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TheTarquinon Ask HN: How can so many people be wrong?

Your premises are flawed. Human brain power is not an additive substance. So 1000 brains are in no sense of the term 1000 times more powerful than one brain.

Crowds don't actually have wisdom. All they really have is consensus.

As such, if a problem is the kind of thing that one person usually gets wrong, then it's also the kind of thing that the majority of a million-person crowd will also get wrong.

TheTarquinon Mailgun API 2.0: forget MIME

Cool! This will be awesome for implementing feature on cross-platform devices. I can definitely see a use case for standardizing mailing across, e.g., several different mobile platforms. Just keep the POST request object across all of them and send the request however is convenient.

Great idea.

TheTarquinon So you think you know C: the Ksplice Pointer Challenge

I learned a lot from this, thanks for posting. Mostly I learned how rusty my C skills have gotten in the years since I last used them.

Maybe time to bust out my K&R again.

TheTarquinon Is this the best paper abstract ever? (on light speed neutrinos)

I wonder if there's a scientific paper equivalent to Betteridge's Law of Headlines:

If a headline ends with a question mark, then the answer is "no".

TheTarquinon Show HN: Who's Hiring? (postings mined from Twitter)

It looks like you have some room to refine your searching / filtering. I'm in the Seattle area and it's picking up some noticeable noise.

e.g.:

"Tacoma cannery property to be repositioned: Pinnacle Foods Group is looking for a real estate developer who can ... http://t.co/UobgHb39

and

"Online entrepreneur pitches for funding for app ... - TasteBand.com: An world wide web entrepreneur is looking t... http://t.co/JKAnZdBk

TheTarquinon Show HN: Who's Hiring? (postings mined from Twitter)

Awesome work!

Do you have plans to expand the data source beyond Twitter? Maybe with filters for users to select source(s)?

TheTarquinon Steve's Google Platform rant

"...a few minutes..."

You obviously read a hell of a lot faster than I do.

TheTarquinon Steve's Google Platform rant

I agree with skyo and aphexairlines. I've found Amazon a fantastic place to work and am, frankly, baffled by the flak it's taking here in the comments. My experience at Amazon has been fun and rewarding, and I'm thrilled to be a coder at such an awesome company.

I guess your mileage may vary, but I've found AMZN to be an awesome place to be a programmer.

TheTarquinon Learn to program in 21 days (comic)

Speaking as someone who has had to maintain code written by someone who "learned" from these books, I completely agree. What was there was certainly C++ in a purely linguistic sense, but as code it was complete gibberish.

TheTarquinon A Libertarian Convert to Socialized Medicine

You attack Libertarianism on the grounds that it has adherents that disagree widely on several topics. So does that mean that if I found some Objectivists that disagreed on points of policy, that Objectivism would "mean so many things that it means nothing?" Your argument certainly seems to imply as much.

TheTarquinon Just Ask HN (or more precisely, url-less) posts

Awesome feature. Just in checking it out, I found several excellent questions that it would never have occurred to me to ask.

Thanks for implementing this!

TheTarquinon How Software Engineers and Designers Can Increase Their Focus

I'm not sure there's anything one could say about focus/productivity that's particular to software engineers. When it comes right down to it, the sort of work we do is susceptible to the same procrastination pitfalls as any other knowledge worker, and so it can be avoided in the same ways.

The most helpful advice I've gotten on productivity has come from Merlin Mann of 43Folders (and other projects), and he mostly writes about writing.

TheTarquinon How Do You Solve a Problem Like Patzer? A VC Perspective

This is an awesome take on the VC game. I imagine it's not the only opinion, however. The metaphor he sets up with regards to customers and shareholders could also be twisted (and I'm sure is, by some VCs) to a more hierarchical idea in which the VC needs to answer to the shareholders. Some VCs may even want to stretch that notion further and say that the startup is answerable to the VC.

I think this is a less accurate analogy, but I could certainly see it giving rise to the idea of "the Patzer" as something less like a business decision and something more like a sin against the VC.

TheTarquinon Achievement Porn

Consider how much real achievement we would see if all the motivated hackers put down WoW and started up their development environment of choice.

But there's a lot of truth to the fact that human beings need recreation. We need down-time when we're not building, making, doing, etc. There's a lot of engineers who, if they put down WoW and fired up Eclipse would just stare at the screen for hours wondering what to build next. Or they'd disappear into an equally "unproductive" passed time like email, solitaire, or social news forums like this one.

TheTarquinon Achievement Porn

It seems to me that this essay is based on a strained analogy and a whole bunch of convenient equivocation. His whole "achievement" link to video games seems to be a largely rhetorical one. What if those were called (as they are on some systems) trophies? Starts to make the rest of his essay sound a bit strange.

Furthermore, to compare arbitrary accomplishments in games and saying that the only thing which distinguishes them from achievements in life is that the video game ones are too easy or in some way "false" is to ignore that they're fundamentally different kinds of undertakings.

To play a video game is to, as Merlin Mann says, "move your hands a little and make small decisions". The activity is essentially medatative or recreational in nature and the results further that goal. The point of these "achievements" is to relax and have fun. The point of the "achievements" in real life is to better ourselves or our circumstances.

Furthermore, the in-game "achievements" are rigorously structured, those out-of-game are radically open-ended.

Both the structure and purpose of the two kinds of achievements are completely different. To conflate them and then deride video-game achievements for being inferior misses the point. It's like people who say that Guitar Hero doesn't make you a good guitarist.

Well, duh. But no one's making the argument that it will. We don't play Guitar Hero to get good at guitar. We don't play video games to accomplish anything.

TheTarquinon Why passion is not what you need in a programmer

Interesting! I did not know that. Thanks for the explanation and link.

TheTarquinon Why passion is not what you need in a programmer

What was the distinction there? As far as I understand things, "cabinet maker" would be a proper subset of "carpenter".

TheTarquinon Perception trumps knowledge: optical illusion

An interesting idea. This would put it in the same class as a remarkably large number of emergent "senses" like our sense of distance or of weight, which are both effected by ancillary information.

TheTarquinon Perception trumps knowledge: optical illusion

Which isn't too surprising since perception constructed by the brain. :)

Touché. I really should have said something like "the subconscious can mess..." or "the lizard brain can mess...".

TheTarquinon The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

So, out of curiosity, down-voted because it wasn't funny, or because jokes aren't encouraged?

TheTarquinon Why passion is not what you need in a programmer

Interesting. So, out of curiosity, are you just not particular about projects? If you had to choose between two arbitrary projects to work on, on what criteria would you base your choice?

TheTarquinon Why passion is not what you need in a programmer

It's largely been my experience. The best programmers and the best hackers I know are all more passionate about what they're DOING with code rather than the minutiae of code itself.

Which isn't to say they aren't interested in technique. After all, carpenters still like to geek out over tools once in awhile . . .

TheTarquinon Perception trumps knowledge: optical illusion

What's even more interesting is how much of the image you can remove while still maintaining the illusion. Block out almost all the image except for squares A and B and just a VERY little bit of space around them. The two squares still look different colors.

The brain can mess with perception in pretty significant ways based on very little information.

TheTarquinon Why passion is not what you need in a programmer

Agreed. Also, none of the coders I know are passionate about programming. Rather, they're passionate about making cool stuff.

As the saying goes, programming is not a what, but a how. Hackers don't get passionate about the act of coding any more than carpenters get passionate about driving nails.

TheTarquinon Phrases that should set off an alarm in every software developers brain

"This data contract won't ever change..."

TheTarquinon The Principles of Great Design

I went to Gonzaga University. In fairness, their program was awesome at teaching the fundamentals, and I did leave with an excellent grounding in both the theory and practice of programming.

But only when it came to the actual code. Nothing about UI, design, business, etc. And only as much architecture as they really HAD to teach to make the students strong programmers.

TheTarquinon The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

You want an anti-pirate system that will work? That's easy, we've had a working system for centuries!

You hang 'em from the yardarm as a warning to others, and then you burn their ships to the water line.

Pardon? Oh, you mean the OTHER kind of piracy.

TheTarquinon Piano music visualized on a logarithmic spiral

Very cool links! Thanks for sharing. These bar-graph visualizations remind me of Gregorian notation for some reason.

TheTarquinon Piano music visualized on a logarithmic spiral

Cool! This is a great way to visualize the relationship of notes in a chord. One of the harder things to teach in beginning music theory are chord forms, since it requires thinking relatively, rather than absolutely. Major and minor chords are related together not because of the notes themselves, but because of the intervals between them.

In this visualization, though, all the related chords are roughly the same shape. Seems like it'd be a great way to harness visual thinking to teach a more abstract concept.

Very cool!

TheTarquinon Springing To Mexico, Ahlstrom Aims To ‘Create [the VC] Industry’

Interesting. I wonder how how cultural differences will effect how the VC market develops south of the border? I imagine part of the reason why American-style VC isn't as widespread down there is due to political and social differences, rather than simply economic ones.