Viewing profile — tinymollusk

Just a quick vote to reinforce what you did. You made something, and asked for the most absurd audience to critique it. Keep being you. HN hated Dropbox, of all things. I am hesita…

Jon, I run a few sites in a similar space. I feel 1MB is fine for my customer base. If HN isn't your customer, don't worry about them. If HN is your customer, you have the hardest …

With 100k grants to give, I think you'd want quite a few crackpots, and maybe even some lazy mathematicians. Those could be the types who come up with a game changing result.

I switched to 90+% audiobook after being an avid reader my whole life. I think my eyes have gotten worse, so physically reading because tiring quickly. The secret for audiobooks, f…

I interpreted that remark as a commentary on humans preference for failing in a conventional manner being perfectly acceptable, versus possibly failing in an unconventional one. (I…

Something I've been wondering about for a while now... Would it be possible to train an algorithm to identify similar characteristics of data from different schema? Looking at the …

Richard Feynman's famous quotation is applicable here: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool". False positives are often …

Madoff said he is happier in prison than he was while fearing his scheme would be discovered. [0] That doesn't really make me any more sympathetic to his criminal and unethical act…

Humans, on the other hand, have all kinds of biases (intentional and unintentional, conscious or not) that creep in because they do have context. The important thing is that we bui…

The company decision makers could be making a bad decision. They're likely in dire straits to be in this position in the first place. Add in shareholders, some slick marketing/badm…

Your second paragraph is problematic. First, truly free markets are unlikely to be an accurate statement of where someone earned their money (e.g. the US is nowhere near that, so t…

My perspective is that unit economics guesses are important because you want to estimate the scaling factor. You might not know where they are now, but it's important for runway go…

My approach is to spend 98% on substance, then use a template (like Beautiful.ai) or contractor to quickly put together something visually appealing. Doesn't have to be a unique de…

I'm not suggesting it's true, but it does fit the narrative of his (and his employer's!) incentives. People usually act in line with their immediately obvious incentives. Not a smo…

I agree about this particular comment -- your interpretation is likely correct. I was just trying to connect it larger, to the decision making skills that I'm working on (and thoug…

Is that true, and is that objectively more impressive? To the former, I always assumed there were in flight adjustments after launch. Elon's roadster had inaccurate calculations, I…

I can't wait to see what AI can do with the collective time and resources it took for that seagull to evolve.

Doesn't his "99/100" give us a much better idea of his confidence in his own knowledge, compared to something more vague like "usually" or "the vast majority of the time"? I ask be…

When you say economic consensus, do you mean there are testable predictions based on the consensus that have been shown to be reproducible in multiple real world experiments? Lots …

I suppose I believe it's less important whether or not we collectively determine the correctness of the other person, and more important that I use their contrarianism to question …

Outside of the slightly distasteful attitude ("I didn't bother" and "I bet" are slightly abrasive sounding), isn't the attitude one of the skeptic? It jibes with my understanding o…

I think your analogy would be more apt if you were spitting seeds onto public property, and the state took the trees. Or even further: you spit seeds (your data) onto Google's prop…

It also adds human redundancy and specialization, both of which reduce risk for a company. In the "product/market fit" words, before fit, a company is all risk. After fit, during g…

How much should you bet to never be ruined but maximize the long term expected value of your bets?

I didn't find "Everybody Lies" particularly compelling. It was an interesting piece of exploratory research, but I didn't see a lot of effort on generalizability. Several of his ex…