yagibear

I'm not sure that online shops are any less likely to try "to manipulate for maximum benefit". The palette may change (fresh bread smells & video surveillance get replaced by cookies and Referer fields) but the motivations and biases stay the same.

Real men read in hex.

Haven't we already voted in a poll from PG http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349421 asking "Allow stories about the election?", with 49 yes and 218 no when I last checked?

This article has virtually nothing to say about the SCIENCE of driving directions, but many words about the mechanics of collecting mapping data and user expectations about how it is presented.

pg congratulates pseudonym nickb [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152388]? I wonder what the number of upvotes for this means...

Nevertheless, 20k certainly represents a valuable contribution.

Hacker news?

But quality is much harder to evaluate than quantity, particularly in the short term.

It's interesting to try to tease out what factors might contribute to these jobs being overpaid:

1. Fear: Wedding photographers, pilots, longshoremen & orthodontists

2. Creaming a little from a lot: Skycaps, real estate agents, mutual-fund managers

3. Scarcity: lecture circuit

4. Legacy: longshoremen, old CEOs & athletes

It's just a provisional application so far => not so quick.

How is Father's Day any more relevant to Hackers than it is to the rest of society? If no more relevant (as I suspect), then reminders such as this seem off-topic for HN.

"sicp of networking" is a bit over the top. IMHO it gives undue emphasis to Varghese's research interest in packet classifiers, and is filled with typos.

Too amazing to be biographical; so classified as fiction http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v3=1&DB=loc...

I saw a reasonable TV documentary on this topic some time ago entitled "Survivors Guide to Plane Crashes", which is briefly summarised at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5402342.stm

One of the more interesting aspects IMHO was the reason for turning off cabin lights when approaching for night landings: to acclimatise your eyes to the ambient light in case of crash. Of course the cabin crew don't disclose that...

A simple Google search reveals more tips: http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+survive+a+plane+crash

It depends on which market you are trying to attract: Deliberate errors would only encourage readers who aren't already motivated to find errors. More advanced readers would already be on the lookout for "errors" in case the author has made them inadvertently, or in case the reader can extend the state of the art known & described by the author.

I used to sponsor 3M by keeping a pile of PostIt notes beside me when reading, but paperclips are just as good once you recognise that the smaller inner part of the clip can indicate which side of the page you are marking.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123879 from 53 days ago

Yes, yagibear at gmail dot con

The paragraph at the end of the notes is possibly the most relevant to startups:

"After a talk at Harvard, I told them to work for who they admired the most, so they all become self-employed. It’s important to go to work for someone or some organization you admire."

Thanks for the link; I've always been an Asimov fan. The short story format is fine for entertainment, but takes a while to get to the point:

Tapes are actually bad. They teach too much; they’re too painless. A man who learns that way doesn’t know how to learn any other way. He’s frozen into whatever position he’s been taped. Now if a person weren't given tapes but were forced to learn by hand, so to speak, from the start; why, then he’d get the habit of learning, and continue to learn.

I've never questioned the goal of schools to develop learning and thinking skills, rather than just convey content. However, the question is with what content should those skills be developed? It is that choice that requires a delicate balance between fundamental and practical content.

Universities seem to be struggling to cope with the depth of knowledge that has accumulated. It is empowering to "know how those things work" from first principles, but as time progresses, the volume of such knowledge grows towards and beyond the capacity of the courses that convey it. Universities must then (as they are now) make a delicate balance between covering fundamentals (which most practitioners consider too "academic") and preparing graduates with skills that they can immediately apply in practice. Many graduates seem dissatisfied with the balance that universities choose.

Link to http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc in the submit page & beside the "add comment" button, as is done with "help" on the profile page.

This is claimed in the "Formatting fixes" entry in http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html , but doesn't appear to me now.

This article focuses on the receptor side (company employing for a trial) and glosses over the donor side (organisation that loses/offers the person for trial). Universities aren't affected by students taking internships over summer breaks, and are hardly affected by students inserting internships during semesters. However candidates at later stages of life are likely to either have an employer (who is likely to incur disruption and have little incentive for allowing extended leave), or be unemployed (which makes them less attractive for receptors).

A better link is http://www.vinvesting.com/docs/munger/ which provides his full "Art of Stock Picking" speech in which he gives his opinion on mental models, as well as the UCSB speech & another.

I'm intrigued that the stated IQs seem above-average (100):

"In the study, Norwegian epidemiologists analyzed ... military records. ... the researchers found that eldest children scored an average of 103.2, about 3 percent higher than second children (100.3) and 4 percent higher than thirdborns (99.0)."

103.2 more than compensates for 99.0.

Since Norway has mandatory military service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_service#Norway , this does not refute jokes about "military intelligence".

Any tips on finding a NON-technical co-founder?

A related issue is timescales: Negotiators may sacrifice a reduced commission through reduced sale price if it means expediting the process and allowing them to get onto other deals. Founders don't have the same rate of turnover and so have more interest in spending time to raise the sale price.

And workarounds have been suggested a few times:

http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/ http://ycsearch.com/

Phil Emma of IBM has written in recent issues of IEEE Micro a useful (IMHO) series of 2 page articles about patenting. No-nonsense tips from someone with over 100 IT patents.