shokwave

60% of people drop out[0] - before you knew this, you had an 60% chance of dropping out. Now you know the statistics, you can go about exerting effort to end up in the 40% that don't drop out. And that number - 60% to 40% - tells you a little bit about how much effort you're going to need to put in (not much).

90% of startups fail[1] - now you know that, you want to put yourself in the 10% that don't. 90% to 10% is a bigger gap to jump than 60 to 40, so it's going to be a lot harder.

0,1: not actual statistics

The search function joke got me good.

The author writes as if, when a 'real person' makes a recommendation, they aren't just making a prediction from data. The difference is that we can see how the algorithm works, whereas our picture of what the human brain does when it thinks about what someone might like is very murky.

And even if trusting a recommendation causes a placebo effect that increases the perceived quality (as others have pointed out, it seems plausible that a hyped recommendation may cause disappointment instead), why on Earth would we trust a process we don't understand, but mistrust a process we do?

We got used to it with laptops (think back to when they were mostly desktops - "I have to charge my computer?") and we'll probably get used to it with cars, assuming the same value to be gained is there (probably is).

tl;dr: They take too long to charge so clearly nobody should wait 58 minutes instead of 46 or whatever.

Hell, why even bother charging for 46 minutes? Charge it for however long you estimate it takes you to fill up the gas in your other car, and complain when the car runs out then, too.

Not a good piece at all; can't say whether that reflects on the author too or this is just him/her being mindkilled over, of all things, charging time.

Huffington Post Sports "Deceptive" Title

Agreed, instance_eval is definitely disgusting, but this trick scores well on readability, it's no more of a trap than some other Ruby idioms, and it serves a good purpose (robustness!).

    def foo(bar, baz=(default = true; 'default')) 
    # it still looks separated from other arguments
      if default
        puts "#{bar}.times { puts #{baz} }" 
      else
        bar.times { puts baz }
      end
    end

To anyone who knows more Ruby than I - is there a good reason against that I'm missing?

Signed up. I want to see this train wreck first-hand.

It's all well and noble to say "health journalism is flawed, everything is breathlessly reported as a breakthrough", but when you put Tara Parker-Pope and Gary Taubes in the same category, you're committing more of the same mistakes. There's nothing noble at all in shooting down all of health journalism.

He goes on to say:

"Worse still, health journalists are taking advantage of the wrongness problem. Presented with a range of conflicting findings for almost any interesting question, reporters are free to pick those that back up their preferred thesis."

It appears that this author's preferred thesis is that when presented with conflicting evidence, one should throw one's hands up in despair and do whatever you want ("apply common sense liberally"), instead of some kind of analysis of the evidence to find which side of the conflict is more reliable.

Start with -just- the bar.

Or get Starting Strength, by Mark Rippetoe, which has about 70 pages of instructions and diagrams on the correct form of each lift.

Or find a gym that has a personal trainer willing to teach you the proper form.

Or do it, record yourself with a camera of some sort, and find a community of weightlifting people (/r/fitness welcomes this) to correct your form.

Once you see the strength gains tapering off, go into a cut phase - eating less than maintenance calories - and you'll see aesthetic gains to rival your strength and confidence gains.

From Pistol Lake is good.

Yes! Even a "Trash Exchange" where all moderated posts are dumped instead of deleted would be an improvement.

What if I told you that you could get these same benefits with only a 10-20% drop in WPM? And that you could be faster on the newer layout in two weeks?

Believe it. Go to carpalx's key swaps page ( http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?partial_optimization ). Make the first change on their list - swap K and E - and use the new layout until your brain gets used to the swap. Once you're comfortable, make the next swap.

Once you've made about 7 swaps you're on a layout that's on par with both Dvorak and Colemak, and you never had to waste a single hour in typing trainers.

Each swap takes me about five hours of typing over about 3 days to get used to. I imagine if your job has you typing all the time, your day-count will be lower. I have currently swapped E/K and O/J, and this post has reminded me to swap F/T as well.

There are plenty of keyboard remappers available for windows and osx, and it's not difficult to do yourself in linux either.

Insurance pays out when you lose your job or crash your car; ie, when you get unlucky. Lotteries pay out when your pick of numbers was a better pick than ten million other people; ie, when you get lucky.

Economics has repeatedly suggested that the natural logarithm of dollars is an approximation of the utility of money.

When you're lucky, you go from 50k to 50m. In logarithms, 10.819 to 17.727. When you're unlucky, you go from 50k to effectively 0. Which is 10.819, to negative infinity - but probably, you'll have enough to live on, so like 1 (0). So you gain almost 7 utility for playing the lottery, but lose more than 10 for not playing the insurance. (The closeness of seven and ten explains why so many uninsured people play the lottery.)

If you do want to write a system of equations and solve for happiness...

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/the_science_of_happiness/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/bq0/be_happier/

Without the hostility, the designers might get the idea that their suggestions were good.

Without the hostility, the submitter might get the idea that hackernews liked the article.

You say the response "is not constructive and leads to no learning whatsoever". I'd like to substantively address the second claim.

    "A smart man learns from his mistakes.
     A wise man learns from the mistakes of others."

The designers learned that their changes were bad. They learned WHY their changes were bad: many responses gave detailed reasons. The submitter learned that their model of what HN likes was wrong. And if the submitter thought this was a good design, they learned their understanding of design is wrong. All the others who read the submission and responses learned a few design pitfalls to avoid. There are whole chapters in books on design that teach less than this.

And this is learning from the event itself! What learning could this event LEAD to? I don't know, someone might pick up a book on design?

(As an aside, I didn't address "not constructive". I have a truly marvellous rant on the emptiness of this concept that this comment field is too small to contain.)

Explanations are great, but I've found I got a lot of use out of an intuitive method for applying Bayes' Theorem.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4305144

When I find a great fishing spot, I always make sure I release a joint statement informing the fish.

The author makes it seem as if you have two choices: "tolerance and dependence" or "kick the habit". Maybe acting like caffeine is methamphetamine bumps up the pageviews, I don't know.

But I do know that caffeine once or twice a week for a burst of energy won't see you developing a tolerance - so you can continue to benefit.

Hey. There's a problem you want to solve, and you tried a way of solving it. Now everyone's waving their arms about and yelling at you. Right now, you're going to feel like you should stand by your decision.

That is a mistake.

That is a mistake, even if your solution is the best solution to the problem.

It's a mistake because if you dig in, fight hard, and refuse to surrender - if you entrench - then the solution becomes entrenched. And if all this backlash can't uproot it, well, what possible chance could a better solution have of replacing it?

Well, one obvious counterpoint: startup founders and early employees work 90 hour weeks before you point cameras at them.

He has patents, he tried a space program, and he's a strong supporter of the Long Now foundation - wait, that's evidence for him being crazy?

It's tempting to think that since a group is bigger than an individual, they should have some sort of power to select beyond the individual's procreation - but while groups are more powerful than individuals, groups are not more powerful than procreation.

It's easy to expect, and believe, and accept group selection, because the method of transmission is so obvious, that behaviours are taught to the next generation! This obscure 'years later, gene expression' stuff just seems so unlikely - humans aren't wired to expect causality over years or decades.

Interesting. I take modafinil 2-ish times a week, sometimes to skip a night's sleep to work on my own projects, sometimes to get a really productive day at my day-job with a startup.

My subjective experience with driving on Modafinil is very different: I become significantly more aware of everything on the road. It turns me into a laser, sure, but a laser that's constantly scanning back and forth. Too many confounding factors to say why that is.

I haven't noticed any diminishing of 'broad thinking'. Not sure I could claim any increase, though.

His claim that it's better to get productive days through other means seems to be a false dichotomy: Modafinil isn't dangerous like he's convinced it is, and while you can get productive through better health and rest, you can get even more productive by eating healthy, exercising, resting properly, and taking Modafinil. It's not clear why he thinks that Modafinil will force you to be unhealthy, thus making it a choice between "healthy" and "moda" (Honestly, the days when I take Modafinil, I find I have the focus to exercise harder and longer, and the willpower to eat much healthier).

His points about 'shortcut to a really productive day', 'having a clear big task to focus on', and 'drink a lot of water' are all spot-on, though.

I have to disagree with his recommendations: I think Modafinil's value proposition is positive for almost everyone, and proportionally more valuable as the value of your time or focus increases. HN readers in particular tend to have valuable time and extremely valuable focus; Modafinil is a huge gain, something like a large fraction of just the positives of amphetamines, with the negatives of caffeine instead.

The illustrious gwern has an article covering the medical research, benefits, risks, a novel cost/benefit analysis, and supplier information here: http://www.gwern.net/Modafinil

(Yes, it's been linked a few times already in this discussion. Go read it already.)