259 karma · joined July 24, 2009
Email: david@davidrorr.com
Looks like I don't have to build it anymore. =P
(My personal pain point was finding ordered lists of materials -- taking you from beginner to at least intermediate, produced by someone who knows what they're doing. Fingers crossed that BookShout will expand in that direction.)
I don't exactly disagree with the (implied) point, but your argument is... lacking.
However, the ideas stand: To have a large success, you need to a) be doing something, b) avoid rushing things _too much_ [1], and c) pay attention to how small or insulated your market is. (You can't be "the next Facebook" by writing a landscape company search, even if it's the best ever.)
[1] This is tough to get right -- you need to launch before you're satisfied, but take longer than you really want to. The optimization of time spent really depends on the situation. For instance, if you're rehashing an old idea and selling based on the UI, it's worth going over with members of your target market before you release, to make sure what they _use_ is easy for them to find. But if your idea is new, you need to release ASAP to get market validation while you can still pivot if you're a bit off the mark.
"Avoid the obvious content"
"Take the less usual side"
"Slip out of abstraction"
"Get rid of obvious padding"
"Call a fool a fool"
"Beware of pat expressions"
"Colorful words"
"Colored words"
"Colorless words"
Though [edit] the titles are a good summary of the article [/edit] (as per "slip out of abstraction") the examples given are humorous, thorough, and help in really getting the point being made.
It's interesting to consider how the author's (sometimes verbose) sentences could be shortened. If writing for pure conciseness, what would you cut out? Which parts are completely necessary? Are the rephrasings necessary to convey the different aspects of the current point? Is the example given important enough to stay?
"Pat expressions are hard, often impossible, to avoid, because they come too easily to be noticed and seem too necessary to be dispensed with."
=> "Pat expressions cannot always be avoided."
"A writer's work is a constant struggle to get the right word in the right place, to find that particular word that will convey his meaning exactly, that will persuade the reader or soothe him or startle or amuse him."
=> "Each situation calls for a certain word with a certain connotation; the writer toils to find it."
Again, there's no problem -- it's excellent writing, it just struck me that word golf could be as interesting as code golf. What is the shortest possible phrasing to express this exact idea? (I suppose we're doing it all the time, except in English classes where word count is the goal.)
Fear of rejection is no different from other irrational (or at least maladaptive) fears -- and those often _are_ treated by repeated exposure to the source of the fear.
I'd take a bet that you're not the type this was designed for. For some, being rejected at all is a huge blow to ego, confidence, and self-esteem, which can have serious effects on mood and productivity, for instance.
For these people, getting rejected more often means that each rejection is less significant and reinforces the knowledge that rejection happens. That is much healthier, and I'd hypothesize that it can increase one's average level of happiness. (It also gives an individual much more control over himself -- or takes it away from others, at any rate. Same thing.)
Personally, I've been training Isshinryu for ~9 years. It's been great for me, in terms of keeping me in shape, relieving stress, and learning confidence and discipline. Isshinryu is a striking art, but we also practice judo and grappling to a lesser degree. I actually wish we did more of those two, because many fights end up on the ground, and I feel underprepared for that -- though many of the people I've trained with have learned judo or wrestling separately, so it's possible I'm better prepared than I realize. (The evidence is still there, though. I rarely won on the mats. =P)
As far as starting a martial art, just find a dojo and go. Most will welcome you to watch a class so you can get a feel for the style and the instructors. Your first few weeks practicing can be embarrassing for some. Don't quit. Nobody there is expecting you to know what your doing, and you'll adapt to the dojo's norms pretty quickly.
The main thing, though, is to find a teacher who knows what they're doing. Also important: make sure you respect them. As long as you have these, your martial arts training will definitely improve you. No guarantees about making you into an unbeatable street fighter, but you won't be disappointed.
If that ain't a reason to pick up a martial art that trains falling... (Or you could have common sense. Either way.)
From my perspective, college has a lot to offer. Research, the chance to meet important people in the field, the chance to meet interesting people out of the field. These influenced my decision to be here (though I hadn't actually considered the possibility that college wasn't a requirement).
If you know your interests, I think going to college (for a degree) is a great way to go, because you can learn cool stuff full-time and meet people like you. Clearly you thought you did know -- but it turns out that working as a webdev wasn't the answer.
Given that, you probably need to talk to people who aren't the people you identify with. My vote is to take some time to find your interests, by traveling or being a bum on the streets of New York. Talk to everyone you meet about their interests. (Make a point, of course, to meet anyone and everyone you possibly can.) Hopefully you'll find that someone will infect you with their own passion.
If none of those float your boat, then get a part time job (one that you won't tie to your identity -- it's hard to get burnt out from being a waiter, even if it sucks to do) and make enough to pay your living expenses while you take classes in any subject you can think of at a community college. (Not for a degree, but to see if anything catches your interest.)
Whatever path you need to take, find _something_ that interests you. And then do it.
If it turns out later that web development (but only cool projects) is really what you want to do, then do it. If you still can't do it as a salaried position, other HNers have recommended going freelance. I'd say either that or keep your non-identity day job while you build shit on the side -- just make sure that one of your projects is making you enough money to put something away, because you won't be able to live forever on next to nothing.
"There are many ways of coordinating an attack without using a mobile phone," says Aurélie Branchereau-Giles of OnAir, a company based in Geneva, Switzerland, that Airbus is backing as a maker of in-flight cellphone and Wi-Fi systems. "The position of our security experts is that the use of mobile phones on planes does not constitute any additional security threat."
I tend to agree. A timer is as effective, though perhaps slightly less precise, than a phone call. Even as it stands, one could probably set up an ad-hoc network with the explosives (laptop in luggage? Not sure about signal strength.) and use pretty much any electronic device to connect to it.
I'm usually afraid to say something wrong, since I know that there are always experts on the topic of the post. It makes more sense to me to let said experts explain a particular topic than to possibly disseminate wrong information, even though I might have a useful perspective to add.
The logo is simply a scan of my hand, from a flatbed scanner converted to black and white. The "back" in the picture is the scanner cover, and the shadows are from the scanner light."
But no image on the main page =( I really wish they'd archived that, too. (Says something about the necessity of making v1 look good. Of course, the web was a different place in '97.)
OTOH, that could certainly be the article taking his words out of their (grammatically) proper context.
Yes, the wording is technically incorrect, but the common usage of "cognitive dissonance" is generally about practical implications, like this.
"A lot of people who applied to YCombinator are probably hacks with derivative ideas and little ability to actually accomplish things. You are probably one of them. A dreamer who sees external capital as a shortcut towards making money without actually working for it."
But contrary to the author's view, YC is also very good at analyzing startup potential. That's how it works -- the business model depends on it. If you don't get accepted to YC, chances are, there's a problem. Of course, they can't accept everyone, and presumably the number of applications is increasing with time, so that problem may be that there are just too many applicants with good ideas. But rejection from YC is a perfect opportunity to reevaluate your idea and your potential. The fact is that there are good startup ideas and bad ones, and being rejected from YC is a hint that you may have a bad one.
If you're still confident and passionate after reevaluating, _that_ is when you run with your idea anyway.
My line of thinking probably evolved from the ease with which Facebook could just push the entire zipped file to purchasers, instead of just the relevant info. This is incorrect in that 1) I wouldn't imagine facebook shares its actual data, just uses it to allow advertisers to target their ads, and 2) even if they did, I seriously doubt they would group data by user thoroughly enough to be identifiable.
Half of my concern was what would be accessible via facebook connect, and the ability of a malicious website to harvest scary amounts of personal information via this + cross-site user tracking (about which, admittedly, I know almost nothing). Again, the data dump is only about ease of access, not a totally new ability.
I'm also talking about things I don't really know about. I've never used fb connect, nor do I have experience with cross-site user tracking. But I'm certainly under the impression that it would be possible to combine these two concepts into something disturbing. (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1250497 would seem to imply that a large advertising network could do this sort of thing (though I'm not sure where the fbconnect info would come from, exactly).
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This is disturbing. Yes, Facebook was sharing your information before -- it was the source of all their ad revenue. But now, instead of individual pieces of data (location, specific interests, etc.), they have the potential to share (read:sell) an entire person's worth of data in a lump. Not saying it will happen immediately, or at all, but I see some serious possibility for harm here. (Cross-site behavior tracking just got a whole lot scarier, if you can link it to a FB profile...) Of course, there could be some serious academic applications to this, too. And it makes them look more open, and access to your own data is good.
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I'm on HN to learn, but the downvotes told me nothing. (No child comments.) So in the interest of writing better comments (and hopefully improving my own analyses), what's wrong with this one?
Is it the cynical outlook? Is there something factually incorrect? Is mine just an unpopular opinion? I'm looking for feedback, because I didn't expect my comment to bomb like it did.
Anything you can offer is appreciated!
As it is, I could make it through a multiple choice/free response test (with 4 or 5 choices, and open-ended questions) in many subjects knowing less than half the material going in. Getting an A, mind you. Granted, I'm not the typical case, but the point is not to have everyone getting easy A's. That's not why we have school.
School is supposed to be a place to learn to challenge yourself continuously. It should teach the value of persistence and hard work, because those are skills that can be learned and will seriously affect the life potential of an individual [1]. This is a separate consideration than intelligence, which according to some studies (that happen to agree with my point... don't you love selection bias?) has a fixed, unchangeable component [2]. The effect of these suggestions would be to lower the effort bar - more students will be like me, and have to put very little effort into their schoolwork to get the grades they want. I did not learn how to work hard (at least from school), and neither will they.
[1] [pdf] duende.uoregon.edu/~hsu/blogfiles/sat.pdf according to University of Oregon researchers, high college GPAs are not correlated with high SAT scores. If we assume the SAT tests what it intends to, the implication of this study is that hard work can lead to mastery at least as well as intelligence, in most fields.
[2] http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20020017191357data_trunc_sy... Neural plasticity implies that you can learn new things, and the rate at which connections can change determines a "general intelligence factor" commonly called G.
Woot's business (from their FAQ page: http://woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx) is about selling one item a day, at a really good price. The Sennheiser headphones are today's item... and in that space where they're calling out AP, they usually talk up the day's product. They work in the sales pitch later in the text, though it isn't included in the TechCrunch article.
So their alternative payment is buying their product instead of paying them directly. (But really, it's just a lead-in to the marketing pitch they usually have. I think. It's my first time there, too.)
For what reasons is finishing high school better than dropping out? Not that they don't exist, but you've dismissed his argument without listing any.
"As we’ve watched Amazon customers make purchases on the site, we can clearly see that promoting the most helpful reviews has increased sales in these categories by 20%.(One out of every five customers decides to complete the purchase because of the strength of the reviews.) From this, we can project it has contributed to Amazon's top line by $2.7 billion."
Maybe I'm just missing something... Is there a metric for how many users base their decision to buy on the helpfulness of the review?
Even at that, we have no idea how many of those who bought an item because of the reviews would have bought it without.
I agree with the article that reviews are useful, and I definitely appreciate the community-upvote functionality. It's pretty neat. But I think the case is greatly overstated, and their estimates are pretty dodgy.
Use the magnetic field to keep the mirror on the desired surface. No atmosphere in space, so there's no other use/necessity for the technology, right? And we already have proof of concept: "Today, Brousseau and buddies reveal a next generation liquid mirror that gets around these problems. The proof-of-principle mirror is just 5 cm across but sits atop a honeycomb of 91 actuators that can deform the liquid. […] And they've overcome the the non-linear control problems by superimposing a strong uniform magnetic field on top of the field created by the actuators. This has the effect of linearising the response of the liquid."