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Tangent, on "having a life".

I met a woman from New York who was visiting SF. We both had been to Burning Man. She expressed her distaste at how much time San Franciscans spend on their art projects. According to her, New Yorkers "have a life".

So, that bar conversation ended pretty quickly. But later on I got to thinking about it. There might be positive senses of "having a life", but I think she meant it in the more common way -- a horror of getting too enthusiastic about anything.

Oh yeah, we could plant a rose garden in our backyard, but you know, we have lives.

It makes me feel tired just contemplating it.
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While I've taken many, many walks in the heat of the Texas summer without sweating, it is freaking hot. Though, it's no reason to skip a nice walk -- just bring water.
There can be something akin to meditation in walking, or "taking a walk". An approach I've taken in the past is attempt to hear all the sounds. Not to listen to, just hear. Wherever you are, there are likely enough sounds for this. If you catch yourself focusing on one sound, gently let it go back to the level of the rest. If you find yourself not hearing sounds, gently let yourself hear them again.

I believe this is quite similar to bringing your mind back to the breath in sitting meditation in Vipassana and similar practices, though others may correct me. The difference here is that it's perhaps somehow more obvious when your mind has strayed from its object. In fact, there are forms of walking meditation in Vipassana and other practices. These focus -- again, I believe -- much more on the walking: the walking and its sensations are the object. Generally you would walk up and down a short stretch; this avoid the worry of a route, or how to return to the starting point.
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Also not cool is to be a patronizing prick. If I may sprinkle a bit of anti-troll powder: I liked your article and admire anyone who approaches his craft with that degree of thoughtfulness. There's relatively little flamewarism in this community overall, and you'd make a pretty good participant, so please feel welcome.
so a 6-volume set of books on modernist cuisine should cost me $0

Actually, he never claimed anywhere that the book should be available to him for zero dollars. He said he'll wait for the torrent.

That's not quite the same thing.
I have the book and was disappointed, my experience was "OK let's learn about X" I search to find mention in the book, and I get something like "mostly harmless." Or something with much less information than in the first few lines of the wikipedia article about X. I still don't know where's any good stuff in that book. Anybody cares to explain?
exactly. They can take your house more quickly than they are by raising your taxes. And when they do, the value of your house will decline rapidly, as it is no longer as good an investment.

I remember when Massachusetts reduced property taxes in the 80s, housing prices went up rapidly. It suddenly became a better investment, costing much less every year to maintain.

The opposite will happen if they raise the taxes.
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I'll admit I was a bit cryptic with my remark. :D I was considering things from a server standpoint when I wrote that comment, and from that sandpoint it's extremely obvious that PHP is dynamic, since the page is constructed every time.

But after a few minutes I realized that if you look at it from the client's point of view, the rendered page really is static. It's not always the same between requests, but once it's rendered, it's not likely to change. So you're right in that respect!

What I got a kick out of is that my remark could be taken both with and without its tongue-in-cheek intent. It really is amazing that, once upon a time, PHP was considered dynamic. And now we want more!
Yeah the Rails crowd are nuts about github, whereas pythonistas for example also have bitbucket.
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I walk anyway. It's worth putting up with the heat or cold.
I don't take walks. It's not because I'm afraid of how I will be perceived - that's crazy, how could everyone else know? Why would they care?

I just have a lot to do, and when I do have downtime, I prefer to spend it on sites like Hacker News. That's all.
Taking walks is an essential part of how I program. They're like garbage collection pauses to clear out irrelevant details that were clogging my thinking. You know how a lot of people say that they do their best thinking in the shower? Walks work the same way.

They're also good for just relaxing.
One of the biggest things I missed when I loved form NYC to the Phoenix area was the option to walk places.

In New York I would take the A train from Washington Heights to Columbus Circle, and either walk up to the Metropolitan Museum, or down to the Village. It was endlessly entertaining, with sights and sounds to fill the mind.

What a joy.
Event business (conferences, tradeshows, music events) is another example of cash business. You can be profitable within weeks from the start.
Pencil? What's that?

Seriously though, I don't really write any more except very rarely. I've been trying to get rid of anything paper based for the past 5 years and I think that I am slowly getting there.

So what does that say about me as a geek?
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It makes me hope I am smart enough to do the same thing when the chance comes!
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If he had just thrown "and my dream is to become a chef" into the mix my nerd cortex would have been at peace.

Where do you get off being such a fucking good writer? What a delightfully perfect sentence. You make me sick.

Ok, I'm embarrassed now. :)
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One, and I didn't know it was wrong at the time. So no!

I really hate how Facebook works the spam/address book angle. It is very unethical. I don't trust facebook in the slightest.
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Then why not use antitrust and other policies to create actual competition where it's missing? As the 'backdoor' meetings of Google and Verizon hosted by the FCC show, federal rulemaking just cements the power of incumbents who can send planeloads of lawyers and lobbyists to DC.

If lack of competition is the problem, address that, don't try to simulate competition via slow, often braindead, eventually-twisted-against-upstarts regulation.
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I do agree that some people may have higher learning rates than others but the differences are too small to matter. I will even agree that there may be outliers, a super tiny amount of the population (although I've never met one, and some that are considered true geniuses have some serious mental deficiencies). Overall the differences when it comes to the general population are too small to be that much significant. The people getting phd degrees have in general the same degree of potential learning ability as the general population.

If there were really that big of a difference between their potential ability to learn as opposed to the general population than they would be passing this down to their kids. Since you claim that the difference is so large than with careful breeding we should be able to produce a super race of geniuses within a couple of generations. That is not how evolution works.

Improvements are infinitesimally small and I don't see why would intelligence be any different. We all evolve as a species, not as individuals. I do not get the sense that we have been getting that much smarter based on our overall written history of the past thousand years.

The reason why some choose to pursue a phd and some don't is the same as why some choose to pursue a career as a painter, musician, writer and why some just choose to be a blue collar worker. It is what they feel passionate about. Some don't feel passionate about anything.

Culture and environment also play a major role and this is really what makes a difference between people choosing to do a phd or not. If you or your peers tell you that you cannot get a phd and believe it then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

There are differences in rates in learning but they are not large enough to matter. Culture and environment play a major role.

Edit: Not even Einstein could be called an outlier. He was a bright person but I hardly believe that his potential ability to learn was that much higher than yours or mine. He was even considered mediocre by many of his professors. It really was luck that he happened to be born at the right time in history to be able to make the contribution he did. Even he had to ask one of his mathematician friend for help when doing the mathematics for relativity. (you need to read his biography).

Newton considered a giant of physics was considered a pretty ordinary student. He didn't amaze anybody by showing a high potential for learning during andy of his school years nor did anybody imagine that he would come to make such huge contribution to physics.
It's risen to the point of cliche by now. "Hackneyed", one might even say.
Yes, and that's why it's dumb to call articles about exercise and nutrition "hacks". When all of human endeavor falls under the rubric of the "hack" the word ceases to mean anything.

Hack your commute, take public transit! Hack your next dinner party with parlour games. Delightfully clever key hack keeps all your keys on the same ring. Hack Mexican food with a "burrito" sized tortilla! Hack your brain with REM sleep. Hack the sun with a straw hat. Hack hygiene with silver oxide "deodorant". Hack girls with compliments. Hack your windowsill with a pot of wheatgrass, and hack the sky with the goddamn moon.

It's stupid. Take a walk.
They have also done a great job of managing content on their site, even with a relatively small staff... unlike some other sites ghrrm-ghe-etsy.yi-grhmtm.
That was my reading of the assertion, and similar claims that everyone, excepting the obviously retarded, can potentially (assuming effort + time) achieve the same level of intellectual mastery.

Is it somehow impolite, or demonstrably incorrect, to assert that there are people who are in fact stupid? Or people who are quite functional but not particularly bright? That there are people who, through no fault of their own, could never achieve certain intellectual goals no matter how much time or effort because they are simply not mentally capable?

Life experience tells me otherwise.
Good call. I start with what I am using:

- webmin for administration

- stashboard as dashboard / status monitor

- monit as watchdog / monitor

- mrtg as network / CPU / connection monitor

only the last one is using SNMP
I think it's fantastic. And no, it's not just for the young.

Programming as a career sucks, but if you already have the passion for it then you're half-way there.

Working as a contract programmer is excellent minus the client management part which we all had to go through.

I would be delighted if my dad told me the same. I'd question his sanity, but definitely be glad.
I would just add a couple of more nines to that 99.9%.
A reset that achieves a blank page that involves +8 requests and 21KB of text.

I'm all for it, but it should weigh much less.

Does it really need modernizr and jquery?

Could it not have merged the css files that call each other?
Like Internet Explorer is deliberately stunted to make web applications look slow and clunky. But once a critical mass is reached and people see the alternatives outside the microsoft ecosystem (chrome in the browser, neooffice etc on mac) People end up realising that MS are just really bad in environments that they do not control, whether this is on purpose or not at that point really ceases to matter.

For the record, I think it's a bit of both, why invest in attaining mastery in products you directly compete with, it makes sense to half ass your effort to cast the platform in the most negative light possible.

And before apple zealots get too self righteous on this issue, I offer iTunes on windows as exhibit A as to why those in glass houses ought not be throwing stones.
I got a series of "lol" popup dialogs, then was pushed out of the room and returned to Hacker News. I was fairly frightened by this turn of events and won't return using my normal browser without some assurances that I'm not going to be victimized. I guess I'll fire up a virgin firefox profile and try some more.

On the user interface side, it would make sense if any line starting with "/" was interpreted as a command (legit or not). Otherwise, you'll have a lot of "/help" and so forth in the channels. Especially since "/print" is a valid command.

Update: Not sure, but I think someone has now injected some JS which causes everyone else in the channel to continuously spam it with the word "crash". Good times...
Why the emphasis on 10? Shouldn't it be a percentage of the people you ask?
F#'s dynamic support is more interesting than C#. Instead of giving you yet more special-case compiler rules, F# provides dynamic lookup and assignment operators, but you provide the implementation. That way you can implement what you'd like to happen in the scenarios where you want dynamic access with convenient syntax.

I've found MS's less-typed APIs like MVC to be more annoying to use. Taking "object" everywhere? Just means the tools (IntelliSense/compiler) can't provide the info I need, and I'm forced to go read documentation for small things.

Especially silly is the whole "use an anonymous type as a dictionary" idea. (E.g, SomeFunction(new { width=100, height=200, style="bla"}). The only reason I can see a need for this is because the language doesn't have handy list/sequence and tuple syntax.

There are good places for using dynamic typing. Unfortunately, it seems MS is mainly doing it for interop and as a patch for other annoyances.
> According to supporters, the law that set this up (Proposition 13) has saved taxpayers $528 billion (http://www.hjta.org/about-hjta/history-hjta); that's $17.6 billion a year - pretty much the budget deficit of the state.

I'd love to spend 20% more than I get to keep after taxes, but to do so would be irresponsible.

Prop 13 has been law for decades. It isn't a surprise. The legislature and governor knew how much they had to spend and decided to spend more. The fact that they chose $17B is completely arbitrary on their part, so it's absurd to use it as an argument about prop 13.

CA govt has a lot of money to spend. Why isn't it reasonable to expect it to stay within those bounds?

If not the current bounds, then what bounds?

Note that CA has ramped up its spending significantly (beyond inflation) over the past few decades with almost nothing to show for it. In fact, CA govt spending during the "golden era" was significantly less (inflation adjusted) than it is now....

Based on what we're getting, CA govt arguably spends too much. If you want something more from govt, find something to cut. LIFO works for me.
Macs also have the advantage of mind-share.

On the other hand, Windows really ought to try and sell the ease of basic UI interactions and Window management, possibly with a screen cast.
My experience (probably heretical) has been that being able to move around and resize windows on Windows7 is much easier than on the Mac. Fitt's law is not terribly complicated and explaining it to users and why they need it and why Windows does it better may not be a bad thing.

Edit: They've already partially done that, it looks like.
This reminds me strongly of a John Muir quote I've recently been finding to be very true.

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."

I find more enjoyment in a simple hike through a forest than I've had at work for a very long time. Also, I find that when I go back to work after a trip to the forest or even just a walk outside the city, I feel better and am less crabby about going back to work. I think this is something that is sorely lacking in many people's lives. Not recreation but just being out in whatever wild we have left. Aaand now I sound like a crazy hippie.
Pollution is something that affects quality of life and health of people. That's important.

By 'areas of natural beauty' I basically mean national and state parks and other areas that provide quality of life for many people just through observation and enjoyment. It was a pretty ambiguous line, I admit, but what I really mean is : preserve some parts for the enjoyment of all and future generations. Don't close off existing farmland and already modified environments. Let farmers grow, miners mine, timber workers log. Use the resources wisely for the improvement of living standards.
> It's stupid. Take a walk.

Good idea ;-)
I think that's defined as egoism; ethics tend to be concerned with the theoretical value of morality.
herp derp I obviously meant it to the most extreme case possible.

I could counterargue that I gave my word not to do any wanton killing and therefore it's prohibited and then I can wedge whatever I want into that system.
Yeah, I was thinking more for componentry. Won't replace carbon fiber composite frames.
A useful and somewhat though-provoking test.

But, it feels really frustrating not being able to argue back; especially when the test starts claiming logical conclusions regarding my beliefs and opinions based on technical definitions ("irrevocable proof", "justifiable", etc) that I disagree with. :-)
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Great - signed up for the beta. Let me know when you're ready to test it out. Btw, I'm an employee at another YC company so if you need to get in touch can always do it through my profile here (which links to my blog).
you need to re-evaluate how you are handling characters. you aren't escaping and encoding properly. there is no point in just smashing the little bugs that people bring up because it will still leave other things open. time to re-eval.
You don't have to get very technical to use the meaning of "irrevocable proof". Interpreting the definition to mean 'proof that cannot be refuted' is pretty straightforward, and not a technicality at all.
We're closer in views than you might expect. I especially agree about industrial policy and legislation that chokes off business.

Youth unemployment - well I have a lot of opinions about this - and your answer is correct - you up and leave and chase the work, you don't sit around and complain. Part of the problem is that we tell everyone that they're going to have a wonderful career when that is plainly not an option for every school leaver. What should be taught is self reliance and basic financial literacy and let people make their own decisions from there.

As for that unemployed capital - there's plenty of scope to put it to work, but the regulatory environment closes off a lot of options, minimum wages being just one of the factors. It just takes some creative destruction and some new ideas to get it moving again. I don't have any of those ideas (nor any of the capital, for that matter) but I'm sure there are plenty of new things just around the corner.
> Can you have PhD in arts or post modern philosophy? Does that require high IQ?

Yes, and yes for the latter. Philosophy is my own field, and while I would be much more comfortable making this assertion of analytic philosophers, post-modern (I'll assume you really mean 'continental') philosophers are still very smart people.

Since you aren't doing any research, I will do just a little, and point out that philosophy PhDs tend to have been philosophy majors, and philosophy majors tend to have extremely high GRE scores, and the GRE is extremely correlated with IQ; philosophy majors are #1 and beat every other major when it comes to the Verbal and Analytic Writing sections - surely not the work of people of average intelligence - and rank 15th out of 50 in math scores (ahead of majors such as biology, accounting, architecture and others; being beaten by various engineering, physics/astronomy, and math majors): http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...

> Not every book from back then survived.

Yes, but many catalogues (the Suda eg.) and quotes have survived. The survival rate and biases introduced by history can, and have been, estimated. (The latest one I heard about used statistics about the survival of works of the Venerable Bede, but I can't find the citation in a quick google.) The bias is not orders of magnitude, though it hits some authors badly (Sophocles's prize-winners, eg.) as one would expect from a random process.
That page does have a better design.

It's a bit funny though that one of the points on a Why-Mac page is that "It can run Windows".
>9 out of 10 people already use Windows

Is this really true?
I was under the impression that Macs constitute at least 15% of the market (at least in America)
Damn. Where was this in the beginning of my internship when I was declaring every C++ function explicitly and used stdio for everything. And references, I'm still not sure when to use references and when to use pointers.

Learning C++ after Java and C is the WORST because all of the assumptions you pick up from either language is wrong.
A startup from my area that I wasn't involved with basically did this tactic. They found a number of people interested in the product they wanted to build. They requested that the interested parties sign up at about $10/mo to be the first customers, and then the startup started building their product.

Once they came around to launch time, the customers had already played around with the 'beta' product and given feedback, and nearly all of them have retained their subscription at $10/mo, where as new customers have to pay significantly more.

I think its a reasonable trade off to give a discount to them, especially when they helped work through some of the bugs of the early phase. They may not be the customers that will make them rich by throwing them money, but they certainly helped get the startup to the position they are now.
Please read the literature. There is plenty of evidence that directly contrasts your viewpoint from the last 50 years.

And by the way, your second point is directly contrasted by the article I linked to.
1) I agree volatility is cut which may be favorable. However, 2% is a very low maximum. The overall effect is to reduce taxes, especially on those who held houses long.

2) cities overspending: The better answer is to require neutral-cyclical spending. e.g. if revenues greatly rise, a large % must be placed into a fund.

3) Ignoring federal funds (which tend to be associated with mandates out of the state's hands), the state's expenditures have risen by $18B since 2005 and $25B since 2000. The $20B number represents a 20% rise, which might seem high. But then again inflation accounts for 25% and population growth another 9% - in a sense California is spending less than it was in 2000.
I am professional developer and can honestly tell you that developing on the Mac is just awesome to developing on Windows,the Mac rocks inside out!!!.

Honestly, I find this to be true only when developing against Unixy platforms or tools that have better support for Unix than Windows (like git or node.js or arduino)
Even if you did, a SINGLE base change can cause large differences in function. Thats one change out 3 billion, which is many more 9's.
Would you like a pony too?

How about you build one?
EDIT: sorry tenderlove ... that was just my gut first reaction. perhaps it was cognitive dissonance from seeing an AT&T Engineering banner mixed with an ultra-casual blog post :)