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ej's latest post seems to indicate airbnb did not follow through.

airbnb needs some Tom Peters Wow tactics. If they had jumped on this thing as dave1619 suggests in this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2824374 And as others, including edw519, suggests in the main thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821280, imagine the blog post ej would have written and it would have turned this shite into gold.

airbnb has had the advantage of having a mainly "geek" clientele so far. As it expands it's going to get less savory users.

Arrington reported on her blog post and didn't get his facts straight about the financial help. What he quoted as an update was, in fact, already stated. The impression he gave of airbnb's indifference was unfair.

"Be Remarkable."? He could have picked any positive adjective out of the thesaurus and it would been as useful as that. Weak article.

The New Diary by Christine Rainer is another good book on exploring through writing. It has many of the same techniques. The freewriting technique not only gives you ideas, but sometimes a sense of peace about what worries you.

I've noticed that there is no downvoting allowed on comments on your own submissions. I think that's a good idea. I think downvoting is important. I'd like to see when a comment has been downvoted. I also miss the karma points being shown. More indicators like that create a richer, more Minority Report feel for reading HN.

Is there any word that has been rendered more useless than the word god? That word belongs to the fundamentalists and the hucksters, and instead of trying to salvage it, it seems like time to let it go. Yes, the internet can be very good and very bad, just like everything else. What's god got to do with it? Couching things in the "language of religion" never clarified anything.

When I was a kid I had the top score in Galaga at my local arcade. I held the spot for months. Then one day I came in to find my score doubled by someone. The arcade owner told me that it was a guy who went around to each arcade and ran up the scores. Like a game playing gunslinger.

Now on the web any time I find a fun game and play it for awhile and improve, I come online to find that the high score has been run up by some aspieoverlord to unwinnable levels.

So how do game designers overcome that demotivating unwinnable high score phenomena?

"lenguages" was weakly typed.

7 dollars for life, but it looks like you have to pay some sort of per message price a la this line... "JUNE SPECIAL: 100 more free SMS credits, Login & go here!"

Perhaps this is a naive (or dumb) question, but what will all those new engineers do? Reddit is doing what it has always done why does just scaling up require so many more engineers?

The story is that Alcatraz had very warm showers for the inmates to prevent them preparing for the long cold swim to freedom.

No one can accuse Bill of having a sense of irony. This makes me think of recently deceased poet, Gil Scott-Heron's Whitey on the Moon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY

"To further my ambition, my mother “hacked” the system by using her co-workers’ address in a more affluent neighborhood to ensure that I received the best public education possible."

Oops now she would be a criminal for doing that.

This previous Hacker News thread might be helpful for language learning. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603562

I use memrise.com for French and it incorporates these techniques in language learning. Greg Detre and Ed Cooke have a great site there.

For general info about the memory methods I recommend Mnemotechnics.org

The main reason that American times in memory events has improved over the past few years (besides more people spending more time and effort) is that we have started using the more advanced techniques of the Europeans. We have gone from one two-digit image per location to the 3 two-digit numbers per location PAO method of Dominic O'Brien to the 4 two-digits per location of Ben Pridmore.

This is a helpful article, but the theme of the site it's on is really tacky with its faux wood paneling which sort of takes away from its message about awesomeness.

digitizor.com has a couple of off-putting features. Their ad placement is very obtrusive. And when i clicked on the "beta" link it took me to a Microsoft ad which purported to be "informative".

I think what Newport is saying is that you have to work smart harder in order to get smarter and more hard-working. It's after the hard work and learning that the inspiration comes. The paradox is that if you want something to "come to you" you have to go after it first.

General advice at Study Hacks http://www.calnewport.com.

Clicking on it still has the effect of awarding an upvote. You just can't see the totals any more.

I've started projects that seemed merely interesting and became obsessed with them after steady immersion. Sometimes you just need to see the glimmer of something to motivate you to dig and find the gold.

I just started using nudgemail with my Google calendar and I like the ability to just send an email with a task or appointment and be reminded of it as well as have it put into my calendar automatically. It does seem to put appointments into the previous day however.

I woke up thinking about The Information and how the African Drums demonstration of "redundancy overcoming ambiguity" might play out in writing and mnemonics.

Perhaps the karma for submitting articles should be separate from the karma for comments. I know when I was out to build karma I focused on submissions because there wasn't a downside.

For me, perhaps it was my ignorance of the subject that both made me miss the book's inadequacies and made it seem wonderful to me. The concepts were new to me and were counter-intuitive in a mentally liberating way. It was also during a zeitgeist that produced books like The Tao of Physics.

Sorry I don't have a citation for that. As far as I know it hasn't been researched. I was mostly being flippant but I'm not ready to let go of the concept of Talent. There are people who are no more knowledgeable or experienced than I who are way better than me at stuff.

Being able to spend that much time in that focused of an effort seems like a talent or perhaps a "condition" like Asperger's.