ecuzzillo

Relatedly, Myhrvold did actually make a really genuinely huge contribution to cuisine with his gigantic ubercookbook Modernist Cuisine, and so it makes me sad that he turns out to be a bloodsucking asshole by trade.

It's not a student's fault if their high school is arbitrarily bad. You can sometimes tell that a student is smart and their high school sucked. Such students tend to get even smarter than you thought they were once they get to college.

High schools can be arbitrarily bad, and so it's customary for most colleges to have remedial courses, like Physics for Poets, for those students coming from high schools that didn't provide that.

Having the words you write be dispassionate and objective doesn't mean you lack an agenda. Everything written ever picks a small set of facts to consider from an effectively infinite set of facts.

The choice of which facts to include, moreover, represents a fairly strong bias; it says that this set of facts is more interesting or important or whatever than most other sets, and enough so that you should ignore all the other sets for the moment and just look at this set.

Which, in the case of this particular book, presumably, along with the countless choices about which facts to include about each battle, also includes at least a) the choice of which 100 battles, and b) the choice that battles of any kind are important enough to talk about for a whole book.

So even if the author tries to stay away from expressing an agenda on the usual axes, I doubt he successfully avoids having one altogether.

10.6 is fairly easily piratable, though.

To do that, wouldn't they have to admit that they aren't growing like nuts anymore, and wouldn't that kill their valuation? (Even established companies like Apple and Google base most of their valuations on the premise of future growth. When the premise of future growth goes away, you have Microsoft.)

I believe he was saying that in lieu of the bot.

There are still many stupid comments, but I think at least one flavor of stupid that was there before is now gone. Also, I find fewer stupid comments at the top of each page.

This was enacted during what felt like an apocalypse of comment stupidity, and it's down from then, but still subjectively up from a year or two ago.

The whole point is that you can't compare a town with 300k people with a blue-collar culture to the Bay Area. It's not even close to as good for startups. Why is this controversial?

Yes, it has people with degrees, but no, it does not have many rich people. It has a few, and if they buy not-too-expensive houses and seem Pittsburghite-friendly, they are venerated. It did well in the recession because its economy is based on education and healthcare; this does not make it particularly good for startups.

Yes, it compares well to other cities of its size startup-wise, but we're comparing it to SV, which is not of its size, so nevermind.

Yes, there do exist nice restaurants, but we're comparing it to the Bay Area, and the mean, median, and top 10% quality of Bay Area restaurants is ridiculously high, so nevermind.

Pittsburgh's weather is worse than Seattle's. Yes, it is #2 to Seattle's #1 on the country's least-sunny list, but in Seattle, it just rains a lot, and whether or not it's raining, the air is palatable. In Pittsburgh, it's either freezing your nose off or making your eyes water with humidity.

The thing about being morally opposed to rich people is an instance of an observation I've heard from multiple people other than myself: Pittsburgh's message seems to be, stay here and be one of us, and don't think you can be any better than us, because we don't think that's possible, and in fact find the idea offensive.

Which is not exactly a startup-ish sentiment.

Rich people would never want to live in Pittsburgh for many reasons, including that the culture of the place is in some ways morally opposed to the concept of rich people, the infrastructure is poor, the weather is always terrible, there is never any sun, and the food is terrible (often self-righteously so).

In other words, the cost of living is low because rent is low because there's no demand because no one wants to live here.

On top of all that, SV already exists, so if you were going to start a startup, there would be no reason not to start it there. And, once you exited there, you would have no reason to leave, and especially not in favor of Pittsburgh, of all places.

Thus, good investors, also known as angels, will never cluster here.

More on-topic, it seems like the CMU fund is going to have a committee of bureaucrats decide who to fund. Why would that ever be a good idea? I graduated from CMU and work there now, and if I started a startup and were offered money by said fund, I would reject it. They'd want me to go to an 'OFEF business workshop.'

I don't know if this data is available, but I'd be interested to see what percentage of this class was incorporated before applying, and what percentage got incorporated as part of the process.

Also interesting would be what percentage of this class include repeat YC founders.

A key selling point of the Air is that it is a full-fledged Mac computer. If it has to run normal Mac applications in an emulation layer, which will undoubtedly be slow because the Air's processor is not powerful, this will not be true.

I don't disagree, but to be fair about the time, there's at least an hour in the DC airport and at least half an hour in the Boston airport, and that's assuming there are no delays on either tarmac due to planes being in the way of your gate or your plane needing something inspected or replaced. So it's more like 2.5-3 hours vs. 7 hours. Still probably worth the flight, depending on how much you like driving, but I think most people think only about the actual flying time, rather than the total time spent dealing with the airport process.

HN feature request: Make the color of links I've already read something other than semi-invisible grey. Currently when I'm looking for a link I just clicked on, it takes me a very long time because it's so anti-eye-catching.

So, in particular, when I click on a link to read it, then hit back to upvote it and/or comment on it, it takes a long time to re-find it.

(Yes, I could open it in a new tab, blah blah.)

I flagged it because every comment I read on it was stupid. There was nothing intellectually curious about the topic-- just poking people's political identities.

Here, someone in close proximity to a reasonably significant historical event used social networks to broadcast his observation of said event. If this has happened before, it hasn't been very many times, and it's undoubtedly been only quite recently. We are witnessing a new historical phenomenon that will undoubtedly be worth a line in a history textbook.

Moreover, importantly, the comments on this article don't completely suck. There's some meta-noise like this, but much less complete political stupidity.

Given that the reddits initially had a bad idea, wouldn't this mean that if they applied today with a similarly bad idea, you'd have rejected them and not called them back?

It seems like companies that apply with no idea, then, would be at a noticeable disadvantage during interviews. Is this true?

He isn't just sticking you in a bucket randomly. Your language on the subject has an emotional edge that goes beyond dispassionate observation that college education may be overvalued. It actively pushes the reader toward the conclusion that you actually do have a dog in the fight, and the college system has somehow wronged you.

I don't know if it has, but based on said language, I'd be surprised if it hadn't.

My perspective: Having gone to CMU CS, which on the one hand doesn't have particular brand recognition outside CS, but on the other hand is fairly good at CS as undergrad programs go, I believe I can say that I probably did get 100k and possibly even 200k of value out of the education, quite aside from the piece of paper. A lot of the teachers I had were really seriously excellent (and I don't say that lightly), and I wouldn't have been able to learn from teachers that good in that array of subjects (field theory, abstract algebra, robotics, cryptography, etc) as well in any other situation. Yes, I could have read wikipedia and the lkml and so on, but, having done both, classes from really really good teachers work better.

On the other hand, I think I got lucky not only in terms of the ratio of program strength to brand recognition, but also in which teachers I got within the university; if I had taken different classes in different semesters, I believe I could have done a lot worse. Not remotely all the teachers were good or even passable. And, I could easily imagine getting very little value out of the experience, and I bet a lot of people, particularly ones at big-brand institutions, do overpay for the education they get.

The point is, it's a complicated question. There clearly is some value in some undergrad programs, and there also clearly is a problem with rising prices. Comparing it to a con scheme is not really doing it justice.

Why don't you?

They don't consistently fix it if it's slow, though. It takes about four seconds to search for a term you haven't previously searched for in Gmail (which I think requires having 10k+ emails, but I'm not sure), and it has for a long time.

I'd be most interested to see whether hiding the scores changed voting behavior appreciably. Do stupid comments get upvoted more or less? It seems like that's the ultimate test, much more than whether people prefer it after trying it for a few days.

I mostly agree. It reminds me of stop-and-copy GC: you have a root set (very old accounts, or maybe current moderators) and you see what you can reach from it (the accounts the root set consistently upvotes), and you chuck everything else periodically.

What it means for an account to be GC'ed is up for experimentation, but a reasonable default might be that it doesn't get any voting or submission rights. Arguably it's a bigger problem that stupid comments get upvoted than that stupid comments exist at all.

It's very rare that there is a huge volume (>100 comments) of insight provoked by a single article, just because there's not usually that much insight to be had in the first place on that topic, and you can be sure that 100 separate comments didn't have it all on the same thread.

You usually can only get that much noise on a topic by poking people such that they NEED to correct some injustice done by the article. Sometimes good articles poke people like this, but in either case the comment thread ends up sucking.

Or you could just talk to them.

Nobody ever acts like the next revolution is the next revolution. If they did, it would be the current revolution, or at least the current fad.

It seems to me that most of the innovation doesn't come from big companies anyway, so why should Apple give them precedence for any seats?

The second complaint seems to be complaining about Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap); historically, Sturgeon's law has been nearly as inviolable as conservation of angular momentum.

If anything, I suspect that mainstream journalism has never been orders of magnitude better than it is now. It's just that back in the day, we didn't have bloggers with photo essays showing us what we could be reading instead, so our standards were different.

The content owners (not content makers, note) are liable to just refuse to use such a new medium, relegating it to a mostly irrelevant piracy channel.

I don't know about physics, but in robotics and computer vision and CS, there is no correlation between credible research and journal publication. I suppose physics attracts more quacks, though, and it's not quite as easy to verify because you need expensive equipment generally owned only by people who publish in journals all the time anyway.