peterlk

> I assume that the best part of the best books will surface in daily conversations, YouTube videos, CliffsNotes, podcasts, Reddit posts/comments, blog articles, etc

I don't think this is true. In theory, you may be able to find all the information contained in the books, but it's drowning in garbage. The benefit of books is that the information has been distilled for you. Good books distill information better than bad books.

> One issue for me is that books are a very big time investment. I read very slowly and I don't remember everything I read either.

I hardly read books any more, though I do enjoy a day of reading in the sun when it's warm. I listen to audiobooks while I'm traveling, working out, or doing housework.

> I have thousands of non-fiction (mostly self-improvement) books in my reading list on GoodReads, but almost never bother to read any.

Different folks will tell you different things, but for me, the following self-help content covered most of what I've read to date:

* Any Alan Watts lecture series - I listened to "Out of your mind" (listen to the whole thing) * The Book of Joy (Dalai Lama and Desmond TuTu) * Never split the Difference (Chris Voss) * The hard thing about hard things (Ben Horowitz)

And then read (or listen to) whatever strikes your fancy.

The concentrated focus of books makes them stick better, in my opinion, than blog posts, online commentary, etc.

That's true, but I think the point is that we're stifling exploration. I was trying to come up with an example challenge that would have been the right kind of experiment for me. The one that came to mind is as follows:

$10 (pick any amount) of gold is dissolved in a glass is front of the student. If they can get it back, the gold is theirs.

You can provide varying amounts of information to make the task easier or harder. Grades depend on creativity, effort, and communication.

> The laboratory work of introductory chemistry is closer to a cookbook than an experiment. Students are given incredibly precise instructions and told to find a certain result. If they fail to find the result, they are made to redo the “experiment”.

This absolutely resonates with me. I am re-learning chemistry now, and this sticks out to me as something that frustrated me as a student. The amount of time that it took to get the experiment right sapped away all my curiosity for what I was actually doing. It's worth mentioning that part of the purpose of the labs is to teach lab techniques. But the cost seems really high to me. I think it teaches people to be good lab techs, but not good scientists.

Warning: pure speculation ahead.

Look at their stock price. I bet there are a lot of tense board meetings happening right now. Culture flows from the top down, and if executives are panicking about the stock price, it makes sense that they'd lose focus. I mean, if you had stock at slack, it would be easy to fall into the trap of cutting costs and following the money instead of shipping an excellent product.

My notebook is a todo list. If your email/request/etc. doesn't end up in my notebook, I will probably not do it. This is a forcing function for me for prioritization, delegation, and escalation. It's become more relevant as my work has shifted away from pure software engineering. I'm still working on which items to duplicate to work systems, but usually the point is to capture ad-hoc work that is not already in the system.

I find it pretty interesting that this comment is on HN. A few years ago, I think it was pretty widely accepted in SV that the last method you mention was just part of the grind. Maybe not the most straight-shooting approach, but still accepted. We even had a title for it: growth hacking. People hired growth hackers! I'm going to refrain from asserting a value judgement; I just thought it was interesting

I have had this conversation with so many people now. If your (private) company has taken VC money, options are toilet paper. Treat them as valueless scraps. Now, maybe you'll get lucky, and make something off of them, but that should be a pleasant surprise, not an expectation. Cash is king. If you're in it for the money, go work at MegaCorp, and take a sizeable, steady paycheck.

I struggle to believe that this is a core concern, and not a response to other pressures. For example, being reliant on other countries for energy.

I'm hopeful that the scientific community will be happy to colloquially refer to this as the FARTiscope

For anyone who wants a concrete experiment to challenge your ideas of just how complex nature is, try making a cell. Just one cell. From scratch with nothing but ions and proteins. If you find that to be achievable (there's likely a Nobel prize in it for you), try making one that divides. Now imagine that somehow an elephant can be encoded in the ions/proteins of just two cells. Humanity has never built anything that even comes close to such complexity. And then to imagine that ecosystems operate on the complex interactions between these immensely complex organisms.

I just finished up an introductory biology lecture series, and this suddenly makes less sense to me than it did before. What is it about the foreign cells that is identified as foreign by the host cells? The cells ought to be remarkably similar. They're human, with the same function/pluripotency using the same protein interactions. So why attack it?

Colorado has laws that give monopolies on the infrastructure to whoever owns it. But in order to get around anti-trust laws (or for some other cynical reason), so in your case, there is really only one provider, but they share their infrastructure with their competition and throttle them to nothing. So your options are "whatever comcast offers" and "whatever comcast decides CenturyLink can offer"

I don't think that your response is in good faith.

Not everyone wants to spend a third of their life in school. And I have proof that it is not necessary in all cases by the existence of at least one counterexample:

I have a friend who did not receive a college degree. He is now a professional fabricator, and a better mechanical engineer than most of the mechanical engineers I went to school with

This is only true in theory, not in practice. For example see the "education" that many student athletes obtain. As demand for college increases, and subsidies from the government continue, the incentive for colleges to offer a good education decreases. Going to college does not ensure broad knowledge or a quality education.

I have a pet theory about this.

Your whole life has goal posts laid out for you. You go to elementary school, get good grades so you can get into honors classes in middle/high school. And you do this again for college. Everything is quantitatively measured. How many questions did you get right? How many days did you attend school? How many extracurricular activities did you participate in? How many hours did you volunteer? All check boxes that other people hate laid out for you so that you can be measured in the funnel. And, artually, for some people this process can continue in their career. You get good grades in college, then you get an internship at BigCo. Then you get a job at BigCo. On and on until you die.

The problem is, you never had to figure anything out. So if you ever decide to do something non-standard or if randomness hits you too hard, or if someone along the way deems you "not good enough", now you're off the track. And you have never had to set your own goal posts. If you have to be constantly told what to do, employers are not going to want to hire you.

I think the lack of critical thinking goes hand in hand with an inability to function without rulebooks and structure.

This is one of the strongest cognitive dissonances that I have. And I have no idea why it exists. I know that rationally, tabs are really the better choice. Each user can choose how to display code in their editor.

But I just hate using them.

Maybe it was the 8 space default of vim (nano?) when I was sysadmining. Maybe it was that there was inertia, and tabs are always the thing that's causing problems. But I just can't get over it. I just don't like tabs.

> This very American attitude of separating "business enterprises" from "consumers", which to me sounds like separating the noble and important from peasants or cattle, is utterly sickening

I'm kind of on the fence about this. My counterargument to your comment is that the iPhone, Google search, global shipping, oil production, etc. could not be created by individuals. These things exist because huge groups of humans organized into things called "businesses".

Protecting businesses is like protecting the economies of states. There are massive effects for lots of people if businesses are not treated well. So yes, businesses get special deals sometimes. Unfortunately, this is a slippery slope, and people often fall down it.

To me, the truth in your comment is that US culture tends to give credit to CEOs for the efforts of all the other people in the organization. And this can be easily conflated with all kinds of other issues like "fines are just things that are illegal for poor people".

What is "the original memristor hypothesis"?

What definitions of memristors would make them physically impossible?

What hypothetical benefits are so compelling about the physically possible definitions?

Are memristors real? I feel like I've been hearing about how memristors are going to revolutionize computing for as long as I've been paying attention (~10 years). And yet, they never arrive. I also recall some detractors who say it's all marketing and "true" memristors aren't going to be viable for a super long time. Can anyone from HN summarize what the deal with memristors is?

Here's how "Best Sellers" become a thing:

Publishers count the number of books they sell.

This seems pretty simple, right? It is, but as a consequence, easily gamed. Publishers don't sell to you and me, they sell to book stores. So, you create some marketing to get people to preorder your book from a lots of different book stores. Book sellers inform the number of copies based, in part, on preorder numbers. There are ways that you can get book stores to order many more books than there is demand for by fraudulently (not sure if it's legally fraudulent, but maybe?) pre-ordering books, and stocking shelves with books that no one ever picks up. But boom, there you go - best seller.

If you want to cut out the middle man, and you're rich enough, you can just _be_ the middle man. Buy all the books from the publisher, and resell them. The publisher still gets their money, so they don't care. Again, now you have a best-seller.

And then, of course, there are legitimate sales that the best seller lists market themselves as measuring.

Book sellers don't want to be stuck with unsold inventory, so there's something of an arms race between book sellers and publishers/authors.

After seeing this game first-hand, I no longer believe anything on a best-seller list. As Amazon continues their vertical integration, it's not clear whether this problem will be addressed or not. The system can still be gamed, especially if it's run by algorithms.

So, basically, I'd argue that it doesn't matter whether WaPo is "right" or not because the input data is likely of poor quality anyways.

This is an aside, but can we define what a "startup" is? To me, if you have a repeatable business model and have scaled it to thousands of customers, you're no longer a startup.

Is the convention that if you take private investment, then you are a startup?

Before I respond to you, I will say that I have been on both sides of this argument. Especially early in college, there was so much to learn, and so many unknown unknowns. I craved the conversations with PhDs, postdocs, and researchers because everything they talked about was brand new to me. Being constantly immersed in new lines of human inquiry was beautiful. But after a while, the spaces of unknown unknowns became harder to find. But I have found that the things that I used to find pedestrian are much more interesting than I used to think they were. I just hadn't dug far enough.

> Some people are not interested in those pursuits and they are, in comparison, very "pedestrian" in terms of complexity.

No, they are not pedestrian.

* Sports - I have become much more interested in endurance sports. If you have never wondered what it takes to be a top endurance athlete, I'd say, it's something you should wonder about. Lots of people have asked the question "How far is the human body capable of being pushed?", and the answer to that question is fascinating and complex. The difference between top athletes is hugely psychological. Much of endurance sports is just "how much pain can you put up with?". Here's a different, but related question. If people are really pushing themselves as hard as they can, why don't they die more often? If you are talking more about team sports, personally, I like soccer. Ask yourself, how is each player observing the field to maximize outcomes? Every player on the team is playing a live-action RTS to be in the right place at the right time. And every opposing player is doing the opposite. There is a ton of depth in sports. Humans who play sports are not dumb or pedestrian.

* family - What philosophies of family have been most useful over human history? How did native americans' views of family differ from stereotypical modern families? Which do you think is better? If you really don't care about peoples' individual families, take them as data points to learn about how humans build structures of multiple humans. Why does/doesn't polyamory work for some people/cultures? What things does the human brain learn at different times (i.e. how are your kids doing from a learning perspective?) People love talking about how their kids are growing, and the ways that humans grow is fascinating.

> food - Nutrition. What makes good food? What parameters are good chefs optimizing for (hint: it's more than taste, texture, and presentation)? Can you do it? If you think you can cook as well as a professional chef, I challenge you to try. The thing that's difficult about this is that I needed to try some really good food to understand how far short I fall. Cooking is chemistry, and it is equally interesting.

* religion - How can you possibly say that religion is pedestrian? That's mind boggling to me. Religion has been one of the longest running, most universal organizing structures of human experience. This, to me, makes it totally fascinating. How have religions changed over time? What did independently invented religions look like? Why are many so similar? How did humans explain inexplicable phenomenon. I believe that humans have been as smart as we are today for basically as long as there has been written or oral history. The difference was that the didn't have the mental abstractions and information to come up with the solutions that we have today. Religion fills a lot of voids in human understanding over history, and provides a fascinating window into human history. Talking to people about their religion will make your life richer.

> The parent comment clearly enjoys pursuits that are of higher complexity and feels as if people in general do not share that interest and hence to him they seem boring

This exactly reinforces the initial comment of the parent:

> If you talk to a person, and the conversation is dull, they might be a boring person. If most of the people you talk to seem boring, then you are the boring person.

Basically, if you cannot find the complexity in "pedestrian" concepts, it's not because they are not there. It's because you're not able to find them. Maybe you're not being curious enough, maybe you're being arrogant, maybe you're just tired, and can't be bothered on that day.

I have a favorite saying relevant to this:

If you want to be interesting, be interested.

Give others the benefit of the doubt, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Lots of very talented humans have dedicated their entire lives to studying your so-called "pedestrain" topics, and they learned interesting things. I think it would be worth it for everyone to try to figure out the things that they discovered - at least some of them.

I was curious haw this is actually measured, so to make it easier for others, LAI stands for "Leaf Area Index" [0], and is measured as "the one-sided green leaf area per unit ground surface area (LAI = leaf area / ground area, m2 / m2) in broadleaf canopies.[1] In conifers, three definitions for LAI have been used"

I'm a bit surprised to see the greening in the Rockies, and in North America in general given the devastation that the bark beetle has caused over the last 20 years. But it's nice to read that some trends are in the right direction.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_area_index

To any browser developers out there, I beg you, please, please, please whitelist lvh.me. I am so tired of security restrictions making everything painful for lvh.me.

I don't buy this argument. There are known psychological effects which mute interesting discussion and promote division and extremism. Regulating algorithms that amplify these effects seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do to me.

My favorite quote addresses this:

"Don't be mad 'cause I'm doin me better than you doin you" - Childish Gambino

Figure out what that means for you, and you'll be successful. That's my theory anyway. The amount that I believe that theory varies from day to day, but I use it as a mantra to keep me level.

Really? I couldn't seem to prove that I was human. I thought it just threw you into an infinite "prove you're human" loop at the end.

I grew up viewing school as prison. I was part of a program in elementary school which meant that I traveled to other schools regularly. My elementary and high schools were quite nice, but my middle school and the schools that I traveled to were very prison-like. The windows are small, and covered in metal bars or thick metal meshing.

Using the bathroom required permission that was often denied. Peeing between classes often meant penalties for being tardy (in middle/high school where you had 5 minutes to get between classes which may be a 4 minute walk apart, and teachers always had that one last thing to say). My middle school banned shoelaces for a while because of gang violence. I had a Spanish teacher who regularly handed out negative grades on tests (your grade would have been better if you hadn't showed up and taken a 0 on the test). I had a different spanish teacher who took it upon herself to regularly humiliate students who were doing poorly and lecture us about how we could never expect to get anywhere in life.

It wasn't all bad. I had a fantastic chemistry teacher and a great physics teacher. But there was a lot of bad.

I prefer to see the silver lining in this. If Google wants to break the web for Firefox, fine. I'll keep using (and evangelising) FF, and the sites that are broken won't get FF traffic. I believe that FF is doing the right thing far users, and Google, while in a powerful position is currently on the losing side of history with respect to privacy. Apple is taking that fight to them, and putting budget behind inte convincing average internet users that privacy is cool, and Google abuses your privacy.

The walled garden approach worked for a while for Microsoft, and it's working for now for Google, but eventually, it stops working. Once people leave, walled gardens keep them away.

I too have a huge problem with touch screens in cars. Having tactile knobs means I can find things on the dash without taking my eyes off the road. The thing that I think most of the comments are missing is the thing that powers all tech... Ads

There is currently a push behind the scenes to own the in-car advertising system. This is a reason why Google is making a play for an automobile OS [0].

I desperately hope that car manufacturers return to physical buttons, but in-car ads are offer huge potential financial upside. You could sell a car at a loss to consumers and still come out ahead...

[0] https://www.android.com/auto/