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akd commented on Head of Design at Facebook: How Her Team Uses Data To Make Decisions   zurb.com/article/515/podc... · Posted by u/mikemcaveeney
izaidi · 15 years ago
It's interesting that the only time Facebook seems to want to offer you any kind of emotional experience is when you're trying to leave the site, and the experience is designed to be a negative one, rooted in guilt.
akd · 15 years ago
I find that checking Facebook is almost always an emotional experience. I see so many more new babies than I ever did before Facebook.
akd commented on Ron Conway Explained   bhorowitz.com/2010/04/07/... · Posted by u/sharpn
SWalker26 · 15 years ago
Maybe they're not working hard enough. Larry Bird and Michael Jordan both said they were the first to the gym and the last to leave. My point here is simple: there are no shortcuts to success (other than rare exceptions).
akd · 15 years ago
But working hard isn't ever enough to reach the pinnacle of achievement. I could have worked my ass off at basketball, from age 3, and I would have never been an NBA player. Someone with more natural gifts than me, but fewer than Michael Jordan, might work hard his whole life and only brush the minor league/NBA border.
akd commented on I Saw the Crisis Coming. Why Didn’t the Fed?   nytimes.com/2010/04/04/op... · Posted by u/jakarta
zaphar · 15 years ago
Saying someone was just a "supremely lucky flipper of coins" always seems like a cop out to me. It's not so much the fact that he was right but the reasons he gives for being right. He gives very good explanations for his reasoning and it was sound. Explain how his reasoning was not sound and then you can make statements about how he was just "super lucky." Otherwise you're just guessing about how lucky he is and that doesn't really help anyone.
akd · 15 years ago
A lot of reasons can sound totally justified in retrospect. "The Colts will win the Super Bowl because they have superior talent." "The Saints will win the Super Bowl because the Colts' ego will go to their head." A lot of people take actions and have reasons for them -- when those actions turn out to be right, the reasons are often given undue credibility.
akd commented on Become a better entrepreneur by failing completely   dechen.posterous.com/beco... · Posted by u/davidechen
tjmaxal · 15 years ago
Every time I read an article about how great failure is I want to scream ONLY IF IT LEADS TO SUCCESS. and the only way to know if it does is retrospectively. I think the bigger take away from these article is really keep trying.
akd · 15 years ago
Failure can be great even if it never leads to success. Several people I've known have started a business with their own money, failed horribly, and never started another. But it gave them perspectives they never had before, and most importantly they worked the rest of their careers knowing that they had tried their best, and just weren't the right person at the right place at the right time to succeed.
akd commented on Ask HN: Please review my weekend project: a dating website for dogs   plentyofdoggies.com/... · Posted by u/liquimoon
akd · 15 years ago
You should make it more tailored (but not explicitly mention that) it's for dog owners to meet each other. For example, meeting other "friendly dogs and dog owners" or something like that.

Everyone knows it's not for doggie breeding, most pets are spayed or neutered.

akd commented on Barbie Computer Engineer   shop.mattel.com/product/i... · Posted by u/jgamman
miri · 15 years ago
If I ever get a female child that is smitten by the scourge called Barbie (oh please, O [Insert Deity Here], make her a Lego child), I'll at least give her one like these so she can have an Engineer Barbie (oh, the bragging potential, "My Mum is a computer engineer just like Barbie!"). Not that my grandmother's misguided attempts at girlifying me with Pink Mermaid Barbie ever worked, anyway.
akd · 15 years ago
O, Thor? :)
akd commented on Free software vs. SaaS: A matter of control?   itworld.com/open-source/1... · Posted by u/abennett
fnid2 · 15 years ago
I always find it interesting in hosting forums when people complain about the operation of an open source product they are using not doing something they want it to do and getting really mad at it. The performance sucks, or it has a bug, or whatever...

Well, you know... it's open source and it's free. You can fix it if you want. But no one does, they just complain.

And if they do fix it, they don't commit the changes to get them integrated, so they can't upgrade anymore. shrug

akd · 15 years ago
How many people have the ability to actually improve something? Should those people not demand quality?

I can't engineer a car - does that mean I shouldn't get mad when my airbags fail to deploy? I can't cook well - does that mean I shouldn't be disappointed by a substandard meal at a restaurant?

akd commented on The World's most Ingenious Thief   wired.com/magazine/2010/0... · Posted by u/pinstriped_dude
darien · 15 years ago
What I'm afraid of are the multitudes of copycat buglers who may look up to him as a role model, meanwhile causing more harm than good.
akd · 15 years ago
The copycat buglers would play reveille as they made their escape :)
akd commented on Do you really want to be rich?   blog.cubeofm.com/do-you-r... · Posted by u/maxklein
Aetius · 15 years ago
"Money provides a layer of abstraction"

This is so true.

For those who say that getting money for the sake of getting money is a useless pursuit, no, it isn't. No one who isn't already rich is getting money strictly for the sake of getting money. They are doing it for an infinite number of reasons. Caricaturing them into rat-racey participants of Lifestyles Of The Rich and Famous, simply because they want to be rich, is despicable. Money is like energy. Just because I'm interested in acquiring a gigawatt of energy doesn't mean I want to use it for smelting aluminium. I can use energy for an infinite number of activities. That's why I want to be rich. It allows me to easily pick and choose what I want to do, without specializing in doing just that.

akd · 15 years ago
Pedantry: a gigawatt is a unit of power, not energy. Perhaps you meant a gigawatt-hour? :)
akd commented on Show HN: Review my startup: Quora, a topic based question and answer site    · Posted by u/ccheever
_delirium · 15 years ago
I'm not sure this is a reliable way to get an identity behind all of your users. It was reliable back when Facebook required .edu email addresses, but these days there are huge numbers of fake profiles, and it's easy to create a throwaway profile if you need one to sign up for a site.
akd · 15 years ago
I have 5 or so fake Facebook profiles I use for expressly this purpose.

u/akd

KarmaCake day623March 31, 2008
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Amal Dorai
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