Viewing profile — a4isms

This is well before most HN readers' time, but Michael Milken, the "Junk Bond King," was handed a $600,000,000 fine and a ten-year prison sentance for insider trading and racketeer…

> Demanding similar changes at the thousands of smaller airports where A320-class planes land would be a non-starter. Perhaps similar: One of the reasons the Vickers VC10 was so su…

My 2c: The goal is longer, thinner wings than usual. Long and thin wings are far more efficient—think gliders and the U2. But beyond a certain width, those wings become incompatibl…

In 2001, OG Business of Tech blogger Joel Spolsky famously said about Napster: Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for down…

Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY

Another—very old—rationale: People write code differently when they know that it will be reviewed by people who will not only comment on it, but also form long-term impressions of …

Excellent!

With people I'm invested in, like a community (which includes co-workers), I start with some experience that they are good people, which provides an incentive to ask whether option…

Here's a simple idea: You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. And three interpretations to consider: 0: The default: That person is irrationa…

Feels like "I Don't Hire Unlucky People" all over again, but with extra tokenmaxxing steps. https://neonrocket.com/2014/05/rescued-from-the-ashes-i-dont...

There is something of a tradition in the design world to use theft-shaped words for things we collect for inspiration/ideas. A piece of advice I followed in the 80s and 90s when pa…

The easiest metaphor for HN's evolution is that of gentrification: An outsider community forms in a down-market neighbourhood. Lacking money and power, it makes its own culture. Th…

In addition to his book, I am constantly linking to "Intuitive Equals Familiar:" https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html A short must-read for people designing (via prompt …

Jef was a huge proponent of incremental search. That hasn't become mainstream-ubiquitous, but it is certainly code-editor-ubiquitous. Jef being an extremist, he wanted incremental …

Two connected anecdotes: 1. In the 90s, I had a struggling one-man Mac ISV, and would do gig programming on the side. I did a lot of work for boutique investment banks, and also fo…

Or, investors do understand the difference, but think they're buying low to sell high to "greater fools." If the market can remain irrational longer than a fundamentals-driven inve…

Or more specifically, didn't Tesla bail out Elon's cousins Peter and Lyndon Rive?

A very long time ago, I found myself commuting to work alongside a centi-millionaire who happened to only own one car, a Volvo 740 Estate. His wife drove him to the commuter train …

This is something you say aloud, while muttering "useful idiot" under your breath.

Good comment! When there is a boardroom battle over control, I think almost any take is fair. Sculley kicked him off Macintosh. Steve then tried to oust Sculley, who gave him a "wi…

> they benefit from being familiar . “Intuitive Equals Familiar,” a classic from Jef Raskin, the man who started the Macintosh¹ project at Apple: https://www.asktog.com/papers/rask…