436 karma · joined March 2, 2008
It's based on a technology[2] created by the guy who made Palm.
And here's a guy trying to fool it and mostly failing.[3]
[2] http://www.numenta.com/htm-overview/education/HTM_CorticalLe...
I think that helps me focus more, and it's probably one reason that I don't get sore from standing in one spot. Others may experience different results.
However, I did have someone with a Ph.D. in kinesiology (I think?) tell me that there's essentially no evidence of knee, hip, or back dysfunction in developing countries where people don't sit all day.
That rant over with (sorry, again), I just went to the local hardware store and got some cinder blocks. The price difference (~$7 for the cinder blocks versus ~$1000 for a height-adjustable desk frame) was worth the slight lack of convenience. That, and without the adjustability, I won't be tempted to just leave the desk in the 'down' position.
I'd like to see cars go the way of the horse. Horses used to be used for transportation, everybody had one, and they were abused to a huge degree. Then cars came along, and now horses are kept just by enthusiasts who care for them a great deal and go riding for fun every once in a while.
I think the best of both worlds would be for [insert your car alternative of choice here] to develop enough to replace the car for commuting and errands, with just a few thousand cars for people who like to drive them around tracks or through the countryside every once in a while.
Do you not get sweaty on motorcycles? Even with a fully mesh jacket, I arrive everywhere _drenched_. In the height of the summer, I put on an athletic shirt and keep my real shirt in a bag to change into when I get to my destination.
If anything, I'd say bicycles are better because it's difficult to go fast enough to require the safety gear that a motorcycle does.
Disclaimer: new motorcyclist, used to race bicycles at a high level; I'm kind of a pedal head.
I have a copy, and it's wonderful for looking up common topics in mathematics. The problem is that math is so enormous as a field that you'd essentially have to print and bind every journal article ever written to truly encompass all of the current mathematical knowledge.
I'm really quite a layman in this area, but I've heard the overselling argument quite a lot, and I'd be interested in hearing why it might not be a valid one.
Most of those things exist in airline lounges.
"My dream airline would be one where I could be dropped off on the tarmack, hop on the next plane that is taking off (think bus stop) and be on my way. No getting there three hours in advance."
That exists. They're called charter flights.
"Still doesn't help that at the end of the day airports are typically not at your destination."
Charter flights for that, too. You can use smaller airports that are likely close to your destination.
So all those things already exist. It's just that they're really expensive. So really the dream is to have first class lounges and charter flights available cheaply and for the masses. That's probably never going to happen, because such things really do cost a lot of money to run and because then there would be even less differentiation for the expensive tickets.
Holy crap -- I went to college with that guy. I always knew he was really, really into Starcraft, but I had no idea he had legions of internet followers.
Somehow, even with doing all that, he had time to do some really interesting math research. You'll find quite a few results if you search for him on Google Scholar.
Why 'waste time' with languages? I can rattle off a few reasons: the goal isn't to teach only subjects that people enjoy, but to help create productive and responsible citizens of not only our country, but of the entire world. Particularly in this age of globalization, it's increasingly important for people to have knowledge of languages other than English.
Further, the earlier one starts with language education, the better one is at learning _all_ languages later in life. It also makes traveling vastly easier.
It's also usually the case that by learning the language of a people, you begin to have a much better understanding of their culture. Even for people who have no intention of leaving the borders of the United States, it's becoming harder and harder to count on English being spoken in all parts of the country.
Or, shorter: because it makes you a better person. Screw getting into college.
I'm really reaching here, but I'm pretty sure that idea goes back to Plato, if not even earlier.
This is what physical education was supposed to be about. Unfortunately, it's turned into, at best, an incompetent teacher with a whistle shouting at kids, or, at worst, disappeared altogether. I think we, as a society, are missing out on something pretty big.
I've dabbled in this field in my job, but I don't have any real training, so I've had to teach myself.
The classic text in this field is _The Design of Everyday Things_, by Donald Norman.[1] Also very useful is _Interaction Design_.[2] The first is a very quick read (it's only about 200 pages, and not very technical), while the second is a textbook intended for use in university courses on HCI.
I've found both very valuable in trying to figure out how users approach things without any formal cognitive science or HCI training.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Interaction-Design-Beyond-Human-Comput...
Supposedly it's because the watch hands form a 'smile', and this is supposed to evoke feelings of happiness in potential buyers.[2] I'd never noticed it before, but ever since someone pointed it out to me, I've noticed it in _every single_ watch ad I've seen.
[1] http://nymag.com/images/2/daily/intel/08/01/31_eliandtom2_lg... [2] http://www.ubr.com/clocks/frequently-asked-questions-faq/clo...
He's right about the smudgey screen -- though supposedly both the iPad and iPhone have oleophobic screens, the iPad was noticeably worse than the iPhone.
Granted, several thousand fingers running over it for 16 hours a day probably wasn't the intended use case.
That's why CDs (and cellphones, modems, and countless other digital devices) use channel encoding.[1] That way you don't have to have a perfectly noise-free signal to reconstruct the original information.
I don't know that many specifics of the DVD or Blu-Ray standards, but I'd put money on them using Reed-Solomon or something similar.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed-Solomon_error_correction#D...
(Edit: forgot footnote)
I could be wrong, though -- I only did this back-of-the-envelope a few months ago. I never really tried that hard to make it work.
"Even in music there is evidence for improved skill. When Tchaikovsky asked two of the greatest violinists of his day to play his violin concerto, they refused, deeming the score unplayable (Platt, 1966). Today, elite violinists consider this concerto part of the standard repertory. The improvement in music training is so great that according to Roth (1982) the violin virtuoso Paganini "would indeed cut a sorry figure is placed upon the modern concert stage" (p. 23)." [1] There are no stationary targets.
He uses this as evidence that the notion that "a sufficient amount of experience or practice leads to maximal performance appears to be incorrect" [2]
[1] http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti... p.366
[2] Ibid.
So many people (Gladwell, Cohen, and apparently the Brazen Careerist person) have referenced this 10,000 hours claim, but no one has cited the actual research paper that came up with this notion. The paper actually addresses almost all of his points.[1]
"There are more high school swimmers than ever, therefore more opportunities to find and train great swimmers. They have access to diet, training, technology, and facilities that didn't exist years ago. That's all." Yes! That's the point! The authors of the research point out that "the fastest time for the marathon in the 1896 Olympic Games was just a minute faster than the required entry time in ... races such as the Boston Marathon," _because_ people now know the proper way to focus their efforts at practice.[2] 'Practice,' here, being training and diet. But it still takes 10 years or so of _deliberate practice_ to become world class. It's just that the bar for world class has been moved.
"I'm a case in point: I practiced the piano for an hour a day for more than ten years. I became good, but there were others who practiced twice as much who were worse, and still others who practiced less and are much better." Again, he is unwittingly supporting the 10,000 hours claim. The study points out that "the view that merely engaging in a sufficient amount of practice, regardless of the structure of that practice leads to maximal performance has a long and contested history."[3] It is not just 'putting in the hours' that matters (because then one falls into the trap of assembly-line-worker syndrome, where "improvement of performance was often arrested at less than maximal levels"), but rather what it calls "deliberate practice," which takes quite a bit of very hard work and practice tasks that are defined in a very specific way. (There's a good description of the characteristics of deliberate practice on p. 367 of the study). That is, people who just practice for hours without much thought as to what that practice should be and how it will challenge them in new ways are doomed to be less successful than those who are coached through a process of deliberate practice. It's quality, not quantity.
All that being said, I don't think being an entrepreneur actually has anything to do with being an expert. It's much more luck and hard work. Cohen gets around to saying this too. I agree with him. I'm just not sure why he felt the need to try to refute the current literature on becoming a domain expert to say, "Hey, becoming a domain expert probably isn't your goal. Your goal is to become an innovative entrepreneur."
[1] http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
[2] Ibid, p.366
[3] Ibid, p.365
--> Edit 1: matrix cited a more recent text by the same author I was describing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142983
--> Edit 2: Oops. The Harvard Business Review article that Penelope Trunk talks about was actually written by the same person who wrote the paper that I cited and the book that matrix referenced, so my "but no one has cited the actual research" claim was inaccurate: http://www.coachingmanagement.nl/The%20Making%20of%20an%20Ex...
The plans that subsidize their phones start from $60 a month for unlimited, and the unlimited plans that don't subsidize phones start from $50 a month.
This may, of course, vary from provider to provider. I'm only familiar with T-Mobile.
http://www.t-mobile.com/Shop/Plans/Cell-Phone-Plans-Overview...
You're looking for The Christian Science Monitor. Their whole reason for being is avoiding sensationalist reporting (biased reporting, I'd argue, is impossible to avoid completely). They go so far as to not use any of the wire services, so that biases don't creep in there, and use their own on-the-ground reporters instead.
What's tragic is that news sources like that are being plowed under along with the Fox Newses of the world with everyone's decision that "eh, blogs are just as good."
(edit: Well that's embarrassing. Apparently HTML markup doesn't work here.)
I think a key takeaway from that article, that the author didn't get around to stating explicitly, is that for a 'sociopath', _everything_ is a negotiation. Everything. In fact, all of Powertalk is subtle positional negotiation hidden in everyday language. (For the security research-minded, I think a helpful metaphor might be covert channel information attacks/information passing).
If Powertalk is negotiation, then learning how to actually negotiate might help. Luckily, there are hundreds if not thousands of books written on the subject. _Negotiation Genius_, by Malhotra, _Bargaining for Advantage, by Snell, and _Negotiating Game_, by Karrass are all seminal works. I've found them helpful.
(Note that these books are usually written from the perspective of someone trying to sell a thing or a service. It takes a bit of a mental leap to figure out how to apply these strategies to the rest of life, but if you're intelligent enough to be a reader of Hacker News, I'm sure it won't be that hard.)
I'm not a salesman, so I've never tried this technique for sales, but I'm always surprised how much better people can understand things when I diagram them in real time using a piece of paper than with any fancy infographics I might have carefully constructed ahead of time.
It's usually caused by crush injury, but if you're enough of a knucklehead, you can give it to yourself in the gym too.
I'm an athlete first, and a technology worker second. And what you just said ("better to ... use a machine that isolates ... while not straining unrelated muscles") is the fitness equivalent of something that would be a top post on The Daily WTF.
That is almost exactly the wrong idea. I mean, so precisely opposite of correct information that I hope you didn't write that as a joke and I'm not getting it.
The only time isolation movements make sense is if you're already a very competitive bodybuilder who walks around with hundreds of pounds of lean muscle mass. Otherwise, isolation movements (especially when performed on machines rather than with free weights) are a genuinely terrible idea. At absolute _best_ they will make you gain muscle and lose weight vastly more slowly than you could. Most likely, they'll make you wind up with a chronic injury.
Please, please, please don't go to the gym and work on machines. Do compound movements instead. If you're interested in making physical improvements, go pick up Starting Strength. It's $30 and the author is an absolute genius.
[That was officially my first flame. I feel so hollow inside ...]
Try searching for 'search' with Google. Google itself (perhaps the best known search engine) comes in at result #20 -- at the bottom of the second page of search results.
You can search for "malloc lab" and find tons of copies of the assignment (with only the instructor names and course numbers changed), but here's one:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15213-f02/L6/mal...