jonathanberger

It's common in San Francisco. Chubby Noodle is an example I booked today for a party of 8.

If you like this article, I recommend finding his other pieces particularly about airplane crashes.

He writes in a gripping manner and normally seems to have done pretty thorough background research, as well as personal experience.

If Sam believes the merge has already begun, then his, Musk’s, and other’s predictions about superhuman AI are really just describing a rather boring fact about the world.

His examples of the merge in progress are social media determining how we feel and search engines deciding what we think. The problem here is the anthropomorphizing that humans have done throughout history to understand things they can’t fully explain. Gods don’t get angry and cause rain and search engines don’t make decisions about what we think. A search engine is just a complex math formula that can’t make a decision anymore than a calculator “decides” to output 4 when someone types 2 + 2.

Bostrom and others in this camp always have a hard time describing what “superhuman” will look like or mean. But I will guess in 2075 that the goal posts will be moved and it will be said that in 2017 we hadn’t realized that there was already superhuman AI, as evidenced by calculators that could already do math faster than a human.

The mistake this article makes is thinking that the typical person will interact with many different USB-C ports and cables than his or her own. The reality, is that people will get to know their own ports, buy their own cables and devices, and things will work 99% of the time.

Only occasionally they'll need to use a friend or coworker's device or cable and then there could be confusion. Although, even then, assuming the friend also has one of the most popular computers/phones/cables, it'll probably still work.

Yes. We all know (and the article starts out saying) most adults need 2000 calories a day.

But then we see pictures of what most would consider one meal, and since we have 2 - 3 meals a day, eating any of these actually leaves you with 4000 - 6000 calories a day.

Wouldn't it have been more instructive if this article showed pictures of meals that were 700 - 1000 calories?

The fact he's investing his time in building tools for others rather than putting all his time into winning on his own, raises doubts about his actual winnings.

One explanation might be that he's maxed out how much he can win.

> A basic method for thwarting some email trackers involves disabling emails from automatically loading images, including invisible tracking pixels. But that doesn’t defeat all trackers, which are also hiding in other places like fonts and web links.

Anyone know what the author was referring to here when saying "fonts"? My impression was disabling images and not clicking links made it impossible to track the opening of an email.

Does anyone know who or what organization is behind A9T9? It seems the author/source is somewhat obscured. It would be important to know before using for more than a hobby project.

Not that I'm aware of. I'm guessing it's for fraud reasons. But I'm pretty frustrated by the lack of messaging/explanation around this change.

If you're going to change this for the worse, at least communicate to us about why the change was needed.

I believe he's referring to App.net

One key component would be SEO juice. The knowledge should be easily findable by others, even if people use different words to describe what they're looking for.

An open question would be how to make the site sustainable monetarily. About.com is this idea (but non-wiki editable) and they've plastered so many ads on the pages that it's become nearly unusable.

I like the idea a lot, and have started the most barebones version of this at http://aboutfact.com . If anyone else is interested in chatting more about this, let me know.

I just tried to visit but got a "can't find the server" error.

Ah thanks, whoops. Should have finished the whole thing. :)

Did anyone else try to find the citations made in the blog post back in the original NYT article? I did and couldn't trace some of them down.

The third bullet point in the blog says "In his article, Broder claims that 'the car fell short of its projected range on the final leg.' Then he bizarrely states that the screen showed 'Est. remaining range: 32 miles' and the car traveled '51 miles,'"

When I do a Command-F on the article, I can't find "32", "51", "final leg", or "fell short". Where is Tesla getting these quotes from?

What's the "unlock code"? I search for home help text or some explanation for about 30 seconds but have been left puzzled.

Yes, it's cataloged in Martin Fowler's excellent book Refactoring, Improving the Design of Existing Code in Chapter 9.

I'd recommend the book strongly.

It just doesn't matter how many stats they release. The stat just doesn't "feel" true. I have never read a report from anyone who has signed into Google Plus, who has reported anyone but Google employees or their friends using the service.

The only thing bragging about statistics from the service does is make people trust Google less. It does not further engender confidence in Google Plus.

I agree with those that point out that Google Plus is counting "active" users in fallacious method. Common sense of millions of users has to square with the stats companies are releasing. Facebook's? They make sense. Google's? They just don't.

I'd love to read a post about both the inspiration and making of this project.

> "Not surprisingly, every answer he’s offered up so far has been studiously on-message."

This part was a bit disappointing. Part of the fun of an AMA is finding out the unexpected.

His one-liners about the Bulls or "NOT BAD" were my favorite parts.

Thanks for pointing this out Dan, I updated the post to include snippets of other popular terms. You're absolutely right.

For yet another timezone tool, here's the time at 10pm UTC-6 in your local time: http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/?t=10pm&tz=GMT-6

See also http://www.ididwork.com that was a YC company in 2008 I believe.

This was my guess exactly, actually.

I think pg in his essays is saying something stronger, which is that determination is actually more important than intelligence.

And although I tend to agree, let me play devil's advocoate for a moment. "We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is determination."

A more important predictor of success could be, ambition. It's different from determination because with ambition you need to make it big, but with determination you just have to have it.

Determination is the wrong thing because to make a startup succeed you have to want it, but you also have to want to make it big.

In fairness, pg touches on this when he says, "I don't know if it's exactly right to say that ambition is a component of determination, but they're not entirely orthogonal. "

Apologies for the link bait like title, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

It's interesting to see pg's opinion about what is important in founders evolve over the years. When I applied to YC in late 2008, I was told by alumni that YC was "looking for smart people." Although he's talked about discipline and determination as early as May 2004 in his essays those words were most commonly found next to the words "talent," "skill," or "smart," as if the two qualities were equally important.

Now it seems that YC has learned empirically that determination is the more important predictor of success (see intro to The Anatomy of Determination).

A concern for YC might be: with this new emphasis on determination, it might become the next thing applicants try to "fake" to get accepted?

In your local timezone: http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/?t=7:00pm&tz=PST%20(...

On the fastest hardware, you could keep Default.png displayed just a split second longer to avoid the "blink too quickly" problem.

Yes, it's bad because it further delays the launch of the app but if the hardware is so fast that the short blink is a concern the slight added delay probably isn't a big deal.

Has anyone come across any opensource/community attempts to build a set of financial site scrapers? It seems like an area where such an approach might flourish.

Time in your local timezone: http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/?t=8:30pm&tz=Pacific...