fbbwsa

backgammon.

started playing it recently when i got a new job and the guys at my new firm play it. fun as hell.

high fructose corn syrup.

obesity becomes the new norm. everyone gets so fat they can't walk around, global production grinds to a halt. Nobody can remember how to hunt or farm since its so long since our sedentary society has engaged in such primitive practices.

the irony is that we all die of starvation in the aftermath of our obesity. slow acting doomsday.

haha, actually made me laugh. funniest HN comment I've read in a while.

Wow!

Insightful! I guess I happen to be the very rare counterexample in that at some point in every interview process I've been through, I've been asked questions like the ones the author says won't get me hired.

And I've never been asked "can you do this job?" (not so bluntly anyways, though obviously you are evaluated on that to some degree)

Those questions don't mean you are not getting hired at all. They are (for better or for worse) standard practice by HR personnel. They might not tell you anything about a candidates capacity to do a job, but a lot of times personality fit is just as important. And I can tell a lot about a person by their answers to really stupid questions (even if they are canned, planned out, rehearsed responses).

I want to work with cool people and have the pleasure of doing so. If competency was the only factor my firm asked for when hiring, I'd probably be working somewhere else.

Ability is a necessary, but insufficient condition for employment, in my opinion.

THATS why the employers ask you the questions that "Mean You're Not Getting Hired"

Wow, that is one of the worst articles I have ever read by Gladwell.

I generally think Gladwell is overrated, but at least provides interesting anecdotes. I was sorely tempted to quit reading it about 2/3 through, but then I thought "maybe he'll tie together the 'football quarterback selection' story with the 'teacher selection' story in a meaningful way." But no. This would have been more interesting as a piece about either just college football quarterback selection or just the question of incentivising a high level of primary/secondary school education. In the context of the article, they're really not the same question

I'm not against open ended questions and unresolved endings, but the analogy was strained, lacked interesting content. And I am interested in both college football and the "quality of US secondary school education" debate...

The Gladwell love-fest is getting out of hand. I've enjoyed his writing to date for the most part, despite thinking that it was not quite as groundbreaking as some people seem to insinuate. But now, anyone will publish him just because he's Gladwell.

link? and is it free?

i wish somebody would create an exchange where buyers and sellers of stock could synthetically place bets on these companies.

i'd love to shortsell facebook at its latest official valuation.

i love this idea.

it amazes me that people can deconstruct organic life as being just mechanical robots built with organic parts, then try to make their own organic robots that "live" (have biological processes, reproduce, etc.)

science is cool.

:)

but gmail is good. and we like it.

being corporate != departure from quality.

its not really fair to say that the burden rests on hackers and startup founders to promote/use small providers. small providers also have a responsibility to innovate and compete to provide superior products. It is the responsibility of end users to choose the application that suits their needs best.

If small providers aren't competitive with gMail, then gMail will maintain its large marketshare and continue to receive attention from its users.

More interesting to me is the question of what actions can be taken to get on the winning side of this.

If its really so inevitable, what sort of positions can I put on to profit the most from this?

cool.

first thing i wanted to do was to add some companies and find out what the highest salaries were.

unfortunately i had to hit next a bunch of times to get there. would be kind of cool if there were sort features or the option to control how many results per page.

can you refer me to the previously posted link to the source data you are using?

i know this is a terrible thing to say... but...

I love bluefin tuna. its delicious. knowing that i might not be able to eat it in a few years leaves me conflicted between increasing consumption for my personal enjoyment (at the cost of the burden of knowing that I'm accelerating bluefin toward its extinction) and decreasing personal consumption for the small moral victory that I at least tried to help keep a species on earth (at the cost of decreased sushi enjoyment).

If God wanted bluefin to survive, maybe He should have made them less tasty.

like the idea.

i'm definitely a believer that the "restaurant/food reviews" space is underdeveloped. Yelp and Citysearch have great reach, but I feel like its not giving me what I want.

Check out: http://www.dishola.com/

incidentally, i still think somebody should write an article about what the community thinks is "Fair" compensation.

Skip past the "it depends" dialogue (which granted is important), and describe some border cases:

1. founders are jerks/morons, no faith in idea 2. founders are cool, but morons, no faith in idea 3. founders are cool, smart, misguided idea that might be able to be changed to work 4. founders are good + good idea

in case 1, i suspect most people only work for money in case 4, i suspect some people will be willing to work for equity or money or some combination.

In case 1, the "compensation" including money probably has to be higher to put up with a crappy job.

In case 4, how much $ would it take in a "salary only" situation. In a split, how much equity and salary would you require?

2 and 3 are somewhere in between.

I've always been curious what people think fair compensation is for early stage startups.

99,71,34, Sqrt(8), ... http://xkcd.com/487/

lets talk.

my gmail account is fbbwsa@

claude shannon = biggest stud ever.

i highly recommend "Fortune's Formula".

Great read. Smart dudes (Shannon, Ed Thorpe), blackjack, casinos, financial markets, and more.

http://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Formula-Scientific-Betting-Ca...

I'm going to do the thing that makes it seem like I'm a suckup, but I'm unaffiliated with YC:

PG mentions this in his articles about Bayesian Spam filtering. Seems pretty compelling.

agree. can't argue with the results, traffic, and revenue of Drudge report.

Design can mean a lot of things, but the kind of "design" i care about when presenting information can be evaluated independently of its "results, traffic, and revenue".

Results, maybe. Not sure why Jason makes such a point about the success of the site. Seems almost like "because its so popular, it must be good design".

McDonalds sells the most burgers, that doesn't mean it makes the best burgers.

Even from the "results" perspective, its hard to believe that the results are good BECAUSE of the design. If apple.com turned its page to all text, I think it'd still have great traffic. Unless you consider "being at the right place at the right time when there were no serious competitors" a critical design component of Drudge Report, I have to disagree with Jason's assessment.

sexy 21 year old college co-ed looking for an older man to "show me the ropes" if you know what I mean.

NSA.

On that note, what sort of compensation IS acceptable?

I'd join someone with a vision I believed in/thought would succeed for no salary and all equity.

I wouldnt give up any $ salary for equity to work for a concept I didn't believe in.

How much would it take for you to work for all salary and no equity? I feel like the general consensus in the community seems to be that people undervalue/underpay developers but despite all that I've never really had an idea of what the asking price really is, except that its probably somewhere between 50k and 150k

i love the taste of g-undecalactone. and the sweet, slightly citrusy overtones remind me of freedom.

isobutyl anthranilate is only so-so though.

since we've already established that i was out of line, i just thought i'd revisit this topic of pseudoscience vs science since:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/18.html

currently (as of Nov 19, 7:40am CST) is the number one ranked post on HN.

I think it reflects both of our sentiments.

Incidentally, I went to UT Austin as well.

annoyingly addictive. tower defense = untold hours of my life that i will never get back...

A++++++ would waste that time again if given the option (and would also be annoyed that i did)

hmm... correct.

my apologies, offense not intended, though looking back I can see that wasn't the nicest post by me. You didn't claim it was science and you're right it shouldn't be critiqued as such.

i AM a scientist by training, so sometimes the stuff i see on the internet people try to pass off as science perturbs me. i wrote that hastily after a quick read of the article and i confess i was out of line.

And you know what? I don't have a problem with it, and even if someone does, you should tell 'em to screw off. Worse than bad science, is when one person tries to prevent others from the act of content/idea creation. naysayers provide no value and you're right to be annoyed by my response. my initial response to your article wasn't intended to be in that spirit, so my bad, guy.

keep it up.

you are correct, I skimmed/misread the post. I thought it 75 richest LIVING people (and could not for the life of me figure out why they were using such an old Forbes list...), not in history.

Thats why I was assuming we could assume dead people and those under 25 wouldn't be as relevant and fit all potential candidates to a 50-ish year birth-year block.

Taking any arbitrary 9 year period in a 50 year period and finding that it captured ~20% didn't seem odd to me, which is why I screwed up with my bad argument.

Good catch.

wait, you didn't include a way to contact you.

i tried emailing to: join("adam", "@", "8planes", ".com")

but my email client returned an error.

Sort of a terrible example by the author (Gladwell, I guess), I think with regards to the wealth creation window being limited to those born between 1831 to 1840.

don’t see why its surprising at all that 14/75 of the richest people in the country came from a given 9 year time period.

Since we don’t know what the distribution looks like, lets grind through this.

If we had no a priori reason to suspect that that particular 9 year period is different from any other, we might think that 75/14*9 ~48 years encompasses all 75 of the richest people 75 people in the country. If we expected that 9 year birth period to show more wealth creation then we should see MORE than 19% representation.

In a time where most people didn’t accumulate their wealth quite as early, lets imagine that people could even imagine to START getting rich at 25 (remember this is a time where instant wealth creation via the internet didn’t exist). Add 48 years to that, and we’re at an age of 73.

Current life expectancy is 78 in the United States and it was lower back then.

So… the claim that 14/75 of the richest people were born within a 9 year period is not inconsistent with the null hypothesis that being born in that 9 year time bracket shows absolutely no proclivity towards wealth creation than any other equivalent 9 year time period.

love that article.

i wonder how much better it works for tall suave sophisticated types vs short stubby fat types.

the diner's appearance is probably more important than the "tip".