Hacker News Reader

applecoreon Ask HN: PG has many essays. What's your favorite one?

Stuff is probably among the most impactful and it's especially relevant around the holidays.

http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

If you want your RSS reader to work for you, restrict yourself to adding only the feeds of individual people and not those of major news sites or aggregators.

An individual person is naturally limited in the quantity (and quality) of their output, so the end result is a daily shortlist of original insights, essays, and articles that are manageable and worth reading. As a bonus, you no longer have to check up on individual sites, since everything will show up prominently in your feed.

applecoreon Mind-wandering: the rise of a new anti-mindfulness movement

Mindfulness is backed by thousands of years of evidence-based practice and millions of deliberate practitioners; this mind-wandering "movement" has, as far I can tell, a couple of web articles written about it and very few people intentionally practicing it.

applecoreon Zero to 140 Paying Customers in 10 Months (pivot story)

It's affirming to see (again and again) the incredible compounding effect of blogging and writing engaging content on user growth. It's surprising that more startups don't focus on it; it seems they're hesitant to try for one reason or another.

applecoreon The History of the Black-Scholes Formula

This is more accurately the history of Long-Term Capital Management, not the BSM formula (which really began in 1900 with Bachelier's Theory of Speculation).

applecoreon The Content Marketing Handbook

How do you market your online tool: if you build it, will they come?

applecoreon Why a German billionaire says that pledges like Mark Zuckerberg’s are really bad

Your argument makes no sense: the people control everything in a democracy, literally, by voting for their representation in government.

applecoreon The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

Joe K's BorN is a great read. Love Hofstadter's quote on the matter:

“People who are normal, i.e., sane, sensible, don’t try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weird, cryptic messages.”

applecoreon The day I did something

A similar situation is discussed in Godin's Linchpin: you could do most of that attorney's job, perhaps even better than he does, except for what he does for five minutes a day. Of course, all the value is created in those five minutes.

applecoreon Open Season Is Seen in Gene Editing of Animals

The problem isn't with genetically modified organisms; it's with human nature. The promotion of GMOs by certain parties as an unequivocal good, and the tendency to label anyone as anti-science who questions the laissez-faire regulation of their widespread commercial use, sets off a skeptic's sense of human greed and hubris at work.

applecoreon The Triumph of Stupidity (1933)

Yeats's The Second Coming, written in 1919 and following the cataclysm of the First World War, conveyed the same horrific and accurate vision of the future:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

applecoreon The Cult of the Toto Toilet

> The feeling of having a genuinely clean butt gives you the confidence you need to go crush it in the boardroom.

Memorable indeed.

applecoreon The Macro

Historically, the term colophon was also used to indicate the brief statement at the end of a book with details about how it was printed.

applecoreon How Early Exit Disease Stunts the Growth of Midwest Startup Communities

The simple explanation for this phenomenon: bad founders tend to sell early (if they succeed at all).

applecoreon Bitcoin Is Back, But It Never Really Left

That "uncanny" ability is mostly a result of markets being much more sophisticated (in terms of price determination) than you think. It has nothing to do with bitcoins; it's just as true for stocks, bonds, or any other traded commodity. If you're a long-term investor and not a short-term, price-sensitive trader, you shouldn't worry too much about it.

applecoreon Bitcoin Is Back, But It Never Really Left

We're somewhere between the Trough of Disillusionment and the Slope of Enlightenment within the industry-standard hype cycle, which is just fine.

applecoreon Fidelity Devalues Stake in Blue Bottle, Dataminr, Zenefits Following Snapchat

What methodology does Fidelity Investments use to determine the valuation of their stake in these privately-held companies?

applecoreon The Making of a $500M Mansion in L.A.

> The main thing to understand about L.A.'s growing crop of no-expense-spared spec homes is that they are not actually homes, in the usual sense of the word. Most buyers live on other continents and visit these properties for only a week or two each year, using them mainly as places to park their wealth.

No one is going to live in it. Like the most expensive art, the one-of-a-kind nature of this property is what makes it attractive (for investment purposes).

applecoreon Chamath Palihapitya Launches Rama Corp to compete with AT&T and Verizon

“Fuck it! Let’s come back to the US and try to fuck this country up.”

What a time to be alive.

applecoreon Ask HN: How do I evaluate my equity offer?

First, divide the total number of shares outstanding by the small number of shares you expect to receive through restricted stock and options over the next couple of years. Then, multiply this number by zero to calculate the value of your stake in the company. Finally, figure out the total amount of salary you're giving up for this equity stake over the same time period.

applecoreon I apparently got 50% better at my job last month

Serious question: what's so crazy about having worked 268 hours in a month? That's only about 50% more time spent working than a standard 40-hour workweek, i.e., about 10 hours per day during the week (220 hours worked over 22 days, Mon–Fri) plus another 6 hours per day over the weekend (48 hours over 8 days, Sat/Sun).

applecoreon Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?

The future is owning a state-of-the-art 3D printer to produce the small plastic part for your sixty-year-old washing machine.

applecoreon The Case Against the Universal Basic Income

It's even more ironic when you consider that a small group of political philosophers riffing off the musings of some early Enlightenment thinkers are essentially responsible for Western civilization as we know it.

applecoreon The Apple iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus Review

It's a near-universal practice for several versions of important system software (like operating systems and databases) to be maintained and supported simultaneously. It's unusual for updates to stop entirely as soon as the next major version is released.

applecoreon Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

This sounds crazy enough to work.

applecoreon Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS

Except a tree structure is the only conceptual model that works for composing a user interface (out of simple, largely stateless components). See, for example, React and JSX.

applecoreon People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality

History rhymes. Read Thomas Piketty's Capital and Will Durant's Story of Civilization to understand the cause and recurring nature of economic inequality.

applecoreon Rich versus King: The Entrepreneur's Dilemma (2006) [pdf]

Of course, the most common outcome is Neither Rich Nor King.

applecoreon Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

Twitter's third-quarter revenue is expected to be around $560 million USD. WhatsApp is certain to be a major source of revenue for Facebook, but right now it's de minimis.