Per folks in the know, Google doesn't give itself any preferential treatment.
Try searching for 'search' with Google. Google itself (perhaps the best known search engine) comes in at result #20 -- at the bottom of the second page of search results.
I'm sorry, I try very hard to avoid being the typical arrogant internet jackass, but I just can't not respond to that.
I'm an athlete first, and a technology worker second. And what you just said ("better to ... use a machine that isolates ... while not straining unrelated muscles") is the fitness equivalent of something that would be a top post on The Daily WTF.
That is almost exactly the wrong idea. I mean, so precisely opposite of correct information that I hope you didn't write that as a joke and I'm not getting it.
The only time isolation movements make sense is if you're already a very competitive bodybuilder who walks around with hundreds of pounds of lean muscle mass. Otherwise, isolation movements (especially when performed on machines rather than with free weights) are a genuinely terrible idea. At absolute _best_ they will make you gain muscle and lose weight vastly more slowly than you could. Most likely, they'll make you wind up with a chronic injury.
Please, please, please don't go to the gym and work on machines. Do compound movements instead. If you're interested in making physical improvements, go pick up Starting Strength. It's $30 and the author is an absolute genius.
[That was officially my first flame. I feel so hollow inside ...]
I'm not a salesman, so I've never tried this technique for sales, but I'm always surprised how much better people can understand things when I diagram them in real time using a piece of paper than with any fancy infographics I might have carefully constructed ahead of time.
I completely understand how you feel. I've been there.
I think a key takeaway from that article, that the author didn't get around to stating explicitly, is that for a 'sociopath', _everything_ is a negotiation. Everything. In fact, all of Powertalk is subtle positional negotiation hidden in everyday language. (For the security research-minded, I think a helpful metaphor might be covert channel information attacks/information passing).
If Powertalk is negotiation, then learning how to actually negotiate might help. Luckily, there are hundreds if not thousands of books written on the subject. _Negotiation Genius_, by Malhotra, _Bargaining for Advantage, by Snell, and _Negotiating Game_, by Karrass are all seminal works. I've found them helpful.
(Note that these books are usually written from the perspective of someone trying to sell a thing or a service. It takes a bit of a mental leap to figure out how to apply these strategies to the rest of life, but if you're intelligent enough to be a reader of Hacker News, I'm sure it won't be that hard.)
The Economist has an established editorial slant and actively practices advocacy journalism.
You're looking for The Christian Science Monitor. Their whole reason for being is avoiding sensationalist reporting (biased reporting, I'd argue, is impossible to avoid completely). They go so far as to not use any of the wire services, so that biases don't creep in there, and use their own on-the-ground reporters instead.
What's tragic is that news sources like that are being plowed under along with the Fox Newses of the world with everyone's decision that "eh, blogs are just as good."
(edit: Well that's embarrassing. Apparently HTML markup doesn't work here.)
That's not true of T-Mobile, Google's provider of choice:
The plans that subsidize their phones start from $60 a month for unlimited, and the unlimited plans that don't subsidize phones start from $50 a month.
This may, of course, vary from provider to provider. I'm only familiar with T-Mobile.
So many people (Gladwell, Cohen, and apparently the Brazen Careerist person) have referenced this 10,000 hours claim, but no one has cited the actual research paper that came up with this notion. The paper actually addresses almost all of his points.[1]
"There are more high school swimmers than ever, therefore more opportunities to find and train great swimmers. They have access to diet, training, technology, and facilities that didn't exist years ago. That's all."
Yes! That's the point! The authors of the research point out that "the fastest time for the marathon in the 1896 Olympic Games was just a minute faster than the required entry time in ... races such as the Boston Marathon," _because_ people now know the proper way to focus their efforts at practice.[2] 'Practice,' here, being training and diet. But it still takes 10 years or so of _deliberate practice_ to become world class. It's just that the bar for world class has been moved.
"I'm a case in point: I practiced the piano for an hour a day for more than ten years. I became good, but there were others who practiced twice as much who were worse, and still others who practiced less and are much better."
Again, he is unwittingly supporting the 10,000 hours claim. The study points out that "the view that merely engaging in a sufficient amount of practice, regardless of the structure of that practice leads to maximal performance has a long and contested history."[3] It is not just 'putting in the hours' that matters (because then one falls into the trap of assembly-line-worker syndrome, where "improvement of performance was often arrested at less than maximal levels"), but rather what it calls "deliberate practice," which takes quite a bit of very hard work and practice tasks that are defined in a very specific way. (There's a good description of the characteristics of deliberate practice on p. 367 of the study). That is, people who just practice for hours without much thought as to what that practice should be and how it will challenge them in new ways are doomed to be less successful than those who are coached through a process of deliberate practice. It's quality, not quantity.
All that being said, I don't think being an entrepreneur actually has anything to do with being an expert. It's much more luck and hard work. Cohen gets around to saying this too. I agree with him. I'm just not sure why he felt the need to try to refute the current literature on becoming a domain expert to say, "Hey, becoming a domain expert probably isn't your goal. Your goal is to become an innovative entrepreneur."
--> Edit 2: Oops. The Harvard Business Review article that Penelope Trunk talks about was actually written by the same person who wrote the paper that I cited and the book that matrix referenced, so my "but no one has cited the actual research" claim was inaccurate: http://www.coachingmanagement.nl/The%20Making%20of%20an%20Ex...
Well, you cited music performance, but so did the guy who did the research everyone who talks about "10,000 hours" is referencing:
"Even in music there is evidence for improved skill. When Tchaikovsky asked two of the greatest violinists of his day to play his violin concerto, they refused, deeming the score unplayable (Platt, 1966). Today, elite violinists consider this concerto part of the standard repertory. The improvement in music training is so great that according to Roth (1982) the violin virtuoso Paganini "would indeed cut a sorry figure is placed upon the modern concert stage" (p. 23)." [1] There are no stationary targets.
He uses this as evidence that the notion that "a sufficient amount of experience or practice leads to maximal performance appears to be incorrect" [2]
Yup, the correct signal might not get through if you don't have perfect shielding. And a speck of dust on a CD could theoretically ruin a whole song.
That's why CDs (and cellphones, modems, and countless other digital devices) use channel encoding.[1] That way you don't have to have a perfectly noise-free signal to reconstruct the original information.
I don't know that many specifics of the DVD or Blu-Ray standards, but I'd put money on them using Reed-Solomon or something similar.
I have an Apple store right next to my house, so I stopped by today to play with an iPad.
He's right about the smudgey screen -- though supposedly both the iPad and iPhone have oleophobic screens, the iPad was noticeably worse than the iPhone.
Granted, several thousand fingers running over it for 16 hours a day probably wasn't the intended use case.
This isn't entirely related, and it's for a totally different reason, but analog watches in advertisements almost always read the same thing, too: 10:10.[1]
Supposedly it's because the watch hands form a 'smile', and this is supposed to evoke feelings of happiness in potential buyers.[2] I'd never noticed it before, but ever since someone pointed it out to me, I've noticed it in _every single_ watch ad I've seen.
I've dabbled in this field in my job, but I don't have any real training, so I've had to teach myself.
The classic text in this field is _The Design of Everyday Things_, by Donald Norman.[1] Also very useful is _Interaction Design_.[2] The first is a very quick read (it's only about 200 pages, and not very technical), while the second is a textbook intended for use in university courses on HCI.
I've found both very valuable in trying to figure out how users approach things without any formal cognitive science or HCI training.
"Del Percio argues, is that the brains of athletes are more efficient, so they produce the desired result with the help of fewer neurons. Del Percio’s research suggests that the more efficient a brain, the better job it does in sports. ... but even the most genetically well-endowed prodigy clearly needs practice—-lots of it—-to develop the brain of an athlete. As soon as someone starts to practice a new sport, his brain begins to change, and the changes continue for years."
This is what physical education was supposed to be about. Unfortunately, it's turned into, at best, an incompetent teacher with a whistle shouting at kids, or, at worst, disappeared altogether. I think we, as a society, are missing out on something pretty big.
Sketerpot's pretty much right. I'm no actual PE historian (somehow I doubt such a thing exists), but I've heard several times that what the article describes is how it was supposed to work. It probably never did work that way, though.
I'm really reaching here, but I'm pretty sure that idea goes back to Plato, if not even earlier.
His thesis seems to be that he didn't like language classes very much, and that some colleges don't require language knowledge anymore, so we should do away with them.
Why 'waste time' with languages? I can rattle off a few reasons: the goal isn't to teach only subjects that people enjoy, but to help create productive and responsible citizens of not only our country, but of the entire world. Particularly in this age of globalization, it's increasingly important for people to have knowledge of languages other than English.
Further, the earlier one starts with language education, the better one is at learning _all_ languages later in life. It also makes traveling vastly easier.
It's also usually the case that by learning the language of a people, you begin to have a much better understanding of their culture. Even for people who have no intention of leaving the borders of the United States, it's becoming harder and harder to count on English being spoken in all parts of the country.
Or, shorter: because it makes you a better person. Screw getting into college.
Holy crap -- I went to college with that guy. I always knew he was really, really into Starcraft, but I had no idea he had legions of internet followers.
Somehow, even with doing all that, he had time to do some really interesting math research. You'll find quite a few results if you search for him on Google Scholar.
" Treat me like a human. Have a zillion power ports. Have free wifi. Have desks to sit at. Spare computers ala libraries. Have restaurants with food that isn't so horrible. How about couches or rocking chairs? How about a library? ..."
Most of those things exist in airline lounges.
"My dream airline would be one where I could be dropped off on the tarmack, hop on the next plane that is taking off (think bus stop) and be on my way. No getting there three hours in advance."
That exists. They're called charter flights.
"Still doesn't help that at the end of the day airports are typically not at your destination."
Charter flights for that, too. You can use smaller airports that are likely close to your destination.
So all those things already exist. It's just that they're really expensive. So really the dream is to have first class lounges and charter flights available cheaply and for the masses. That's probably never going to happen, because such things really do cost a lot of money to run and because then there would be even less differentiation for the expensive tickets.
I'm really quite a layman in this area, but I've heard the overselling argument quite a lot, and I'd be interested in hearing why it might not be a valid one.
_The Princeton Companion to Mathematics_ is the closest thing to what you're looking for that I know of.
I have a copy, and it's wonderful for looking up common topics in mathematics. The problem is that math is so enormous as a field that you'd essentially have to print and bind every journal article ever written to truly encompass all of the current mathematical knowledge.
[Somewhat off-topic from bicycles in cities; my apologies.]
Do you not get sweaty on motorcycles? Even with a fully mesh jacket, I arrive everywhere _drenched_. In the height of the summer, I put on an athletic shirt and keep my real shirt in a bag to change into when I get to my destination.
If anything, I'd say bicycles are better because it's difficult to go fast enough to require the safety gear that a motorcycle does.
Disclaimer: new motorcyclist, used to race bicycles at a high level; I'm kind of a pedal head.
I'm paraphrasing Jay Leno who was being interviewed on a car show, so take this with the appropriate number of grains of salt, but ...
I'd like to see cars go the way of the horse. Horses used to be used for transportation, everybody had one, and they were abused to a huge degree. Then cars came along, and now horses are kept just by enthusiasts who care for them a great deal and go riding for fun every once in a while.
I think the best of both worlds would be for [insert your car alternative of choice here] to develop enough to replace the car for commuting and errands, with just a few thousand cars for people who like to drive them around tracks or through the countryside every once in a while.
I'm really not trying to be mean, but imagine your ancestors for a second. You know, the guys who ran down and killed animals that weighed several tons. Imagine how befuddled they'd be, sweating and bloodied from defeating the mastodon that just tried to kill them, when you told them that you can't be bothered to stand up for a little while while you type. It says something pretty embarrassing about society when we've collectively decided that myriad orthopedic problems are better than standing up.
That rant over with (sorry, again), I just went to the local hardware store and got some cinder blocks. The price difference (~$7 for the cinder blocks versus ~$1000 for a height-adjustable desk frame) was worth the slight lack of convenience. That, and without the adjustability, I won't be tempted to just leave the desk in the 'down' position.
However, I did have someone with a Ph.D. in kinesiology (I think?) tell me that there's essentially no evidence of knee, hip, or back dysfunction in developing countries where people don't sit all day.
The reason that I don't experience that might have something to do with my latent hyperactive tendencies. With my standing desk, I'm able to pace around the office, walk to the whiteboard, and then return to the keyboard.
I think that helps me focus more, and it's probably one reason that I don't get sore from standing in one spot. Others may experience different results.
This is sort of off-topic because it's not using Mathematica, but this[1] is another really neat intruder detection system that I've found that's surprisingly accurate.
It's based on a technology[2] created by the guy who made Palm.
And here's a guy trying to fool it and mostly failing.[3]
They don't have the adjustability of the app, because they're just tinted glass or plastic, but ChromaGen already makes contact lenses that do essentially what the app does.[1]
I'm mildly colorblind myself, but I haven't tried them to see how they work. The thing is, mild forms of colorblindness really don't affect everyday life much, so I can't see a point in treating it in most cases.
I'm really struggling to think of a strength training scenario where your heart rate wouldn't be elevated (thus increasing blood flow). Consider a max. back squat, where all your muscles are contracting to the maximum degree that they can for several seconds. I'd say that'll make your heart pump.
(Thanks for the citations. That's awesome, and I wish more people would do it.)
> We can build new software to do anything we want ...
I'm being really pedantic here, but you actually can't. There are actually uncountably which are impossible to solve with an algorithm. There's a (by necessity) incomplete list of examples at: [1].
I think your mistake is in assuming that he meant a standard, FDIC-insured savings account by "in the bank." It's not terribly hard to find ~5% dividend yields in the stock market, particularly if you look outside the United States.
Further, in the US, once you have a net worth of a million dollars, you qualify as an accredited investor, opening up a plethora of new investment opportunities to you.[1]
Along the lines of blown out knees in gymnastics is the incredibly inspiring story of Shun Fujimoto, who injured himself during a gymnastics routine in the Olympics, and then kept competing.[1] Per the Wikipedia article on the guy, "One doctor stated: 'How he managed to do somersaults and twists and land without collapsing in screams is beyond my comprehension.'"[2]
Watching that video and reading his story quickly put an end to my complaints of "but I need a nice ergonomic keyboard to be able to work at all!"
That's really surprising on the health care front. I think many westerners (myself included) think of Japan as a paragon of efficiency and effectiveness in nearly everything.
Can you elaborate on what's wrong with the system?
I don't think the two are _necessarily_ contradictory.
The article says, essentially, that a basic strength and conditioning program is the way to go. The GP says that picking a sport that makes you fit is the way.
To add another opinion, that ties the two together, to the mix: think of the fittest people you know. To a person, they're probably obsessed with their chosen sport (which may be soccer, or bodybuilding, or weightlifting, or running, or ...). These people live and breathe their sport, and when they're not doing it or training for it, they're thinking of how to get better at it.
At some point, thinking of how they can get better at it is probably going to lead them to doing, well, a basic strength and conditioning program. That's because squats and presses and the rest of what the article outlines are still about the best the exercise world can come up with for almost all the athletes out there.
(For what it's worth, I'd strongly second the recommendations of the article for Starting Strength and Olympic-Style Weightlifting. They're both fantastic books.)
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can remember from when I was doing ICPC, I wasn't allowed to bring in anything in electronic format. I could, however, bring in printed materials.
Have the rules changed? Or are these libraries just for practice problems?
I'll second the call to hear who the designer is, if you don't mind sharing.
Actually... could you outline your process of finding the designer? What was the workflow like? Did you send him your .nib files and let him go to town, or did you send him screenshots, or what?
There are _huge_ economic, cultural, and military benefits to being the sole superpower that don't exist for country number two.
These benefits are, in essence, virtuous cycles that give the superpower a advantages on the world stage just by virtue of already being in first place. Think of it like compound interest, or a really big ball in Katamari Damacy, only for geopolitical power. That is, the US can arrange things in its favor to make it more powerful just because it's already quite powerful and no other country is.
As an example, the United States Dollar is the de-facto reserve currency for the rest of the world. That means that the US can purchase things without having to first go through (expensive) currency exchange, giving the US an economic advantage. The reserve currency status is also a major factor that also allows the US to borrow money pretty much at will.
Similar arguments can be made about cultural, military, diplomatic, and other power.
That means that countries aspiring to be the superpower have the deck stacked against them. So when, despite this, China overtakes the US, the US will have an awful lot of catching up to do. It's not fighting for food in the streets, but it would be a fairly serious blow to the US.
"...because the US government is believed to be highly unlikely to default."
And that belief stems largely from the status of the US as the sole superpower (at least for now). That's the point I was trying to make. I just didn't do a very good job of it.
I probably should have just picked an example of the US exercising diplomatic power, because that's much more intuitive to me than currency markets are.
I've only seen a few models of surveying tripods, but the ones that I did see didn't have locking legs. Their stability comes from points on the bottom of the tripod legs which you drive into the ground when setting up the tripod. I'd imagine driving three stakes into your floor at home wouldn't be optimal for you.
You could probably find a used astronomy tripod (used to hold a large telescope and then position it precisely) that's out of spec for astronomy use but that would hold your laptop just fine.
Private intelligence?[1] They tend to put a much larger emphasis on delivering good information over writing an engaging story. They do focus almost entirely on geopolitical news, though.
Stratfor and KGS both offer free access to a limited set of their analysis.[2,3]
There are some places where ITAR makes sense, even if it does overreach in areas like encryption or model rocketry.
For example, I'd argue that it's a positive thing that Lockheed couldn't sell F-22s to [insert violent autocrat of the month] without some very significant reviews.
You can search for "malloc lab" and find tons of copies of the assignment (with only the instructor names and course numbers changed), but here's one:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15213-f02/L6/mal...