riggins

Low interest rates make consumer loans more accessible. It's much easier to service a 5% loan than a 10% loan.

Here's the National Federation of Independent Business survey about what are the primary concerns of business. Interest rates/financing is last ... pretty much at an all time low.

http://www.nfib.com/surveys/small-business-economic-trends/

I'm pretty sure that if I dug up the Federal Reserve report it'd also show that banks have excess reserve (i.e. money that they'd love to lend at a reasonable interest rate rather than earning 0%).

I just need a good introduction. Its a field I'm interested in but know very little about.

i.e. don't make jokes.

I've wondered about this because I've done the same thing and gotten downvoted. There's nothing about not making jokes in the guidelines. Personally I like a little humor mixed with my HN.

Is there some unspoken guideline that HN is supposed to be humorless?

And on a semi-serious note, isn't mildly interesting that one of the most common cultural myths (vampires) may have some scientific validity?

I've now got empirical evidence of what I always thought.

I think DMX rhymes words with themselves more than any rapper I've ever heard.

This study says that owning a cat makes if more likely to have Toxo.

Wikipedia, which the grandparent node quotes, said the opposite. In fact, Wikipedia, correctly links to the study and then gives a summary that's 100% opposite of the actual findings.

numerous studies have shown living in a household with a cat is not a significant risk factor for T. gondiiinfection,[18][40][46]

If this is the standard, then we can also say

The trouble with Ivy League Universities

There should be some sort of Goodwin's law wrt using Wikipedia as your evidence.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/253802.php

For example, rats infected with the parasite lose their fear of cats, and are even attracted by their scent, making them easy prey

The Violinists Thumb,

Toxo does even stranger things to rodents. Rodents that have been raised in labs for hundreds of generations and have never seen a predator in their whole lives will still quake in fear and scamper to whatever cranny they can find if exposed to cat urine; it's an instinctual, total hardwired fear. Rats exposed to Toxo have the opposite reaction. They still fear other predators' scents, and they otherwise sleep, mate, navigate mazes, nibble find cheese, and do everything else normally. But these rates adore cat urine, especially male rates. In fact they more than adore it. At the first whiff of cat urine, their amygdalae throb, as if meeting females in heat

I haven't read the source research myself but the author isn't the only one drawing the conclusion that toxo-infected rodents are actually attracted to cat urine.

It's the finance industry culture. Why?

Finance is a zero-sum game. That leads to a set of incentives where what you need to do is beat the next guy.

Tech is almost the opposite of a zero-sum games. That leads to a set of incentives where what you need to do is crack a complex problem. Cracking complex problems requires collaboration.

agreed. There's also evidence to back that up.

source: Get Anyone to Do Anything (David Lieberman, Ph.D. Psychology)

The second factor in making sure that you are understood has to do with expectation. Numerous studies show the powerful role that expectation plays in understanding and include such finding as (a) girls who were told they would perform poorly on a math test did so; (b) assembly line workers who were told that the job was complex was and difficult performed less efficiently at the same task than those who were told that is was easy and simple; and (c) adults who were given fairly complex mazes solved them faster when told that they were based on a grade-school level

what would you rather invest in (assume there are no costs other than inventory to keep it simple).

A store that has $100K of inventory that turns inventory once a year with a 20% profit margin

or

A store that has $100K of inventory that it turns 10 times a year with a 5% profit margin

And we know who's getting really, really rich ... and its not 'people selling tools'. Its Google, Apple, Facebook, AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, MongoHQ, Heroku, Parse ... i.e. successful tech companies. Its not an unknown.

Tech is responsible for huge wealth creation. If the Forbes 400 was around in 1849, you wouldn't have seen any gold miners occupying the top spots.

Its as apt as saying people going to Wall Street to make money is like the gold rush. The only similarity is its the same physical location.

One night I escaped the hacker house to go out with a group of founders from various startups ... At 10:30 the waitress came over to take our orders for a second round. I ordered another whiskey, but everybody else looked at their phones with muted anxiety. At 11 pm the founders rose in pairs to leave, as if they had an exam in the morning. One founder (his company was literally an app that optimized app stores for other apps), who’d ordered a water and had taken off neither his backpack nor his jacket, apologized on behalf of everybody for leaving so early.

vs.

By contrast, on a weekend afternoon I went over to find my young cousin—a talented and good-humored UX designer for Google—with his friends in Alamo Square, where they were winding down a barbecue in the January sun.

IMO, the author has outsmarted himself trying to find a way to 'upend' conventional wisdom.

I just don't think its bad for smart, motivated people to sacrifice bar crawls and bbqs in the hope of accomplishing something important. That doesn't sound like a problem to me ... that sounds like maturity.

If the failure rate for all start-ups is 90%, I'm betting its lower for start-ups founded by ex-google engineers.

Let me put it concretely.

When Sebastian Thrun decided to launch Udacity I suspect the chance of failure was less then 90%. OTOH, I have 2 non-technical friends who managed to raise money to develop 2 more social networking app. I think the chance of failure there is easily 90%.

So maybe another way to put it is 'don't fool yourself'.

If you have Thrun-esque talent, start a company. If you don't, think twice, then think a third time for good measure before starting a company.

1. Benevolent option: the money goes to the website but it goes back to the user after a year, less a fee (the website will also earn interest for that year so you'd get fee + interest income). Not only do you help people stop procrastinating but you also help them with a saving program.

2. Devious option (and probably more commercially viable). the website takes the money but the website also runs a weekly lottery that pays out some fraction of the revenue collected.

I'm kinda dying to know if people actually sign up to send some random website money. As it is, I'm almost wondering if its satire.

As the comments have pointed out the difficulty is accurately identifying items.

With used books you don't have that problem because every book has an ISBN number so you can easily identify any book. That's enabled a robust used book market.

So maybe the business isn't the end product, maybe the business is an intermediate step, the equivalent to ISBN numbers for everything.

The business I'm thinking of is QR tags for everything. The QR code allows the owner to simply scan the QR code when they want to sell their stuff.

You'd have to work with OEMs. The pitch to the OEMs is that a QR code that allows the item to be identified and easily resold enhances the resale value, thus enhancing the initial value of the item.

I'll admit, I don't have enough experience to say whether or not that's true, but the person who was making the argument to me had lived in China.

There's a article linked to below in the comments that talks about cultural differences and how it effects the ethics of cloning.

However, wouldn't you agree that China is getting closer to the US in technological sophistication? How does that picture look if a much larger proportion of China's population is geniuses?

China will be the first to clone humans because they don't have our ethical restraints. Since China already is interested in eugenics, its easy to infer that they'll be interested in cloning geniuses.

It will get interesting if a large population of geniuses in China starts to tip the technological and military balance and whether other countries would feel compelled to respond.

I'd be tempted by a motorized version of this for around $1,000.

that depends on your definition of intro-level.

Take CS. Yes they have intro level stuff

Learn to Program | An Introduction to Interactive Programming In Python

Then they have classes that require prior knowledge

princeton algorithms | stanford algorithms | functional programming | programming languages

then more advanced class like

probabilistic graphical models | compilers | information theory | neural networks | reactive programming | analytical combinatorics

Plus this is just the first wave. You can see that they're organizing classes so they go deeper with their specialization tracks. And its natural that professor's would create the introductory courses first ... because obviously one has to learn the fundamentals before you can proceed to more advanced classes.

Furthermore, I expect that the next round of classes you'll start to see more advanced materials. Robert Ghrist who's created the UPenn Intro to Calculus class said his goal is to create a MOOC in topology (his specialty).

My initial thought is the best setup would really depend on the task.

For really complex tasks I would guess that you'd want a more closed environment. As a concrete example, if you're trying to make a theoretical breakthrough in cryptography, I'd guess you need an environment where you can seriously concentrate.

For maybe a less complex task, one where execution matters the most, like web development, a more open plan where its easier to coordinate might be better.

And obviously the quality of your co-workers matters a lot. High quality co-workers will have less questions and the value of training them up will be greater.