my5thaccount

"Who will train all the NFL stars?" That's really what it boils down to. Training the million dollar gladiators for our modern society. Living vicariously through innocent children. Parental adrenaline rushes. It's sick. We should just ban it. It's worse than corporal punishment and that'll get a teacher fired but we let kids pummel each other on the field and it's fine. It's ridiculous. Those kids aren't choosing that for themselves. We won't let them drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, but we'll let them do that to themselves to get a smile out of mommy and daddy. It's awful!

I've gone from super excited about life and the future when I sat down at my computer to pessimistic and frustrated with society.

Yeah, I think you're right. Everyone expects a reversion to the mean -- even the batters themselves. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But maybe it's more than that. The will power to overcome our intrinsic limits eventually runs out. We can only focus on the ball so long before our thoughts wander. And at some point below the average of our capabilities, we get tired of taking a break and start to perform again as well as we know we can.

I was really dismayed when Colin Powell argued for invading Iraq. Yes, there are military people who get it. But just look what's happening.

I guess they have to think, what is the alternative? We can't change our role in the Middle East. We can't just stop supporting Israel for example.

I suppose yes, they tried Camp David. I guess I just want everyone to cease fire.

Maybe the overpowered people resorting to terrorism, I do hate that word, have to think there is a positive outcome from the cease fire. If they cease firing and life doesn't improve, why did they cease firing? At least firing alleviates the frustration of it all. They think they are hurting those who are hurting themselves.

But life for the Palestinians never improves no matter. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse for them. The people with the power have to stop exerting it over others and selfishly taking more.

I had a buddy in Afghanistan and he said their way of life is 500 years old. I mean, I think okay, if they don't want to progress, that doesn't mean we should use the tools of our progress to take from them so we can progress more.

I think at some point we have to stop betraying people.

No, but thanks for bringing him to my attention! It's amazing how someone like that so long ago could have such an impact on so many fields, while today, it takes teams of people to win the Nobel prize in a single field.

It's a testament to how much we know today relative to yesterday.

Thinking about this and the wisdom of crowds makes my brain feel fuzzy.

Articles like this remind me how rational and practical the military is. I know so many brilliant military minds, yet war itself seems outdated and plagued by so many emotionally irrational decisions. I can't reconcile those two thoughts.

How can people inside the military be so incredibly smart, yet still think it makes sense to ... you know, kill people's friends and families and not expect them to become terrorists.

What am I missing? It can't just be greed. Military industrial complex. The military minds aren't smarter than that? I struggle with it.

There are plenty of things she could have done before calling me, but she could call me and she had a great experience doing so and now loves the product even more and has more confidence using it, because she knows if she faces something really hard, there actually is a person who will help her just a phone call away. If anyone asks her about it, she can say, "Omg, I just called them and they answered and I was in. I've never had that before!"

There's a real value in that and all it cost me was a phone call. No money well spent, imo. I was going to wake up that day anyway.

That's how Hunch worked and it was pretty good.

The only two apps I had in the list were Youtube and Google Maps, both are installed at the factory and it guessed: You are a married guy older than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year

This is a fantastic book. Buy it if you haven't already. Fantastic book. Really, one of the best books written in any field. Written by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Highly recommended.

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Encyclopedia-Modern-Bodybuildi...

I'm excited for you. You're embarking on a great journey, you don't even know! Or maybe you do. :)

As big as The Rock, yes. His mom is Samoan. They are huge. If he didn't exercise like he did, he'd be as big as a sumo wrestler.

I feel like this kind of attitude stops people from achieving more, "Oh, I can never be like The Rock, so why bother, clearly he has more going for him, whatever..."

But don't let the lack of his genetics stop you! You are in control of your body and yes, your limits may not get you biceps as big as a thigh, but you will get stronger and more fit and be proud of your accomplishment. You will have more self-confidence for no other reason than believing in yourself enough to do it and succeed.

Like all things that are hard, people just give up. They don't have the vision to see it through.

Don't measure yourself by the achievements of Dwayne Johnson. He's a primo genetic specimen, physically and mentally, not all of us can be like that, but you can put in some hard work and become a better person, be more fit, stronger, and more powerful.

It is possible to get built. I was a skinny kid, picked on. Got tired of it. Started working out. Upped my protein intake. Went to the YMCA 3 days a week. The dudes in there were humongous and looked at me and smilled, this scrawny kid.

The first week I was there, one looked me and said, "It's hard, okay. Don't give up. Commit to 4 months of work and you will notice a difference. You will get stronger. You will bulk up. Don't give up. It takes time."

So I did. 4 months was nothing. I got a lot stronger. I put on mass. It worked!

This girl I had a crush on, she looked at me one day, looked at my new biceps and said, "Wow, you aren't so skinny anymore."

Within a couple years, I was curling 75 lbs on the preacher bench. Before I started, I couldn't bench press 50. If you want to change your life: Exercise. It takes time and energy and commitment, but it really does work and you will feel powerful and in control of your body like you never thought possible. People will look at you differently -- with admiration, with envy, with fear, with lust. Your life will change.

Right, yes, I always forget about the dollar! The dollar will be the one to prove them all wrong!

It's ironic that a currency designed to solve the problems of currencies controlled by human beings is now suffering the very same problems that caused all the fiat currencies before it to fail.

Human beings are the problem.

"Join the waitlist" Really? There are only, what, 10 candidates?? Srsly Google?

Customers rarely call me, but when they do, it's fine -- I love them. It's usually because they can't figure out how to log in. It's especially painful when they call at 8:30am on the east coast and I'm on the west coast and my cell phone wakes me up and they say, "I can't log in." and they are mad at me and I don't even know who they are or which account and it turns out they've been typoing their username for days.

But I love every single one of them! "Hi, yes, sorry you're having trouble, I am happy to help. Which customer are you with? What is your username? Ah, let me send you a password reset to your email address. Did you get it?"

"Yes."

"Ok, great. Let me know if you need anything else."

And you can hear their tone of voice change immediately to, "OMG, this person was so nice and I was so mean to them and I was clearly doing something wrong, but I don't know what it was, but wow, I actually called a company on the internet today and someone answered the phone and actually solved my problem!!!!"

Nothing better than making customers happy.

Just wait until the payee has a comma or a quote in the name and you download a CSV and the programmers can't even properly format a CSV and it's broken in Excel.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Strategy Rules - Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs by David B. Yoffie, Michael A. Cusumano

These are all timely books and recently written.

The fact that they are ignoring this is a very bad sign. It's way easier to do and hasn't been done well and instead they are doing something really hard that people can already do easily outside the system. They've shifted their focus from their customers needs to beating the competition and it will their downfall.

Lots of different instant messengers like skype. Google chat, facetime, just the regular old phone. Video conferencing tools. Even screen sharing systems like gotomeeting. It's a solved problem mostly, but hard to do technically, so that's why it concerns me that Slack is trying to do it when there are lots of things no one does well and slack isn't addressing those. This is a bad sign for slack, IMO.

That is spooky. Both from heart problems too. Maybe the stress of teaching the class takes a toll. Heart attacks are pretty common among men of that age, though.

Coincidence, of course. Spooky. For sure.

I wish slack would concentrate on making the app more productive for teams to work together remotely. We can type fast enough, in fact, hackernews tells me I'm typing too fast.

The problem is organizing and collecting the information and ensuring it is useful later, rather than just during the 5 minutes. Let users break a chat message out into a threaded discussion for example. We already have plenty of voice and video chat options, we can just pick up a phone. Those things are ephemeral. Text is forever. Let's keep more of that so we can use it to further the business objectives.

Funny how, at HackerNews, a post with data and intent on progress is still drowned out by useless rhetoric that will never actually make a difference. Someone posted real numbers with a clear intent to find a solution to an imminent problem and did not get one up vote. Edit: More than one upvote. :)

Quotas are fine for an enterprise with a decades old sales process that has data to measure. SurveyMonkey was entering a new market and growing the sales force quickly and before they even knew what a reasonable quota was.

You could say that's bad planning, you could also say it's throwing spaghetti at the wall to see which sales person sticks. Data gathering, if you will.

Modern wood stoves are sealed to the inside and have vents to pull air in from outside the house via vacuum created by the heat pushing the air out through a vent to the outside as well.

You'll easily pay $800 for one of these stoves, used -- in the summer. Which is why I was saying that you can just use an inflation calculator to figure out how much things cost today relative to yesterday. We have better technology, more building codes to follow, and more things to buy.

Life does cost more today than it did back then, more than inflation can account for.

I'd like to see conversion rates between qualtrics and surveymonkey surveys. Who is the monkey, exactly? The person building the survey, the person filling it out, or the company providing the service?

Sales people are really good about selling themselves, but generally not so great at actually selling the thing you are hiring them to sell.

I took, we called it Diff-e-q, my freshman year in college and the professor died a couple weeks into the course and the new guy was not pleased about having to teach it. We did the applied aspects with the springs and the little ants running away from a candle heating the corner of a plate.

What I didn't like about it was just all the memorization. I had no desire to memorize a bunch of formulas that I knew full well in the real world I'd look up in a table or type into a computer. What I wanted to learn how to do was solve problems using math, not memorize patterns of formulas to apply to problems.

So I didn't memorize them and instead went to work and earned money to pay for college. Still passed the class but it was one of my lowest grades. It's a hard class even without the memorization.

Cool, that person's math an mine are the same! :)

He does say, "That price does not include windows, door, insulation or interior furnishings. In place of a brick fireplace I have recommended a recycled steel barrel stove and stove kit from Vogelzang that would be more efficient."

Those things he is excluding will easily double the price. A wood stove costs thousands, maybe hundreds used. 8 sqft of insulation is $50. Windows are $200 each. A door the same or more. And also, 10'x15' isn't really viable for a home, even for one person, much less a family that wants a shower in the bathroom.

We also have building codes now that require a functional kitchen and bathroom which add significantly to the price of a livable structure the government won't tear down.

I think bare minimum costs to build a livable structure today, would be in the $50,000 range and the mortgage on that would be $300 per month, which would fit within my proposed living stipend of $2,000 per month per family of 4.

This amount of money is not realistic even when you put it into an inflation calculator. For example, Walden built his cabin for $28 in the 1850's, which is about $900 today and clearly not enough to build a cabin with today's dollars even scrapping like he did.