Hacker News Reader

conoryoungon How to Respond to Criticism – Learning from Dr. King

Feeding a squirrel while wearing a tank top is a good move. Draws attention away from the fact that you're trying to draw attention to your buff physique while at the same time emphasizing your sensitive caring side. Not that there's anything wrong with showing off your buff physique. Unless you're Tim Ferris, in which case highlighting how big a poser you are is probably the last thing you need. The squirrel is genius though.

conoryoungon OSWALD Hand-held Computer (designed by students)

Can't wait to try this with my JFK commemorative keyboard.

conoryoungon Go Daddy Files Patents for Enhanced Whois and DNS Records

A boycott would only work if there were a concerted effort behind to spread the word as far as possible.

The recent Whole Foods boycott was a good example of how to do it - organizers used the forums section of the Whole Foods website to get the word out and Whole Foods didn't prevent it.

A couple of people changing hosts on HN is not going to amount to a hill of beans and would most likely just inconvenience those people since Godaddy is the cheapest option available (if you use their frequent coupon codes).

conoryoungon Ask HN: I need some hardware based startup ideas

Electric car company

conoryoungon Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

In some studies, self-regulation skills have been shown to predict academic achievement more reliably than I.Q. tests.

Observing an individual's ability to self-regulate works as a good predictor of character in all kinds of situations, interviews being one of the more useful applications. Although justifying your subject judgments to your colleagues could be tricky -> "He answered the concurrency questions better than average but kept slouching down into his chair - I don't think he's going to be able to meet deadlines".

conoryoungon Ask HN: group project for HN or if anyone wants to run with it

The target demographic is not exactly rolling in cash but an interesting, socially conscious idea nevertheless.

conoryoungon The power of mobile money

Good article.

Paypal, Amazon Payments and Google Checkout should all be in a good position to dominate the mobile money market in the US, I would think.

conoryoungon Please Evaluate My Startup Idea

StackOverflow does this for free.

If you post a code sample and don't properly indent it, someone with high rep will correct it in within minutes. Such nice people.

conoryoungon Experiment: No Comment Scores

Interesting psychological side effect I just noticed: I wasn't previously aware of my tendency to scan a long thread for comments that stand out because of their high comment scores but I just did it when I opened this thread and felt like I didn't have my usual bearings. In one sense it levels the playing field. In another sense, though, it removes some key information that helps us to prioritize where we direct our attention.

conoryoungon Tales of a Bottom Feeder Recruiting Agency

Is it in fact the longest post you've ever written or just similar to the longest post you've ever written which also happens to be on this same topic?

conoryoungon PatchMatch: Amazing new Photoshop algorithms coming in CS5

I haven't even learned one tenth of the features in CS3 yet. And yet, surprise, surprise, I seem to do just fine. More feature bloat as far as I'm concerned.

conoryoungon Seth Godin takes down pages from Brands in Public

I considered it for a moment but immediately erased the thought from my mind.

conoryoungon Github and Engineyard part ways

It's like when your boss let's you "resign" so you don't have to tell a future employer you were fired. EY was fired.

conoryoungon Ask HN: Is learning Scala/Clojure/Haskell a good career move?

So I take it you don't believe any of these languages are going to achieve much traction in the business world. That's generally my take too. But there's still a lingering doubt: what if one of these is the "next big thing"? Just like you would have kicked yourself if you had had the opportunity to buy Google shares when they had not yet passed $10.