laxatives

Even if you aren't able to recall useless events in your life, you still have memories of most of them with the appropriate cues. Tgat doesn't hold for early childhood.

That website was amazing, but it actually surprisingly difficult to maintain a positive ratio without making a decent effort. For every album I wanted to download, I had to download 1-3 others I had no interest in for the sake of seeding.

Their contests evaluate your algo on a number of heuristics, namely high alpha and zero beta. They are agnostic to you or your background.

Is there a reason you linked the 12e of the book? Is the 16e not the latest and greatest? It does seem like they just reprint every 2 years and increase the cost $30....

Honestly, this is a great pitch for your line of work. It sounds like you really enjoy it.

Just curious, can you share your role/organization and the people you typically pass and the people you typically fail in your interviews?

I think the point is that your strategy isn't independent of your opponent. Maybe a similar example is nontransitive dice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontransitive_dice

In other words, it isn't sufficient to shoot for the highest score possible.

Care to elaborate?

I guess those Ramanujan-like infinite series are a bit like trivia questions, right? Does anyone really have an intuition to solve something like that?

Its an opportunity to take something like an intro level college course over the summer while in middle school with gifted kids your own age. You need to qualify by taking the SAT and scoring above some threshold and you can only take courses for subjects you scored well in (a high math score doens't qualify you for the language arts courses). A huge number of prominent people in all fields went to CTY.

I went in 7th grade to take Algebra over 3 weeks. It was pretty fun and remember being sort of blown away at the final presentations by what other groups had accomplished in their time. My group was pretty boring and just did did problems out of a textbook...

Honestly, my biggest memories from that were spending time with other kids (namely girls), especially since this is like peak puberty age. Its also at an age where its easy to make friends living in a dorm for a month.

I went to a similar course studying abroad, and it wasn't nearly as good. I took an overview course on physics in high school. It wasn't a math based course, so it just devolved in to pop science. And it was at an older age where people are much more judgemental and I remember thinking I'd prefer avoiding a good number of people for various reasons. I never had that while at CTY.

Apple's add was rebellious in the sense that they weren't trying to intimidate or smear a competitor, they wrote a genuine welcome. Slack's ad, by comparison, is a passive aggressive roommate leaving weird, indecipherable post it notes on the fridge.

This doesn't seem so crazy. Google deletes emails after a few months for rank/file and 6 months for executives for the sake of avoiding lawsuits as well.

I think one of the best features of sharelatex is that you skip the insanely bloated installation/package maintenance process. Some of those packages use GB of fonts and I remember having a complete installation with over 30GB of fonts. Not really an issue anymore, but 5-10 years ago, that was pretty excessive.

Honestly, this guy is a genius. And people can't get over that their scroll wheel doesn't work on a website that hasn't been updated in half a decade.

Everyone is going nuts about the presentation/scrolling/UI of worrydream, but they are missing out on the goldmine of what he's actually been working on: http://worrydream.com/#!/Showreel2012

Its absolutely insane someone could be that productive in 2 years. A lot of the ideas in that showreel are incredible. Yeah many of them probably don't work, but I saw dozens of new interactions that don't exist anywhere else. Plus the demo is >4 years old. That's amazing.

His CV has the following quote: “One of the greatest user interface design minds in the world today.” — Alan Kay

People are obsessed with getting immediate gratification and have little to no attention span these days.

There's a button under the parent link that lets you skip the paywall labelled `web`.

Can you set up phone alarms/reminders with org-agenda or something similar?

* Emacs org mode to prep for meetings, maintain TODO lists, and general notes

* Also keep Slack open when I am working. If someone needs something, they can ping me on Slack and I will be available within 5-30 minutes.

* Gmail stars for everything I can't address immediately. Everything else is dealt with immediately and inbox count is 0 for most of the day (both work and personal addresses).

* Iphone calendar (with alarms) for everything I am putting off for later or need to schedule/remember

* Iphone notes for everything I am putting off indefinitely (movies/books/games to consume, gifts to gift, songs to learn, general goals for the next few years, travel destinations, events)

* Occasionally I leave things out of place so that I remember what I'm doing next time I leave the house (tennis racket on the bike + tennis shoes and shorts/compression shorts in my bag)

That's pretty much it. I really don't like having to keep things in mind. And when I want to zone out on a run or a vacation, I can safely do so knowing whatever I need to accomplish is on one of those lists and will probably get an alarm from my calendar if its urgent. I used to love using Pocket for reading papers/articles when I don't have a reliable connection, but its completely broken now and doesn't save pages consistently or renders pages unreadable.

IMO maintaining a wiki is way too slow and (depending on your work place) only accessible across VPN, which is incredibly inconvenient. Paying someone to act as scrum master/maintain a kanban is generally a waste of money/time as well, unless you work at a huge company (10,000+ people across hundreds of teams). But I'm biased and have always had a strong preference for small teams.

I really wish there were an edition with the footnotes inserted into the main body in some clean way. Like a quarter of the book is in those notes and many plot critical segments are buried back there.

No, at the time Palantir was mine and a lot of other people's too choice at Berkeley. They spent a ton of money on recruiting my class and I went there for dinner/lunch several times.

I had very similar intervies at Palantir and Yelp, albeit Yelp was understandably just a quick phone screen with a recruiter. However, the "trivia" interview at Palantir came from a forward deployed engineer on the DC based team I was interested in working with and one of my last hour long, onsite interviews of the day. Seemed like a big red flag at the time.

What was the audience? Maybe he does think it is a valid issue, but doesn't want to discuss it with the media since they are liable to misuse his words.

Should get a refund then. A minute of longitude near a pole is inches. Its a minute of latitude for a reason.

That isn't really a fair comparison. There's a selection bias among kidney donors (they must pass some minimal health requirements) and are at a lower risk than the general population.

I'd mostly agree, but say that it took me more like 300 pages to "get" his style and an additional 200 pages to actually enjoy. Its a serious investment, but absolutely worth it. Easily one of my two favorite books of all time, next to GEB. I finished it and had a strong urge to start reading it from the beginning again immediately.

This argument applies to all forms of media. As the barrier to entry to create plummets, there's going to be an insane amount of noise, even if there's tons of good stuff around. If you don't need a publisher's/editor's approval, no one is going to tell you your work is not worth distributing.

But "not reading" is click bait. The author is just being more selective in how they spend their time, since they can only afford to consume an increasingly narrow sliver. But you are seriously missing out if you elect to ignore the (good) stuff that will last, like (IMO) GEB and Infinite Jest.

There's something to said about attention spans in the digital age. Nautilus isn't a single serving news site; it provides long essays with sufficient background to digest a topic you probably don't really spend much time thinking about otherwise.

They aren't trying to give you a single sentence summary of some result. They are trying to get you to care about some esoteric subject. This one just happens to gel with the ycombinator crowd.

Proofs should be in DAG form, but starting a presentation from first principles seems like overkill. If your audience isn't at least as interested already interested in your side, they aren't going to be baby stepped through ever layer, especially when the first layers are the lowest levels.

Probably the same still holds if you flip the DAG and start with the conclusion, as you've already mentioned. People are going to tune out if you are presenting an opposing argument.

I don't think there's a great formula for arguments. You have to know your audience and pick your battles. Maybe the next best thing is making clear what you want/don't want and making clear what you believe others want/don't want and trying to find options that maximize as many of those constraints as possible. I think a lot of arguments stem from people who are already in agreement about most things.

Norvig's code is beautiful.

Karpathy has the benefit of being one of the best known bloggers/teachers in the most popular graduate-level course in possibly the most financially successful subfields ever while graduating at the peak of industry spending (so far). He's almost certainly the student described in http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/technology/the-race-is-on-... His experiences and successes are not generalizable.

But he's probably my favorite blogger too and its at the very least interesting to hear his take on his experiences.

> > Picking the school. ... your dream school should 1) be a top school

> No, at least, in mine and other's experience, you should go to the best school where you're still capable of being in the top ~1% of your graduating class. You'll feel like you're the best and that's almost all that matters (Malcolm Gladwell's talk [1]).

Isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens after you want to progress to the next environment?

Is it realistic to be in the top 1% anywhere? Isn't that like being the best graduate ever from a small program, or the best in a decade at a larger one? You're not competing with a large population anymore, you're competing with someone who has passed dozens of filter steps in their lifetime and have gotten just as far as you have.