gdne

tl;dr Yes. Books are worth it.

For the vast majority of my life, I didn’t read any books. Reading for me is a painfully boring experience. I simply lack the ability to read and comprehend at a speed that keeps me engaged.

Then, I realized I assimilate information very differently based on the medium. For me, math is a very visual thing. Graphs and plots make mathematical concepts immediately understandable. For general learning, hearing someone talk about a topic is most effective for me. This is when I decided to give audiobooks a go. This has been transformational for me.

Any good audiobook app will allow for faster playback. I’ve trained myself to listen to books at 2x speed (or faster). This is easily 5x the speed I would comprehend the material if I physically read it. So it’s super effective for me. I listen to these books in my car during my commute. Audiobooks convert my commute from a time waster into probably the most valuable time I have in my day.

So why are books worth it? For me, books end up performing like the repetitive learning system of Anki (https://apps.ankiweb.net/). A good book is somewhat repetitive as it goes deep on a focus area. Spending 10+ hours over the period of a week or so consuming a topic and having time for my brain to stew on it is incredible. I can’t get this from pod casts or blog posts and other online content.

I only listen to non-fiction books, typically on topics around human psychology, business, and topics I hope to give me new insights.

Bottom line: books are worth it because they offer depth that I can’t get anywhere else. That depth is the value.

1.25x? Aim to get accustomed to 2x+. So much time savings. I have a friend who’s blind and super proficient on his laptop using screen readers. He runs all the speech at 3x+. It sounds like gibberish to me, but he’s crazy productive. He inspired me to learn how to understand and follow significantly sped up audio. Saves so much time.

He’s describing a recorded marketing video. It was deliberately produced and edited to contain that specific message. Comparing that to an off the cuff error during a live discussion is disingenuous.

The problem is the interface. Voice commands and their responses are linear, one dimensional. It’s difficult to represent complex interaction within that scope. Think of all the investment that has gone into telephone based automated customer support. The best interface conceived so far is the dreaded phone tree. That’s essentially the same interface smart speakers are exposing.

The opportunity is to figure out how to better utilize the voice based medium. No one has done it yet. When they do, it will also likely improve the experience around screen readers and accessibility.

Came here to say this. Simpson’s paradox is exactly how gerrymandering works. It’s all about how the data is grouped.

I can’t tell if you’re serious or sarcastic given the insanity spewed by talk radio.

It isn’t relevant to crypto. This is specifically about spam email mitigation. I don’t agree with their conclusion, which is “we can’t reduce spam to the level we’d like without imposing undue burden on legitimate senders so we shouldn’t do it at all”. The “all or nothing” doesn’t make sense. They never consider things like whitelists (legitimate senders need to do zero work), different levels of work required for different senders (eg a sender’s IP address isn’t recognized so dramatically increase the work requirements), etc.

If you like this topic and didn’t read all the way to the bottom, the author’s recommendation of “Prime Obsession” by John Derbyshire is spot on. It’s a fantastic book.

The problem isn't housing. The problem is transportation and infrastructure. People need to work for a living. They also don't want to spend a significant amount of time commuting to said work. California's transportation, road, and highway infrastructure is completely and utterly inadequate for the population in the SF and LA areas. This forces people into living situations that are far from ideal and creates a fight over housing.

Create multiple ways for people to commute from 30 miles away in 30 minutes and housing will be much less of a problem with people having many more options.

Proof: If people could instantly teleport between work and home no matter how far apart they are, do you really think they would still cram into SF Bay Area or LA housing? Hell no. Housing is the symptom of poor transportation infrastructure.

6. Network. Get personal referrals from people you know who work at the companies you are applying. These personal referrals have an order of magnitude better chance at getting you noticed. Use your time to reach out to people you know. Have coffee with them. Yes. Face to face. Let them know you're interested in working at their company. Ask them to submit a referral. Use linkedin to find people. Don't be afraid to ask a connection for an intro to another person you don't know who could help you. You'd be surprised how helpful people are willing to be.

I feel sad that so much brain power goes into market arbitrage. They produce nothing usable by anyone else. Imagine if these people built companies that made new advances and new products.

> The proposal I present to the commission will ensure the internet remains open, now and in the future, for all Americans.

I really wish they would acknowledge that this type of decision isn't just "for Americans". Pretty much the entire world was watching to see how they were going to handle it.

Whether or not the rich earned their wealth honestly has nothing to do with the issue of excessive wealth inequality.

Excessive wealth inequality creates a massive imbalance in society. The concentration of wealth in the hands of so few leads to corruption, oppression, and wars. We already see all of this and it will only get worse unless we address the issue.

Absolutely agree. People often fall into the false mindset that legal = morally or ethically right. Law is neither. Law is the result of politically motivated negotiations which managed to reach majority consensus. It could be argued that law is amoral.

What this says to me is that people really love content with no ads and are willing to pay for it.

All traffic laws do one thing: increase the likelihood that all drivers behave predictably. Going a certain speed. Stopping at a stop light. Not changing lanes erratically. It's all about being predictable to other drivers so they have time to react to your presence. Being unpredictable is the quickest way to get into a collision. Speeding but being predictable is a lot safer than going the speed limit and swerving erratically.

Because most of the transportation operates on public streets (busses and muni). This forces them to deal with traffic and pedestrian crowds, which make them no better than driving. If SF had a real subway system, things would probably be different.

I just use charles (charlesproxy.com). Does everything this does and 15 bazillion other things too. Works with mobile devices and anything that can set an HTTP proxy.

All of the demos on this page have been available on codepen for months: http://codepen.io/befamous/

There's nothing new here.

Why "young" people specifically? Seems extremely limiting. There are a lot of talented people out there of every age and we should be encouraging of anyone building the next innovation.

Already been tried. It's called hashcash: http://www.hashcash.org/

Coincidentally, hashcash's proof of work is the foundation of bitcoin.

But don't let this discourage you from trying your idea. I think it's still a fantastic idea. Making email cost something to send (either btc or CPU time like hashcash) would kill spam, and slow down the flow of over-communication.

Posted in the context of hn, this link/article seems to be nothing but an underhanded means to get this community to argue the case against net neutrality.

Wow. This is a really great insight. I've worked in advertising and never thought of it this way.

I've lived in SV for nearly 20 years. There's a reason that the homeless problem is as bad as it is here. It's not economics biased against the poor. It's not greedy landlords. It comes down to two things:

First, SV has the economic ability to support a homeless population this large. If the homeless couldn't get basic necessities, they wouldn't be here. There are many reports that show panhandlers here can make $10-15 an hour. Highest anywhere in the world. SV people are extremely giving.

The second reason? Weather. The weather is mild enough that people can live in makeshift shelters year round. With a huge population to provide all the necessities, there's no reason for them to leave SV.

I have a friend who lives in Toronto. We got on the topic of homelessness and asked him how they deal with the homeless in Toronto. He said, "we have an amazing homeless abatement program here. It's called winter." If SV had snowy winters, there would be dramatically fewer homeless here.