Trevor Blackwell, a Y Combinator partner and roboticist, writes about balancing scooters, hardware hacks, spam, programming languages, and compound interest.
HN links his pieces on interest and keeping wealth, and a commenter defended him against personal attacks. Others mention his thesis on noise in systems.
"Yet C++ is also frequently reviled both by those who never use and by those who use it all the time."
I was once listening to RMS speak at a conference. One guy got up and said that this was one of the n great talks he had been to.He mentioned that Stroustrup as another speaker who had impressed him upon which RMS said "You need to get your head checked".
Sometimes a great hacker community can help overcome the shortcomings of a language. Trevor Blackwell makes that point here: http://www.tlb.org/faq.html.
"Besides their intrinsic characteristics, languages define commmunities of programmers. You want to choose one that lets you communicate with good programmers, because you'll learn from them. They tend to prefer powerful languages like Python, Lisp, and C++. So for example, although Visual Basic is actually a powerful and complete language, few good programmers use it. C++, on the other hand, is a rather poorly designed language, but for historical reasons a lot of smart people use it so at least you'll be in good company."
Yep. Alternative phrasing: it's not about how much you work but how immersed you get. That's what you have to optimize for. If it was just about how much work you get done startups would get done in twice the time if you worked at half the pace. But the result qualitatively changes if you never get immersed enough to find the important insights. Hard work is just a means. If it takes real work to find immersion, don't mess with that.
The danger of saying, "I don't need to work too hard," and scaling back on things that seem like dead ends is that they impact immersion. Dead ends are often useful in intangible ways.
Trevor Blackwell calls this tinkering (http://tlb.org/busywork.html)
It's unmentioned in the article, but Trevor Blackwell's PhD thesis, Applications of Randomness in System Performance Measurement [1] was advocating this in 1998:
This thesis presents and analyzes a simple principle for building systems: that there should be a random component in all arbitrary decisions. If no randomness is used, system performance can vary widely and unpredictably due to small changes in the system workload or configuration. This makes measurements hard to reproduce and less meaningful as predictors of performance that could be expected in similar situations.
[1] https://tlb.org/docs/thesis.pdf
Because the URL is different:
http://www.tlb.org/keyboardchop.html
vs.
http://tlb.org/keyboardchop.html
HN does not try to "normalize" URLs. You can also add parameters... if you submit the following it will also be a new entry:
http://tlb.org/keyboardchop.html?hi=hello
SearchYC did not turn up anything with either of these URLs as the main item, but the link was mentioned in the context of this discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185743
Bitcoin solved the byzantine generals problem.
That is a brand-new invention. It enables you to achieve distributed consensus in all kinds of problems.
The problem space is vast, and any new solution is worth not underestimating. It's hard to predict the future: http://tlb.org/#predictions
July, 2002: CDs and DVDs compatible with today's will remain the most common way to buy or rent music or video through 2020.
I'm a big fan of adding noise to systems to make them more predictable (it was the topic of my thesis: http://tlb.org/#papers). But, I believe it's not needed here because the arrival times of /newest voters are already sufficiently noisy. You only need random noise of +/- 0.5 to get predictable results, and voter arrival patters give more than that already.