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istari

205 karma · joined December 10, 2009

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istari··on Procrastination should be solved by lighting fires, not filling buckets
I have the same experience as you and the author. Chrome extensions with timers such as StayFocusd have not worked for me. I just disable it or use firefox or something.

What if the user had to enter a predetermined answer to the question prompt in order to continue? By making the user actually type something that they themselves chose the prompt becomes more powerful.

istari··on Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
You are being needlessly modest. Your posts are always insightful and often valuable. I personally would not mind if you built a bot to spam the front page with your old articles.
istari··on The Ph.D Grind: A Ph.D Student Memoir
As I read I thought, wow this dude sounds just like my friend Phillip from high school. Glad to hear you're doing well.

-Frank

istari··on Save Padmapper: Craigslist is wrong to shut them down. An open letter to Craig
Dear Craiglist, please let Padmapper continue to scrape your data for free because I find Padmapper super useful and much better than your shitty site. I'm not going to address your interests at all, because they are directly threatened by the existence of Padmapper. In fact, I'm surprised that you haven't shut down Padmapper a year ago.
istari··on Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
This is something I always wondered about.

I get FAR more tired running 2 real miles than 2 "miles" on a treadmill.

On a treadmill, both of your feet are in the air for a significant amount of time, and you're not being carried backwards. Yet, I bet that distance still gets counted.

istari··on Someone is stealing your life (1990)
I walk into a restaurant. They charge me $10 for a meal. Yet they only paid $2 for the ingredients!

Now I don't know a lot of math, but even I know that 2 goes into 10... FIVE times! They are charging me FIVE times what it cost them to make that meal!

Sure, they came up with the money to open the restaurant, and the time to make the meal, but does that give them the right to rip me off? Because I spent my life earn my money, and by stealing my money THEY ARE STEALING MY LIFE!

Now you could say that I could always go and open my own restaurant, but that would require credit which THEY wouldn't give me, and ripping off other people, which I refuse to do.

Cooking? What's cooking? Never heard of it.

istari··on A Deepness In The Sky
Blabber is a short story, Vinge's first foray into the Zones of Thought Universe, and features several cameos from A Fire Upon the Deep:

http://books.google.com/books?id=txBNZiQw2GUC&pg=PA78...

istari··on How an Engineer Does Pizza
Because when Marco Polo returned from China, he brought with him fantastic stories of meat pies, mythical pastries with the meat INSIDE of the bread.

How did it get in there? Nobody knows. Many tried, but none could discover the secret. Defeated, the Italians put the filling on top of the bread, and so invented pizza.

According to my dad, at least.

istari··on Can ARM Kill Intel?
Isn't Intel having another go at it by acquiring Infineon?

http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/08/30/intel-acquires-infine...

istari··on A Follow-Up to "The Web is Public Domain"
All of those magazines should pay her for cleaning up their sloppy work.
istari··on Zappos offers new employees $3000 to quit after a week
When your SO is paying you they have a name for that as well.
istari··on Is genius simply the product of hard work?
"Genius" is 10,000 hours of constant improvement.

Spending 10,000 hours on something is incredibly common. Everyone spends 10,000 hours on multiple things. But we coast. It's what we do by habit. It's habit itself.

To break our own habits over and over again in order to improve, to get into a positive feedback loop of ever increasing ability, for 10,000 hours, is genius.

istari··on Ask HN: How do I give my son a head start?
There are some things that you cannot help BUT teach your children. It's part of who you are, your daily habits, your aspirations, your worldview of what a parent should be.

Just by being your son, he is guaranteed 1000s of hours of practice and exposure to these topics.

For example, for me, it was Chinese math textbooks from an early age. I ended up attending Stanford, but my social skills suffered. For your son, I would guess reading, writing, math, and programming are covered.

Other things are invisible to you, and will be nonexistent to your son unless you identify and pursue those topics despite your unfamiliarity to them. For example, I didn't know what "sports" were, and still do not to this day. It's such a large part of society, but does not exist to me.

You should figure out what's "free" and what's "missing" for your son simply as a result of growing up in your household, and plan your educational priorities with that knowledge in mind.

One last thing: expose him to as many different people and social situations as possible. Camp, church, sports, etc etc etc. Whatever involves heavy interaction with other kids and people. The more the better. You may have to get heavily involved yourself to do this properly. Social skills, just like any other human ability, is simply 1000s of hours of practice.

istari··on Why your desk job is slowly killing you
Yes, I have a recommendation.

Get 10 packets of 8.5 X 14 printer paper. (8.5 X 11 works too, but not as well)

Make a tower for your keyboard. Make another tower for your mouse. Tilt your monitor back by putting something underneath it.

Adjust the height by adding or removing packets.

I have no idea why people don't do this immediately when they're considering a standing desk. Everything you need is in the printer room of your office!

istari··on Compared to you, most people seem dumb
Compared to me, most people ARE dumb, in my area of expertise.

What's that you say? Step out of my area of expertise?

No.

istari··on Y Combinator's Original Home For Sale
For pg, diversification would be to take that $1M and plow it into 30 promising startups.
istari··on Apple's Dumbing Down of Computers a.k.a The End of Super-User Computers
This is like saying that car designs should be more "mechanic friendly" and less "closed" because every car owner is a potential mechanic, and mechanics learn by working on their parents' cars.

How would you feel about a car company that offered a model that is easier to maintain and operate but harder to modify?

istari··on Young & Stupid: How I Made 2.5 Million
The author met the prerequisite for getting lucky, which is several tens of thousands of hours of failure and iteration. Sure, if he were more mature, or wrote more coherently than a fifth grader, or had any kind of formal training whatsoever, MAYBE he could've done better, kept his site going, created DuckDuckGo, etc.

But those things are all secondary. He, unlike 99% of anyone who attempts anything, put in those 10K, 20K, 30K hours, and through those countless iterations made his own luck.

istari··on ZestCash is Not Good.
What are you going to do personally to address this evil that you seem so outraged by? Nothing.
istari··on What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
My boss was doing an internship at Intel, and didn't have time to verify the floating point unit because he had to go back to school.
istari··on Family to Receive $1.5M+ in First-Ever Vaccine-Autism Court Award
Isn't there overwhelming logic that heavier objects fall faster? After all, force = mass * acceleration, and if there's more mass, there's more force.

Isn't it LOGICAL that the immune system will react more rigorously when presented with more strains of diseases, increasing immunity to each of them?

You don't answer questions like this based on common sense!

istari··on Darwins artificial ecosystem could be key to colonising Mars
Those things are inherent to the human condition. They are hard wired into our DNA. Where we go, so will they.
istari··on Feynman's Cargo Cult Science
You know how most people decide when someone is telling the truth?

I agree with him = he's honest.

I disagree with him = he's lying.

Very few people care about object evidence that goes against what they believe in.

istari··on [dead]
I use Firefox on a Windows box.

Page 1: Looks interesting. Download or Start Reading? I'll Read. Click.

Page 2: Stop. Do something unexpected. Cool. Okay, how do I go to the next page? Any arrows to click? None. Click somewhere randomly? Nothing happens.

Guess this is it? Cool message, short and to the point. Can't shake the nagging feeling that there's more, though.

It was not immediately obvious that I could use the arrow keys to move forward. I found out only after I opened the PDF to confirm that there's more pages.

istari··on Are you rich? If so, how did you get there?
Being smart about trying to get rich includes getting the right people to help you. Obviously.

Think about the richest person you personally know. Was it really "at the expense of all else"? Or did they structure their professional and social lives in such a way that they built upon each other over several decades?

istari··on Are you rich? If so, how did you get there?
People seem to consider it immoral to want to get rich too much. People are answering in a defensive way.

Every other post here preaches the importance of true happiness, family, friends, health, etc vs money.

I find this tiring. Imagine going to a website dedicated to the playing of tennis at a professional level, opening a post called "How do I win?", and having people stress the importance of enjoying the game and protecting your long term health versus focusing on the narrow and shortsighted goal of winning.

I for one think there's more than enough hours in the day to both get filthy rich and be a happy, well adjusted human being, as long as you're smart about how you go about it. Ask yourself: does that idea seem offensive?

istari··on The student loan crisis will dwarf the housing market crash.
You're backing it up with your own personal anecdote?

That's not valid.

If you found data that said, for example, 30% of college graduates took longer than 6 years to earn their undergraduate degrees, then I would agree with you.

If it's less than 10%, then the using 6 years as a cutoff would be a very good rule of thumb estimate.

Maybe the reason why the 6 year cutoff is so often used is because someone already crunched the numbers and found it was good enough?

istari··on Removing street signs, lights and arrows increases safety and road capacity
Copied from the other thread on this topic.

Vietnam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr5Gssaxl6g

Ikaruga: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-zSi0xt9fY

istari··on Spontaneous order on the road (what happened when traffic lights were off)
The Vietname video reminded me of chapter 2 of Ikaruga, my favorite video game stage and not a good model for urban traffic planners.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-zSi0xt9fY

istari··on The student loan crisis will dwarf the housing market crash.
You didn't factor in the very high possibility of someone dropping out.

Google "college dropout rates". Consensus figures seem to be around 40% of enrollees don't have a degree 6 years later.

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