realize

Operations research is the art and science of obtaining bad answers to questions to which otherwise worse answers would be given.

I’ve always wondered about this, perhaps someone who understands this subject could explain.

Say matter and antimatter were created in roughly equal proportions then some collided to create energy. Couldn’t then this energy coalesce back to regular matter through the mass-energy equivalence? E=mc^2? Repeat this a bit and you’d end up with more matter than antimatter.

As I said, this is so simple there must be an easy argument against it but I’ve never heard the idea addressed.

Typical Marco: "I respect you too much to put up an email solicitation box or fake queue."

It's not enough to have good taste, you have to point out to people what good taste you have, in case they miss it. Which, ironically, is in poor taste.

I'm interested to see what he comes up with. Given their main job, playing podcasts, most existing apps seem good enough. I use Downcast, and generally like it. There are some things I would prefer worked differently, but 10 people might have 10 different sets of minor annoyances, so I wonder if Overcast will be better for me.

The thing is, I'll probably buy it just to see anyway, and so will many others. For Marco, a customer that buys his app to try it out gives him the same (or more) profit as someone who uses it regularly. As long as it's good enough to suit some people best, he'll have a steady stream of people buying it to see if it suits them best.

The best way to learn is by doing. Set yourself a small goal, perhaps a website with a database back-end. It doesn't matter how good the final product is, you will learn loads by making it and having to research each thing you try to do. The version of the product you would make after 6 months will be far in advance of the one you make after 6 weeks.

If read the right way the responses could still allow for direct access to all their users data through a special API. Direct access to the server itself isn't necessary to get at all the data at will.

His main point (and the title of his article) is that people are stating as fact that apple has fallen, whereas their profits are still stronger than anyone's. This is true, and he must feel like hes in a world of crazy people that its even necessary to point this out.

I've found myself caring less and less what woz thinks lately. He is a significant historical figure in tech and wrt apple, but these days not very relevant.

This really needs screenshots. 95% of my initial judgement of whether I want to investigate an app further is based on screenshots.

Doesn't the principle of universality of computation mean that any processing that happens in a human brain, i.e., "intelligence", can also happen on another computing platform, with sufficient time and memory?

The ability of some traders to make consistent significant profits should be an "existence proof" of the inefficiency of markets. The EMH is just wrong.

Not at all, I think they're insane to think their users will put up with ads. But the amount of revenue from people willing to pay is insignificant. Another way is needed.

Getting pretty tired of these "dear company, let me pay for your product instead of showing me ads" arguments. They show a lack of understanding of business models.

There is nothing at all stunning about that site. Boring corporate design, the link to "try" it blocks you with a login popup, the whole idea of bothering to register or "subscribe" or a dictionary. What is the opposite of stunning?

That headline is serious linkbait. The main point is that the dock connector changing will be a bit inconvenient for existing owners. How does that not make it the best ever? There are so many improvements that it would be stupid to argue that the 4S is better.

"So the essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard,and it does not solve the problem well."

The first I know of is "The Fountains of Paradise" by A.C. Clarke. Great book.

I do this when developing and it's great. I don't mind things small if I can see twice as many of them.

This thread is doomed to become complaints from vim and emacs users. I agree with Marco on the hard to learn, but mainly the ugly comments.

As a recent convert to ST2 from eclipse, I agree with his choice. Also, recently having to use windows at a client site, a portable version of ST2 has been very comfortable.

After a few hours I've switched back to 1920x1200. I still love the huge native resolution, and will switch to it in certain circumstances, but for regular web-browsing, email, text writing, etc, it is more comfortable at 1920x1200.

When I'm developing in Xcode or for the web I will switch back to 2880x1800 to get maximum real-estate for many windows.

I have an rMBP. I had been running it at the largest supported resolution (1920x1200). I just downloaded SwitchResX and set it to 2880x1800.

It seems to work perfectly. Everything is smaller, but perfectly proportioned, and there don't appear to be any weird issues like with windows via bootcamp (which has some things small and others big).

My eyes are good, and this screen real-estate looks amazing so I'm going to give this a go for a few days.

If there was a period of rest in between two sessions then some teams would keep working and get an unfair advantage. It would effectively turn into a 2-day hackathon rather than a 1-day hackathon.

And isn't an extremely big effort kind of the meaning of "-athon"?

1. Convince yourself that success is a lottery and they were just mostly lucky.

2. Embrace your envy and let it push you to strive harder.

3. Stop thinking about others and use your mental energy to focus on what you're doing yourself.

4. Accept that you aren't up to their level and live with your limitations. Not everyone is that capable. Do you spend much time envying olympic athletes your age?

5. [insert another cliche here]

As soon as a company goes public the share price becomes what people talk about instead of other factors. Seems like a disincentive to go public.

It's an interesting idea. There is a possibility though, that Hacker News itself is the only HN-type site that can be successful.

What makes HN work isn't the software, it's the behaviour of the community, which vigorously votes up and flags spammy or off-topic posts. I imagine that a community of tech-minded hackers are the most suited for this activity. I imagine that a large majority of those visiting a fitness-related site would be less tech-savvy and logically-minded.

You are very likely to get a LOT of spam from advertisers, and if the community does not moderate it then you'd need super-users to do it. Maybe digg would be a better model?

True, but if the aircraft carrier is heading in a direction that makes its presence a bit pointless then it needs to be turned, and the captain is probably the one to set that in motion.

It was constant experiences like this that made me try Mac in 2010, and I've never looked back since. Kind of weird that Bill Gates just sends an email about it rather than actually restructuring his business to fix it.

Yes, I gave up at "dichotomously opposed".

I have no idea why these have to be on 28 separate pages. They look nice, but I gave up looking after page 3, so who really knows.

"What if Marissa made it known that Yahoo would be the best tech company in the world for hiring women execs, putting women in leadership positions, and advancing the opportunities for women in the workplace (as Sheryl Sandberg is so well-known for promoting at Facebook)?"

Sounds discriminatory to me.