thehooplehead

Agreed. I think HN is the kind of forum where a picture isn't quite worth a thousand words. With these types of articles, I'd be more interested in bulleted summaries than thumbnails. I appreciate HN for being information-dense/text-heavy.

I'll never understand why people act like a forum is a TV channel. Can't people just hide threads, or avoid topics that don't interest them? It's not like HN only has one discussion at a time and that politics has crowded out other topics.

Halfway through, I started thinking, this piece is incredible marketing for the wife's attorney, Fisher. He's the only one really likeable character (the wife didnt care about defrauded customers, the husband was always the villain). Given that the money might never materialize, pitching an interesting, detailed, already researched article to NYT lets Fisher salvage some marketing out of a potential loss.

I pretty much do the opposite. I remember that everyone was a child once and some, unfortunately, still are. Basically attributing annoyances/disagreements to ignorance/differing values rather than malice.

I agree. It doesn't have to be collusion, in fact, I can easily imagine that there's no large scale coordination, maybe just coordination in small 5-10 person teams. For any incentive scheme, there's going to be a subset of people trying to game it. Given that potentially tens of thousands of employees were presented with the same incentive scheme (the performance system), it makes sense that many people/small groups could independently create similar strategies.

I think it's made more concrete by thinking of how many times you've thought of an app, business, screenplay, etc. and realized later that a dozen others have had the same idea. I bet a dozen people in this thread independently sketched out an app like Uber/Homejoy/"AirBnb-for-X" at some point just based off having the common annoyance of taxi-finding or hiring help.

In standup comedy, this happens a lot because we're all living in 2016 so any joke about the election, Bradjelina, Game of Thrones or any other sufficiently public/widely-discussed topic will have dozens of people trying to make a joke off of it. I'd guess that the set of actions you can take in a 'corporate game' is more finite and structured, so it makes sense that thousands among tens/hundreds of thousands adopt the same strategy.

What worked for me was removing barriers to exercise. It's been an odd, decade-long progression, but here's how it went:

-------------

I. Initial Annoyance with Gym

a) The biggest barrier is building the willpower to get to the gym. I live in a snowy city, so I knew that heading to the gym would be torture in the winter.

b) Working full-time meant that the only times to head to the gym were before work (6-8) or after work. I wanted to match my exercise time to when I had the motivation.

c) Heading to the gym is a huge cost. If you do 4 sets, it might only be 20 minutes of actual lifting, an hour round trip to/from the gym, 20 minutes showering. I think mentally, you know that heading to the gym is a a huge time-sink, cluster of obligations that goes far beyond the actual lifting.

--------------

II. the Home Gym - It was the obvious solution to the issues above. In addition, it's been a massive cost saving over the years. It's not a massive setup, here's what I have:

a) Bowflex Selecttech dumbbells - they adjust weights from 12.5 pounds to 52.5 pounds (there's a version that goes up to 90lbs too). You can do a lot of different exercises with them

b) Jump rope - a heavy leather rope, not a speed rope. It's incredible how fit you'll get from jumping for 15 straight minutes every other day. Plus it beats running because you can watch TV while you do it.

c) Two kettlebells

d) Resistance bands - these have been marginally useful, but they're also cheap and really portable. I bring them with me when I travel

e) interlocking floor mats - these protect the floor, but I've never dropped anything in nearly 8 years

f) a yoga mat - for situps

g) an Xbox - I'm not kidding. I would play Pro Evolution Soccer and Fallout 3 while doing situps.

h) Medicine ball - Don't get one. It's no fun unless you have someone to throw it to.

I researched different lifts using ExRx primarily using these two links:

* http://www.exrx.net/Lists/Directory.html

* http://www.exrx.net/Lists/WtMale.html

All of those items can be tucked away into a closet or under the bed. I stuck with that for the first four years of my home gym. Ultimately, I added two large pieces that increased the space taken up, but still don't dominate the room they're in:

* An adjustable bench that folds flat

* the Power Tower (that's really what it's called) - a station for chin-ups/pull-ups and Roman chair lifts

You won't be Instagram-huge, but you can get large muscles. It's a little underpowered for chest since it lacks a bench press, but you'll still have chest gains doing isometric dumbbell presses.

-----------

Finally, this summer, I've lately found a ridiculously effective way to motivate myself to consistent exercise -- I only play video games while exercising. It's essentially a Pomodoro-style alternation between 8 minutes of playing, then lifting 10-15 reps of each exerise. It's incredible to realize that it only takes about 4 minutes to run through your exercises. I think people often spend the interval between sets agonizing about how tired they are and dreading the next set. Now, once I'm done lifting, I go straight to another mental task (video games) which feels like a reward for lifting. Once cycled through my exercises 4-6 times, I drink a protein shake, maybe play videogames for another hour, then continue with the rest of my day.

It sounds bizarre, but it's been a ten year progression to fit exercise as painless as possible. I wouldn't recommend this for beginners though. Exercise equipment isn't the sort of thing you want to buy lightly. Also, I had lifted a bit in high school, and consistently in college before starting the home gym. It's likely best to learn the basics first.

Agreed. I enjoyed getting a better idea of how people lived back in that era. Casanova, as he presents himself, was a perfect trickster archetype.

For example: He mentions being at a dinner where an actress lamented a lisp that would impede her career. Casanova told her he could cure her speech overnight. The next day, he presented her with a rewrite of the play she was performing, with all the difficult phonemes replaced so she'd her lisp wouldn't be noticed.

My main take away is that he's always trying to look at a situation, rationally see it for what it is, but also playfully imagine what it could be.

>> Every service is, on IFTTT or not. We care about the people who use them and build them. The changes we are asking for are indeed more work, but we know they will lead to a better Pinboard Channel on IFTTT in the long term.

This struck me as remarkably hollow. It doesn't even go into the issues of the strong Terms of Service conditions. Maybe, it's the juxtaposition of having just read a reddit thread about CEO interaction [1], but, to me, this kind of message is worse than silence. It's bad enough to get those fake "warm", "friendly" emails from startups trying to stop churn, but at least those are automated.

I like Maciej's style because there's no mediation of business-speak, it's just the message plus some eccentric local color/flourish. Shoot straight or just step aside. Silence is an option.

[1] reddit discussion about CEO interaction, interesting tangent https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4cfd2h/im_founder_o...

Never seen it taken this far, but I do the same thing in Pro Evolution. I've had a few players with bad ratings that suit my gameplay, players with unused skills (fast defenders who can shoot), etc. My biggest gripe with any of these games is that they don't do more with their own data in terms of immersion. I'd trade the recorded commentary for generated text fed through a TTS engine.

The initial description of the library had me thinking of 'the Man Who Was Thursday', a book which includes its own absurd secret society.

Also, anyone interested in real-world social games might enjoy Journey to the End of the Night (http://ichaseyou.com/). It's not a secret society, but it shares some elements of roaming through your city, playing a game with strangers, and creating your own adventures.

Then Apple wouldn't be Apple. This makes me think of the reflexivity idea Soros wrote about in Alchemy of Finance. It's valid to bemoan not buying Apple stock 20 years ago, because the purchase wouldn't influence company trajectory. Looking back wistfully at not buying the company completely changes the situation with restructuring, M&A integration issues, key people leaving or losing autonomy, Apple development fitting into the Sun vision rather than independently.

I think an interesting counterpoint would be to imagine what some companies could have gone on to accomplish if they hadn't been acquired, then killed. There's been tons of promising/interesting companies acquired, then never heard from again.

Understanding this perspective will be a huge benefit to anyone who wants to contribute as a non-technical founder. About 6 years ago, at the end of undergrad, a technical friend and I started working on a project. I had made websites, built computers, dabbled in minor coding, but really wasn't that technical. I had no clue what to do and he probably wasn't comfortable giving direction. I left the project when I felt I couldn't make an equal contribution.

Working for six years made it obvious how valuable it is to be able to get things done offline, in a nontechnical way by planning, finding resources, etc.

Now I've become a lot more technical, the programmer of the office (VBA, ugh) to a programmer without caveats. Non-technical friends ask me to be their tech co-founder, but they have no clue how much work the technical side entails -- they probably still think freelance programmers should cost them $20/hr.

Also, non-tech friends will ask if they can help with my project. I can see what I would need in a non-tech founder, but a lot of times its hard to convey that to people. It's especially hard convey to someone how much effort you expend maintaining a codebase or implementing features to a non-technical person.

Best luck with Genghis and your co-founder search. I hate to be a downer, but personally, I'd never take a non-technical founder that I didn't know beforehand. It's hard enough to gauge the skill/reliability of a tech co-founder/freelancer (with structured, defined abilities and past projects). I wouldn't be comfortable assessing someone as a cofounder based on soft-skills. It's not a statement on their relative contribution, but more on my confidence in my own estimation.

*By technical, I'm also including people with domain knowledge.

They needed a much better explanation. I listen to most of my music on the subway with a lot of background noise; I never worry about low sound quality.

It's not just "date invitation." This is a woman complaining about a guy talking to her at a bar. As a guy, I'd be flattered if a woman asked me out in general, but extremely annoyed if she did it during a job interview.

She's saying that making the conversation an appraisal of the woman's looks instead of ability, the VCs denies her self-determination. She puts forward the archetypical VC-friendly candidate to say he'd be the type of person that would clear a VCs mental filters and actually have a chance at being heard.

No to be a bastard, but I disagree. The design is really off-putting. It instantly made me bounce off the site. If design isn't an early concern, just go for something boring/popular/obvious. Lobste.rs isn't going to get too many compliments for its design, but it also won't get many demerits either.

I say change the colors and don't do it in three columns. That's just my opinion. The site might be awesome, but really, the design made me bounce.

I like this quote, it's well laid-out, but I don't think the reasoning is sound. At heart, the argument it voices anger at advertisers for forcing you to see things you don't want to see and feel things you don't want to feel. That's exactly the reasoning used to limit individual freedom of expression in many places. It creates a victim (the passive observer) in order to vilify an otherwise victimless crime (the person expressing themselves).

For the record, I hate ads too, but I see it as a fair exchange.

Below, I've streamlined and abstracted the quote. If you stuck "women" where I say "insert target," this would mirror a lot of really repressive hate speech that's going on in many parts of the world.

>> People are taking the piss out of you everyday... [They] take a cheap shot at you and then disappear... [They] make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making [you] feel inadequate. They have access and they bully you with it. They are (insert target) and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head... You owe [them] nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you.

For anyone interested in playing dodgeball as an adult, check out the World Dodgeball Society (http://dodgeball4ever.com/leagues/)

They're not aggro-competitive and most of their leagues use very throwable, virtually pain-free foam balls.

Ditto. How about in this thread?

I was watched the video waiting for some big reveal, but was sort of let down by the offering. The site says more about the notebook's quality than the OCR/digitization, which is what I was more interested in.

These days, I see computer time as a limited resource. My eyes started acting up last summer and so I've cut down on my computer time. I save articles into something like Pocket and use the read-aloud feature while I go take a break from staring at the monitor.

It looks like Dropbox just shut down the account's transfers. I take it a couple dozen people started mass-downloading each state's data. This would be the ideal use for a torrent network, right?

I like your initial point about technology needing an implementation. I see this with things like the Leap Motion controller where I think it's an interesting product, but I have no idea why I need/would benefit from one. Then I compare that with things like the Chromecast that solves a problem for my parents/girlfriend who are tech-savvy enough to track down their media online but they don't want to deal with an HTPC/Boxee/Google TV. It didn't take more than a few seconds before I could imagine them using it daily.

Also, "VC-funded sausage party" is a great phrase. Pokes fun at brogramming while hinting at the gender-imbalance. +1

I thought the same.

In my opinion, the article should have been edited down to about 10-20 great ideas. I liked the idea for a competitor watch service, I think it's much better than the one for 'Myspace 2.'

This is fake right? South African sounding name (which happens to be one of a former president) + no mention of it anywhere else on line. Are we posting Onion articles now?

It'd be cheaper to fly up 25 hunters, expenses paid.