(1) I don't think this is the reason it did not work. There are lots of things that make you look like a dork -- PCs, airpods etc -- but they took off like rocketships (speaking as someone who adopted these dork items whole heartedly).
(2) I agree it is a mystery why Segways didn't work, but I think it remains an unsolved mystery.
(3) We have more information now that we have lime and other similar items available. (*)
(*) This is actually a point in PG's favor because the lime's are skateboard inspired. But they're not undorky.
We have a 1:1 skateboard Segway: the Onewheel. It healthily solves the dorky problem, and then some. Still, this doesn't seem to be a perfect solution because, in the face of one of the most consumer-hostile manufacturers around, people are turning to dorkier alternatives (such as EUCs).
Although few things look as dorky as a Segway, especially when tourists are driving them around single-file.
> There are lots of things that make you look like a dork -- PCs, airpods etc
It still blows my mind that actual adults wear AirPods in public. Sometimes actual professional adults who want to be taken seriously (e.g. in business meetings). There is just no way for someone to wear AirPods and look fashionable.
Where do you live? AirPods are completely transparent to me, i.e. I don't even consciously notice if a person is wearing them (just like I don't really notice earrings or watches).
This is not a criticism of Blitz which looks fine. From what I can see, it is better than fine.
However, this reminds me of the early Rails (or even Rails 4.0) demos that I saw where they build a blog in 5 minutes.
Here is the thing: The fastest way to get a skeletal app running -- even if it is written in C -- is to
> git clone already_written_archetype.lang
And then you can modify it.
So you can put that archetype into the framework. So I always wonder if the right example is not build a blog or to-do-list or twitter clone. The right example might be:
take a blog and change it into a twitter clone
Because you can always download the archetype if you need to but the framework should demonstrate how nimble it is. (Again, I don't claim Blitz is not nimble and I would have to play with it to know.)
There are allegations that Satoshi may have accidentally slipped up and leaked IP address that was not a Tor exit-node or other anonymous-proxy.
Could either be Satoshi fucking up and not using Tor all the time (has happened to other 'anonymous' entities) or perhaps they needed a clearnet connection for some reason and managed to use another internet connection not attached to any identifiers that would lead back to them despite that.
Before I began my studies in Zen, I thought a tree was a tree and a stone, a stone.
When I started to study Zen, I could see that a tree was not a tree, and a stone was not a stone.
Now that I am a Zen master, I know that a tree is a tree and a stone is a stone.
-- Source: my buddy in college
I think you come full circle to learn that you can only keep so much in your head at one time and that you're always in some sense loading up what you need for the next month or three. At least this time you knew to look for the man su command, and remind yourself of the work you did, that you shared with all these other people.
I do a lot of podcasts or audiobooks while gardening of late. I’m tapering off because it’s not the same experience. I started by listening to just nature based books. It was different. More in some ways, less in others.
If you can’t be alone with your own thoughts then brother are you in a bad place. Everything in moderation.
Reminds me of how after learning how CPUs, memory, operating systems etc work I thought "wow, it really is all ones and zeroes". A simple phrase but it became more meaningful with deeper understanding.
Sorry, but ”computers work by ones and zeroes” is one of my pet peeves.
It is true in the sense that 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science, but really, it is false and almost certainly establishes magical thinking in the layperson.
Modern computers run on electricity, and in electrical circuits such as computers, true/false is represented as a transistor semiconductor being in a conducting or non-conducting state. Current can either flow, or it can’t.
In fact, one could build a computer out almost anything that lends itself to both being on and off, and to being controlled by its on/off state (or that of another equivalent assembly).
> (A) Modern computers run on electricity [not ones and zeroes]
> (B) one could build a computer out almost anything that lends itself to both being on and off
You got it right in B, which is exactly the point when people say computers are just 1s and 0s. Computers are a mathematical concept, not just some electrical device, as you seem to claim in A. The fact that you can build a computer out of water or air pressure or Minecraft Redstone is exactly the point people are making when they say they're built up from 1s and 0s (not electricity, not silicon and copper, not Redstone).
Cut me some slack, I was referring to our beloved contemporary devices when I was saying modern computers in A, so the comparison is a bit apples and oranges.
I'm not trying to nitpick you here; I'm genuinely confused why "Computers are all 1s and 0s under the covers" is a pet peeve of yours! It sounds like you mostly agree with the statement, so I'm just not sure why it would bother you.
Because I have seen so many laypeople operate off the misconstrued idea that computers literally work like that!
Granted, many of these people have been around since before typewriters and phones were a common thing, but the ”1s and 0s” explanation does not offer anything tangible for people who cannot see the trees from the forest (sic), and thus it only widens the ”digital divide”.
From what I've seen the problem is more being that people just take that as the whole truth without considering more interesting ideas that are based on it and make it actually work.
But I don't think this contributes to a "digital divide", people who aren't particularly interested in computers wouldn't be more excited with different wording.
In my experience the best thing to get people interested in computers is to show them more than MS Word in school. Fortunately a substitute teacher was more competent than that and absolutely blew my mind with a for loop.
I think oversimplification is a major contributor to magical thinking, and magical thinking lends itself to continued failures to understand things, especially in the context where the computer is not operating normally.
Imagine if people generally understood that automobile combustion engines work by ”combusting fuel” without knowing anything more about their car.
That’s absolutely true in a sense, but if we left things at that, drivers would probably be inclined to think some kind of magic is happening, because that’s what science thought of combustion for a long time! (see ”Phlogiston theory”)
I wonder how those drivers would explain the functioning of the pedals and the shift knob.
Is 1 indicative of current flowing? Or not flowing? Is that consistent with a given chip, let alone an entire system? Is it always DC current, or can it be AC? In fact, is the 1 represented by current, voltage, and/or frequency?
There's lots of different answers here in different contexts. The reason 1s and 0s are good is because they represent the information in the digital domain, not the implementation in the analogue.
I recall trying to explain how hard drives worked to a guy who didn’t believe me, it was weird because he had aspirations of being a hacker some day. He got really mad “math is math” style when we explained they are analog rounded to binary and that’s why disk erasers exist and take so long (and this was before they got really paranoid).
Then people kept wandering up and agreeing with me and by the end it was practically an intervention.
if only the Carmack level was attainable for us mortals; I've moments where I trick myself into writing passable code but after a little research the same memory order semantics from my IDE stare back at me from Carmack's Doom 3 code 20 years ago. RIP
Kurzgesagt's short video is great too, it's (quasi-)verbatim, but the music, animation and narration makes it quite poignant.
The idea behind the story is quite fascinating to me. If simulationists are right, it's as good or better of a "why" as "origin seeking" IMO. Not that I believe one way or the other, I just think the idea's interesting to ponder on.
It's not nonsense, it's an obviously-tautological statement, made with the full awareness that it's not helpful advice, but used to explain the point. It's one sentence out of a long essay. Later in the essay he provides recipes for coming up with startup ideas, even though he warns that that approach is suboptimal. What more could be asked of him?
It's not empty, it's just way, way! too politely phrased. It's not advice on how to find ideas or how to become that person, but advice on who is ready to give founding a startup a try.
During my career I did freelance mobile app and web development for about 10 years.
In that time I came across many people who wanted to found a tech startup because "that's where the money is" and being a tech startup founder being a status symbol. Some enthusiastic youngsters, but mostly people who had a successful non-tech small business. And they were not the right sort of person and did not have the right hunches, they didn't use what they learned from their non-tech business, but instead sat down over a beer with friends to brainstorm "social-local-viral" app ideas.
The advice instead should be that if you are struggling to come up with startup ideas, you probably aren't the right sort of person at this time. You should do something entirely different for a while until you find a product that just has to exist.
Unfortunately, they had never read HN or PG, nor could I do more than politely refuse their business.
One of my friends went to space and had her life radically changed last year, and the opportunity entirely arose from the fact that she is one of the kindest and nicest people you will ever meet, and if you were tasked with filling the seat on that rocket, she'd be on the top of your list.
She got "lucky" in the sense that narrowly surviving bone cancer as a kid gave her a compelling story, but it's everything she did after getting cancer, and her conviction to follow her dreams, which led to the opportunity.
That documentary was pretty good. It's awesome seeing her leverage the whole situation, interviewing with so many people, joining the SpaceX medical team, she really took the inspiration part of inspiration 4 seriously. Both her and her brother are very kind, her brother is decent at smash bros too.
The things that you think are going to take a long time will take a short time and the things you think will take a short time will take long.
So, for instance, if you have 4 hours scheduled to implement some neural network to optimize X, it may take 30 minutes to type in the algorithm and get it working, but it will take 3 hours to get the environment set up, the version of Tensorflow or whatever up and running, and much longer to type up your results.
So, hopefully, if you expect this, you won't crumple in despair when you find your self 1.5 hours into the time and you haven't even got the right language working with your IDE for that hello world to come up. No, you're right on track, and just keep going.
This looks great so far. Eager to hear from all the people who are going to point out the other platforms that are similar so I can learn about them too.
(1) I don't think this is the reason it did not work. There are lots of things that make you look like a dork -- PCs, airpods etc -- but they took off like rocketships (speaking as someone who adopted these dork items whole heartedly).
(2) I agree it is a mystery why Segways didn't work, but I think it remains an unsolved mystery.
(3) We have more information now that we have lime and other similar items available. (*)
(*) This is actually a point in PG's favor because the lime's are skateboard inspired. But they're not undorky.