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This is one of those ideas that seems so obviously good after the fact that it just makes one marvel


The Hustler - 1961 & The Color of Money - 1986

Both with Paul Newman.

Optically about pool hustling. Really about the processes through which the naive progress as they encounter the underbelly of reality.


Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to be able to edit a comment that has a reply


Where's Ambani at?


Does showing a large subest of the pages that point to it, default ordered by something that's roughly equivalent to pagerank, with the ability to then search within those results capture the essence of what you're getting at?


No, not really. What I'd really like is to input the URL and get a search result listing that includes number of posts and date of last post at least.


You just have to remember which books you put the money in. Every now and then I open a book that I haven't read in years and there are five 20s pressed between the pages.


Doesn't changing only one metric at a time tend to lead to getting stuck in a local maximum?


Surprisingly simple question that is very hard to answer well I think....

If you only test one variable at the time then you simplify your tests to the point where you can extract some metric to determine whether you've improved or not compared to the old situation.

Nothing stops you from then doing more ab testing with other combinations relative to your 'new best'. This may include going back to the original setting with some other variable changed, that way you avoid the local maximum problem.

So say we have a site in position 'A', we make version 'B' and we test them against each other. If we find out according to our chosen metric that 'B' performs better we now have several choices:

We can do another A/B test starting from 'B' changing some value to see if we can improve on 'B' directly, or alternatively we can go back to 'B' versus 'A' + some new modification that is not 'B'.

I hope that's clear....


If you really believe that the A/B parameter space and the C/D parameter space interact with each other, then yes, you could get stuck in a local minimum. So in that case you should test all combinations simultaneously. However, it will take a lot longer to collect enough data in this case. So if you think it is likely that the parameters are independent, it would be better to change only one set at a time.


I would read even more recent stuff. I agree on Che. How about reading about Kevin Kelly and Louis Rossetto? Bob Hunter created Greenpeace out of nothing. Petraeus revolutionized the most powerful military in the history of the world. It's through a mix of ancient literature, philosophy and political economics that one gains perspective on human nature. And human nature does not, has not, and will not change. But the structure of the world evolves, making modern revolutionaries much more interesting. When I know what Kolakowski had to say about Marxism, I'm going to go move past Marx and spend more time on Popper who hasn't really been rebutted (to my knowledge) yet.

Kolakowski -> http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...


How about reading about Kevin Kelly and Louis Rossetto? Bob Hunter created Greenpeace out of nothing. Petraeus revolutionized the most powerful military in the history of the world.

Now that you mentioned Petraeus, I see you're confused about what "Revolution" means in this context. The course is teaching actual political, armed-struggle type revolution.

Big-R Revolution is very different from anything else. It's the popular uprising of a group of people and the assertion of their will upon, and demand for their rights from, another group they deem oppressive.

Revolution derives its will from the people, and the people derive theirs from their group identity. No people, no revolution. Petraeus is a beauracrat; I don't see a nation of Petraeuses besieging the pentagon with small arms and demanding their birth right for a more efficient budget system.

Bob Hunter is an activist, not a Revolutionary, for he still lacks the popular support of determined people who are willing to defend their home planet. He also lacks the Other; the target of his alleged Revolution. No opposing Other, no Revolution.

Kolakowski is a Philosophe academic, plenty of pen-pushers to go around, frankly. I particularly avoided recommending the Western Marxists and academes because of their petty intellectualism.

Good day, Sir.


The late Bob Hunter (you are still speaking of him in the present tense, he died in 2005) may have created greenpeace out of nothing which was very commendable (it probably saved the whales, and - ironically - the whaling industry), but the greenpeace of today is now more of a marketing organization, not an activist platform. Fuel for their boats used to be the main operational cost, now it is media buys. Their CEO receives about 140K euros, which is a slight difference with an ideal driven activist.

The people that support it do so from a strange mix of environmental consciousness and guilt (at least in my circle of friends).

Some of its positions are just as shortsighted as those held by the industries that it opposes.

That doesn't mean I'm against 'green', it's just that greenpeace has evolved to survive in a media driven society.


I think this is too dismissive of other forms of revolution. I like Michael Albert's explanation of revolution, which is a fundamental change in at least one of a society's defining institutions. http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/2564

From this perspective, the 1953 US overthrow of Iran's parliamentary democracy (to install a monarch) was a successful revolution. And even a revolution with the best of intentions (which obviously wasn't the case with the 1953 revolution) won't necessarily result in an improved society. To the contrary, society might even regress. If a revolution suddenly occurred right now in the US, since we US citizens haven't laid the groundwork of serious popular organizing and institutions, we might expect a form of fascism to probably result.


It took a lot of self-restraint to keep me from downvoting-this-because-I-disagreed-with-it


Right, it is not tech focused, because his point is not so much Portland as the actual cultural distinction between good places for entrepreneurial people and good places for starting up.


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