skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are plenty of good reasons not to be a rationalist. In fact, valuing the truth as a sort of Platonic ideal to which everything else must be subservient is an arbitrary moral choice in a universe where moral facts are either non-existent or inaccessible.

The rationalists' position is that believing true things is almost always strategically superior to believing untrue things. This is an empirical claim, not one about "Platonic ideals". You can choose to value whatever you want, but presumably you have some ends you want to achieve, which requires decision making, which is usually assisted more by true beliefs than by false beliefs.

Now, there's some evidence about cases where this might not be true. The blog post raises this about happiness surveys, etc. This evidence seems to me to weakly establishes a negative correlation, but not necessarily that rationality causes less happiness. At any rate, for any particular subgoal (say, becoming better at programming, achieving material wealth, etc), believing true things is probably going to be good strategy. That's the rationalist claim, anyway. For happiness in general, it gets murkier.

Yudkowsky also has a whole thing about how a rationalist can still win at Newcomb-like problems. The gist of it is, what's rational is whatever will meet your goals. This means if you need to preserve some false beliefs, you should go ahead and do that.

For example, you may find false beliefs about how long a project will take motivate you to get started. If you really accepted that your project would take a long, long time to bear fruit, maybe you'd never have begun, and you'd have been worse for that. In this case you've got this other irrationality about how you're weighing future benefits that you're compensating for by lying to yourself about how far into the future you'll reap your rewards.

Here, the two irrationalities together take you to a local maximum. If you only got rid of the false belief about the project times, you'd be worse off. But, if you could get rid of both irrationalities you'd be _better_ off. You wouldn't have the motivation problem AND you could plan more efficiently.

But maybe you just can't get rid of your tendency to over-discount future benefits. If so, you should just accept the local maximum, rather than anti-strategically attacking your tendency to underestimate project costs and leaving yourself worse off.

You could make a similar argument about religion and many other false beliefs. Which local maxima we can realistically step beyond is another empirical question. But I think it's clear that there are many false beliefs that are strictly negative: that is, you're better off without them, even if you don't change anything else about your thinking.
I have to say I'm kinda surprised that no one has mentioned Jony Ive as a potential successor. Successive keynotes have given me the impression that Jobs trusts Ive and Ive seems to have a similar obsession for making beautiful things. I even remember Jobs referring to Ive as one his best friends.

Jony Ive and Tim Cook in my mind will form a very potent team.
This is the best job I've ever had and I think everyone there is awesome. This should be a mutually beneficial move for everyone so I don't think burning bridges will be an issue.
> Is anyone else confused by this vitriolic response?

Numair's website says Shawn Parker felt like he missed out on the college experience. Numair is touchy about Harvard people thinking they're all that. Also, Numair has personal knowledge about Shawn Parker. Therefore, Numair is Shawn Parker.

You're welcome.
But rationalism is not just the assumption that all others are dumber, rather the realization that some are dumber and some are smarter. The goal then becomes to determine which are which, and to move oneself toward the truth. It assumes that there is some method of comparison, and that not all solutions are equal. It does not assume that the way is clear and unambiguous, nor that the truth is all on one side.

Compare Western medicine with homeopathy. I'd wager my life that there is no such thing as water memory. But at the same time, the placebo effect is definitely real. Where a absolutist would argue that modern medicine has nothing to learn from homeopathy, and a relativistic would argue that from within each system each is equally 'true' for its adherents, a rationalist will feel comfortable disbelieving in the surface explanations of homeopathy while at the same time trying to understand how modern medicine could be improved.
I loved it when Paul Carr during the 2010 Crunchies made the joke "hey look into the crowd, are there Quora users in the room? Oh wait, I mean to say all Quora users are in this room". I love Quora because it provides me with a lot of inside knowledge

I feel bad for Quora because of the valuation they got, people are hating on them. It is a simple service that provides a community for techies / entrepreneurs like us. People hate on it because it's prospering with a simple solution, but yet if it's so simple, why didn't they come up with it?

keep in mind the value of Quora also lies within its developers. Adam D'Angelo was the CTO of Facebook, and he is quite amazing. Many original key developers of Facebook is building Quora, thus they have extensive experience and knowledge in this area.
Keep one eye on Steve's participation on the BoD at Disney. If that drops off, that could be an indicator as well.
When you use ClickToFlash, it still loads the Flash objects, it simply doesn't show them until you tell it to. To the websites you visit, you're still a visitor who has Flash installed.

I want websites to know that I don't want to view Flash content, that's why I go without the Flash plugin altogether.
Be very careful that you do not use copyrighted source code for which you do not have right, which includes open source licenses like the GPL in your proprietary codebase.

When the time comes for your company to be purchased, it's likely that the acquirer will scan your source against known OSS codebases. There are companies whose entire business is to perform these scans for potential acquirers.

If they find a match, it raises red flags and the acquirer could walk away. Buyers get uneasy when it appears they may not actually own what they're buying.
A different perspective on pair programming
The evolution of computer displays
Predictably, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons in high school. Just as predictably, I didn’t lose my virginity until I stopped.

Um... it's 2011. Are we really still making "nerds can't get laid" jokes? I mean, Vin Diesel plays Dungeons & Dragons. I'm not offended or anything; the author is clearly joking, but it seems pretty low-brow for the opening hook on something posted to HN.

EDIT:

It's an established fact that Dungeons & Dragons is a bigger threat to human reproduction than all the gay marriages in the world.

Oh whoops. OK... complaint retracted. I expressly condone the usage of dated nerd jokes if used to setup a punchline this hilarious.

That'll teach me to comment before reading the rest of the friendly article.

EDIT 2:

I thought this sounded familiar... this is from January, 2010! Obligatory: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/1/27/
"all humans ... believe in the assertion that true things can be known"

Actually, there are a minority who do not believe that. I take Richard Dawkins and Morris Kline ("Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty") as representing themselves accurately, even if I believe their positions to be incorrect. See Martin Gardner's essay "How Not to Talk About Mathematics".
Firstly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with drinking about debauchery in general. I live in SF, work at a Palo Alto startup and attended college in Berkeley and found that entrepreneurship and debauchery went very well together. The startup I work for exited to a Fortune 50 company for a great deal of money, and has a fridge stocked with beer. I drink a lot—and yet still get great work done.

Meeting girls has not really been a problem either. Palo Alto has Stanford, tho its girls tend to be way too smart for me. SF is the world's most promiscuous city (SF State girls are great!), and Berkeley is a huge college town.
No worries.

We all have different things that work for us. You have your count mnemonic, to misuse the term. For me it really is as simple as finding something, anything that I can get done. One example: I needed to update the sales copy on one of my landing pages, but for some reason didn't want to get started. What did I do? I started by changing the background color of the site. Something easy that took just a couple of minutes, then when I'd finished testing that and found it to be an improvement, I moved to changing the headline on the page and eventually the whole sales copy.
You, Eduardo, the Winkelvoss twins... All of you want to feel important, to be recognized. It's nuts. It makes no sense. But again, you went to Harvard, you know about this better than I do.

Give me a break. Desire for recognition is, if not universal, at least common enough that you don't need to infer ridiculous bullshit about Harvard's entire undergrad population to explain a couple instances of it.
"If you are going to do a legal analysis on your bullshit placement firm's blog...."

If you're going to knock a website at least take 2 seconds to look at the title before doing so.

"Above the Law: A Legal Tabloid - News, Gossip, and Colorful Commentary on Law Firms and the Legal Profession"

It's far from a "bullshit placement firm's blog", it's a tabloid focused on the legal industry. In fact, it's extremely popular in the legal world. Being light hearted in nature is a great way to entertain and grab the attention of people stuck reading legalese all day.
Sure, for apps that you distribute. Most of the technologies listed here are server-side and/or web technologies.
You bet! Every chance I get. If I am in a section of code for some sort of change, I will definitely take the opportunity to update/improve the current state of affairs. Doesn't mean you need to go through and rewrite the entire thing.

For example, a recent requirement of mine was to revise some xml processing to create sitemaps. As part of the changes, I rewrote the logic to use xml LINQ (c#) and the resulting function is much cleaner, and will be easier to maintain going forward.

It also makes routine maintenance changes more palatable.
still not clear.

the code unobfuscated is:
(a=[a=[]]['sort'])()['alert'](1)

my argument is that this is the same, and less chars
(a=[]['sort'])()['alert'](1)

I can't see any benefit of the encapsulation of the array assignment there.

edit: also, just noticed that my previous comments i was writting $=[[]] when i was thinking of $=[], but both works the same, and are still less chars :)
The performance analysis is pretty bad. Comparing synchronous I/O performance against asynchronous I/O based solely in terms of bits per second transferred only tells a small part of the story. It doesn't show how well the server scales as more and more connections are added, which absolutely essential information. It would have been far better if the author had plotted the connection rate and response time against the transfer size per connection.
I've never done what you did, but props to you because you're doing something very entrepreneurial and I love it.

I don't think you should sell your idea before you build it. Tell your boss about your ambitions to do a startup, and how you saw an opportunity that you believe is very promising, which is the reason you are quitting.

Tell your boss that you always looked up to him, and ask if you two can stay in touch and ask him for some advices for later. If he replies affirmatively, stay in touch, and exchange Emails from time to time, and then when your product is available, ask him to dinner and pitch it to him.

If he replies no, then he's probably not too pleased with your leaving, thus it wouldn't be a good idea to pitch anything. Save it for later.

Best of luck man!
I think JWZ put it best when he said "Dear Japanese people ..."
Don't burn any bridges, try to be as friendly as possible and maintain connections. You never know when they'll help in some way. Best of luck!
Why the downvotes? This is the comment that actually answers the question the poster asked! The fact that you disagree with the statement "It's also not spam" doesn't mean you should downvote, especially when the other 90% of the comment is very informative.

If you disagree, comment, don't downvote.

To restate: the searchfreedom page contains more of the stuff that an algorithm can know is important to a good search ranking like more mentions of the search phrase and more relevant outgoing links. It also contains nothing malicious. The stackoverflow page has some stuff that we consider important, like the ability to comment and by being the authoritative source. But Google cannot take this into consideration because it cannot know -- it's just an algorithm.
>rather the realization that some are dumber and some are smarter.

What? You think that begins with _rationalism??_ The world is divided up into people who realize this and people who do not?--for that is what defining 'rationalist' in the context of people's self-identification attempts to do.

Your definition leads right back to mine. Everyone realizes it. Everyone!
Thomas Edison's 1911 Predictions for 2011
Good for you.

I'd love to see a private equity database that tracks venture investments by angels or super angels. Maybe something automated that monitors outgoing links on portfolio pages, or something like that.
Not Quite a Reporter, but Raking Muck and Reaping Wrath
> Sex, booze and testosterone is what drives every man

> It isn't?

Some of us aren't so shallow and self-centered. It grieves me that people live like that.
65% of Internet users have paid for online content
We only know one side of the story

That's right, and you can go in endless circles second guessing which party was in the right. If you decide that it was wrong to take the work back, you're just siding with the client. It's not hard to imagine them having done something equally drastic that we don't know about.

In many cases, contracting is effectively lawless and the stakes can be arbitrarily high. There aren't many actions I would categorically rule as out of bounds.

Keep in mind that there are people out there who are utter wrecking balls. They do nothing but damage to everyone they work with, and sometimes to themselves as well. The "professionalism" of their victims is what allows them to keep going.
Just an additional point, Groupon's China strategy is very ambitious. There are monopolies like Tencent, a company that is basically Zynga + Facebook + AIM/Skype + Blogosphere + Twitter, you name it , they have it. As matter of fact, Zynga got Farmville from Tencent. They're basically an internet monopoly in China with deep government connections. Every new idea that seems promising in the American market, they would take it and implement it. They got deep pockets.

They recently introduced group buy as well. I'm quite certain Groupon is aware of this type of competition. If Google is even getting dominated in the Chinese market by Baidu and the government, I doubt Groupon is going to accomplish much success in China. It's too young and too ambitious, and I think throwing money into the Chinese market is like falling into an abyss. That's what I firmly believe because I know the Chinese market quite well.

Prove me wrong Groupon =) (I actually really respect Andrew Mason as a CEO)
I must upvote BUT here are some disputes to your claims:

"Its 2011 Are we really still making "nerds can't get laid" jokes?"

Honestly, from my experience try s/D&D/World of Warcraft. Yes people who play WoW get laid. Highschool kids who play WoW instead of building up real social skills don't get laid.

The thing though is the author's assertion is incorrect. Its pretty hard to not get laid as you get to college. I mean you have to be in a closet pretty much. Which is what can happen with WoW or D&D. However the only virgin I know of (and hell, people I thought would die virgins have proved me wrong) is a virgin because she just does not like most guys shes met, and is too shy to do anything about the ones she does. Nothing to do with games.
Dui | defense attorney Orlando
Careful with that line of thinking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
See http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin :

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. - Misattributed to various people, including Albert Einstein and Mark Twain. The earliest known occurrence, and probable origin is Rita Mae Brown, Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983), p. 68."
Your separation of "neutral" and "impartial" is wrong, particularly in the given context.

Also, Godwin's law - you lose.
Body decoration is nearly a human universal -- it's unsurprising that new technology will be adopted for this, though whether this particular fad will take root is doubtful.
A flag to enable targeting stackless python instead of normal python?
Sure, you might select Sydney over UWS. But students from other Group of 8 universities are pretty bright self-selectors too. Where are the equal number of Rhodes scholars from the Universities of Queensland, Melbourne, Western Australia, New South Wales and Adelaide, the ANU, and Monash?

(I went to Sydney too, for 2 years, before depression wrecked my life. Spent 1 year at St Andrews college.)
They're playing the role of the middle man, in my opinion

Much of the world is middlemen, and it is often a fairly profitable place to be for companies. (A large multinational advertising firm with 35% margins that employs quite a few PhDs comes to mind.)
Apple of Sun's Eye (1996)
For non-subscribers:

Page 1 - http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/2...

Page 2 - http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/2...
That was the point of my caveat, actually, the "whether they say so or not."

Nihilists still act as if things are true and kinda negate their own point. That guy who wrote a tome about meaninglessness and then offed himself at Harvard wrote a poem about meaning and finding it _through_ belief in meaninglessness.

That's a little besides the point, however, because I think it fundamental that it is only after experiencing meaninglessness that we are free to create meaning. How do you know what's really important to you? It's what you do after you don't think anything matters.

There are people who are _actually_ nihilists, who _actually_ cannot bind meaning functionally anymore. They are some subset of schizophrenics, I suspect.

If you really, fully believed that not meaning nor truth existed (which is a contradiction since the justification for the argument must use the concept of truth) you would be unable to function.

tl;dr the theory of meaninglessness is useful as an abstraction but it is not a practical reality.
Rob Pike: Geek of the Week
Wow, that was fast. I didn't realize HN used hackerne.ws. I've always used news.ycombinator.
That's probably why it made such a good movie. Hard to imagine how boring the real-life version would be.
Yes. The founders' voting control effectively means the board of directors reports to them, and Schmidt reports to the board. But I'm still surprised they can skip the chain of command on decisions like this. Maybe this is just my won ignorance.
That's because when we talk about "strongly held beliefs" we're talking about an emotional and not rational attachment to the idea. Emotionally-held ideas are not examined as they are tied up in self-image.
Custom Paper, Custom Writing Service, Custom term paper, Custom Essay
Custom Paper and Custom Writing Service. All custom papers, term papers , research papers and essays are written from scratch by highly qualified, professional writers according to your instructions and requirements.$9.95/Page plus 20% discount.
Lisp Syntax Doesn't Suck
I think the reason it gets ragged on is two things:

- The hype is immensely disproportionate to what they're doing and how successful they are - they're the millionth Q&A site both chronologically and by traffic.

- TC hype it like they own a piece of it. Quora's got potential and it might even live up to the hype eventually, until then we're constantly pushed to pretend it already won.
Custom Essay: Essay writing and help services
Custom Essay :: Essay Paper Writing Service: Our Custom Essay Writing Service has been providing original, one of kind projects for our clients. We provide original research, which is not intended as a substitute for independent academic study. Get your Custom essay now with 30% extra discount package. Our custom essay papers are guaranteed to be original and are delivered to you before the deadline. You can choose the deadline to be as close as 24 hrs. We also provide free originality report (Plagiarism Report) on request. Our dedicated support staff is always there to assist you with any type of difficulties.
I think you're right on. Ive and Jobs share a similar background (in design, if you consider the calligraphy story) and Ive's personality has been really ingrained in the latest Apple creations. Besides, Apple has already all the structure in place to handle a CEO with less business/operations experience and more focused on products. If Eric isn't coming to Apple (and to me, he is more needed at Microsoft anyway), Ive would make a great CEO.
Most people seem to be in complete denial.

No one else could have done what Jobs did with Apple in the past 10 years. No one else will be able to do it in the next 10 years.

Replacing one multi-talented genius with five talented geniuses does not produce the same result.
I love this idea! There is no reason to not use GPS since all of the devices support it now anyways. Thanks for the ideas!
this is my favorite take away from the whole thing:

That need to rewrite is important and often neglected when coding. Modern programming languages, especially object-oriented ones, are interface heavy. This means that before you can make anything happen you need to write down a lot of preliminaries, often making important API decisions before the best design has emerged. Once it does emerge, there's so much written down already that it feels counterproductive to back up and rework the interfaces. These languages create a penalty for rewriting that encourages working around early design mistakes rather than fixing them. I believe this dependence on interfaces before code is a major reason for programs being so much bigger than they used to be.
oh. thanks, i missed that. weird.
Personally, I wouldn't try to negotiate anything. Build your product and let the strength of that product do all the talking.

Actually, if I were to negotiate something, it would be the possibility to do consulting work if I needed more money while building the other business.
I'll add it tonight!
She isn't trying to make a case against those specific students. They might not even exist exactly as she described them. She merely used three examples to illustrate her argument, and she included one vaguely "conservative" example (the student willing to kill for the government) to balance two "liberal" examples. That's pretty good for a former Republican officeholder writing in the Washington Post. There is only the faintest whiff of partisanship here; don't let it distract you from her argument.
I feel like a moron for asking this, because clearly at least 18 people liked it enough to upvote without explanation, but...

Why would I want to do this...?
It still says you have Flash installed to JavaScript and the like. It doesn't load the flash objects.
I'd be willing to help with my experience with these tax issues. =)

I'm both licensed and experienced in the tax field.
How to Save $1 Billion on Solar in America
The reason not o would be battery life. I'd hate it if I had to recharge my phone every 2 hours.
Good point, I'll add it to my TODO list ;)