temphn
I for one thank you for your contribution. Hacker News can be a bunch of jackasses at times.
You are absolutely right: distributed version control led to git, which completely changed programming. And though Satoshi didn't cite it by name it was almost certainly also part of the inspiration for Bitcoin and the blockchain, which has led to another $30B in collective market cap.
If you want a suggestion for what to do next, or what to advise, you can probably have a lot of impact (and make money) by getting involved in some of these new distributed ledger/ICO projects. You have the technical ability and it's now possible to monetize at the protocol level. Here are some links if you're interested:
https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/
https://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crow...
1) Google has Android because they did something very similar to Apple: Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board and used his inside info to drive smartphone development at Google. A massive lawsuit then transpired, but for Google on balance it was worth it to steal the Android IP from Apple.
http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/20/steve-jobs-im-going-to-destroy...
2) For that matter, David Drummond was on the board of Uber and arguably took info from there to Google as well, using it to start their ride hailing project. Uber did not sue at that time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-02/exclusive...
3) Google was very slow on self-driving. Levandowski and others tried to get Google to ship a real self-driving car product for years, but only Uber actually had the cojones to do it in Pittsburgh and Arizona. That is what finally lit a fire under Google to spin out Waymo.
For example, send the #GawkingatRapeCulture hashtag to the Coke rep who chose to advertise on Gawker and ask them whther Coke is intentionally supporting rape culture by donating to Gawker. Make sure not do this purely as a solo op; once you have the data on their advertisers, pull together a website that makes it easy for anyone to chip in via one click.
Those who run sites with advertising inventory can also donate ad slots at lower CPMs to the sponsors of Gawker in order to pull revenue away from Gawker.
They profit from clickbait. So we need to hit these people in the wallet.
What Silicon Valley does better than anyone is create
exits. They know how to get people who they have made
money for to turn over a lot of that money to buy the
companies they have invested in. They know how to put on a
show to get a company to an IPO. They know how to go out
and get hundreds of millions of dollars to bridge companies
with 10s of millions in revenues to their IPO and more
importantly to make sure the IPO happens.
startups which provide deluxe on-site benefits could extend
their daycare, meal and on-site walk-in health care to
people who have WIC or EBT cards and can show that they
live in the neighborhood. The bonus here? You can meet
actual people in your neighborhood.
http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/behavior/sexdif1.htm
Men and women display patterns of behavioral and cognitive
differences that reflect varying hormonal influences on
brain development
By Doreen Kimura (May 13, 2002)
Men and women differ not only in their physical attributes
and reproductive function but also in many other
characteristics, including the way they solve intellectual
problems. For the past few decades, it has been
ideologically fashionable to insist that these behavioral
differences are minimal and are the consequence of
variations in experience during development before and
after adolescence. Evidence accumulated more recently,
however, suggests that the effects of sex hormones on brain
organization occur so early in life that from the start the
environment is acting on differently wired brains in boys
and girls. Such effects make evaluating the role of
experience, independent of physiological predisposition, a
difficult if not dubious task. The biological bases of sex
differences in brain and behavior have become much better
known through increasing numbers of behavioral,
neurological and endocrinological studies.
Sex differences in problem solving have been systematically
studied in adults in laboratory situations. On average, men
perform better than women at certain spatial tasks. In
particular, men seem to have an advantage in tests that
require the subject to imagine rotating an object or
manipulating it in some other way. They also outperform
women in mathematical reasoning tests and in navigating
their way through a route. Further, men exhibit more
accuracy in tests of target-directed motor skills--that is,
in guiding or intercepting projectiles.
Women, on average, excel on tests that measure recall of
words and on tests that challenge the person to find words
that begin with a specific letter or fulfill some other
constraint. They also tend to be better than men at rapidly
identifying matching items and performing certain precision
manual tasks, such as placing pegs in designated holes on a
board.
http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/images/00018E9D-879D-1D06-8E49...
Here is Louann Brizendine of UCSF:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/...
Review 1: Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist at the
University of California, San Francisco, explores
groundbreaking issues in brain science...Brizendine
graduated from the Yale University School of Medicine and
draws on research done at the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood
and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF in 1994.
Review 2 :This comprehensive new look at the hormonal
roller coaster that rules women's lives down to the
cellular level, "a user's guide to new research about the
female brain and the neurobehavioral systems that make us
women," offers a trove of information, as well as some
stunning insights. Though referenced like a work of
research, Brizedine's writing style is fully accessible.
Brizendine provides a fascinating look at the life cycle of
the female brain from birth ("baby girls will connect
emotionally in ways that baby boys don't") to birthing
("Motherhood changes you because it literally alters a
woman's brain-structurally, functionally, and in many ways,
irreversibly") to menopause (when "the female brain is
nowhere near ready to retire") and beyond.
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by
instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to
perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest
arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being
bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable
of leading in a heretical direction.
The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous
thought presented itself. The process should be automatic,
instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.
He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He
presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the
earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than
water' -- and trained himself in not seeing or not
understanding the arguments that contradicted them.http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/06/boycotting_the_n...
Boycotting the Nature Publishing Group
The Nature Publishing Group publishes not only the
prestigious journal Nature, but also many others. When this
company bought Scientific American, it raised the
institutional subscription price seven-fold. Now they are
insisting on quadrupling the fees for 67 journals to which
the University of California subscribes.
Right now, we pay them an average of $4,465 per year for
each journal we subscribe to. After the increase, this
would soar to $17,479 per year. In response, the University
of California is considering a system-wide boycott of the
Nature Publishing Group — for example, cancelling
subscriptions to all their journals.
https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint/blob/master/lib/rule...
That is exactly what it is.
As an example, the lint checks that "bro culture" is bad, but female-friendly (like Minted.com[1]) is assumed to be good. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Very predictable. Like any neo-Puritan, he then comes after profanity, and beer, and even (god forbid) competitive-sounding job descriptions! His vision of the startup future: an HR drone stamping on a programmer's face, forever.
So how about thoughtlint? Avoid hiring rowanmanning, or anyone on their helpfully provided list:
https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint#thanks
People like this will spend their time being Adria-Richards-esque thought police rather than shipping code. Contrast with Max Levchin, who actually sold a startup for a billion-plus dollars:
http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-...
Max Levchin: The notion that diversity in an early team is
important or good is completely wrong. You should try to
make the early team as non-diverse as possible. There are a
few reasons for this. The most salient is that, as a
startup, you’re underfunded and undermanned. It’s a big
disadvantage; not only are you probably getting into
trouble, but you don’t even know what trouble that may be.
Speed is your only weapon. All you have is speed.
[1] http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-particular-things-Minted-...
Over the last decades, numerous researchers have
painstakingly collected, analyzed, dated, and calibrated
many data series that allow us to reconstruct climate
before the age of direct measurements. Such data come e.g.
from sediment drilling in the deep sea, from corals, ice
cores and other sources. Shaun Marcott and colleagues for
the first time assembled 73 such data sets from around the
world into a global temperature reconstruction for the
Holocene, published in Science. Or strictly speaking, many
such reconstructions: they have tried about twenty
different averaging methods and also carried out 1,000
Monte Carlo simulations with random errors added to the
dating of the individual data series to demonstrate the
robustness of their results.
1) The "divergence problem". The lack of correlation between model inputs like tree rings and the instrumental record over the last few decades is acknowledged by all; climate scientists generally state that it is due to anthropogenic factors, arguably assuming the consequent.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tree-ring-proxies-divergence...
2) Serious climate model prediction failures over the past 10 year period, as acknowledged in Nature:
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2...
In other words, key model inputs used in climate reconstructions do not strongly correlate with the instrumental record over the last 30-40 years ("the divergence problem") and climate models have so far had a poor track record over the last 15 years, with average temperatures winding up below the envelope of model predictions. These predictive failures in the datasets we can check bode ill for the prospect of hindcasting global average temperatures to within 1 degree more than 8000 years ago.
http://cdixon.org/2012/11/23/some-problems-are-so-hard-they-...
1) This kind of article is pure propaganda, intended to make money for Business Insider by "raising questions" and selling ad revenue against the pageviews.
2) "We" aren't responsible for the decisions of people who live within a 100 mile radius. If "we" are held responsible for their outcomes, financially and morally responsible, then "we" will also demand control over their lives to a degree you'd find unpalatable. This can be trivially solved by re-institutionalization and a Boston-Bombings-style sweep and cleanup of the camp. It won't be because the idea is to give them (and Business Insider) our money without giving us any control over their behavior or the use of funds.
3) The questions raised by BI are highly selective. For example, they put expensive homes on this map: http://www.businessinsider.com/homeless-in-silicon-valley-in...
But they don't talk about quantitative easing or Bernanke's 85B/month in mortgage purchases, which have the express intent of driving up home prices.
One could go on. But the right answer is that we didn't cause this, we're only paying attention to it because of BI's SEO, BI itself isn't going to dedicate its operation to donating money, you aren't going to dedicate your life to helping them, and so on. The right answer is no action on this issue that you heard about today, will forget about tomorrow, and is insoluble anyway.
Refuse to be guilt-tripped by cynical manipulators relying on maudlin sympathy, people who want to draw your attention to an issue, blame it on you, and then charge you (involuntarily via tax) a pretty penny for not solving it. For how many billions have been spent on "the homeless" to date? The result is only to subsidize them and build a permanent caste of homeless caretakers.
The real solution is to reverse de-institutionalization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation), but that would be fought tooth and nail by "homeless advocates" who'd see their budgets vanish in a trice. Public homelessness as we know it is subsidized, it is a government-and-NGO-caused phenomenon.
http://www.businessinsider.com/former-business-owner-homeles...
She ended up homeless when she turned to California's
shelter network and hated it. ... Five years ago she moved
into The Jungle and says she has no regrets.
So: what "very old" models performed "very well"? You must be thinking of something here. I'm not talking about a Krugman blog post where he says the stimulus was too small. I'm talking about an actual scatterplot, a time series prediction with the X axis as time, the Y axis as the dependent variable, and actual empirical measurements plotted vs. the predictions of theory.
Here is another example from a different field:
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2...
http://www.nature.com/news/499139a-i2-0-jpg-7.11335?article=...
You can see the graph halfway down the page, with theoretical predictions as the red line and actual empirical measurements as the black line. The Nature article admits they don't match well. But in other fields they do match well. For example:
http://physics.info/projectiles/practice.shtml
In ballistics the predicted time series match experimental results very closely. So I ask again: what "very well established models" in economics performed "very well"? Which of them nailed the curve?
http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/wp-content/up...
And the independent variables of course tend to like this:
http://m.research.stlouisfed.org/fred/series.php?sid=BASE&sh...
Neither seem particularly textbook, but you're obviously thinking of something. Given that people who think differently from you invented Bitcoin (and thus have at least a glancing familiarity with advanced mathematics, if the solution of the Byzantine Generals problem means anything) it would be great to see some plots to the contrary. Not just models, but X/Y plots or tables in which Keynesians predict something and nail it. It's not hard, after all to find many examples of Krugman, Bernanke, Goolsbee, or Orszag making quantitative predictions that turned out flagrantly wrong [1].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_Afghanis...
The twins' father, Walker Inman, 57, lumbered from the
mansion, his tattooed sleeves visible under a black T-
shirt, drinking his morning rum ... He'd been full of
dangerous mischief since he was a child. As a 13-year-old
orphan in 1965 taken in by his aunt Doris Duke, Walker –
then called "Skipper" – had romped around her lavish
14,000-square-foot Hawaiian estate without regard for
property or propriety
[1] Celebrities and athletes are of course excluded from this sentence. They don't become wealthy through scaling businesses/managing people, and as such have a much higher incidence of behavioral issues. Many NBA and NFL athletes are bankrupt after a few years out of the league, in fact.
[2] http://www.yale.edu/scan/GT_2004_NRN.pdf
[3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/01420...
[4] http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/kalthoff/bio346/PDF/PowerPo...
[5] http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1737667,00.ht...
The Minnesota psychologist and her colleagues found that
disparity could be due as often to innate factors such as
perinatal care or his birth parents' genes. "The
deleterious effects may quite possibly have come before the
adoption ever took place," Keyes, the study's lead
researcher, says.http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-ceo-tim-armstrong-appeare...
A few minutes later, Armstrong complained about leaks to
the media. He said the leaks were making Patch seem like
"loser-ville" in the press. He said, "That's why Abel was
fired." "We can't have people that are in the locker room
giving the game plan away."