Hacker News Reader

amsilprotagon How Did Cool Become Such a Big Deal? (2014)

Guess the age of the author at the time of writing and then click [0]. If you're like me, you were pretty sure he was over 40, likely over 50. The reason why this is statistically likely is because cool died about 15 years ago and everyone under 35 knows it, but the article doesn't even mention it.

As the author says, cool started gaining popularity in the 30s, as mass broadcast media became dominant and service jobs made up over 50% of the US work force [1]. Almost all service jobs, to a greater degree than farm and manufacturing, require the participants to signal competence. The cool persona is Hollywood's and Madison Avenue's counter-signaling answer to this demand. Cool is on another plane from those other, gaudy service sector workers. Cool doesn't flaunt competence, but if you give cool a guitar, gun, motorcycle, or skateboard, flawless execution will ensue. Anyone can adopt the mannerisms of cool (to Madison Avenue's benefit [2]).

What replaced cool? Genuine enthusiasm. With the rise of the internet, social media, and Youtube, entertainers are no longer selected by service-economy executives. Now entertainers rise up through skill, passion, and endless hours of self-promotion. Now artists and athletes have access to their fans, and their fans see their dedication and associate it with status. To get a sense of this change, watch a few early 2000s Scarlett Johansson interviews, then watch a few current Jenifer Lawremce interviews. The new cool is engaged and open, a tightly-packaged version of the qualities of Youtube star or professional athlete.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Skinner_(journalist)

[1] https://www.minnpost.com/sites/default/files/images/articles...

[2] This chart https://www.ahrq.gov/sites/default/files/wysiwyg/professiona... from this 2018 study https://www.ahrq.gov/professionals/education/curriculum-tool...

amsilprotagon Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban

AmEx was one of Warren Buffet's earlier investments, and a proof-of-concept of investing in companies with defensible moats. This ruling comes 55 years after his initial investment, and the moat feels as deep as ever.

Later businesses have perfected the art of winning the customer relationship and solidifying their lead with hardball terms for vendors (Walmart), merchants (Amazon), advertisers (Facebook/Google), developers (Apple/Google) and contractors (Uber).

amsilprotagon Taiwan’s Technology Secrets Come Under Assault from China

If podcasts are more your speed, I'd recommend Bloomberg's Odd Lots with Dan Wang, which talks about China's 2025 plan.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-21/this-is-c...

amsilprotagon China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data

There's a great breakdown here [0]. The first chart shows age 15-44 deaths going up ~10% from 2010 to 2016. The third chart shows drug overdose deaths going up 50%(15-24), 80% (25-34), and 60% (35-44) from 2012 to 2016.

[0] http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2018/05/lawler-us-deaths-j...

amsilprotagon The high modernism of social media companies

The cited fragment does suggest that interpretation, that the de facto goodness should be scrutinized. But the entire memo frames terrorism and bullying as unfortunate side-effects which must be tolerated for the sake of ever greater connectivity.

--- [Newport quote in brackets] ---

Andrew Bosworth June 18, 2016

The Ugly

We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly.

We connect people.

That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.

So we connect more people

[That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.

And still we connect people.

The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.] It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.

That isn’t something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.

That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.

The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use win.

I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. If you joined the company because it is doing great work, that’s why we get to do that great work. We do have great products but we still wouldn’t be half our size without pushing the envelope on growth. Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing.

In almost all of our work, we have to answer hard questions about what we believe. We have to justify the metrics and make sure they aren’t losing out on a bigger picture. But connecting people. That’s our imperative. Because that’s what we do. We connect people.

amsilprotagon Creator of “Ren and Stimpy” Accused of Preying on Underage Girls

I remember watching a Stern interview, Billy West Vs John Kricfalusi 1995 [0]. Kricfalusi came across as petty and self-absorbed, essentially calling West a scab for acceding to management by voice acting multiple characters in later seasons. West claimed the show would be insolvent otherwise and he needed the money. Kricfalusi said this act led to defeat of the creative faction by the executive faction.

I don't know how I stumbled upon it years ago, since it only has ~300 views even now. But i still remember how psychologically manipulative Kricfalusi sounded, and my surprised reaction at the end when Stern sided with him.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6OoJP3VJoA

amsilprotagon The original pitch for Diablo (1994) [pdf]

If you're interested in Blizzard history, there's a 4-hour interview with Rob Pardo hosted by Civ 4 lead and Offworld Trading Company creator Soren Johnson. Pardo also recounts the beginnings of Diablo in part one around ~1:27:00, although he wasn't involved in the project at that time.

Starcraft, WoW, and Hearthstone are also discussed. Warning: audio quality is not great.

https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/rob-pardo-...

amsilprotagon Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

(Pinker lists the following medical researchers and public health crusaders as having saved more than 100 million lives each: Karl Landsteiner, Abel Wolman, Linn Enslow, William Foege, Maurice Hilleman, John Enders. How many of them had you heard of? I’d heard of none.)

The first 94 pages are available on Google Books. Here is a link to the page with a table of these researchers' accomplishments and approximate lives saved.

https://books.google.com/books?id=J6grDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA64&

amsilprotagon 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

This reminded me of the $560MM "AI Fund" South Korea touted after the AlphaGo-Sedol Go competition [0]. Looking for news now, it seems like they teamed up with Singapore and are taking a less centralized approach. From [1]:

Gwangju Metropolitan City (GMC) plans to set aside US$920 million (1 trillion won) to support the AI Town Project, which is expected to incubate 1,000 AI-oriented startups and educate and train 5,000 for the sector within the decade, starting from 2019.

The 3 sub-projects of the AI Town Project include: (1) Establishment of AI Research Institute, (2) Development of AI-oriented Campus, and (3) Creation of AI-oriented Start-up Ecosystem.

[0] https://www.nature.com/news/south-korea-trumpets-860-million... [1] https://www.opengovasia.com/articles/singapore-and-south-kor...

amsilprotagon Ask HN: What has HN given you?

What a coincidence. I just started reading and bookmarked the archive.io of Impro yesterday after seeing used copies on Amazon starting at $25. I'm assuming it's out of print?

https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-KIkLrSPi_3lzPl5v/Keith%20Joh...

amsilprotagon The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry

There is a popular anecdote along these lines that comes from the 1950's US Air force.

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

The scientists also expected that a sizable number of pilots would be within the average range on all 10 dimensions. But even Daniels was stunned when he tabulated the actual number.

Zero.

Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions.

Using their definition of "average range", which is the middle 30% (in height, waist circumference, etc), we should expect to find one such individual for every 1/0.3^10 = 169,351 people on average.

amsilprotagon Amazon Health

If we assume investors are omniscient, there is somewhere between a 3% and 11% chance Amazon Health will commoditize the market. Weigh those numbers a bit upward if you think Amazon can't do it instantaneously.

CVS dropped by just over 4 percent by midday, UnitedHealth plunged a whopping 11.5 percent, Express Scripts was off by 3.6 percent, Cigna was down by just under 7 percent and Walgreens fell by 2.6 percent.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/30/cvs-other-health-stocks-do...

amsilprotagon The Follower Factory

I don't remember that 99pi. Was it Reply All?

https://gimletmedia.com/episode/112-the-prophet/

After Andrea is attacked by a stranger in Mexico City, she just wants to figure out who the guy was. Investigating this question drops her right into the middle of one of Mexico’s biggest conspiracies.

amsilprotagon What gig workers can learn from romance writers

How much of the genre's success can we attribute to an inclusive culture? I would guess it may have helped level out the income curve - a $10,000 median annual income is higher than I would have guessed for a saturated, hit-based industry.

But in terms of aggregate genre growth, I think the Kindle and iBooks/Audible helped much more. Seeing the three-fold increase in romance author income coupled with the halving of other authors' income from 2008 to 2014 suggests that readers really altered their preferences to avoid being seen with a physical romance novel.

It feels like a similar phenomenon occurred with scifi/fantasy, judging by the audible best seller list.

https://www.audible.com/adblbestsellers

amsilprotagon Buffett Says Stock Ownership Became More Attractive With Tax Cut

I'd love to see the results of the following survey given to a representative sample of cryptocurrency investors.

1) If you want to invest in cryptocurrencies, you should understand them. (true/false)

2) Most cryptocurrency investors don't understand cryptocurrencies. (true/false)

3) I understand cryptocurrencies. (true/false)

I would guess each question would have 80%+ true responses.

amsilprotagon The worst is yet to come for American shopping malls

A more quantitative, in-depth article on the topic was published by Bloomberg in early November.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-retail-debt/

amsilprotagon U.S. judge says Uber withheld evidence, delays Waymo trial

In its filing, Waymo said it was inadvertently copied on an email from one of its suppliers with drawings of Uber’s circuit board design for its lidar technology, short for light detection and ranging, ” that are laser-based sensors used in self-driving cars. Waymo said Uber’s design bore “a striking resemblance” to its proprietary and highly secret design and infringed on Waymo’s patents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/technology/google-self-dr...

amsilprotagon People Who Speed-Listen to Podcasts

What a coincidence it would be if people's optimal speaking speed, both reading out loud and conversational, was equal to their optimal audio comprehension speed. There could be some evolutionary justification for this to be true, but it would still be remarkable.

I would love to find data on listening comprehension based on audio speed and activity, whether it be lying down, driving, doing chores, walking, or exercising. My intuition is that there are many people that best comprehend the material at around 1.5x-2.0x and comprehension drops precipitously at both ends. My guess is that, as with many mainstream broadcast choices, the canonical broadcaster voice is purposefully slow to cater the widest possible audience, including ESL listeners.

amsilprotagon SEC fines Zenefits and former CEO for misleading investors

This is a recurring theme in Matt Levine's Money Stuff.

One thing that I occasionally mention around here is that every bad thing a public company does is also securities fraud: If you did the bad thing and didn't first disclose it to shareholders, then they can claim to have been defrauded by your failure to disclose it. (If you did the bad thing and did first disclose it to shareholders ... why?)

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-22/stock-buy...

amsilprotagon Billionaire Insys founder charged in U.S. opioid bribe case

For those unfamiliar, or who want to explore the idea that Kapoor simply didn't bribe conspicuously enough, see [0]. And although it is true that so-called "deaths of despair" are all increasing[1], the trend-lines for opiates look especially distressing[2].

[0] http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-famil...

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078

[2] https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o...

amsilprotagon 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

I think his definitive piece on the subject is E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction (1993) [0], definitely worth a read if you have the time. Wallace's "six hours a day" refrain is an interesting contrast to our now dominant usage pattern of dozens of 10 minutes chunks of daily social media consumption.

What explains the pointlessness of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it. It's not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It's that any such connection has become otiose. Television used to point beyond itself. Those of us born in like the sixties were trained to look where it pointed, usually at versions of "real life" made prettier, sweeter, better by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today's Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what's not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.

[0] https://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram:+television+a...

amsilprotagon Paul Mus, Ho Chi Minh, and Me

I've also enjoyed reading Chris Appy's post-show notes after viewing.

Christian G. Appy is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015), Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (2003), and Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (1993).

http://www.processhistory.org/tag/pbs/

amsilprotagon Companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 Demo Day (Day 2)

The marketing choices are interesting. I don't think we'll see that line in their B2B copy. The names Covetly and PreDxion feel like a tonal mismatch for their more rulebound audiences. The cartoonish visuals of Construct Simply and CarDash also feel a bit off relative to a pick-up truck or motor oil ad. But in those cases, the clients often drag the service providers to the platform.

amsilprotagon Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

The timing of this video is a lesson in humility. It's posted one month before a positive earnings report showing high growth in active buyers that gives the stock an ongoing 1.3x price increase. As far as I have viewed, Shkreli seems ambivalent, using vague heuristics to predict the future -- expectation of a yahoo-like slow decline, poor UX and discovery, and stiff Amazon competition.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:EBAY (click 5y)

https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/08/11/why-shares-of-ebay...

amsilprotagon Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

The first graph linked below shows "hotness" as a function of time with upvotes held constant. The equations are above the linked section. Compounding this effect, there is a feedback loop where hotter elements are more likely to be seen and voted, which increases hotness logarithmically.

So no, the algorithm doesn't intentionally punish dense material. But it does happen incidentally.

https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo...

amsilprotagon Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job

I think people are trying to say abrogate. I've seen this usage a few times lately.

amsilprotagon Bill Gates questions worth of space exploration for improving humanity (2013)

From [0]:

> Musk is without doubt a dazzling salesman. Who better than a guardian of human welfare to sell you your new, self-driving Tesla? Andrew Ng—the chief scientist at Baidu, known as China’s Google—based in Sunnyvale, California, writes off Musk’s Manichaean throwdown as “marketing genius." “At the height of the recession, he persuaded the U.S. government to help him build an electric sports car,” Ng recalled, incredulous.

Based on the TED talk [1], Musk seems to be proposing a scarce luxury transport solution. The Boring Company is an answer to the question, "What inconvenience do Los Angeles millionaires suffer daily?" And for this he is being elevated to no less than savior of humanity?

[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dol...

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_buildin...

amsilprotagon “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

Is this true? Wasn't Microsoft brought down for harming incipient businesses by bundling competing software into the OS? Wasn't standard oil fragmented in part for receiving anti-competitive freight fares?

Couldn't it be argued that Google's featured snippets and accelerated mobile pages will lower the revenue of content creators and thus decrease consumer surplus in the long term?

amsilprotagon A Critic Looks at His Own Early Artwork, 35 Years Later

This slide show is a follow-up to [0]. I'd argue the context is more interesting than the content. The original article is a kind of counterweight to survivorship bias. What happens when an artist in his early twenties gets some glimmers of potential success as a professional artist, and then goes down the rabbit hole for about a decade only to find that their work is seen as mediocre?

From the article:

Soon, I went to get Roberta. I told her the news [about rediscovering his art] and asked her to come see. She came into my office and started looking. For a long time. Longer than I had. One by one. Studying, not saying a word. After a while she turned to me and said, “They’re okay.” Stricken, I said, “Okay?! What do you mean ‘okay’? I think they’re beautiful. Aren’t they great?” She turned back to the drawings, looked a little longer, and finally said, “They’re generic. And impersonal. No one would know what these are about. And what’s with the triangles? Are they supposed to be women?” I shot back, “No! They’re Hell!” She talked about how many artists “never get better than their first work.” And just like that, I was right back to where I was when I quit: crushed, in crisis, frozen, panicky.

[0] http://www.vulture.com/2017/04/jerry-saltz-my-life-as-a-fail...

amsilprotagon Survivorship Bias

I was reminded of that talk when I saw the comic, and surprised to see the comments debating the influence of luck and effort in life outcomes.

Both media are making the same joke, but I don't think anyone would feel a need to defend effort if they had seen the talk instead of the comic. The talk's beat-for-beat parody of the just-so success story paints a very clear and recognizable target.