IsaacL

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241.
Leadership, community, and how I got Hacker News’s second-highest average karma(joshuaspodek.com)
2 points by IsaacL 13y ago|0 comments
242.
by IsaacL 13y ago
Common lore has it that PayPal's problems began largely after eBay bought them - half their initial staff left after the first year. Early PayPal was very elitist and performance-driven, wheras eBay is famously bureaucratic.
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by IsaacL 13y ago
Yes, that was sloppy of me. You have to be precise when talking about the effects of biological evolution on our brains. We know our brains were initially created entirely by biological evolution; what's not clear is how direct or indi
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by IsaacL 13y ago
Is this where you came across the concept of "insight porn"? http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/trying-to-see-... There's an interesting possibility that our brain actually gives us a neu
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by IsaacL 13y ago
Thanks for your post. It's refreshing to hear more realistic opinions on this situation. I opened up the Hacker News homepage to see if anyone was discussing the US debt crisis. (I'm not American, and I find HN a fairly good sourc
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by IsaacL 13y ago
Good answer, that sounds like a reasonable compromise.
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by IsaacL 13y ago
I agree, but it's interesting to think about how you would handle such information programmatically. Even for a case where you let users input their own gender, it's tricky. Do you simply add some extra genders? Male-to-female tra
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by IsaacL 13y ago
My opinion is that it really depends on the individual, especially their motivation and focus. Some people are cut out to be solo founders, most aren't. When I tried working on projects alone, I tended to get distracted easily. Partner
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by IsaacL 13y ago
You're right, but that's still not an argument against trying a standing desk. If some people find them useful, and some don't, and assuming the cost of trying it is low, the rational thing to do is not to wait around until e
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by IsaacL 13y ago
http://www.meredithtax.org/taxonomyblog/gita-sahgal-feminist... Here's another interesting story I came across - basically, Amnesty sacked one of their staff because she, an outspoken feminist, criticised their co
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by IsaacL 13y ago
Great quote from George Leonard's Mastery : "In his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Zen master Shunryu Suzuki approaches the question of fast and slow learners in terms of horses. “In our scriptures, it is said that there are fou
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by IsaacL 13y ago
When I see things like, I try to actually answer the question "why don't they fix this"? Often it's not because the company in question is dumb, but because they're operating within certain design constraints. Think
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Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism (2005)(paecon.net)
24 points by IsaacL 13y ago|7 comments
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by IsaacL 13y ago
I was reading this very interesting thread, and had to jump in here as well. I actually worked (briefly) on a very similar idea last year - basically an Exec clone for the UK. We scrapped the idea after a month, since we realised that you&#
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What are we not being told about PRISM?(quora.com)
3 points by IsaacL 13y ago|0 comments
256.
by IsaacL 13y ago
I hear this a lot, but I disagree. 1. Firstly, take startups where the founders had an original idea, but they pitch it as "X for Y". Is this a bad thing? Many people will say that they should pitch it on its own merits. The thing
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by IsaacL 13y ago
Ah, interesting! Thanks for the counter-example.
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by IsaacL 13y ago
An absolutely corrupt elite that made their tiny city state one of the most prosperous and stable countries in south-east Asia. Lee Kuan Yew is probably one of my favourite political figures - studying Asian leaders like him, or China'
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by IsaacL 13y ago
The title might as well be "COBOL vs. FORTRAN: which programming language makes you more productive?", if you catch my drift. Why limit yourself to 2nd circuit depressants or 3rd circuit stimulants?
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by IsaacL 13y ago
Indeed, I think the analogy hides circular reasoning - OP simply assumes what she wants to prove (men have a steady rise to the top). Just looking at two other comment threads today - the guy on the doomed project and the guy sacked from Fa
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by IsaacL 13y ago
Is anyone else reminded of the "charter city" they were going to build in Honduras? (Paul Romer had the idea, inspired by Shenzhen, of having third world countries set aside land to be under the jurisdiction of first world countries with mo
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by IsaacL 13y ago
I read it the opposite way - your chances of having a big impact are low, so stop worrying and start a company anyway. This might sound paradoxical, but for a lot of people (myself included) being told "don't waste your time on something tr
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by IsaacL 13y ago
Random theory I have (hopefully some HN-ers with actual military knowledge can weigh in): modern militaries need less technology and more manpower. It seems since I was a kid politicians have been saying that armed forces should become smal
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by IsaacL 13y ago
The original meaning came from one of the stories of Baron Münchhausen where he supposedly fell into a bog but escaped by pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. So the basic concept of self-sufficiency gives you the meaning of bootstrapp
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by IsaacL 13y ago
There are tons of mental blocks we can have that prevent us working on our own stuff. Some people don't have any of these blocks (or at least, none strong enough to stop them). These people are the ones who say "just do it", because for the
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by IsaacL 13y ago
"People poke fun at each other. It's how we establish groups. It's how we operate. We pick a trait and converge around it, as soon as we see a member of the species who does not have that trait, we make fun of them and maybe, just maybe, we
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Using Randomly Generated Turing Machines To Create Drawings on a Canvas(wry.me)
1 points by IsaacL 13y ago|0 comments
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by IsaacL 13y ago
You seem to be all over this thread saying "oh well this is bad but men also have it equally bad sexism is exaggerated etc etc". I agree that women can be shitty to men. But men, in general, can be far shittier to women. Being patronised by
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by IsaacL 13y ago
Does anyone actually believe that online dating algorithms reliably predict relationship success? I've always seen it as merely a weak signal of compatibility, and I imagined other dating site users saw it the same way. It seems lots of peo
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by IsaacL 13y ago
Hear, hear. I spent most of yesterday afternoon reading Cal Newport's blog and the first few chapters of his book "So Good They Can't Ignore You". His thesis is basically that the idea of "following your passion" is incredibly misleading,

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