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msg | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?

Not for every reader but Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) is something between historical fiction and science fiction. Worth a try in your case.

Also, it's hard to go wrong with the yearly Hugo Award winners and nominees. Sometimes they are middle entries in long running series, which is worth checking on Wikipedia if you like to start at Book 1. Usually it is just going to mean the whole series is great.

How about a few great authors who have all won?

  Ursula K LeGuin
  Lois McMaster Bujold
  CJ Cherryh
  Connie Willis
  Jo Walton

msg | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?

Anna Karenina. It's probably my favorite book, and this is probably read #7 or so.

It's a very observant novel about love and marriage and adultery and divorce in most every permutation, life and death and meaning.

It's different every time I read it and has something to say to readers in any phase of life.

msg | 11 years ago | on: Bezos Faces Season of Worsts as Losses Mount

Amazon is a service oriented organization. In the technical teams at least, there is a strong pressure to evolve to fit your niche, and grow independently behind the safety of a well defined interface.

So a lot depends on the niche. Big awesome service, performance, security, frontend, startup, tools... Cost center or profit center. Secret consumer project or retail.

msg | 11 years ago | on: Amazon’s Cloud Is Growing So Fast It’s Scaring Shareholders

IMHO skirting the rules is legal. If you care about Amazon's behavior because of the law you should have no problem here. If you care about local presence for some other reason you should be talking about that instead.

You can't blame companies for operating within the four corners of the law. Perhaps you would prefer that they break the law.

msg | 11 years ago | on: Master Emacs in one year

Also, and this is weird, you can get vi bindings in emacs through editing modes like viper-mode or evil. So if you want, in emacs you can have both.

In contrast, you will never see emacs inside of vim.

msg | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: any advice for someone changing career to become a software engineer?

I said an undergraduate level education. By which I mean knowing the things a CS undergraduate knows, not that you go to a brick and mortar university.

They are not useless abstractions for people to write mathematical papers about. These ideas are what enable you to proceed deeper when your framework leaks and breaks.

Anyway we are probably in violent agreement.

msg | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: any advice for someone changing career to become a software engineer?

The dirty secret of software is scalability. Scalability to big O, big O to algorithms, algorithms to computer science. How do you like me now.

You don't want to use the right software language or framework with the wrong approach. You want to be able to reason clearly about the core problem and understand the tradeoffs of different classic solutions. Or invent a brand new approach. Or invent a framework or invent a language if necessary.

Consider this a plug for at least undergrad level education in CS. You can learn most of the rest of it on the job, but not computational thinking.

msg | 12 years ago | on: Humble Indie Bundle X – Pay what you want and help charity

People will be cagey about this game because they don't want to spoil it, but it's a game where you play a scientist team that provides unique services to the elderly.

Its gameplay lacks depth and has some annoying sections even, but as interactive narrative it has few rivals.

msg | 12 years ago | on: How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood

At the top of the article is a Netflix genre generator. That is worth the price of admission all by itself.

But then there's a fairly entertaining look into what happened to content at Netflix after the million dollar challenge.

msg | 12 years ago | on: Watsi Lands $1.5M Donation From Humble Bundle

Is this just a bottom line of their donations through customer purchases of Humble Bundles? That is, when people buy Humble Bundle X, they can specify the money goes to charity, the developers, or Humble. Watsi has been a featured charity along with the Red Cross and EFF.

Or is this a separate donation from the Humble Bundle leadership or such?

msg | 12 years ago | on: Dan Ariely: At $61K a Year, College Is a Bargain

I think the headline is a fair cop, especially because the first question right out of the gate is, is $61K for a year of Cornell too expensive? Ariely says "It's too cheap," and goes on from there about the value of in-person education vs online education. He conducted an experiment on his students and found that the more in-person one of his lectures was, the better their subjective experience was.

That said, he is in a very interesting position to explore both sides of the question. It's not too hard to project out into the future and believe university education could finally change in your lifetime. But the people who are in the trenches actually gathering data have the most to say right now.

msg | 12 years ago | on: Facebook reveals friends list even when it’s set to private

This notion makes sense to me. The more public or quotidian your thoughts and behavior, the greater chance that people will be able to nail you down. And there are interesting feedback loops when you go public, then people expect you to continue to be public in similar situations.

There is an interesting tension between the benefits of collaboration and the benefits of individuality. John Lennon and Paul McCartney playing off each other, or Andrew Wiles working alone in obscurity.

Surprise and disruption are closely linked to privacy in my mind. Not necessarily by launch time. But the groundwork for originality to me is laid in the soil of a rich inner life.

msg | 12 years ago | on: Facebook reveals friends list even when it’s set to private

Right, when preferences are in conflict do you protect the person who cares or the person who doesn't?

Also privacy is like a thermodynamic arrow. You can't unspread a secret or make public information private. So you shouldn't treat the decision to go public lightly.

msg | 12 years ago | on: Landmark Senate Vote Limits Filibusters

Just a shot across the bow.

If we continue to see blanket obstructionism on legislation, I expect to see the filibuster limited there too (or made more difficult). That is when the cannonballs will start flying.

msg | 12 years ago | on: Secondhand Vapor? Americans are Split on Public E-Cigarette Use

Beside the point, but the graphics are a little hard to read because they don't range from strong approve to strong disapprove. The first graph is:

  Strong approve
  Approve
  Strong disapprove
  Disapprove
  Neutral
It would make much more sense in the spectrum from negative to positive. It would also look like a bell curve on that particular graph.

  Strong approve
  Approve
  Neutral
  Disapprove
  Strong disapprove
This happened to the other graphs in this article too.
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