Hacker News: fyi80

New comment by fyi80 in "Writing Effective Welcome Emails"

fyi80 — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:18:54 +0000

#5 "Echo their name back at them"

That is literally a specific advice to write low-quality "porn" content that stimulates superficially and then trigger an anger/betrayal reaction.

These "tricks" are copied straight from a used car sales lot, and we hated them there too.

New comment by fyi80 in "Writing Effective Welcome Emails"

fyi80 — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:15:46 +0000

You have interesting friends. Any email that puts my name in the subject line is spam.

New comment by fyi80 in "Inequality and Mass Transit in the Bay Area"

fyi80 — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:14:05 +0000

Another horrible repeating of the "income inequality" trope, and then showing graphs of median income that don't get near the top l% of US earners, while citing a stat that the top 1% of earners are gaining.

New comment by fyi80 in "Inequality and Mass Transit in the Bay Area"

fyi80 — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:08:28 +0000

200K income, you can easily afford to allocate 25% of that to a mortgage interest (plus 10% for principal, taxes, etc), $50K/year

3.5% mortgage -> 50K/yr * 100% / 3.5%/yr = $1.5M house price

interest rates are so low these days, you can spend 50% more on principal for the same interest, compared to 2006 when rates were ~6.25%.

New comment by fyi80 in "Lenticular Photo Used To Secretly Convey Hot Line Number To Abused Kids"

fyi80 — Mon, 06 May 2013 22:17:54 +0000

Oh my. In my day they just gave us coupons for free personal pan pizza for each 10 books we read.

New comment by fyi80 in "Gwern answers 'Ask gwern: Who are you?'"

fyi80 — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:14:53 +0000

> You are asking, gwern, a question about what people like about your writings.

tokenadult, do you have an Ed.D or Ph.D in Education? Or maybe something related to Social Work?

Did you know that this communication style, which you use rather consistently in your HN posts, and which is prevalent in the education community, is poorly-received rather outside that community?

Not saying your style is wrong, just that is extremely grating outside the Ed world. It sits in the uncanny valley of faux-familiarity, and as such it breeds mistrust.

New comment by fyi80 in "Startups: You Should Value Software More"

fyi80 — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:18:04 +0000

If I had $10 for ever hour I'd saved, I'd have $1000 every day. In reality, though, "saving an hour" on one task just leads to "getting stuck for an hour" on another task.

New comment by fyi80 in ""I can't do math" (2001)"

fyi80 — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:14:39 +0000

Java/C++ programmer who observed that English lacks Perl's qq operator or python's r''

New comment by fyi80 in ""I can't do math" (2001)"

fyi80 — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:02:02 +0000

> Erdos liked to tell another version of how Kummer computed 7 times 9: "Kummer said to himself, 'Hmmm, the product can't be 61 because 61 is a prime, it can't be 65 because that's a multiple of 5, 67 is a prime, 69 is too big-that leaves only 63.'

That's how I do problems like that, too (I am not a genius mathematician), and it is exactly the sort of thinking that kids should be doing all through K-12. Estimation, intuitive reasoning, analogy, pattern matching, logic, etc.

New comment by fyi80 in ""I can't do math" (2001)"

fyi80 — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:58:12 +0000

> that a course in introductory logic

This is barely touched in standard geometry text books. 2-column proofs and all that.

But most people don't notice it, and it deserves far more treatment. Many of the smartest people I know attended special gifted programs in K-12 that did teach formal logic and informal critical thinking skills.

(correlation != causation, though)

New comment by fyi80 in "Google Glass on Saturday Night Live"

fyi80 — Sun, 05 May 2013 20:13:45 +0000

Or someone who has never used it, mocking its imagined failures, shows that when people gets there hands on it, they will see it wildly outperforming expectations and achieve mass-market appeal.

New comment by fyi80 in "Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses"

fyi80 — Sun, 05 May 2013 03:24:51 +0000

I hope you made exorbitant purchases at a retail postal shop to compensate for your extreme abuse of the system.

New comment by fyi80 in "Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses"

fyi80 — Sun, 05 May 2013 02:07:54 +0000

Only if they get a LOT of mail.

New comment by fyi80 in "How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google"

fyi80 — Sat, 04 May 2013 23:01:32 +0000

Well, if a drug has a dose in the ~200mg range, you can't physically fit many of them into one pill.

New comment by fyi80 in "How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google"

fyi80 — Sat, 04 May 2013 22:59:41 +0000

If only there were a way to predict that users searching for "taxi" tend to want local results, and users searching for "abortion" don't. You know, like that other search engine does, called, um, Google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=abortion

https://www.google.com/search?q=taxi

Or if you were willing to type more than 2 words into the search box before blaming Google for failing to read your mind, while you simultaneously tell Google to stop trying to read your mind.

New comment by fyi80 in "How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google"

fyi80 — Sat, 04 May 2013 22:55:21 +0000

Watson-ish system is IBM's medical diagnostics system.

and Google Search is basically Watson.

New comment by fyi80 in "In 1897, a Bicycle Superhighway Was the Future of California Transit"

fyi80 — Sat, 04 May 2013 22:19:28 +0000

Check out the real estate section of your local newspaper. It has a long and glorious tradition.

New comment by fyi80 in "Focusing On Prevention And Neuroscience, President Ends Reagan’s War On Drugs"

fyi80 — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:51:04 +0000

Here's the actual policy document: http://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/drugpolicyreform

(It uses that horrid layout with broken scrolling that the NYT popularized with its Snowfall story.)

New comment by fyi80 in "Failed Startup's Final Income Statements Reveal Grave Error"

fyi80 — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:43:24 +0000

Where is the part where Hsieh wrote that he sold each item at a marginal loss?

New comment by fyi80 in "Failed Startup's Final Income Statements Reveal Grave Error"

fyi80 — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:41:46 +0000

Funny story: In 5th grade, on career day, the proprietor of an Army-Navy Surplus store explained margin to me:

I buy a shirt for $7, sell it for $10, and get $3 dollars profit and $7 to buy another shirt.

I was genuinely confused about the $10-3=$7 he was claiming he could use to buy more shirts, when it was already used to pay wholesale for the first shirt.

But maybe that was confusion about Return on Invested Capital, not confusion about margin.