amsilprotag

There was a great Bloomberg Decrypted podcast a couple weeks ago weighing the costs and benefits for a small town in offering a multi-million dollar subsidy for thousands of low-skill Amazon warehouse jobs. Is it really worth subsidizing at all when the government will have to fund various welfare programs to cover the difference between the ~$10.00/hr paid and a livable wage? But since towns compete and prestige is awarded to politicians who win deals, towns race each other to near zero expected value.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-14/your-tax-...

Block chain, smart contracts, what about the very basics? What about VCS, DRY documents, standard libraries, pop-up annotations and definitions? It seems like law has no interest in introducing standards to improve productivity and usability.

Look halfway down this article on the proposed health care replacement bill for an example of current legislative version control.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-07/the-repub...

This is a great real-world example of the Nobel Prize winning concept, The Market for Lemons. [0]

A buyer wants to spend somewhere between price 4-6, but they aren't able to tell quality 3 from quality 7. Due to fear of getting taken advantage of, they end up settling for low quality at low price. Sellers react to this behavior, and we get the price/quality distortions described above.

[0] http://www.economist.com/news/economics-brief/21702428-georg...

The essay isn't about what matters in the absolute. It's about deciding where to spend a marginal hour, year, or life with imperfect information. And it's obviously true in retrospect that Newton's lifetime was spent in a way which produced more good to society than yet another theological life. Contrast his contributions to the most prominent 17th century theologians:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_theologians#...

The problem is that two equilibria exist. The equilibrium of a tipping culture is reinforced by high-performing wait staff. If one restaurant or one city adopts a no-tipping policy, the well-tipped will move, the poorly-tipped will stay, and quality will suffer. The other problem is that the tipping culture has created many extrinsically motivated workers. Cultures without tipping require people who intrinsically perform well, but years of living under the carrot and stick of tipping has produced transactional workers.

The no-tipping equilibrium perpetuates because most customers don't like the math and decision-making required after every meal. And most workers don't like being put into a Skinner box. And finally, the best wait staff in no-tipping cultures don't realize how much they're subsidizing the worst wait staff.

We as a society simply fell into the worse equilibrium. The only solution is a national edict, but this likely won't happen because there isn't the political will, and the beneficiaries of the current system know who they are and what they'd lose.

Yes, the second link leads to the episode discussing the origin of the form.

The Planet Money podcast investigative journalism was some of the most disheartening listening I've encountered all year.

The two most glaring abuses, in my mind, were the blackmailing of employees to put their name on a banking industry do-not-hire list if they didn't make sales quotas that proved nearly impossible without the opening of fake accounts. Essentially, WF used the industry fraud blacklist as a punishment for employees unwilling to commit fraud.

The second malevolent practice was using the company ethics line as a kind of honeypot to discredit and fire potential employees who wanted to report opening fake accounts on clients' behalf.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/07/497084491/episo...

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/28/499805238/episo...

There is a schism on this site between the entrepreneurs and the technologists. The entrepreneurs will tell you that what Soylent did was hard. They found a population that would enjoy a nutritional supplement, but didn't like the branding of current offerings. The created and popularized a brand to serve busy, health-conscious professionals.

The technologist will tell you that Soylent is essentially a direct marketing business that mixes commodities (poorly) and sells them at high markup.

A similar narrative has existed in business news for the past year, where readers bemusedly read about a pyramid scheme company that distributes protein shake called Herbalife to see whether it will implode or not.

Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast is doing a three-part series critiquing the state of American education and its effect on social mobility. The first part (released last week) gives a personal perspective of a child who passes on an opportunity for social advancement to instead provide family support. As far as I understand it, the next parts are looking at the incentives that that shape college budgets.

Part 1: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/04-carlos-doesnt-reme...

I'd love to see more companies with an evil canary cartoon image file. Perhaps when violated, canary.png could direct to a cartoon unicorn sheepishly grinning with one stuffed cheek.

citing http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

"What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert."

Prophetic counter-example.

For an earlier perspective, Here's a 1983 Tom Wolfe essay about Noyce and the founding of Intel, briefly mentioning Andy Grove at the end.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyc...

He's also identified the narrative as a popular excuse among the poorest-performing hedge funds ("We valued the stocks properly, it is the market that is wrong." and "We aren't even trying to beat the market, we are merely offering a different risk proposition.") After over a decade of data, hedge funds must compete against the more compelling narrative, that hedge fund winning streaks are a matter of chance, and that the average investor isn't capable of picking one with prolonged better-than-market returns.

If we are to use this [0] definition, then "Hypergrowth at" can be omitted. It seems like a better title would include "in highly regulated industries."

It's interesting to note that the essay only includes discussion of law as it relates to defending startups from incumbents, not as a caveat to the advice: "The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place." Is it the case that Zenefits merely failed to grow fast enough to present a more credible threat to state prosecutors?

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

I'd recommend popping this into your console.

$('.job-text').css({color: 'black'})

His position seems to be similar to MIT engineer David Mindell's, who recently wrote Our Robots, Ourselves[1]. It seems to me that the more hours one spends solving real problems with AI, the less likely they are to believe an apocalypse is imminent. Conversely, the more dependent a prognosticator is on book or film sales, the more likely they are to predict or depict a near-term AI apocalypse.

[1] Google Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nDdqGUMdAY

The following are three of his less partisan articles and their top-voted comment, plucked from Brooks' most recent articles [1]

Communities of Character

"Pop sociologist Professor Brooks is at it again...."

Tales of the Super Survivors

"It certainly does, Lord Brooks..."

The Evolution of Simplicity

"If only excessive materialism and manifold opportunities were the problem in this country. I think Mr. Brooks tends to project his own affluent angst on society at large..."

This is the force, imposed by readers, to homogenize ideologically. The deluge of criticism is to be expected when a high delta exists between a columnist's ideology and their platform's. In an ideological battleground, where vilification trumps truth, I think the burden of assessing quality lies on the reader.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/column/david-brooks

I find myself doing the same, despite increasing preference for "she" by academicians and journalists.

See the top post in another HN thread for my criticism, copied below. When "she" becomes the default, I find myself veering off from the topic at hand to consider gender politics and try to infer the author's intention. Does OP see makers as "us" and managers as "them"? Is OP using "she" because /they/ believe managers are disproportionately male and so chooses a pronoun to prevent further exclusion? An ideal grammar solution should not require the author to disclose his politics, either by omission or commission, just to communicate effectively.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10658187

"Manager time" is a small allocation. Since the manager's heap only uses blocks this size, she can do this all day without any problems or fragmentation.

"Maker time" is a large contiguous block. If the heap is empty, you can allocate them without any problem. But stick one manager-sized block in the middle and now you've split your heap such that the total time available is large enough, but it's not contiguous. Classic heap fragmentation[2].

I think many of the disagreements in this thread can be attributed to different interpretations of the word.

There is the thought-dulling sarcasm common on the internet that is equivalent to preaching to the choir in reverse, "It's ok, congress is on it" or "Another cold day, so much for global warming." Similar is the the teenager's use of mocking sarcasm as a blunt act of defiance.

Then there is the playful language that makes the listener try to inhabit the mind of the speaker and likely does generate creative thought, such as the article's example “Pat, don’t work so hard!”

Finally, sarcasm can be used to express ideas that, if said bluntly, would be unacceptable. A boss can tell a recently-berated employee, "the customer is always right" as a way of commiserating with the employee without directly discrediting the customer. Or a coworker can say "Another good policy decision from management" and gauge the listener's reaction without directly revealing their own opinion.

Pinker on shared vs mutual knowledge, the value of ambiguity: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/pinker/files/evolutionary_s...

Does that make the search engine GoOgle?

The presenter is making the same argument, as evidenced by pairing the above quote with a quote criticizing the printing press.

"Life after MOOCs" is portending the replacement of low-feedback, low-engagement MOOCs with the more social, self-paced, text-based offerings. I think they have the right idea. Learners feel more mentally engaged editing and browsing wikis or documentation, solving problems with peers, and participating in Q&A with TAs rather than the traditional MOOC activities of viewing tests and answering quizzes.

Code-learning platforms are already evolving past video, copy-pasting code, and quizzes. freecodecamp is embracing social learning and forming peer relationships. Codewars and codecombat are employing gamification elements to increase engagement.

Free Obfuscated Source Satire (FOSS)

The JS from https://github.com/benzweig/jankyscroll:

<script>var jankyscroll=function(){"use strict";function n(){var n=Math.round(Math.random());return 1==n?-1:1}function o(){return(5Math.random()+8)/10}return function(r,t){function i(){a&&clearTimeout(a),a=setTimeout(function(){window.scrollBy(0,to()n())},400)}r=r||400,t=t||20;var e,a,c=function(){var i=Math.floor(window.scrollY/r);e!==i&&(window.scrollBy(0,to()*n()),e=i)};window.addEventListener("scroll",c,!1),window.addEventListener("resize",i,!1)}}();jankyscroll(170,100);</script>

It seems like they chose two lines to make a cleaner SVG animation to the "x" when you click on it.

Many times throughout the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast[1], a founder expresses the sentiment, "If I had known how hard it was going to be, I might not have started the company." The difficulty discounting has also been cited as the reason why many successful founders are young and inexperienced. So while hubris can lead to disastrous consequences for engineers, it could be viewed as an asset for inciting action.

[1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html

I don't think the research does an adequate job differentiating intellectual activity from agency. Is the learning and exploring their substitute for addiction? Or is it the linking of action and effort to reward?

I'd be interested in comparing the inert mice to mice that are rewarded sporadically for a physically demanding but intellectually effortless task, such as running on a mouse wheel. I'd guess the results would be similar.

I challenge "easily printable." This way of writing sheet music is vastly more space inefficient. Each beat requires an entire row of space, whereas a beat in sheet music might require 3 square inches at most. Having many pages of sheet music, like in coding, makes it much harder to understand the song as a whole and navigate repeats.

I do like the fact that — unlike with sheet music - the 12 semi-tones are spaced evenly, as they are in reality. This allows for fast visual recognition of chord types and intervals.

There is danger in creating artificial scarcity by cutting off gamblers after a threshold. It will likely result in an increase in desire and addiction. Consider Candy Crush, a game where players are cut off access to the game after a certain amount of plays. This has the result of increasing desire, habit formation, and decreasing burnout.

If there is a solution, I think it lies in educating the population and making access as inconvenient as possible.