ryanmolden

I am not a crazy anti-healthcare nut as this comment will make me appear, but I think you mean "healthcare is paid for by others/collectively", since it isn't free to provide services, unless your doctors are working for no money.

Actually I suspect a not insignificant number of people aren't even aware of Facebook's edge-rank shenanigans. I have lost count of the number of times I have had to point out, even to techy friends, that you can reset the sort to most recent (over and over, thanks Facebook). This normally comes after people complaining they didn't see some post or another from a friend/family member, because Facebook decided it wasn't "popular" enough. Then again most of my friends are the kind that only friend actual friends, if they had feeds 800 people deep I suspect Facebook culling most posts would be appreciated. The only thing that annoys me is constantly having to reset it, you'd think after N times they would take the signal of "your edge-rank trimming is abysmal", but no.

I actually saw a demo of live conversation translation between two speakers (Chinese and English) using cell phones, at a Microsoft tech fest a few (2?) years ago. Something from MSR, obviously not on the market yet, so not quite there, but there are lots of people trying to bring the star trek universal translators to life :)

Or had a parent/child relationship or owner/owned relationship across every thread, or installed a journal hook, or... Don't get me started on Window's non-nicety if you want cross thread/process window relationships and want to be able to keep your primary UI thread from locking up if the child thread does.

The quote about context is interesting, so he is predicting Ive might read Bret Victor's Magic Ink paper? :)

Currently reading Hallucinations. His coverage of such bizarre conditions as Akinetopsia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetopsia) make his books great reads for the casually curious and really make it concrete how much of our reality is formed primarily in our heads.

Works great on small projects, does not scale to very large projects. There is a non-zero amount of communication, scheduling and cross-team coordination that needs to happen. If you want developers to do it, that is fine, it just means less development time. If you have never met a good PM it is easy (but intellectually lazy) to write off the discipline. Once you have worked with a good PM you realize by off-loading that drudgery (well, drudgery from a dev perspective) everyone wins.

This. I used to attribute it to douchiness, and sometimes it can be. Some people seem to feel the need to flaunt some kind of (mostly imaginary) superiority over others. That said, the curse of knowledge is also a good explanation. Some people just assume it is common knowledge because for them and others they talk with it is, so when they encounter someone that doesn't know it, it is easy to think "they must be an idiot". I have heard countless people express this exact sentiment (privately) when so and so doesn't know X, which is odd, since the set of all things one is not an expert in / knowledgeable about generally contains many different Xs.

A cheaper price for goods and services is not a necessary precondition to existence. People are free to pay more than absolute rock-bottom if they feel the more expensive goods/service are superior. Unless you intended your list to be disjunctive and I read it as conjunctive, if so, apologies.

Businesses are run by human beings, so while businesses themselves may be amoral, people making the decisions on direction of the business are not. Or at least one would hope that is the case. That isn't to say there is no place for regulation, but assuming without regulation business should be expected to run amuck is a bit cynical.

"People ask me why I don’t do lectures at magic conventions, and I say, ‘Because I’m still learning.’ Meanwhile, you’ve got people who have been doing magic for ten months and they are actually out there pontificating. It’s absurd"

This.

Yes, when I said ignore I meant from an information gathering perspective. If I care about an issue enough I will actively donate to organizations representing my interests. It is really all I can do when <insert idiot politician> is from an area I have no vote in.

Anytime someone's argument is the moral equivalent of 'my opponents are doodie-heads' I pretty much start ignoring them. It is a shame that an elected official, ostensibly 'leading' our country, is making such idiotic arguments and isn't more embarrassed about doing so.

>feel that though google glass would be a hit product

This will be a very interesting test of Collinridge's Dilemma.

It would also increase the value of raw cocaine as a pre-cursor to highly valuable (from a cost vs. resale perspective) crack. The CIA being involved in, or simply turning a blind eye to, cocaine smuggling when the funds were to be used to fund things they viewed as necessary but those "idiots" in Washington wouldn't fund is not entirely looney. The angle of increasing the value of a fairly easily smuggleable drug is more compelling to me than a conspiracy targeting African-American communities in particular, like the CIA is run by some crude caricature of a southern grand dragon.

>Personally, I think it was a nom-de-plume of several people

See also: Nicolas Bourbaki for a historical example of such an occurrence (minus the disappearing / remaining anonymous part).

I have always been a strong believer in the saying "Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them". Studying this area would be difficult though as you either need to know ahead of time who would be successful, or study such a large cross-section that you are statistically likely to snare future successful people in your population.

I've really like Watsi since the first time I saw it on HN (before you were in YC). I was thinking about it yesterday and I think the satisfying part is the ability to see a case actually get funded. A lot of charities you give money but it is for a somewhat amorphous problem, to "fight hunger" or "help fund education" or "research a cure for cancer". These are all noble causes but it is somehow less personally fulfilling because you can't see any near term changes and just have to tell yourself perhaps your donation helped in some small way. With Watsi you can actually see that you and some other anonymous strangers paid for an actual procedure, and it got done, and it is pretty easy to see the direct connection between your donation and a real, positive difference in someone's life, even if you don't know / will never meet that someone.

It is the same with that IndieGoGo fund the other day to help the Kenyan hacker trying to get to NYC for Hacker School. There is something fulfilling about refreshing that page and seeing the goal met and then exceeded and knowing it will impact their life in a way that is greater than I could have impacted my own by spending the same money on something for myself (or, perhaps, something more directly for myself, since clearly this kind of thing gives me some personal satisfaction or I wouldn't do it, selfish altruism and all :))

I read the "Korean immigrant" comment slightly differently. Not as a "if that schlub can do it so can you!", but rather as pointing out that immigrants to most countries generally face all the same business challenges of any citizen plus the burden of being an immigrant in a society that may not always be welcoming. If someone can succeed facing all the same challenges you would face plus a few more it can show you that your challenges aren't insurmountable. Or maybe the person is just so head-and-shoulders above you that you shouldn't even compare, but that is less likely in my experience (i.e. variation amongst people in sub-groups, say entrepreneurs, are generally not as vast as people think, mostly because most people only compare against the outliers).

You didn't like his answer of "I worked my ass of to get here"? Is it that he didn't acknowledge the role of good luck or do you honestly think he didn't work to get where he is at?

The last sentence hints at some kind of conspiracy or upvoting-ring, but of all stories this one seems least likely to be due to something like that. It may just be the case that your interests and what you find relevant are not actually generalizable to the HN community at large.

I actually like stories like this. Stories of people being driven to better themselves and their lives and using the internet to open doors that never would have been possible even 10 years ago. If HN just became story after story like this then, yes, it would be tiresome, but I don't think we are in any near-term danger of that happening.

Having a broad range of stories, even some that are not strictly about tech in some way that would personally benefit you, is good for a community, unless we want to develop some sort of echo-chamber where all we ever read/think/talk about is <insert pet technology topic here>. I have met people who are like that, I choose not to associate with them for a reason.

His "Your Movie Sucks" book (http://www.amazon.com/Your-Movie-Sucks-Roger-Ebert/dp/074076...) has some pretty humurous, scathing reviews.

This is what I love about living in the future (and HN). I live just north of Seattle, I read a story last night about this project in a magazine from the UK (New Scientist). I posted it to a website in California and the project creator, from Massachusetts, responded and it turns out he has had an account here for over 4 years.

I know PG wrote an essay about how certain cities act as magnets for smart people looking to change the world, and how it is advantageous for companies to set up in those cities. That always struck me as a rather antiquated system (though I don't deny it is currently true) and I always wondered how long it will be before that changes. The idea that to properly collaborate we have to arrange such that all of our molecules inhabit a relatively small geographic area just seems silly. Things like this really make me appreciate the power of the internet to connect people and propagate interesting ideas (instead of just memes). Makes me think that before I die the idea of necessary co-location in order for people to collaborate effectively will be a bygone notion. I would welcome that change.

I posted this not so much because I was amazed by the thing itself or thought it represented some pinnacle of "true" DIY, but more so because I like the idea of making things that were once far out of reach of anyone but serious hackers into something that a broader collection of people could feasibly tackle. It isn't quite there yet, but it is due to people like this that it will be, one day. You could nitpick all day about how most anything isn't truly DIY unless you mine/refine all your own materials and create your electronics from first principles, but that starts to get a bit silly.

More generally, I am a believer in the idea I first read from Clay Shirky that as more people get involved in an area average quality goes down but innovation goes up a lot as you get lots of people trying lots of new things, which in the end is only goodness. Except, perhaps, for those that prefered it remain elite so they could feel special (not saying this is you, but I see this attitude in a lot of pioneers in areas that later become more mainstream).

>He may settle for an amazing reference and introductions to investors

Honest question: if you essentially blackmail someone for an "introduction to investors" what makes you think the person introducing doesn't pull them aside before or after and say "this guy basically threatened to sue me if I didn't introduce him to you"? I have to imagine anyone in that position would likely do that, you could never prove they did it, and the investors would likely in no way take you seriously. That seems like the worst possible parlay I can imagine.

>If you're educated, high-IQ tiger parents and want to raise highly successful children, statistically you're better off having your own kids than adopting

This is the most depressing thing I read in this whole thread. The idea that one should view raising "highly successful" children as some kind of outcome they can control or influence through "high IQ tigerness" and cold economic analysis is humorous and sad all at once. Coupled with encouragement to not buck a pointless social tradition because it may make (shallow, deplorable) people judge you as less worthy and thus may negatively impact your future prospects of becoming more like them seems like a rather sad way to live life, but I guess we all have our own goals. The fact that after thousands of years our species is still mesmerized by shiny rocks we dug out of the ground is also odd to me, but apparently not others.

Innate talent just seems like a cop out "explanation". Oh so and so is good because he had an innate talent. One might as well say so and so is good because he has a frogelmonbal. Very few things are innate in humans and I highly doubt many of them matter except in comparing across deviations in some distribution.

Obviously, if you want to play professional basketball you likely better be pretty tall, and that is out of your control. The other skills necessary are definitely not innate, they are learned and improved through practice and competition.

I think people claim some things are innate simply because they don't see the struggle that went into building up the talent and thus it just seems inexplicable. That or they are the people with the supposed innate talent and like the adoration of people thinking they are "blessed by the gods", so to speak.

I predict roughly everyone who already believes in god and follows this kind of news (only half-jokingly).

In my experience most people don't form their opinions based on the totality of current knowledge and keep adjusting them in some Bayesian fashion as more info becomes known. Rather they make up their minds based on something (could be their knowledge of currently accepted facts, could be what they were taught growing up, could be just what they think makes sense, etc..) and then simply scan for confirmatory data, or simply don't pay any attention because they already have it 'figured out'.

Thus if you already believe in god and heard that scientists had discovered the 'god particle' you would likely say 'see, I knew it!', if you didn't believe in god and saw the same thing you would say 'I am skeptical, let me read this article', and you would walk away saying 'that is just a name, it has nothing to do with god, who still doesn't exist'. So really I guess both sides win, and we all lose, or maybe I am just too cynical.

I'll assume your comedy detector is mis-calibrated, I have a hard time thinking someone could post here about the "tiresome whining of their servants" in anything but a joking manner.

I also have heard carriers generally do not allow it (i.e. software makers pushing updates without the carriers permission). I have heard the reason is basically support costs. If they have not had time to test and vet your update against all the models running on their network, and you brick a phone (or a million), those customers are calling the carriers and they are probably pissed. They wouldn't know how to contact Google even if the thought of doing so wasn't so laughable.