Hacker News Reader

vwoolfon The rise of passive-aggressive wi-fi names

My favorite is "It's better when it's unprotected."

No password.

There have been a LOT of Forbes posts like this lately; I commented on one yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4303077 .

vwoolfon The Two Types of Companies in Silicon Valley

I just had that experience with this article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4303730

vwoolfon PayDragon (YC S11) raises $1.35M so hungry people can skip lines

I just downloaded the PayDragon app, and the "Discover" feature is one of the more intriguing aspects. I regularly look for interesting, convenient food, and aside from walk-bys, it's not all that easy to find in my neighborhood.

EDIT: In Manhattan, however, PayDragon only has one restaurant in the "Discover" category right now—it's Murray's Cheese, which might be delightful, but it's also somewhat far and not especially appealing.

vwoolfon Zuckerberg's Big Facebook Mistake

I stopped reading here: "The roadblocks he faced in building the world’s biggest social-networking company were tiny, like an overdramatized civil lawsuit" and also wished for a "downvote" button. This trivializes what it takes to build a multi-billion-dollar company—any multi-billion-dollar company.

vwoolfon Economics of Google Fiber and what it means for U.S. broadband

Some of what you're describing sounds similar to "The Great FiOS rip-off": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/the-great-veriz... .

vwoolfon Don't Blame Sitting — Yet — for Shorter Lives of the Sedentary

Sitting is correlated with fat metabolism issues, but standing for periods of just 10-15 minutes is correlated with vascular disease; standing was shown in studies to correlate with increased stress hormones and increased blood density.

[Citation needed]

This isn't meant as a threat, either: I'd be quite interested in a comprehensive literature review of this stuff.

It reminds me a bit of the brouhaha around barefoot running: some decent evidence suggests barefoot is "better," while some suggests that forefoot striking is really the key. Expert opinion is split.

vwoolfon The Instagram Effect: Causing Silicon Valley to fund the wrong companies?

Peter Thiel thinks VCs are biased against big ideas: http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels... .

(This is in response to the grandparent: "VCs aren't preternaturally biased in favor of lightweight companies, but the people who are doing heavyweight stuff don't have the time to become "real founders.")

vwoolfon Microsoft employee on stack ranking and its 'most universally hated exec'

I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.

I'm pretty sure almost every big contemporary tech company tries this when the big company is small and growing, but it almost never works. Joel Spolsky wrote it about the management problem here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper....

Actually, politics happen everywhere that more than two people congregate. It’s just natural. By “no politics” I really mean “no dysfunctional politics.”

Funnily enough, he uses an example from Microsoft—but the Microsoft of the early 1990s.

He also writes about it here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/07.html.

No formal management doesn't appear to scale above some number of employees / workers. I can't tell what that number is, but I would guess that it's somewhere around 125 – 150 people—that is, the Dunbar number.[1] Maybe it could be as high as 1,000, but I'm pretty damn skeptical it could be higher than 2,000.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

vwoolfon My $47 collapsible standing desk

I think this is why people who pay attention this sort of stuff want sit/stand desks, like Geek Desks, or something like the OP, who I think wants to be able to stand sometimes and sit sometimes.

vwoolfon The Silent Majority of Experts

Using this as a justification not to have good tools ("What's wrong with you? Suffering worked great last time") is bogus logic; there's no reason not to have good tools. The other side of the coin, NOT doing something because you don't have good tools yet, is equally poisonous.

This middle ground approach is probably best.

PG writes about tools and their importance in "Beating the Averages": http://paulgraham.com/avg.html .

vwoolfon Kim Dotcom Will Go to the US in Exchange for Legal Funds

Read Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities if you want a great example of the legal process portrayed in fiction.

vwoolfon Lie More, as a Business Model

Lying is a business model for too many businesses; I'm reminded of Go Daddy's wholly-owned subsidiary, Standard Tactics, and how the latter would register expired domains, while Go Daddy would volunteer to "negotiate" with itself (see the whole account here: http://domainnamewire.com/2008/12/03/standard-tactics-llc-ho... ).

It's very hard to fight this sort of thing, as an individual, much like it's hard to avoid Barclay's (or its larger competitors, like Bank of America or Chase).

vwoolfon 12-year-old sues school district over Facebook profile search

Schools should do nothing: Facebook is outside their purview, despite their belief that their purview is everything.

Parents should "do" whatever they would normally do in communicating with or disciplining their children.

vwoolfon Computer Scientists and Google+: Something Interesting is Happening

She's not precisely on point, but if you're curious start by reading danah boyd's work: http://www.danah.org/papers/ . The stuff at the top mostly deals with teenagers, but her older papers deal with online communities in general.

Again: she's a good place to start, not finish.

vwoolfon Avoid Apress

If you're interested in another tech writer's book experience, check out Philip Greenspun's "The Book Behind the Book": http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story .

vwoolfon The Knife Maker

If you're interested in inexpensive but very good knives without some of the social superiority complexes attached, see the Atlantic's article "Never a Dull Moment": http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/04/never-a-... . The sidebar is also useful.

vwoolfon The Sibling Effect

I would imagine people should want to know that birth order can have profound effects on their personality and disposition: then they can try to actively counteract or encourage those tendencies. What you're not aware of, you can't change.

vwoolfon This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

Agreed. Especially because these replies so seldom make an argument: they rarely say, "this shouldn't be on Hacker News for well-considered reasons x, y, and z." They (usually) just make assumptions about what should or shouldn't be on HN.

vwoolfon This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

I'm fairly confident most people could do most things if they really wanted to, but it seems like most people don't. This is partially a function of time—no one has the time to do everything in the world—but I do wonder about the people who seemingly don't do anything well, or who don't believe they can do anything well. It often seems like they haven't really tried.