Hacker News Reader

myth_busteron 90% of the billion dollar unicorn startups are in trouble

Didn't this happen during the sub-prime crisis where the firms sold their toxic assets to their clients.

myth_busteron The Debate on Whether America’s Best Days Are Past, or Ahead

Ah, thanks for the tip.

myth_busteron Square stock drops 10%, is now less than IPO price

Or scenarios where throwaways are warranted to prevent leakage of personal info. I think flagging/downvoting worked well here considering the post is an hr old.

myth_busteron The Debate on Whether America’s Best Days Are Past, or Ahead

At the core of the article is the debate regarding the points that were brought up in a book.

  Robert J. Gordon, a professor of economics at Northwestern University who 
  has patiently developed the proposition in a series of research papers 
  over the last few years, has bundled his arguments into an ambitious new 
  book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” (Princeton University Press).

As for

  “If you are sitting in Silicon Valley, rich and at the frontier of 
  technology,” said Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard, “it is probably true 
  that things are getting better.”

  The same can’t always be said for the rest of us.

I hope

  The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed

myth_busteron Square stock drops 10%, is now less than IPO price

WaPo: Global markets plunge on oil/China fears.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/01/20/n...

myth_busteron Breakup, as captured by my fitbit

I noticed the condition of the road had a significant affect on the readings. I think we could use supervised learning to perhaps determine different activities.

myth_busteron Breakup, as captured by my fitbit

Got a badge for climbing 33 stairs + a plethora of others, while in actuality I was riding my motorcycle.

myth_busteron Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy

I think this could be turned into a book collating detailed case study in each of those cases where they failed with perhaps cases where companies have made it work like Google Fiber, Amazon's PAAS etc.

myth_busteron SpaceX Falcon rocket explodes on landing after delivering satellite to space

As someone mentioned on Reddit

  Succeeded to land. Failed to stand.

myth_busteron Tech faces hour of reckoning as fundraising drops, layoffs rise

I think Europe will see a surge in investing while US dries up as one is beginning QE while the other is closing it out.

myth_busteron Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments

For me CLRS was a book that explained concepts in an easy to absorb fashion. For example the dynamic programming chapter is top notch.

While the "War Story" section in Skiena's book gave a great perspective of application of the theory.

myth_busteron Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments

I believe people would just write the name of the really popular books like TAOCP, Hackers, Founders at work etc rather than linking to them.

The list:

  "The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think" by Matthew Yglesias
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster
  
  "The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win" by Steven Gary Blank
  Publisher: Cafepress.com
  
  "Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition" by Thomas H. Cormen
  Publisher: The MIT Press
  
  "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition" by Robert B. Cialdini
  Publisher: Harper Business
  
  "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams   (Second Edition)" by Visit Amazon's Tom DeMarco Page
  Publisher: Dorset House Publishing Company, Incorporated
  
  "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold
  Publisher: Microsoft Press
  
  "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers
  Publisher: Prentice Hall
  
  "Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" by Harvey Silverglate
  Publisher: Encounter Books
  
  "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford
  Publisher: O'Reilly Media
  
  "The Little Schemer - 4th Edition" by Daniel P. Friedman
  Publisher: The MIT Press
  
  "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It" by Michael E. Gerber
  Publisher: HarperCollins
  
  "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" by David D. Burns
  Publisher: Harper
  
  "Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications" by Toby Segaran
  Publisher: O'Reilly Media
  
  "The Non-Designer's Design Book (3rd Edition)" by Robin Williams
  Publisher: Peachpit Press
  
  "The C Programming Language" by Brian W. Kernighan
  Publisher: Prentice Hall
  
  "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman
  Publisher: Basic Books
  
  "Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions" by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
  Publisher: CareerCup
  
  "What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought" by Keith E. Stanovich
  Publisher: Yale University Press
  
  "On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction" by William Zinsser
  Publisher: Harper Perennial
  
  "Darwin's Theorem" by TJ Radcliffe
  Publisher: Siduri Press
  
  "Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning Series)" by Liping Ma
  Publisher: Routledge
  
  "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition" by Steve Krug
  Publisher: New Riders
  
  "Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets" by Peter van der Linden
  Publisher: Prentice Hall
  
  "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by Robert C. Martin
  Publisher: Prentice Hall
  
  "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" by Noam Nisan
  Publisher: The MIT Press
  
  "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition" by Steve McConnell
  Publisher: Microsoft Press
  
  "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" by Marc Levinson
  Publisher: Princeton University Press
  
  "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Developer Best Practices)" by Steve McConnell
  Publisher: Microsoft Press
  
  "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler
  Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
  
  "Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty" by David Kadavy
  Publisher: Wiley

myth_busteron Stop Buying Real Estate in SF

What I meant was that the dynamics have changed. A local buying house is different from a non-resident buying the property solely as an investment.

It gives off a different price signal.

myth_busteron Stop Buying Real Estate in SF

  the influx of foreign buyers (particularly money coming 
  from China that is not that price sensitive)

I thought this was a major factor in the increase in home prices. Anecdotal evidences of "tourists" coming in to buy property as an investment, instances of people buying homes without even visiting and bidding wars with homes ending up in the hands of people paying premium and in cash. This phenomenon has also been reported in other major cities like London, Toronto, Vancouver.

myth_busteron Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

I think it would have been a real challenge to get to the mainstream with their logo and their finances [0]

  with financing from the deep pockets of the Qatar government

when the sentiments being purported by Fox, CNN et al were in stark contrast.

[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/business/media/al-jazeera-...

myth_busteron Knuth: Computer Programming as an Art (1974)

Also

  "The science without the art is likely to be ineffective; 
  the art without the science is certain to be inaccurate."

myth_busteron SSH Backdoor found in Fortinet firewalls

Please don't give away ideas. You be surprised how well these things would resonate with layperson.

myth_busteron Interest Rates, Unicorns and What the Fed Means to Silicon Valley

  absorb all the unicorns at their current prices

As to the second point, the "high prices" are in the private market and yes "that's what people (in private market) are willing to pay".

But that doesn't imply it would be the same in public market.

myth_busteron How I Built a Side Project

From MailChimp's website

http://kb.mailchimp.com/reports/about-open-and-click-rates

myth_busteron Chinese Markets Halted, Equities Plunge Another 7%

  So... in about 15 minutes of trade in China, a whopping 
  $637 billion in market cap was wiped out.

From yesterday [0]... that's more than the GDP of some countries.

[0] https://twitter.com/DavidInglesTV/status/684922104412672001

myth_busteron Facebook's “free internet” programme hits a roadblock in India

The fb's attempt to control the internet in third world country brings this quote to mind...

  When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that 
  name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, 
  Planet Starbucks.

In this day and age, Internet should be a utility, with government subsidizing it if required while preventing _walled gardens_.

myth_busteron Working fewer hours would make us more productive

Thank you for this excellent response.

The first part made me think that in the past when church was so dominant and had to get people to work for them, this philosophy would have done the trick.

   'Hard work is its own reward'

This unfortunately brought the "Work will set you free" quote to mind but I'm not in a position to further comment on it.

I think people in power (Churches, Politicians, CEOs) would always try to portray work in this light as it is inherently valuable for them. I think this might be the case too with the older folks calling Millennial entitled brats.

myth_busteron Neal Stephenson: Why I Am a Sociomediapath (2015)

  is the fact that past performance is a huge indicator for future performance

Take Life as a sigmoid function and imagine you are on the slope.

myth_busteron Bret Victor's Bookshelf

  Scrollable rotated version.

Thanks.

Edit: I tried running the image against couple of OCRs but was futile.

Found categorized list [0] on his site. May be dated.

[0] http://worrydream.com/#!/Links

myth_busteron Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

  $10K

myth_busteron Working fewer hours would make us more productive

I too prefer the 4-3 split as it gives me enough contiguous time to concentrate on work and my hobbies.

myth_busteron Working fewer hours would make us more productive

Humans have incredible propensity to acclimatize to the environment. That's the only reasoning I could arrive at when I was poor and saw people around willing to do the most mundane back breaking work than to seek other forms of employment.

The lever that is used in society today is desperation as opposed to higher pay per hr in the "Looking Backward" case. The sanitation worker doesn't enjoy their work and no amount of lower hours may compel them to be scarred by the experience. On the other hand desperation and hunger forces them to take what ever job they could salvage. Most of them would would get used to it while some would work their way out.

myth_busteron Is there any point to the 12 times table?

@Dang, article from 2013.

myth_busteron Is there any point to the 12 times table?

The author is arguing in the context of UK post decimalization of units.

Thanks for additional info on the machinery involved.

myth_busteron What Science Fiction Movie or Novel Is Most Prescient Today?

  “Chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with 
  information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without 
  moving,”

This, from Fahrenheit 451, hit me like a truck.