watching their backs to make sure they don't do anything that can legally be considered corrupt (again, makes sense, shit's a minefield and an ill-defined one at that. If I were in that position I would have people keeping an eye on that whether I was corrupt or pious as a lamb)

Am I missing something? I clicked on that link salivating for the political blood of Comcast executives and all I got was a polite grownup email version of "sry bro can't come, rules n shyt, sounds bumpin tho"

I'm still baffled at how everyone considers these startups to be "underachieving". In terms of becoming the next facebook or twitter? Well, no shit. That's a borderline impossible standard.

Compared to 95% of their peers (which are, at least statistically, true underachievers in that they never made it into the mainstream or at least the tech-mainstream, or didn't survive long enough that we would recognize them today), they're waaaay on the right side of the bell curve.

Indeed. What a bunch of slackers!

(1) I love this.

(2) Having limited legal knowledge, I'm curious what he means with "a lottery ticket to a lawsuit". Is he indicating that patenting something would make a company more likely to get sued? My basic understanding is the opposite, that patents yield protection from lawsuits rather than create exposure to them. Is this flawed?

That's decently accurate. We're all doing what's in our best interest, in the role that we play in that time.

In general - I want to give people who don't know me personally (and especially people trying to sell me anything) less power to catch my attention and pull at my impulses, not more.

Yeah, but Watterson clearly doesn't like working with technology. He's very much a pen-paper-human kind of guy, and I don't see him all of a sudden deciding to step into the internet.

I'll be darned if he couldn't find someone to work with who could handle getting his work online though. It's mere wishful thinking, but he could draw and communicate (or not) in whichever way he wants, and some trusted friend and gatekeeper handles all of the scanning and online stuff, which could be kept very simple and noncommercial. No ads, twitter, comments section or any of the usual "social media branding" stuff, literally just a page with a comic on it.

Sigh. Man, I still miss Calvin and Hobbes.

Am I the only one who thinks that this could hugely backfire from a PR perspective?

The message is "The Verizon Network is Crowded Right Now." not "Verizon is Deliberately Slowing This Right Now." (or some less loaded version of that)

It's bad PR for the ISPs, but combined with the fact that most people can hardly spell ISP, and that Comcast and their FCC homies keep describing the new toll booth as a fast lane, if I were a nontechnical consumer my first response would be, "What the hell are they waiting for? Put in the fast lane! I wanna watch my damn movies!"

This is awesome!

As a non-neuroscientist, the WashU course on Coursera about Computational Neuroscience was also really good. Not sure if there's an upcoming offering, but I'd highly recommend taking it. Keep in mind it's heavy on computation on a "simulate neurons and small networks of neurons" level and light on top-down neuroscience

I kind of suspect Amazon knew this when they were making it.

Remember their free-publicity drones segment on 60 minutes that made Amazon Prime go apeshit right before Black Friday? They've got a very clever marketing department.

Furthermore, this is exactly the kind of thing that would

(a) Drive traffic that otherwise wouldn't care to a promo for a video about another goddamn smartphone

(b) Convince whoever watches it, even if purely for entertainment value, that this is a totally different phone and worth paying attention to (like the opposite of when I keep ignoring Samsung or whoever's "THE NEXT BIG THING" every two months...yeah, whatever, the screen is a different size or something)

If they just announced "we're making a smartphone guys - here's a video!" it wouldn't be nearly as huge. I wouldn't be surprised if this gets on the front page of reddit purely because it's hilarious when you misinterpret it.

Hell, worked on me.

Given the way that one hand tends to quietly grabass the other in prestigious U.S. financial organizations and large corporations, we should probably narrow the title to "unsolicited by Tesla".

Yeah - I second that. Quora is one of the few sites that sends me weeklyish emails that I haven't unsubscribed from because the content is fantastic. I always seem to learn something from clicking through it.

It's kind of a bummer that they're needing to pivot and find a way to revenue - from a non-business, purely consumer perspective I find the site really enlightening and valuable.

SEEKING WORK - San Francisco - Remote or Travel

Data - Python - Machine Learning - Human Learning

Software developer with experience in machine learning, statistics, web apps, data mining specific to hardware. Work mainly in python, flask/django, AWS, proficient with frontend technologies, but much more interested in complicated data-intensive stats-heavy find-some-insights work. If I haven't worked with a technology before, I generally figure out how to handle it pretty quickly. I'm also happy to consult with executives/management about leveraging data, being data-fluent, and not burning tons of money chasing vague "big data" dreams and getting nothing out of it.

EXPERIMENTAL: I'm absolutely passionate about self-directed learning, and the way that most companies incentivize their employees getting smarter is, IMO, somewhere between nonexistent and ass-backwards. If somebody wants guidance incentivizing employees to pick up new skills and mental models (whether technical, management, interpersonal) - definitely shoot me an email and let's talk.

Background also includes mechanical/industrial engineering, and managing large industrial projects, I'm very solid at leading/working alongside teams.

Contact: alex at courseradius dot com

I have a different approach to the same problem, although I'm actively building out a solution involving creating geographically local communities around MOOCs and finding study partners (Coursera/meetup have attempted this but it isn't very good IMO).

If anyone in SF is interested in helping out, I could totally use a collaborator or two if skillsets/personalities mesh well. (I'm doing all the coding right now but the project could greatly benefit from a second developer with good design sense and some web dev experience)

You're right - I should have phrased it "perceived self-interest mixed with doses of human volatility/irrationality"

I would argue more that the instilled mindset of "do as the authority figures say, you have no influence in the matter" that's pervasive in schools also does a huge amount to train adults to not feel like they have this option. That takes a lot to overwrite when it's instilled in you for the first 18 years of your life.

I would say that rather than "the government behaves rationally" - that every individual behaves in their best interest.

High-ranking intelligence officials will push for more power, more capabilities, and will scrap things if they become risky.

If there's somebody sufficiently powerful whose career would be threatened from some risk of exploiting the bug, that risk will be taken seriously.

If there's somebody sufficiently powerful whose career would benefit from the government letting people know about that bug, it'll happen. This sounds unlikely, but this isn't my area of expertise and if somebody wants to correct me please do so.

Congress will largely ignore it because it has nothing to do with their constituency, they're mostly technically illiterate, and because they're being lied to anyways.

...and so on.

I've basically stopped believing any science headline from a major mainstream news source. CNN? MSNBC? Fox? Huffpo? Don't even bother, they're misinterpreting the science deliberately. Dat clickbait.

Awesome article!

Out of curiosity, how do you handle conflicts?

Like, say you have an important customer who wants to meet in the morning, or things have fallen behind and DEAR GOD I NEED THOSE HOURS TO MAKE IT WORK?

I'd assume lots of get-things-done-in-advance so things don't get to that stage, but if that fails and it becomes one-or-the-other, how do you handle it?

I'd also love to hear your thoughts on why you're hanging up the jacket - I'm considering starting consulting in the same area for side income. (and whether you'd considered charging per week, Patrick Mackenzie-ing a lot of the onerous parts, etc)

From a "get people to play with numbers" perspective, this was actually a pretty cool challenge on Warren Buffet's part. Most people are going to spray-and-pray (my facebook feed is full of facetious "shit, there goes my billion dollars") but I would be surprised if there weren't a large number of people who put more effort than they otherwise would have into trying to figure out statistical models for who wins basketball games.

Thank you for saying this!

IMO there's way too much fearmongering (largely from people who have no experience trading, or from traders who don't want to see other people do better than them) about this. I've traded options on a very volatile commodity ETF before (SLV) and came out quiet well on top by playing with patterns and timing. This was in 2010, but there was the same "THE COMPUTERS CONTROL THE MARKETS AND YOU'LL GET CRUSHED" fearmongering hyperbole as there is today. It'll be there four years from now, too.

There's smart money and super fast algorithms and all that for sure, but there's plenty of dumb money moving around too. There are also plenty of people (I will note: often nontechnical individuals) who make a good living day trading. You basically just have to find a pattern ANYWHERE, IN ANYTHING and trade it over and over until it stops working (...and catch on quick). You might lose money (especially starting out), but it's not at all the experience of "you will step in and BE CRUSHED BY EXPERT TRADING ALGORITHMS" that people portray it as.

Start a brokerage account, do some reading, put in a sum of money that's consequential but that won't break you if you 100% lose it, and play around a little bit. Try focusing on one specific (preferably fairly liquid) security. You'll be amazed at how sometimes you make the right call and magically you have more money than you started with, and how you don't immediately die and get shot and lose all of your money to some corrupt evil high-speed algorithm while being eaten by wolves because, you shameful Icarus fool, you dared to trade on the public markets by yourself.

Risk-averse people (especially programmers) who have no experience trading will think you're completely insane and lambaste you, especially if you make money.

Instead of tossing around hyperbole, can you perhaps point out some specifics?

Appreciate you bringing up the flipside.

Out of curiosity, what sites would you say have been constructive?

My intuition is that StackExchange would probably be good if you're knowledgeable in esoteric/lucrative fields, whereas most people probably don't use their real name on reddit (depending on the subreddit, perhaps), but I'm interested to hear your experience.

THIS. I have a unique last name - there is absolutely no ambiguity whenever anything shows up.

Whenever a website (or anything offline that might put rankings or whatever online) wants me to use my real name, I usually default to "Alex", "Alex M/MJ" or "Alex (gibberish)" depending on their guidelines. What they view as a policy that "encourages openness", I view as something that will guide first impressions when people google me unto eternity.

Even if it's not controversial, it's the first thing a potential client or employer sees when they type things into google, and I don't want to be reckless with that. I don't want to have to view every minor action that I make on a website as something that's potentially going to be on the front page of google's results for my name.

When I was in HS, my friends had a poker league, and we all had nicknames and personas - someone put up a page with hilarious (but decidedly unprofessional) caricatures and quotes and it was the first thing that showed up under my name. I noticed it and asked my friend to change it, which he though was hilarious but understood and did.

Same for Meetup. A long time ago I went to some meetups that could potentially be alienating to some folks (agnostics and whatever, way back in the day when I felt it was worth arguing about) and BOOM, google front page for my name. If I had a client who was somewhat religious, I don't care at all but I don't want that to show up and all of a sudden I'm accidentally alienating people. For showing up to something.

Whenever I run a 5k or do anything remotely prestigious I always use my full name so that the front page of google just gets filled with that kind of thing in case anything else that's potentially a liability pops up and I don't notice it. It's annoying.

Set up times to work with people. The best stretches of pounding out productive side project work usually start with discussing it with a friend, both lamenting how much we're wasting time and messing around on it, and then we show up at one person's apartment or a coffee shop and hack on our respective side projects for 4 hours straight.