Hacker News Reader

aaronswon Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

Yeah, I'm exaggerating. I think that the term happiness really refers to two different things. The first (call it happiness0) is how good you feel on a moment-to-moment basis. This is what I was referring to above (pg is always grinning and bouncing; I'm huddled in the corner furiously typing--again, I'm exaggerating). But happiness1 is how you feel looking back on what you've done. And when it comes to that, I feel like the happiest1 person alive. I certainly wouldn't give that up to get more happiness0.

I thought that money would allow me to increase my happiness1 by letting me choose what to work on. But it turns out all the things I've chosen to work on pay just fine, so in practice it hasn't really been a big deal. I think this ties in with something pg says above. Basically: if there's something you really want to do, just go do it -- don't wait for the money to roll in first.

aaronswon Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

In the short-term, my life was much worse. I spent a lot of really painful time struggling to come to grips with my situation.

After that was over, things went pretty much back to normal. There's now a low-level fear all the time of losing all the money (something PG's written about recently) and I'm constantly worried I've invested it badly. I didn't make any dramatic life changes so people don't really treat me differently.

The biggest thing is that it provides a sort of mental backup -- when I'm feeling bad about myself or about to do something risky, I can tell myself not to worry.

My sense is that it bears out what the happiness research says: dispositional factors are much more important than situational ones. PG was an abnormally happy person before he got rich and he's still abnormally happy. I was pretty miserable before and I'm still miserable. (The reasons are more complicated but the result is I prefer my misery.)

aaronswon Higher-Order Perl is available for free as a PDF

Has anyone seen mjd lately? I haven't heard from him and he hasn't updated his blog since January. I'm starting to get worried. (This PDF was put up long before that.)

aaronswon Stealing Millions 25 Cents At A Time

Site is down, anyone have a copy? It seems to refer to this article, though:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178560/FTC_says_scam...

aaronswon The HN tax? FTC mulls taxing online news aggregators

If you read the actual report they're quoting (http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/jun15/docs/new-staff-d...) you'll see, as usual, that the _Washington Times_ is being totally dishonest.

First, the report is simply a list of proposals news industry people have made about how to save their businesses, not new FTC proposals.

Second, it isn't a tax -- it's simply talking about news providers providing licenses for their content to news aggregators.

Third, the FTC isn't even talking about changing the law to create new legal rights against news aggregators. What they're actually talking about is removing antitrust barriers to news providers getting together and starting a joint licensing scheme.

In short, this is less than nothing.

aaronswon Starting To Be Wrong

What Tim doesn't note is that WIRED was one of the leaders of this pixel-for-pixel web design.

aaronswon Easiest path to $2000 a month?

$2000 a month? Find a large quantity of text that isn't on the Web that people might search for, put it online, and put AdSense ads on it.

aaronswon Allan Odgaard's Latest Comments on TextMate 2

I posted it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1034958

aaronswon Ask HN: What happened to the financial reform bill?

Currently the bill requires that the GAO do a study of whether it would be a good idea and report to Congress about it. (That would be the watered down to meaninglessness bit.)

Sens. Merkley and Levin proposed an amendment to make it a hard rule. The Republicans repeatedly blocked a vote on it. To get around this, they added it as an amendment to a Republican amendment. The Republicans withdrew their amendment to prevent this vote. Now there's word that they'll try to pass instructions to the committee in charge of combining the House and Senate bills to try to add the amendment there. If you want to support something like that, please sign our petition:

http://act.boldprogressives.org/act/petition_gambling/?sourc...

aaronswon Adobe's ad : We Love Apple

Currently exists. Has for quite a while now.

aaronswon Senate Votes for Audit of Fed (96-0)

Surprised to see this on HN since I've actually been working on it. Basically, the original gave full, permanent audit authority to the Government Accountability Office. This one requires a one-time thorough audit of the bailout-type expenditures and not much else.

aaronswon IETF dress code

For those wondering, "There are those in the IETF who refuse to wear anything other than suits. Fortunately, they are well known (for other reasons) so they are forgiven this particular idiosyncrasy." is a reference to Vint Cerf. Though I did see Vint in a tracksuit once...

aaronswon All? of YC investments--left sidebar

I sent him the missing Y Combinator startups from my round (Firecrawl, Memamp, and Simmery) -- anyone else have the others?

aaronswon Upload and store your files in the cloud with Google Docs

I think you can just use:

http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_gu...

aaronswon Upload and store your files in the cloud with Google Docs

$0.02 per GB-month is a lot better than S3 or Cloud Storage, which is $0.15. It looks like you can only purchase 14TB per account[1], but the cost savings are such that I wonder if we'll see people switching.

[1]: https://www.google.com/accounts/purchasestorage

But, interestingly, for business customers it's $0.20:

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/store-and-share...

aaronswon Why Textmate 2.0 is not Developed in the Open

For the record, here's the letter I wrote to Allan that this post is responding to:

Subject: what happened to TextMate?

When TextMate came out, it was the most fun application I had ever used -- to this day, have ever used, in fact. I subscribed to the cutting edge updates and it seemed like every day I'd sit down to my computer to work and my editor would be filled with brilliant new features that I hadn't even considered were possible from a text editor. Indeed, who would have ever thought that one's text editor could be a source of joy or entertainment?

But since TextMate 2 started, there hasn't been a single change. Why not let people use TextMate 2 the same way? Why not let them experience the joy of watching the day-to-day morphs of new features and changes and rethinking. You could declare it was only for those who wanted to live on the edge with breakage and the rest, that TextMate 1 was always available for those who just wanted to work. But don't we deserve the option?

aaronswon Tell HN: List of HN Subdivisions

    /saved

Documentation on what they all mean would be helpful.

aaronswon Students Ace Textbook Physics While Struggling With Basic Understanding (video)

For people interested in this stuff, Howard Gardner's book _The Unschooled Mind_ collects similar results from every discipline, from computer science to history.

http://books.google.com/books?id=DVB1n_KkYEQC

For more on CS, of course, you'll want to read http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf

aaronswon Fraud U: Toppling a Bogus-Diploma Empire

And apparently neither do the universities -- if so many people can do so many important jobs with nobody noticing they never went to a university, what's their "education" good for?

I went to Stanford and while it's true, the students did take classes where they heard facts, I didn't see anyone coming away from them having learned much. Instead, it just seemed like a test of whether you could stand it long enough / pay enough money before getting a piece of paper.

aaronswon Has Hackers News Become Less About Hacking?

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

"Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.

"What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be."

aaronswon Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety

I'm friends with Philip and I doubt he'd consider himself a libertarian. He's more of a _Slate_-style counterintuitivist, although he'd probably object to any kind of political label.

aaronswon CoffeeScript, a little language that compiles to JavaScript. Happy Holidays, HN

No.

aaronswon [dead]

I trust Wikipedia more than the National Post. The author's thesis is that William Connolley "erase[d] the Little Ice Age [and] the Medieval Warm Period" from Wikipedia. Well, all you have to do is go to the "Medieval Warming Period" article click "view history" and you can see the last version William Connolley submitted to the site, which begins:

"The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region, lasting from about AD 800–1300. It was followed by a cooler period in the North Atlantic termed the Little Ice Age. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medieval_Warm_Peri...

So these claims seem pretty ridiculous.

aaronswon Googling for Sociopaths

> Microsoft didn't ban other office suite products from working on Windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

aaronswon The Truth About Tamiflu: Has the US wasted $1.5 billion on an ineffective drug?

This is pretty much par for the course for new drugs and goes a long way toward explaining why we're such an overmedicalized society:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244

aaronswon Increase Signups by Adding Video to Your Page

The Obama people, in a much, much bigger test, found that having a video on their splash page decreased signups.

aaronswon 4.3.2.1 -- Another google DNS ip

They totally beat 4.2.2.2, which was my previous go-to server.

aaronswon [dead]

Can someone fix this link to point to the actual page:

http://www.studiobriefing.net/studiobriefing.net/FILM_NEWS/E...

If it's so annoying that Hacker News won't link to it, why should we be surprised that Google won't?

aaronswon [dead]

It might be worth noting that Krugman won his prize "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity" while Becker got it for studying "a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour".

In other words, Krugman is the one who actually studies the economy.