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T_S_'s comments

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: Everything Changes After Lift

It's Newtonian. People have no appreciation for how far you have come (position) or how fast you are going (speed), but they are extremely sensitive to acceleration. VCs especially so.

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: Why Do Girls Throw Like Girls?

I am calling bullshit.

Amazing Fact (TM): I've been throwing right-handed for my whole life. Make me throw lefty and I throw like a girl. Something to do with an urgent need to get base runners out.

Another Amazing Fact (TM): If you play catch with an Aussie, notice their motion will be more overhanded than yours, if you are a Yank.

It's nurture not nature here. Go get a softball and try to fast pitch. I bet there's a girl nearby that could beat you.

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: Why You Should Quit Your Job to Be a Founder

The OP gives great advice. But I was amused by the Dorsey quote referring to "...founders - who may not have been there at inception."

Let's take some highly desirable attributes in an employee and give them a label "Rockstar". Er, no. "Founder".

When words are the currency of persuasion, expect inflation.

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: An Apology of Sorts: Functional Languages Are (Still) Overrated

I have been using Haskell seriously for about two years now and humorously for a bit longer. For some reason I bought the old sales pitch some time ago. Now that I have a clue about the language I would like to rewrite the sales pitch for anyone considering a move.

Here's what happens in the middle of a big Haskell project.

1) Take some existing code.

2) Refactor (Add a feature, change a record element, etc.)

3) Run ghc, then fix all the errors it reports. Repeat this step as needed.

4) Done.

What would be different in python? For one, no compile errors means very little. How many test cases would you need? How would you find all the places the code must change?

Lesson: A tough, smart compiler can be the programmer's best friend.

Meta-lesson: There is little need to discuss laziness, purity or static typing to "sell" Haskell. They are enablers of ghc. What you need is a big, complicated code base and an urgent need to make changes to it. You won't have that until you get your feet wet.

Is Haskell perfect? No, but I'll save that for an OP that is overhyping the language.

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: How To See The Future

As a corollary to this, keep your eyes on relative prices, incentives and human nature. Dull be highly effective.

What technology does is send some the prices of some actions from infinity to nearly zero. Meanwhile humans remain pretty much unchanged.

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?

Politics is theater. At least under our current setup and probably most others.

Ever notice how little policy is actually discussed even when a supposed policy wonk (e.g. Clinton, Ryan) are giving the speech?

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: What's a $4000 Suit Worth?

Why can't the TSA make me a suit? They already have the measurements. I'm barely half joking here. Seems like this is one of those unsolved "solved problems".

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

Reminds me of my kid's $6000 bump on the head. Or the time I had and knee operation and they took five minutes extra to clean out something they spotted and added $3500 to the bill. Or the eye operation where they took fifteen minutes extra because there was a detached retina adding $9000 to the bill. (Insurance wouldn't pay that one. They never said why either.)

You are not exactly going to negotiate at moments like these.

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed

Not much content in this blog piece. Couple of isolated quotes from a Forbes article from a with no tl;dr on offer.

Instead of "Capitalism is...beautiful" ideology it would be worth focussing on when it works and when it doesn't. Seems that there is strong evidence that capitalism harness human nature, property rights, and incentives to enable production. That's great. There is a lot less discussion about what it takes for markets to allocate resources efficiently. Two of the bigger prerequisites are "no externalities" and "symmetric information". Capitalism has no built-in mechanism to establish these conditions. A lot of our problems today go right to those factors. We could do something about it if our politicians would stop playing to the cheap seats. Sorry capitalism, you're ok but not that beautiful.

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: Patents and Juries

A little story about the jury system. Years ago I was a juror on a murder trial in NYC. The judge was strict beyond belief with the attorneys. He seemed tougher than any hanging judge in a movie, though not unfair. The verdict was reached quickly: guilty. Every one associated with the trial went on with our lives. All but the victim and the defendant.

A year later, the judge retired and published his memoir. A big surprise awaited. He had begun his career as an ACLU lawyer in the 60s but wound up with a tough reputation among the defense bar.

An even bigger surprise awaited me. He devoted a chapter to explaining how hopeless the jury system is. To illustrate, he told the story of a murder case. My murder case. I read, "Never was a defendant more plainly guilty". I agreed, with some relief, but was confused. Why this case?

Turns out my trial was the second trial. At the first, some of the female jurors refused to convict. The defendant was "too good looking to have committed the crime", in their opinion. Mistrial. Then I recalled how, in our later trial, two female jurors wanted to find a way to justify a manslaughter conviction for what was clearly deliberate murder. They felt sorry for the handsome young defendant.

You be the judge (or jury), but if I had not lived it, I would not have believed this could happen.

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: The Boolean Graph

If you make me grade my relationships with people (friend/defriend/link/put in circle etc.) you are making me work. You must reward me for that. On all these social networks my reward for that exercise is actually some negative feelings, netted against the positives of getting my message out properly. Maybe that's one reason Twitter is so popular among some, you don't really need to drop followers, you just tweet.

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: 40% of U.S. food wasted

This is not confined to food. In my house probably 40% of cheap imports end up in the trash in a year or two. During WWII, fully half the U.S. economy was devoted to the war effort. Nobody starved, they just drove on bald tires and stayed in the same house. We need a carbon tax (or a consumption tax, for the climate change deniers) and this sort of thing would disappear.

T_S_ | 13 years ago | on: Ben Horowitz: A Good Place to Work

Someday through historical echo transcription (YC14 perhaps), the real transcript will emerge...

Me: Hi Steve, remember how I asked all the managers to me with their direct reports 1-on-1 at least once every six months.

Steve: No, when was that?

Me: Never mind. I heard that Tim didn't do that.

Steve: Do what?

Me: Meet with his direct reports. 1-on-1.

Steve: Oh yeah. Reminds me, great Celtics game last night, huh?

Me: I tivo'd it and caught the last 5 minutes live. Saves a shitload of time wasted on commercials. Cable is gonna die a painful death. What were we talking about? Oh yeah. Please tell Tim to follow up or I will be pissed.

Steve: Sure you don't want to tell him yourself? He never listens to me.

Me: OK, maybe tomorrow. Remind me in 24 hours.

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