Not to make a shameless plug, this is something that the company I work for is working on:
http://www.palantirtech.com/government/analysis-blog/sec-tra...
205 karma · joined July 27, 2008
http://www.palantirtech.com/government/analysis-blog/sec-tra...
On a sidenote, I shelled out for textmate and it's very nice, but now that I work in a more diverse dev environment (Mac/Linux/Windows, and ssh'ing to boxes) learning emacs has become critical for increasing my average productivity.
Still, I don't regret buying textmate. It's beautiful, functional, and inspired some nice features that were subsequently copied/incorporated by others. I wonder what the next version has in store, and how far off it is...
Regarding other drugs and intellectuals, this article comes to mind as well:
The beauty about the raw data approach is that it finds people with similar preferences to you. This is, I think, the real manifestation of O'Reilly's "Web 2.0." Rather than a semantic web, with ontologies and categorization the data do, indeed, speak for themselves.
Even if we were able to extract categorizations based on the preferences in the underlying Netflix data, it'd be difficult to map them to actual categories that we're familiar with. I'd envision it more like a PCA decomposition, where the principle components will be the strongest characteristics among each clique of like-minded movie watchers.
But alas, my Netflix home page is filled with crappy movies (the Matrix has a near-5 rating, but most other movies with its actors are complete crap). Instead I rely on friends with similar preferences for recommendations... which is what Netflix was supposed to offer. If that functionality is hidden somewhere, then they need to do a better job of exposing it.
I think that hackers, however, have an appreciation for the system. Hackers want to learn about complex systems work, but they have a profound respect for those complex systems. Thus, they're not engaged in the business of getting rich no matter what the cost to others.
All the people I know who only want to get rich end up in jobs that promise that. But they are all jobs that reek of unsustainability, like wall street traders and dot-com-type startups with a lot of hype and no business model or valuable contribution to society. These people are selfish and as we're seeing (and have seen during a thousand years of business cycles) their money is gone as quickly as it came.
I think it could make having a simple, portable development environment for scheme much easier. Then you have a production environment for testing and deployment.
The argument is that eliminating the rent expense ($2000/month or whatever) by spending $500k to buy a house outright is better than the tax-adjusted potential return on that $500k if invested.
Sometimes I pull up the site and it gently reminds me that I've spent a lot of time reading it lately.
Other times it's the weekend or I've left my window open for a while (is this how it works?) and I'd like to get back to the site. I've disabled the feature for now since there's no override.
They mail you the stuff from your desk in boxes.
Just because the seatbelt is broken, doesn't mean we should abandon seatbelts. It means we should work harder to make better seatbelts.
An argument I see when libertarians are faced with such questions is that libertarians aren't 'against' seatbelts, but they want to explore the alternatives. And yet they don't seem to come up with any other alternatives...
I think that the field of game theory, and as the most simplistic example, the prisoner's dilemma, shows that libertarianism, as defined by the idea that individuals acting in their own self-interest will create the greatest common benefit, is flawed. Specifically, this will limit the benefit of each individual as well as the aggregate.
Individuals acting in their own self-interests categorically do not arrive at optimal solutions for themselves or for the whole society. It's a complete joke, mathematically provable, and thus ridiculous that it's still being argued. We need coordinators. All forms of government have been imperfect at achieving perfect coordination, which has inspired libertarians and objectivists and etc., but that doesn't invalidate the coordinators' work. Instead, a meaningful endeavor would be to improve the scientific rigor and quality of the policy-based coordination. This is what my research as an undergraduate was based around...
Libertarian, I invite you to go start an investment bank and act in your own unfettered best interest. I'd be hard pressed to see you not end up in a similar situation to investors in any of the past bubbles and collapses.
I really like your point #1, and it's the most important. I'm not sure if there are empirical analyses to support this, but I believe that investing in education has the greatest returns (up to the limit when your whole population is educated maximally--but that's a far ways off from where we are right now). It lifts the whole economy up on its own, and makes it more competitive in the world, which is very important re: Greenspun's comment about today's globalized world being very different compared to the 1930s.
As for the rest... those are nice to haves, but I think that lowering taxes to encourage foreign investment is an asinine comment. There will be low investment in the next few years, as he comments, if there is a poor political and economic environment for it, not if there are unfavorable tax conditions. Investors are sitting on mountains of cash right now; if the government creates policies and programs that incentivize people to put that cash to work (i.e. government/private sector co-sponsored infrastructure projects) then they will.
In my opinion, no self-help guide applies for everyone; we all have our own strengths and vices.
It seems that this one is designed to help build concentration and minimize interruptions by defining concrete "work unit" blocks, thus helping to build discipline in fighting off distractions (internal & external).
I don't feel strongly about his views on the perception of time, but it's not that important to the whole article.
I'm in agreement with several others on this page that finding your calling, although necessarily resulting in a sacrifice of many extracurriculars, is superior. But it's very difficult. In the meantime, living a balanced life with enjoyable time spent outside of work is critical. If you're killing yourself for something that means nothing to you, you're wasting significant chunks of your very limited stint on this planet.
Interestingly, I re-read the "Smart, and Gets Things Done" and "Done, and Gets Things Smart" articles today, and was thinking about how these map to some of these people that I work with. To my eyes, these sorts of people fit squarely in the category of those who have found their calling, and that calling is to crank out good software 24x7. They are so excited by cranking out good code that they are propelled to do it nonstop. Coding is an intellectual, creative process, and you can't just force it to happen with a high salary or stock options; it comes from an internal drive, a desire to get all that code that's trapped inside out into the world.
To me that is the mechanical result of finding your calling: you're so invested and interested in something that you can't find enough time in the day to work on it, to develop it, and to get it out to the world. When I think of people like this I see artists, writers, academics--people who work tirelessly to show their passions to the world, perhaps even trying to cast out the inner demons that torment them.
Interesting, semi-obvious, yet mandatory observation: I have not found this yet, considering that I'm posting on HN.
the point is that things are relatively cheap where we stand today. they may get cheaper, but they may not. look at your downside risk (missing 25% of a bigger bottom) vs. upside risk (we've already hit bottom).
or, if your nicholas nassim taleb, you think that you'd be crazy to make any decision based on the graph, because tomorrow everything could go to zero, and you'd be broke.
i'm thinking of shifting part of my portfolio to stocks. but given volatility, like the article says, it's going to be a small segment, and i can allocate more as it goes up. but i'm investing in the long term, and if the S&P goes to 0 then i won't be worrying about money. i'll probably be worrying about people trying to break into my house and steal my cans of campbell's.
If I understand right, nobody votes, and then who gets elected? You vote to contribute to the sample size, fool! 2 votes for one candidate and 1 vote for another is a questionable victory, but 66,000 for one and 33,000 for the other is decisive.
Can you truly get behind an idea that's not your own... if you have another reason for being there?
Yes.
I want to start my own company (based on my own idea) some day, but I'm learning hell of a lot (and saving up cash) working at another company, on someone else's idea. Getting behind that idea, even if I'm not necessarily passionate about it, is important, because that's the only way I'll do a good job and actually learn what it's like.
So yeah. I think it's important to gain some experience before setting out on your own. It's a safer route if you don't have people to fall back on if your first (or second or third) attempt fails
first and foremost, the article only discussed the sales of famous, high-volume-selling artists. neither they nor i have the data to verify this, but i would be willing to bet that the distribution of album sales across all bands has flattened out significantly since itunes came about. i like itunes because i can find new artists on it through recommendations, search, podcasts... and if i sample an album's tracks and find it to be all good, i do buy all of it. but otherwise... why should i pay for tracks that i don't want to listen to? if an artist is arguing that the album is designed to be heard as a whole, then by all means, prove it.
secondly, again although it's the WSJ, i don't think it would have been too audacious to admit that perhaps half of those full albums aren't worth buying, and that popular music was going through a bubble thanks to the dominance of cd-based albums as the only medium around. to me, online music piracy emerged as a reaction to this. i imagine that fileswapping services still have a healthy user base, but the emergence of itunes from nothing to the dominant player in 5 years indicates to me that people are willing to pay for music, when they feel like they're actually getting something for their dollar. purely anecdotally, everyone i know who was a one-time "pirate" has switched to itunes/rhapsody. not because we're hugely wealthy, but perhaps because we're discovering more great artists this way, and feel inclined to give them some dollars to help them keep making music.