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mtrimpeon Nasty Gal is expected to file for bankruptcy

Fashion doesn't actually change measured in weeks. There is a fairly predictable flow from the next-season designs approved by the fashion elite (think Devil Meets Prada sort of stuff.) The not-too-risky designs there are quickly incorporated by the just-behind-the-curve brands to still make it into the next season and only a year (or more) later the aspects sufficiently palatable for the masses end up at regular retailers.

That means that if you stay in touch with the newest developments it's actually pretty easy to still be sufficiently ahead of the masses to justify a service like this.

And if that sounds remarkably similar to how tech works: I agree with you.

mtrimpeon Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation

At its core NLP is basically little more than a notational system for mental processes which is a pretty hard thing to discredit scientifically.

It's true that that most of the NLP community revolves around cargo culting a few of these processes though (which most likely indeed aren't scientifically valid.)

Saying that that discredits NLP as a whole is roughly equivalent to saying a programming language is inherently bad because a lot of shitty software has been written in it though.

mtrimpeon Ask HN: How do you organise/integrate all the information in your life?

I use Evernote als a log for all correspondence, notes, checklists, clippings, articles etc. all sorted by creation time and tagged with relevant concepts.

Then for every task I would ever like to do at some point in the future, from bucket lists type things to project tasks which aren't yet scheduled, I have a huge WorkFlowy list.

Then for ToDo that I'be actually committed myself to I actually use Google Sheets where each mini-project has its own row with the next action defined and a history of all activities in the context of that project (both previous next actions and other things I did for that project) on the rest of the column. That allows me to keep a 'narrative' of each projects and to group them by meaningful time horizons (i.e. on a specific day this week, next week, the week after, the month after etc.)

This sheet works really well for me together with some Keyboard Maestro macros and allowed me to grow my perfect system but it is definitely time for turning that into a proper app though.

Whenever I get around to making that app I'd also love to include daily, weekly and monthly checklist/self-questionnaires/journals for additional level of planning structure.

mtrimpeon Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

That's the one that seems to be using illegal GCHQ wiretaps ... see the (Dutch) article below about an Appen translator getting a private voicemail of her ex to translate.

http://www.volkskrant.nl/tech/privegesprekken-van-duizenden-...

mtrimpeon The Dutch Reach: Clever Workaround to Keep Cyclists from Getting “Doored”

If you live in Amsterdam you'd be hard pressed to find more than one scooter a month that's going under 25km/h.

Amsterdam is also pushing very hard to get an exception to be able to force them onto the street though.

mtrimpeon Brain-sensing technology allows typing at 12 words per minute

Would this also allow for chorded input?

mtrimpeon Stepping down as Nodevember organizer

In that case I think your root cause analysis is probably quite accurate but that you're drastically underestimating how common of a driver for this kind of behavior it is.

mtrimpeon Stepping down as Nodevember organizer

I was responding to the hypothesis that many of these 'overreactions' are essentially the result of PTSD symptoms... not the specific case at hand since I wasn't even aware of it.

That a mere comment about a personal experience with this dynamic manages to garner a bunch of downvotes is all the more indication that awareness about such dynamics is sorely lacking in large parts of the IT community... which of course only reinforces those exact same dynamics.

mtrimpeon Stepping down as Nodevember organizer

I fail to see how this is relevant. Could you explain?

mtrimpeon Stepping down as Nodevember organizer

I know it's anecdote and not data but I for one became much more active in agitating against such cases after having been inappropriately dismissed after raising a complaint with HR about a colleague being discriminated against.

I rationalize it as becoming more active in human rights issues after realizing their importance first hand but based on my externally observable behaviour the PTSD explanation could be considered just as valid... and to at least some degree also rings true to me.

So I would say that there is indeed a good chance that a lot of these are caused by PTSD related to previous 'similar' workplace incidents and that indeed preventing those original events will go a long way towards calming the current storm of outrage. Not that I have the slightest clue as to how to do that though...

mtrimpeon Farming Invented Twice in the Middle East, Genomes Study Reveals

Now I'm curious what the 'other two' are...

mtrimpeon Farming Invented Twice in the Middle East, Genomes Study Reveals

If you ever interested in this sort of stuff then the book "Guns, Germs and Steel" [1] explores all these trade-offs in great depth (and places them in the larger context of the development of human societies in general.)

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Stee...

mtrimpeon Can we make consciousness into an engineering problem?

Whether that's a tautology or not really depends on your definition of consciousness which is sort of my point: that consciousness, as the broad and poorly defined concept it currently is, is not all that useful.

mtrimpeon Can we make consciousness into an engineering problem?

Not really; but we can make it into a definition problem.

If we go there then consciousness is suddenly just our subjective experience of change/time/increasing entropy.

If you want a definition that's helpful you're going to have to be more specific than that of course.

mtrimpeon Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success

And that's for the relative ease of driving in a US city. I just got back from two weeks of driving in Kiev and I'm pretty confident that we're a looong way away from being able to navigate that kind of traffic autonomously.

mtrimpeon Kinesis Advantage 2

On OS X Karabiner probably lets you. Maybe their firmware could also if you contact them. I once got sent a debut version of their software for the foot pedals and it had tons of cool hidden functionality.

mtrimpeon Kinesis Advantage 2

I absolutely loved the RollerMouse before I got my Kinesis Advantage. It might work for the Freestyle though so you could consider giving it a try. Still the most ergonomic mouse I've used to date.

mtrimpeon Kinesis Advantage 2

Three pedal one here. Bought by accident but now happily use it with middle one to switch modes using Karabiner and outer two either Cmd/Mouseclick or pgup/down, left/right, scroll, space left/right etc.

mtrimpeon React Native for Ubuntu

Not in the same way though.

Swing drew and managed its own widgets using cross-platform Java.

React Native uses native widgets and drives them from cross-platform JavaScript.

mtrimpeon Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

Grow a habit of checking some (any) system first. BJ Fogg's Tiby Habits program is a good start. And make sure it's a tiny investment of time/energy at first so no full-blown complex planning right off the bat.

Generally reading 'Making it all work' from the GTD guy also helped with just wanting to get everything into some system; which I developed bit by bit using tiny habit changes.

By now I have an amazingly complex system involving a Google Sheet, Workflowy and Evernote that would be just about ready to be turned into a professional product... but getting there I went through dozens and dozens of little improvements of just getting everything out of my kind and into some system.

mtrimpeon How Bayes’ Rule Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

That sounds fascinating. Is there anywhere you could look at the result (or code ;) of this work?

mtrimpeon WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

There is no reason why we can't create an entire new computing paradigm that does respect our historic conventions around privacy though.

I gave a talk about such conversational languages [1] at ClojureD last month if you're interested...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD-Dtr9j0f4

mtrimpeon Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

Collective Intentionality / Consensus Building

I know it's not easy and not sexy; but as a species we're in the process of transitioning from a centralized hierarchical model (inherently arising due to costs of communication) to a collective decision making model.

Apart from society collapsing wholesale I don't see any way we won't have global consensus building / decision making in a hundred years; and helping speed that along is the most powerful thing you can do for humanity's benefit right now.

mtrimpeon Is it still possible to get away with a heist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

One implies genetics; the other environment.

mtrimpeon Is it still possible to get away with a heist?

There's a couple of things going on there.

First of all a HUGE selection bias wrt who would actually have gotten to migrate to the US; which is where I'm assuming you're from.

The second thing is that Eastern European cultures have WAY more focus on technical and theoretical/intellectual achievement. Whereas US culture is obsessed with finance and entrepreneurship, Eastern European culture is so with STEM and intellectual achievement.

Thirdly; stay away from racial stereotyping. It's almost always damaging, even when positive, and it's virtually always oversimplification due to an incomplete understanding of the culture and conditions of said race.

mtrimpeon What I learnt from being sexually harassed at Google

The comment was actually based on experience in the Netherlands; which has similar if not stronger employee protection than the UK.

If your case is as clear-cut as the one in this article you might indeed not need a lawyer but if there's any wiggle room; if it's discrimination and not harassment and the accused is sufficiently important to the company and HR judges that you might not have the energy to file a lawsuit etc. etc. etc. then it's still very easy to end up getting kicked out of the company.

mtrimpeon Riemann – A network monitoring system

The parts of Clojure required to write a config file are probably roughly the same size as a custom DSL though.

Maps and lists are gonna be maps and lists...

mtrimpeon What I learnt from being sexually harassed at Google

It's not really useful to single out Eastern Europe. The problem is everywhere; its manifestations are just different.

Eastern Europe for example has much less of a glass ceiling problem but gender roles are stricter and but racism and homophobia are orders of magnitude worse.

In the Dutch workplace (where I'm from) homophobia is for example much less of an issue; but racism is still pretty ingrained and while there are less strict divisions in gender roles but the glass ceiling for women is much stronger.

mtrimpeon What I learnt from being sexually harassed at Google

Indeed; never trust HR to do the right thing. HR will choose the approach they believe minimizes risk to the company.

If they believe kicking you out instead of your harasser is less risky they won't hesitate twice to do so. I can confirm that from personal experience.

If you can afford it get legal advice first ... and then go to HR.

mtrimpeon Are cities the new countries?

WolframAlpha is using data from 2014. Given that Russia's economy nearly halved in 2015 that makes the original statement probably true by now.