Trevor Blackwell

Bitcoin solved the byzantine generals problem. That is a brand-new invention. It enables you to achieve distributed consensus in all kinds of problems. The problem space is vast, and any new solution is worth not underestimating. It's hard to predict the future: http://tlb.org/#predictions July, 2002: CDs and DVDs compatible with today's will remain the most common way to buy or rent music or video through 2020.

I'm a big fan of adding noise to systems to make them more predictable (it was the topic of my thesis: http://tlb.org/#papers). But, I believe it's not needed here because the arrival times of /newest voters are already sufficiently noisy. You only need random noise of +/- 0.5 to get predictable results, and voter arrival patters give more than that already.

This is Trevor Blackwell we're talking about. Perhaps you should be careful before casting aspersions. http://tlb.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Blackwell Ad-hominem attacks are not the kind of thing Hacker News is about. Please keep that in mind.

Some time ago Trevor Blackwell of YC wrote an interesting piece related to the issue of keeping wealth. It's short and worth reading: http://tlb.org/interest.html I don't know what the situation is in SF, but I can attest that there is no shortage of homeless and crazy people in Sweden. I guess that holds true for any European country.

Because the URL is different: http://www.tlb.org/keyboardchop.html vs. http://tlb.org/keyboardchop.html HN does not try to "normalize" URLs. You can also add parameters... if you submit the following it will also be a new entry: http://tlb.org/keyboardchop.html?hi=hello SearchYC did not turn up anything with either of these URLs as the main item, but the link was mentioned in the context of this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185743

Likewise, but I'm using one of the newer ones (Natural Ergonomic 4000) and I like it. Been meaning to mod it ala tlb (http://tlb.org/keyboardchop.html) to get the mouse closer but I've never gotten around to it. Would love to have a trackball in between the keyboard sections to see if it works but never looked into it either.

Did tlb add a pseudonym? http://tlb.org/whyspamcannotbestopped.html Stop may be a little strong of a word, but people will keep believing that Bayesian filtering helps fight spam a great deal until someone comes up with a better idea.

"Yet C++ is also frequently reviled both by those who never use and by those who use it all the time." I was once listening to RMS speak at a conference. One guy got up and said that this was one of the n great talks he had been to.He mentioned that Stroustrup as another speaker who had impressed him upon which RMS said "You need to get your head checked". Sometimes a great hacker community can help overcome the shortcomings of a language. Trevor Blackwell makes that point here: http://www.tlb.org/faq.html. "Besides their intrinsic characteristics, languages define commmunities of programmers. You want to choose one that lets you communicate with good programmers, because you'll learn from them. They tend to prefer powerful languages like Python, Lisp, and C++. So for example, although Visual Basic is actually a powerful and complete language, few good programmers use it. C++, on the other hand, is a rather poorly designed language, but for historical reasons a lot of smart people use it so at least you'll be in good company."

It's unmentioned in the article, but Trevor Blackwell's PhD thesis, Applications of Randomness in System Performance Measurement [1] was advocating this in 1998: This thesis presents and analyzes a simple principle for building systems: that there should be a random component in all arbitrary decisions. If no randomness is used, system performance can vary widely and unpredictably due to small changes in the system workload or configuration. This makes measurements hard to reproduce and less meaningful as predictors of performance that could be expected in similar situations. [1] https://tlb.org/docs/thesis.pdf

The idea is not new. For building systems, tlb argues there should be a random component in all arbitrary decisions. http://tlb.org/tlbImages/thesis.ps

http://www.tlb.org/eunicycle.html http://www.paulgraham.com/segway.html 50% as dorky. 0% as smug.

For those who haven't seen it: http://tlb.org/eunicycle.html

Trevor Blackwell did something similar a while ago (and he is a founder of YCombinator too): http://tlb.org/eunicycle.html

"Not a good reason, in Jobs's view, because the code could easily be reverse-engineered. No it couldn't, said Tim. Could, said Jobs." I don't know where Jobs gets his instincts about this stuff, but he was totally right: http://tlb.org/scooter.html

A practical, robust method for separating essential complexity from accidental complexity in software engineering. Trevor Blackwell has written about something like this: http://tlb.org/busywork.html

Yep. Alternative phrasing: it's not about how much you work but how immersed you get. That's what you have to optimize for. If it was just about how much work you get done startups would get done in twice the time if you worked at half the pace. But the result qualitatively changes if you never get immersed enough to find the important insights. Hard work is just a means. If it takes real work to find immersion, don't mess with that. The danger of saying, "I don't need to work too hard," and scaling back on things that seem like dead ends is that they impact immersion. Dead ends are often useful in intangible ways. Trevor Blackwell calls this tinkering (http://tlb.org/busywork.html)

The "build one" link towards the end of the posted article is much more interesting.... http://tlb.org/scooter.html

From http://tlb.org/eunicycle.html: "Some time ago I built a self-balancing two-wheeled scooter. Since then I realized that two wheels are redundant, and only a single wheel is needed to make a ridable vehicle."

Related: http://www.tlb.org/busywork.html

No, mouse closer better.. http://tlb.org/keyboardchop.html

For anyone interested: http://www.tlb.org/eunicycle.html