owensmartin

Learn to speed-read by learning from a couple of speed-reading books. I recommend the Evelyn Wood system to get you started.

Thanks for the shortened URLs. Question: I always obtain those by hitting "Share" and then copying the link. Is there a better way?

I'm just happy to see the New York Review of Books appear on HN!

Carpentry.

I thought I knew a bit about woodworking because of my middle-school shop class. Turns out it's an extremely precise and technical activity, packed with lessons in engineering, measurement, statistics, and physics.

I'm really excited to mention it to you guys because I found learning woodworking is a great application of modern technology: I watch youtube videos on it at 2x, and can basically google any problem I encounter. I often say to my friends: watching youtube at 2x is my superpower.

Okay I did it myself: https://gist.github.com/javahead123/7045923

Someone PLEASE do this for meetup

Sorry to offer the most trite comment possible, but how does a 22-year-old trying to pick up chicks constitute "hacker news"?

I'd like to tack on another key feature to these 13th chords (no pun intended)-- and that is of spreading out the voicing across the instrument's (usually piano's) range.

There's a sort of rule of thumb in jazz that the only interval that sounds genuinely BAD is the flat 9. Try it on your piano right now (say, C and C# an octave up). Notice that a similar interval, the major 7 (C and B) sounds pretty, even though the notes are kinda clashing because they're so close. But on the other hand the flat 9 sounds GREAT if you voice it right. To see this, hit a low C, then E, B-flat, and D-flat. Similarly this chord works with all the other color tones: 9s, 11s, 13s.

I think ultimately what makes jazz piano truly musical is when the musician has spent a lot of time trying out different voicings, spreading them out or crunching them in, and listened to each one to see which sounds the best.

Great piece of history. I think the author's conclusions are flawed though. He writes:

> Ecological activism did not play significant role in all of these developments; neither did the numerous well-meaning international treaties, moratoriums, and other chest beating displays.

That may be true for the whales themselves, but there were indeed regulations passed on automobiles in the 1970s due to the oil shock:

> In the 1970s, the car companies were required to develop engines working at higher temperatures to comply with lower emissions and improved efficiency and that changed the regime for the tranny fluids. Suddenly, the car companies did not need to lobby any more.

So it was government action regarding auto emissions that wound up propagating into saving the whales. Perhaps that was not among the intended consequences, but we also can't claim that the change was simply due to "market forces."

How I wish the Times would actually put in some technical details! If their aim is the transparent diffusion of news, they shouldn't shy away from technicals that maybe most people don't know. In fact, perhaps it's time more people found out about public-key cryptography, and who "third party" verifiers actually are. Put some due diligence back in the hands of the public.

These meetups are great for DC hackers and entrepreneurs! If you classify yourself thus, you must attend!

My opinion: it looks terrible. In particular it doesn't match the contours or shadows of any of my other desktop items.

As for the google favicon, am I the only one who still misses the old G?

For quick reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2474573

Wonderful. The concept of falsifiability is a gift Karl Popper gave to humanity, and we mustn't forget it.

So from a statistical standpoint, you're estimating theta, some parameter that indicates your level of extroversion. What does this parameter get you? Will you then predict this person's success in life? Why would you want to do that?

Much worse, could you possibly point to this untestable parameter as being the _cause_ of one's success? Hardly.

But from an epistemological standpoint, there is some benefit to identifying what we take to mean intro/extroversion. So that's why we give Jung credit, but more as a philosopher and less as a scientist.

I'm sorry, but I really don't see the benefit for having made this thing-- the tweets it puts out are useless!

Are we just playing around in how to program Markov text generation? Because who cares; they figured that out ages ago.

Arg. It's not division by zero, it's zero work divided by a finite number of workers. Nor is it an undefined supply of jobs-- should you need the quantity "workers per unit work", then, finally, you'd have an undefined quantity.