HN user
Folks who found this article interesting will also appreciate Nathan Altice's book "I AM ERROR" which looks at how the NES's various technical decisions and limitations influenced the NES's lasting cultural legacy. The book contains a surprising amount of technical depth combined with history, business, and sociology. It's really excellent.
Given the current state of the world, perhaps it's not a good thing that philosophical thinking has taken a backseat.
For something more accessible, also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8TlTaTHgzo
So how do you hire effectively as a CEO? There are too many areas for you to be knowledgeable, yet you need to be able to hire top talent across a variety of areas.
Indeed - you can even extend this idea to only identify factors less than or equal to the square root - all factors greater than this have a matching factor less than the square root.
It's particularly interesting that Slack's CEO upvoted that answer - I wonder if that's because the answer was accurate or he was just amused.
Like others have mentioned, I'm very interested in how the author arrived at the ratio of '3'. At the very least this ratio doesn't take into account how capital intensive a company is, since fixed costs seem to be what's left (my understanding could be wrong here depending on which definition of 'margin' is being implied here).
Wouldn't this imply that a company with a lower ratio that is not very capital intensive would have a higher "corrected ratio" than a company which is much more capital intensive (or even simply has a higher cost of capital)?
The person leading this effort is literally the second Justin.tv hire from many years ago.
I know of one interesting story here. Early on in (what would eventually become a very successful) tech company's life, they acquired some collocated space for free thanks to a friend (call him Brad) of an early employee.
Eventually Brad left that particular DC operator, leaving the startup with no inside contact - but the servers stayed up for years to come (and the company was never charged for the resources).
These machines were eventually "replaced" with newer hardware in a nearby facility, but the DC operator has no idea where these old machines are physically located within the facility (thus cannot remove them), so they remain active to this very day, sitting idly by...
This is an existing team who has already shown they can work and accomplish things together. Buying the best individual labor on the free market may not create as strong a whole as just hiring a team outright - this seems like a pretty good economic decision, considering risk/reward.
That's NOT what adverse selection is.
It's absolutely an adverse selection problem - insurance companies, as you say, can't necessarily price based on your existing health condition (not only because of regulations, but also because of asymmetrical information which is too costly, if not impossible to obtain).
As a result, healthy people will choose not to purchase health insurance, since due to the adverse selection problem, there doesn't exist a mutually beneficial transaction for both parties (insurance policies have to price for the average due to the lack of health data, which is economically disadvantageous for the healthy to take). And thus begins the adverse selection death spiral[1]
For one, it reduces the effects of adverse selection[1]. The idea is that everyone reaps economic benefits through such programs, as an average company will have a pool of workers, some who are "healthy" although others may have medical problems.
Compare this to a individuals wanting health insurance - if they're young and healthy they're less likely to want to pay much for insurance, which leaves older and sicker people to pay higher and higher premiums. Of course this is really only an issue with privatized insurance and is a great argument for having a single-payer solution.
How am I supposed to know, before I click on a link, if the ads supporting the site I'm about to visit are "bad" or not?
A possible solution would be to develop an adblock product which whitelisted "good" ad networks by default (I think adblock plus has this feature for google ads at least). Getting that list populated and maintaining it would be tricky but feasible.
Advertisers also love to serve video ads on a flash platform because it lets them perform custom analytics, logic, etc.
What if a coalition of California-based companies sent emails to their employees informing them of the potential harm this bill could do to their company (and thus each employee's livelihood) with an appeal to send a snail-mail or phone up their senators/representatives?
I think especially if the giants (Google, Facebook, etc) got significant amounts of employees to do it then our Congresspeople would take notice. Even if not I think there's enough influence on hackernews to maybe make a difference.
Of course this has potential in any state, but the concentration of software companies in California makes it particular interesting IMO.
It looks like the most commonly-used adjective to describe Jobs was "great" - I wonder how many of those instances were actually "insanely great".
This series of articles[1] goes into some depth in explaining why certain countries (and ethnicities) dominate various sports - this includes an in-depth discussion of why Kenyans are so good at distance running. The author focuses on genetics, location, support, training, incentives, culture, etc. of various combinations of these sports and the countries that seem to dominate them.
It's not yet complete and is quite lengthy, but it's one of the most fascinating things I've read in some time. While the title seems to make the article focuses solely on Olympic Weightlifting, but the main focus is much more general, and is about uncovering recurring patterns between countries who dominate various sports.
[1] http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/training/why-the-us-sucks-a...
Not very easy if they want to maintain compatibility with existing clients (especially considering they haven't updated their linux client for years now).
(Disclaimer, I'm not an expert, but I can squat well over 1.5x my weight for several reps)
For squats, you should make sure to go parallel and "sit back" at the bottom of the movement, while pushing your knees out to the sides as you go down. This takes the stress of the weight off of your knees and onto your posterior chain. Otherwise you'll get hurt knees just as you described.
Not sure what could cause that deadlift problem, other than maybe trying to lift with your back before the bar clears your knees (which until that point your legs should be doing most of the lifting).
FWIW, it took me a long time to really get comfortable with my technique in the heavy compound exercises, but I've seen remarkable gains from them once I learned proper technique.
If you're really serious about doing the core exercises with proper technique, I strongly recommend picking up a copy of Mark Rippetoe's "Starting Strength" book. It goes into great detail the correct technique and mechanics behind the exercises.
How many of those 25k employees actually handle any of the infrastructure scaling?
"If it makes me feel good just after waking up for an hour or so, then is it really that useful?"
If I retain my daytime alertness, I think so :) Morning grogginess is pretty much the worst part of my day and I think $60 to make it go away is a pretty good deal.
Students interested in one day becoming founders may enjoy the software design contest. I did this contest when I was a freshman in college, and I loved it.
My friend and I decided to register about 5 days before the competition. In those 5 days, we came up with a business idea, designed the application (which consisted of a server, a web ui, and a desktop application), coded it up, and prepared our presentation.
Great practice for a YC interview IMO. You come up with an idea, demo it, and convince a panel how awesome it is.
Based on their engineering puzzles[1], I'd maybe expect problems geared more towards approximation/heuristics. The GCJ problems always require exact answers.
You'd be surprised at how often a cleverly chosen data structure or algorithm can improve a web app. For instance, where I work our frontend code uses tries, heaps, and other data structures (and using these makes the user experience noticeably and measurably better than using slower data structures).
In particular, a good hash table implementation will have O(1) amortized complexity [1] (i.e. average complexity over a worst-case sequence of operations). Since in the Real World we deal with sequences of operations rather than single ones, saying that hash tables provide O(1) operations is quite correct.
I'll take it to mean that (given the 1 in 30 million estimate and that there are well over 250 million outgoing airplane seats filled per year by U.S. airlines), the expected number of scans which will cause cancer is nearly 10. That's 10 people who's lives may be put in very real danger.
It doesn't make a very good soundbite, but it plays well to the climate of hysteria!