thalur

(0.55 times the velocity of an unladen swallow)

I'm not sure I quite agree with that. As I see it, the term "luck" is regularly applied to two categories of events. As you've said, there are the chance events (such as winning the lottery or rolling a 6 on a die), and in that I quite agree with you.

The other case, which is what I thought the article was about, is more of an "opportunity" type of luck. For example, if you happened to find a £10 note while walking home. That would be called "lucky" but it is not simply the result of chance: it is the result of you being more observant than everyone who didn't notice the money before you. And in that sense, people can easily be "luckier" than others, as the article describes.

They haven't taken anything down, they've put down their tools.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/throw_down_one%27s_tools

> Also, when I go abroad, I am definitely not enabling data roaming.

I think this is an important point, which is freqently forgotten. So many apps that would be useful in a foreign country are useless because they require internet access. When I went to Bulgaria last year I would have loved to have a translator app for my iphone, but every single one available required internet access, which there's no way I'm paying for at £3/MB!

But a larger screen is (potentially) well worth having. I find my iphone is a little on the small side for serious web browsing - its good for the occasional wikipedia hunt, but its not particularly pleasant to read large amounts of text on.

The section on "when to apply science" seems very disparaging of our predecessors: how does he know that no one tried experiments to prove either of the two ideas?

Both require knowledge of drag (and preferably a vacuum chamber) to perform correctly. Without that understanding, experimental results would probably have "proven" the rational model.

Does anyone know when air resitance/drag were discovered? A quick google indicated some time in the 1600s

On the home page: "For a limited time: free worldwide shipping with pre-order!"

When I tried switching the mouse to my left hand I just started getting pain in my left hand too! I found switching to a trackball mouse has helped a lot, as has using an ergonomic keyboard without a number pad on the right hand side. I use one of these at work: http://www.goldtouch.com/p-65-goldtouch-adjustable-keyboard-...

Thanks for that - I'll definitely give that book a look.

* Went from being able to work on a computer unbearably 35 hours a week to 70+ virtually pain free (when I worked for a YC startup)

That's definitely encouraging. At the moment I can manage about 40 hours a week. Any more than that (like I'm doing at the moment) and the pain comes back :(

Clickable link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=JQn_2fz7zs_2ff7Dkdcp_2...

"If I had my time again, I would dedicate myself to making just enough to live comfortably (say £30m or £40m) as quickly as I could, hopefully by the time I was 35. I would then cash out immediately and retire to write poetry and plant trees. "

I thought this was an interesting remark, particularly as it would 'only' put him in the "lesser rich" band defined at the end of the article. It makes me wonder why he picked that particular amount, whether it marks a decent balance between effort and reward, or just a decent income off the interest for savings.

Theres also a related series of articles starting here: http://prog21.dadgum.com/23.html

Could a viable company be created with the goal of producing and selling an MMO engine, rather than an actual MMO? You would be removing the expense and risk of creating the gameplay side of things (models, textures, quests etc), and could focus on getting the engine right. There would probably be some issues in selling the engine though: there would be a certain chicken-and-egg factor in selling an unproven engine to a new MMO-building company.

Using i and j as loop or temp variable names when working with complex numbers should get bonus points ;)

Sounds like something Dan Brown would write.

I like it. It wasn't immediately obvious to me what some of the features did though - the search button and the unique/common graph next to it for example. I'm also a little disapointed it won't generate names in Klingon - after all, it offers to! :)

I would want a translator to be offline though (or someone else to pay the roaming data charges for me).

How about ranking by how other users who have a similar voting pattern to the current user vote on an article? So, for example, when the page is rendered for user x, each user who has upvoted an article has their vote multiplied by the similarity between their voting pattern and user x's voting pattern before sorting with the current algorithm. Each user then gets a semi-personalised view which, hopefully, is to their taste.

I must admit that I've stopped using firefox completely since I got hooked on Chrome, but I was never a big plugin user. I wouldn't go so far as to say firefox was dead as a result though. The oddest thing is that I don't miss having an ad blocker in chrome, and I have no idea why! Maybe I've just gotten used to seeing ads again, or maybe Chrome blocks popups better than firefox did back before I got the adblock plugin.

At work I've just been writing a testing framework in Matlab (mostly for fun, but it actualy seems to work!). And I have next week off, so I thought I'd have a go at building something in rails.

" "You're using Facebook to say all kind of things that you wouldn't say in public," he says. "My grandmother thought that the phone was an intrusion into her life. Why would this person call rather than knock on the door? Now we just accept it." "

That doesn't necessarily make it a good thing though... At least with facebook or a phone you get to choose some of the data that is held on you.

silly question: if this is successful, won't it lead to an incentive for the developers to add unnecessary extra lines of code, sort of an anti-refactoring - "how can I express this in more lines..." - in order to increase the number of adoptable lines?

It may be due to whatever messed up install the corporate IT people have deigned to give us.

What, working harder? :p

I just get a blank white screen on IE6 (at work). I don't know if that's considered a good thing or a bad thing!

(And believe me, if they would let me use something other than IE6, I would.)

And there was me thinking it would be an article about some undersea cable across the atlantic or pacific...

It seems to me like this was a missed opportunity for building a new model for audio-based advertising. Something that inserts adverts tailored to the listner (language, country, music choices etc) in between bits of music. However, I don't know Last.fm well enough to know if this would work - I've only used it a couple of times.

I know what you mean - I have the same problem. For me, it's worst with television: I can't have a conversation with someone if there's a TV on in the same room. I'm not sure if this is the opposite to the flashlight simile, or just an example of an inability to direct it at will.

I think the doubling comes from the fact that initial estimates are always that it would take x weeks if you were to work flat out 100% of the time. As this is incredibly unlikely to happen, you have to increase the estimate to take into account "overheads" (such as posting here...). I like your "double until it's silly then go back a step" idea; it seems like a good way to get quick estimates.

I try to take into account how accurate my estimates will be: if a sub-task is something I've done alot, I stick with my estimate; if it's something where I think there's a risk of it going wrong I add more time (keeping a note of the estimate and the risk time separately - it makes project managers think you know what you're doing!). I then add them all up, divide by 0.7 (roughly how efficiently I convert booked hours into directly worked hours - the rest is email and meetings etc.). Also, any task where you have to write code that works with someone else's code, I double the estimate.

I think this is a reformatted version of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232192