ArbitraryLimits

I just realized I must be too old for HN, because it reminds me of nothing so much as the writing that went into the "underground newspaper" my high school creative writing teach had us "publish" above the urinals.

From Joel's classic article:

"Microsoft almost made the same mistake, trying to rewrite Word for Windows from scratch in a doomed project called Pyramid which was shut down, thrown away, and swept under the rug. Lucky for Microsoft, they had never stopped working on the old code base, so they had something to ship, making it merely a financial disaster, not a strategic one."

I think it's excellent marketing - they're clearly targeting people who use the word "spreadsheet" to mean "lists that don't involve math" and it's always easier to keep speaking your target customer's language than to try to teach them a new one.

Dude. It's like Open Source. If you've got an itch, scratch it. Write the post and submit to HN, you'll get contributions out the wazoo.

Really? I've never in my life went to wikipedia without following a link from a Google search. I don't think I've ever seen the Wikipedia home page.

Well, I mean the rational portion of my brain realizes it and tries to compensate for it, but I don't knock myself out making sure the rational portion is fully engaged when scanning blog posts.

On the one hand, the author makes a good point.

On the other hand, he actually uses the phrase "simple folks" as if this were a Populist meeting in the 1890s.

I'm really surprised by how much that one slip has undermined his credibility with me.

Probably from Simulink.

You mean the IBM that almost disintegrated in the 90s, and that now employs an entirely different workforce than it did then because their core business has completely changed? And IMO Microsoft is being driving into the ground, it certainly won't be known as a stable employer within 20 years. We'll see what happens with Google, I guess.

Or the government is just the last place left where you can count on a stable paycheck, and lots of engineers like to optimize for that instead of for the possibility of striking it rich.

It used to be, anyway.

In my experience, emails from people like this turn into those "Are you sure you want to exit without saving?" pop-up dialogs: if I get them too often, I start ignoring all of them, including the important ones.

I wasn't complaining that Google is a nameless, faceless, soulless corporation just like the ISPs, just trying to remind people.

Let's take a poll: How many people here understand that Google is doing this because Internet connections are a complement of your personal data, which they would like to monetize, and not out of the goodness of their hearts?

He gets paid in attention. It's not as different as it seems.

Dude. Socialcam was no one's baby.

> The US of A has a greater capacity to produce grains needed to produce the noodles

And more importantly, a greater capacity to subsdize production of said grains.

Edit: Did this comment really get greyed out? The mechanism for that is still kind of mysterious to me. Let me clarify, I don't mean the US has more money, just a dumber system of farm subsidies.

> She's not going to suffer in compensation or reputation.

Are you serious? Have you seen what's happened to Yahoo's CEOs since ... ever?

To adapt the OP's original phrase, I think the US can lay legitimate claim to being the first modern republic, except maybe for the Dutch.

Yes, there were nations with a republican form of government before that, but the purpose of that form was fundamentally different.

The pre-modern republics were set up to allow all the aristocracy a turn at being king, while modern republics are set up to allow the non-aristocracy to prevent there being an aristocracy.

For example, the ancient republics of Athens, Rome, and even Carthage were noted by their neighbors as being especially warlike precisely because, to take Rome as an example, everyone only got six months as consul and so they had to make it by launching wars immediately, both because the plunder would form the basis of their personal and family fortunes and because glory from war was the only goal worthy of an aristocrat. Regular kings, by contrast, could take their time.

In the modern world, we don't respect glory in battle or plunder like we used to, and so we use the republican form of government to prevent anyone from amassing too much power on a permanent basis at all. People often think the purpose of voting today is to select the best leader, or at least a good one, but really it's simply to ensure that the current one has to leave since no one can please the majority of an electorate indefinitely.

> It has color pictures - that's all that separates it from a woodblock print encyclopedia.

Well, that and it fits on a desktop instead of in 100 monasteries connected by donkey carts.

> it's the NPR model

So for one week every six months, you'd go to your Trello projects and instead of being able to use them normally, you could use them for five minutes at a time before you had to listen to a 10 minute plea for money that wouldn't stop even if you donated right away?

Agreed. All the tech popularizers and business people focus on the non-exclusive license for DOS they gave IBM as the smartest decision Bill Gates ever made, and I guess it was, but for my money a very close second was hiring Dave Cutler and his people from DEC to build a real OS kernel. Without the NT kernel to fall back on, Windows would have collapsed under its own weight long ago.

In my experience it doesn't really become clear whether the ideas are good or bad until they've been written down. For this reason I prefer a two-stage backlog, where the first stage is for definition and the second stage is for the ideas from the first stage that you decide you're actually going to do, just not right now.

TL;DR All replacements for fopen() grow until they span multiple files.

It's a question of academic paywalls. If all journal papers were freely available it would have been done by now.

Here's a smattering of articles I've collected, YMMV:

http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-professor

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/05/secret-lives-of-profe...

http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-life.htm

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo...

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html

http://www.ams.org/notices/199701/comm-rota.pdf

http://matt.might.net/articles/books-papers-materials-for-gr...

And the classic:

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html

Good luck.

That's what CiteSeer was supposed to do, unfortunately they quit halfway there.

From "How To Do Artificial Intelligence at the MIT AI Lab" (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to/section3.4.htm...):

After the first year or two, you'll have some idea of what subfield you are going to be working in. At this point-or even earlier-it's important to get plugged into the Secret Paper Passing Network. This informal organization is where all the action in AI really is. Trend-setting work eventually turns into published papers-but not until at least a year after the cool people know all about it. Which means that the cool people have a year's head start on working with new ideas.

How do the cool people find out about a new idea? Maybe they hear about it at a conference; but much more likely, they got it through the Secret Paper Passing Network. Here's how it works. Jo Cool gets a good idea. She throws together a half-assed implementation and it sort of works, so she writes a draft paper about it. She wants to know whether the idea is any good, so she sends copies to ten friends and asks them for comments on it. They think it's cool, so as well as telling Jo what's wrong with it, they lend copies to their friends to Xerox. Their friends lend copies to their friends, and so on. Jo revises it a bunch a few months later and sends it to AAAI. Six months later, it first appears in print in a cut-down five-page version (all that the AAAI proceedings allow). Jo eventually gets around to cleaning up the program and writes a longer revised version (based on the feedback on the AAAI version) and sends it to the AI Journal. AIJ has almost two years turn-around time, what with reviews and revisions and publication delay, so Jo's idea finally appears in a journal form three years after she had it-and almost that long after the cool people first found out about it. So cool people hardly ever learn about their subfield from published journal articles; those come out too late.

You, too, can be a cool people. Here are some heuristics for getting connected: ...

TL;DR Academic papers are for presenting final results and assigning credit, not discussion.

I'm curious whether you track any metrics that try to distinguish questions and answeres posted simply for the information, vs those posted mainly to gain online reputation?

> Multi-domain genies like Goethe, Da Vinci (, Jobs, Feynman?)

I'm sorry but I just can't let this go without comment.

Steve Jobs was not a "multi-domain genius." He had a single, very specific genius, namely gathering lots and lots of ideas and picking the very best one. (IMO the fact that he was an asshole is probably related but not essential.) His entire career was applying this single ability, which he really was a genius of, to multiple domains. He wasn't a genius at anything about those domains per se, just at what he did once he was working in them. I mean, the fact that he had any technical knowledge at all about operating systems or computer graphics already put him in the top tier of "business guys" but that's not the same thing as a deep understanding.

For that matter, let's keep going on your list. Richard Feynmann was a smart guy but all his important work (except superfluidity in helium, I guess) was made exploring a single theme, namely how to put quantum mechanics in a Lagrangian formulation rather than a Hamiltonian. He told the story once of the event that sparked his first interest in physics as a career, and it was his high school physics teacher taking him aside and explaining the principle of least action (the basis of the Lagrangian formulation of classical mechanics) - he basically organized the rest of his career around understanding this principle very, very deeply. The reason he's famous in addition to being smart is that he found a new domain to apply it to, namely quantum mechanics.

My point is that while mastering a domain of application was important for these people, probably even crucial, it wasn't really the engine of their success. They first developed a single talent or interest, and then looked for a domain to apply it to.