skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you're not being "you", and surely that's the whole point?

You need to be careful with the notion of "just being you". That phrase is based on a specific conception of what "you" means: "You" are a Platonic ideal personality that exists independently of its instantiation, your physical body and its actions are a window on this One True You, and the best modes of expression are the ones through which the One True You is most clearly visible.

But this is just a mental model. And it's not always the most useful model. Here's a different model: "You" are a product of your environment as well as your mind. When you're writing on HN you're a different person than when you're writing for Twitter. When you're writing for business you use a different voice than when writing for pleasure.

When you make a deliberate effort to smile, to enjoy people and be entertained, you are a different person. You're not necessarily just impersonating a happy and interested person -- you might be surprised to find that you genuinely are happy and interested! You'll have a lot more friends. You'll get better practice at making friends. Various feedback mechanisms will kick in: biological ones, social ones. You'll be a different person than you are when you sit alone in your apartment.

There is nothing insincere about having multiple aspects of your personality, cultivating them, and applying different ones in different situations. We all do this. Humans are far too complicated to be constrained by a single persona, and our behavior and mood is conditioned on environment and on training.
What project is a summer intern going to be assigned that can has huge P&L potential? A senior trader or quant would take it.
There are these cloth glove liners. They worked well for me, although everyone has a different reaction to these things.
funny, I missed that completely and just read it rightly lol.
And where there's a market, there's a drive for organization.

And where there's organization, there's a need for rules.

And where there are rules, there's this urge to break them.

And when rules are broken, there's punishment.
Well, in the academic fab... you can't be too sure.

There was a day when I was sitting there in an academic fab, in my bunny suit, and a fly flew by. At first I didn't notice. Then I did a hilarious double-take.

I believe the airlock design has been improved since then.
I've often thought this might be the best way to select immigrants. Pick the number of immigrants we want, and distribute green cards via dutch auction. We can give bonuses to areas of national interest, e.g. nurses.

Doing this, we import people who are most likely to be productive. To allow high human capital pople to compete, we could allow the immigration fee to be paid out over 10 years with a nation-dependent down payment required up front (e.g., $75k for brits, $10k for indians).

Of course, politically this is a no go. Politicians push immigration as a way of importing people to vote for them (e.g. dems want poor Mexicans and reps want skilled former Soviets); the good of the country comes second.
On a balcony overlooking Western Baghdad figuring out why our (old and pretty well tested) network code didn't see fit to push packets. Was outside because we suspected the sat terminal was causing the problem. Only ended up taking a couple hours but it was probably my least favourite coding/debugging session.
I had to write code in a run down house that had been converted into a make shift office. There was no AC, and my desk was fit for a kindergartner (no exaggeration). My chair was a metal folding chair and my boss was a sales guy that had no idea how to write even an Excel function. I wasn't there long.
I bet farming makes a comeback.
This is a serious hole in the proposal. If you have enough resources to not need to take investment for your startup (and want to minimize outside early stage money), but not enough for an EB-5 investor visa, then you're excluded. I know several people who fall into that gap; you'd think the US government would be happy to take immigrants with say at least 500k$ to support themselves but nope..
There are too many places that standardized their web apps on IE6 bugs to do that.
I'm sorry, I must have misunderstood you, I didn't realise you were talking about the scientific process. Of course you are right.

The confusion arose from your use of the word "true", which to me means "indisputable objective fact", not the current ascendency of a particular theory. For example, water is composed of 2 Hydrogen and 1 Oxygen atoms. Gravity exerts a downward acceleration of ~9.8ms2. Etc. These kind of things are "true" for me.

Theories are things which cannot be "true", really, merely the best current explanation of something. But perhaps I confused the terms and misread your arguments, so actually it seems we're in happy agreement. And yes, I also suspect General Relativity is not the final word.
This is for all people posting here, please don't be lazy and read through :=)

http://www.thevenusproject.com/
some more - http://images.rapidshare.com/software/rsapi.pl
Also, academia (in the humanities) has much more of a downside.

If your startup fails, you spend a year or two of your life learning a lot of useful skills, but end up out of a job when the money runs out. It sucks, but you end the travail much better off than when you started, and probably better off than if you had toiled in a mediocre corporate job.

In the humanities, if your academic career fails, you've spent a decade of your live to get a relatively useless degree, have weak job skills for someone your age, and probably damaged self-esteem. You're not better off than you were when you began; you're in your mid-30s with nothing to show but a publication no one cares about.
If you are using linux and have a vt enabled cpu available then go for kvm (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page).
"It has become clear that in this market you should have revenue by demo day. Ideally you're ramen profitable. It'll be much harder to find investment if you're not."

If you're "ramen profitable", why do you need a VC at all? You're self-sufficient by that time, you have proven your product - you should be talking to a bank, not YC.
Being likeable and making friends aren't necessarily the same thing. For example, as a teacher I try to be likeable to my students so that they have a more pleasant and interesting time in the classroom. But I don't try to be their friend, because then they might be tempted to try to take advantage.

Conversely, with my friends I am often not all that likeable, but they understand that it's just part of my gruff, honest personality.
Startup:

WIN: fuck you money.

FAIL: On track in your career as a software engineer, but with a couple of years of lost earnings.

Humanities academic:

WIN: tenure track position. Salary caps out at entry level software engineer, but great lifestyle.

FAIL: adjunct professor or barista. You are 30-40 years old, and less employable than you were at age 22. (Some humanities PhD's do well for themselves, but getting the PhD was just a side errand. )

Note: STEM academic is vastly better than humanities, but be prepared to get out early. If you aren't at the top at any stage of the game, quit.
How Bacteria Communicate [video]
Academia is the right job environment for a certain set of people, but they deserve decent living conditions. They shouldn't be exploited just because society views them (correctly or otherwise; mostly otherwise, I believe) as naive pansies.

Few are arguing that academics ought to be millionaires (although they're certainly more deserving of that than most of the assholes running Wall Street, the Fortune 500, and Hollywood) but they should be paid well enough to support a lifestyle comfortable enough to enable a "life of the mind" (which most professors, for what it's worth, don't get to have). The phrase, "we don't pay you to work here, we pay you so you can work here" seems to have been lost on academia.
Well, I nearly killed myself with a line of bad code. I made a silly change to a flight simulator's "unusual attitude" logic. Unusual attitude training consists of putting the aircraft in a very difficult orientation (45 deg nose down, 60 deg left bank, etc.) and training pilots to recover.

Here's what the simulators look like:
http://blafsen.net/photos/simulator.jpg

I changed the code, and brought the simulator up on motion to test it... and the machine started bucking like a horse and tossing me around the cabin. I had the instructor console right in front of me, and for a while it was physically impossible to hit the freeze button - I was being tossed around too badly.

That day I learned a lesson about testing: first check it with motion OFF.
The point being, when you say something like "religion is false" then you have to have this other discussion about what true and false are. People who say religion is false usually pose science as being true, which really doesn't hold up that well either.
Wealthy people can already buy their way into the US with the investor visa (EB-5). I don't think they exhaust their annual quota.
What is STEM?

In the sciences, I disagree with "If you aren't at the top at any stage of the game, quit". It can be the right decision to get a PhD in an 11-20 program, so long as you have options aside from an R1 academic job.
Unless you have about the education of a PhD in economics and have studied the impact of the US economy by allowing more visas (e.g. will the median income of Americans increase?), then I don't think an essay or a blog post will have much influence.

what we need now isn’t another Google, it’s another Wal-Mart.

Add the adjective "vertically-integrated" before Wal-Mart and you may have something.
So you're saying importing more people like those that worked in Bear Sterns would have been in the national interest? This sounds completely backwards to me.

Besides, with your particular method, how do you prevent people from over-bidding and then being unable to pay the fee?

No, whatever algorithm is used to select immigrants, wealth surely is not the thing to use.
I find myself using the iphone while I'm in the house. Just because I dont want to lug my laptop around.
The number of applications you could build for this.

Hang in next to your door.

1. Have it show your daily schedule, weather, errands as you walk out the door. You can add to the schedule and errands/todos from your iphone, computer at work etc.
2. Your gym routine for the day.

Keep it in your toilet.

* Browse the web/email while your on the toilet.
* Have it play Pandora while your in the shower.

Keep it in the livign room.

* Instant TV guide.

Kitchen.

* Grocery list.
* recpies

Essentially any application where you dont need telephony but you do want a big screen and a kiosk like interface. (Ie where a keyboard is needed minimally).

My mom, would love such a thing. Instant on would be really nice in something like this.
This is mostly a problem in people's minds. You are not forced to grow up faster, you do it to yourself. I went to college without a penny from others. I worked every other quarter and did just fine. It took longer, but I also got a lot out of it and ended up without debt.

Leaving school to start some "get-rich-quick" web X.0 idea is very foolish. If you luck into having a huge success on the line by doing a side project with a friend during college, that's different and very rare.
I can't vouch for any other generations, but it's hard to tell people my age (born 1985) that they /can't/ accomplish anything even if they try their hardest. Life is a lot more fatalistic and free will a lot weaker than we've been taught.

It's very sobering and depressing to learn that scarcity is a very real thing. There are only so many spots for the jobs that people want, and most of the time people get there through personal relationships, luck, or other things most people just can't realistically be expected to have.
How not? Many strains of Buddhism consider mind to be the first-class citizen and worlds to emerge from minds, as opposed to the materialist view wherein matter is the first-class citizen. That doesn't mean that the laws of physics are controlled by my mind, but that this world only exists because trillions of minds exist to experience it, and not independently of them.

Think of it this way: there's no reason not to believe that there aren't infinitely many (or a massive number of) universes. Of course, if they're generated "randomly" (whatever that might mean) the vast majority of them won't support conscious life (fine tuning). For those universes that don't harbor conscious life, there's no difference between them existing and not existing. Ergo, they don't really exist. Then, minds create worlds.
... what we need now isn’t another Google, it’s another Wal-Mart.

Yeah, because Wal-Mart is known as a big net job-creator...
Or write a program that analyze the noise level from the recording device to detect any motion and alert you. Hooked up with Growl and IM and now you have a dead-alert system. However, since it's a life-or-death situation and you couldn't focus 100% your commitment into it, I'm glad that you move on to a different job now. Working on your startup or side projects and you may end up killing someone isn't the kind of thought you need for the rest of your life.
Working as a tech team-lead for a large international company, I was assigned to a team that was a year behind schedule on an 8 month project. I rallied the people, we worked for 14-16 hours every day (weekends) and managed to get the code in production in about two months.

I was proud of my team, that is what got me through the days.

After that my boss denied my salary raise with the suggestion that if I don't like the salary, I know where the doors are.

I was insulted by the insolence. That was what got me through the door.
The reason religion exists.
Ok, it's a good idea

Design is simple and clean and the site seems to be working well.

However no one can predict if it will be useful or not. In my opinion, for Freelance Jobs, it may be successful, but for a company, i don't think it's good to hire from twitter, as you may get a lot of responses from different people.

Anyway, we shall give it a try, I tweeted it (http://twitter.com/omarabid/status/1503823559)
What's your take on why this is? It is very perplexing to me: my intuition says that strong math almost implies suitability and predisposition for strong programming. Why is this not the case?

I am not supplying a guess now, because this comes as a total surprise.
The popularity of a job is decided by the number of followers or messages that refer to same url, which can be seen in 'Popular' tab. (24hrs/7days/30days) etc. We decided to use #rtjobs hashtag as its purpose is to share 'jobs to be filled' among the network. We wanted to differentiate the job tweets sent by bots from the job discussions done by actual twitter users. Thats the reason behind going for '#rtjobs' (re-tweet-jobs) instead of the popularly used tag '#jobs'.
I didn't say that his argument depends on it, just that it would be more convincing if he wrote well.

If he understands something important about writing that E. B. White didn't, he ought to be able to use that special insight to produce better results, much as someone who claimed to have discovered the secret of making money ought to be rich.

You're right that the first sentence is more informative. Among its other problems, it's too informative. It's like saying that pi is 3.27394 rather than 3.14.
More hogwash. The moment such a cloning happens, you'd become two distinct individuals and would immediately diverge into having separate experiences. Science would not at all consider you the same thing.

I'm talking about one time slice: the moment at which the cloning took place. You can argue that a zero-width time slice doesn't really exist, but we're in "meta-science" (which is philosophy and not science) here. For that matter, there's no such thing as a pure kilogram of iron. Two seemingly "identical" objects are almost certainly not identical at the atomic level. My point is that most science operates under the metascientific assumption that two physically identical objects are identical, and while this may be philosophically wrong regarding matters of consciousness, it's a damn good/useful assumption to make when you want to reason about, say, chemical reactions.

Science would say there are no two distinct and separate consciousnesses.

No it wouldn't. That's scientism, which is inherently speculative. Science says nothing about consciousness. Cognition is a different animal; that can be observed.

And we very well know consciousness is bound to your brain.

More scientism.
You're partially right, although this is outside the scope of my article. The article is simply stating that it's easier to find any investment (debt or equity) when you have revenue. Ironically, its easiest raise money when you're already making it.

Regardless, there are still good reasons to seek VC investment when profitable. Several YC startups are going down that path. A bank might lend you $10-50k if your net is $2k/month while a VC might invest $1-5 million.
Making something people want would be. Except I doubt it will actually stop being possible to make lots of money by speculation.
Thanks for the feedback, this will help a lot to make the application more usable. We have added these issues to the forthcoming release.
As a deconvert from Christianity as of early February, I think this article makes some good points.

If you'd like to read the testimonies of other deconverts, visit unreasonablefaith.com, de-conversion.com and debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com

Many of them are former pastors, missionaries and apologists. Some of their testimonies were what helped me 'see the light'...

Interestingly, while I was a Christian, I came to the conclusion that some genuine, sincere Christians were genuinely and sincerely delusional. Ultimately, Christianity is responsible for forcing me to think things through, since you have to check everything by 'the Word' (Bible)

I wonder if 'G-d' is angry with me for posting this on 'Resurrection Morning.' Oh well. See you in hell...
I guess they are skimming. I have negotiated, and they don't accept my desired rate. My current contract used the recession as an excuse to lower my rate. And, I was out of work in Jan and Feb due to hardly any contracts in Chicago and no one accepting my rate. May I send you my resume for you to quickly glance at it?
No, there is no conscious evasion of responsibility. The person who writes the response thinks they are saying "I will fix it" or "I am telling X to fix it" and the passive voice is consistent with what they think they are saying. It is just hard for anyone else to figure that out without being mindreaders.

This is particularly common in people with academic background, as the passive voice is often encouraged in scientific writing.
Ah, actually, I have a guess; it is quite simple. Please don't read it until you thought of one first.

Writing code requires knowledge of code conventions, syntax, and as importantly, the libraries. This is a declarative/episodic memory task, less so of working memory, symbolic manipulation, and abstract reasoning task. The latter traits are dominatingly important in math/physics. In coding there is a mix of the two, with the former taking precedence after the program logic has been deduced.

Which brings about the next question. The mathematician part cannot be learned merely through patience, but becoming expert at a language can be. Now, why is it that your brilliant math/physicist friends cannot become such experts? Do they lack the patience? Or, does coding simply not "click" with them? Is there a causal relationship? Now my intuition says there is none, and so we are back to square one: it is perplexing that they are not good programmers, unless there is some personality reason behind it.
"Being likeable and making friends aren't necessarily the same thing"

Good point, thank you.
Industrial automation controls programming at a tire factory in Georgia. It was 90 degrees outside and you're in a large room with row after row of tire ovens that run above a few hundred degrees. We had machines with thermal sensors set to fault out at 120 and ac units on their enclosures and they still faulted regularly. They spray the tires with lube so they don't stick to the ovens so there is a layer of black crap on everything. All the machines running made around 100DB of noise. I got put on the project towards the end as it was way past due and they wanted to appear to be doing something so they decided 24hr on site was the way to go so I was working 8pm to 8am.
Because VC can oftentimes get you to the next level beyond ramen profitability faster than you can on your own. Even at ramen profitability you are still quite vulnerable to the whims of the market; it may make sense to have some VC cushion even at that point.
People who are really good at math often find programming boring and mundane. I used to work with some guys who had physics PhDs from MIT and they all referred to their programming jobs as "whoring." I've read a few articles about Stephen Wolfram where he makes the admission that he can't stand programming.

I'm not very good at math but I'd prefer working through a trigonometry textbook to working on another ruby on rails website.
nice idea! could you somehow let a user browse them by continent or even region?

btw, i am always annoyed if i meet the clearspring embedded flash thingy (due to the addthis button). dunno if that affects others as well...

alternate services include:

* http://sharethis.com

* http://www.addtoany.com

http://linuxuser.at/blog/why-addthis-sucks-because-of-clears...
"There is nothing insincere about having multiple aspects of your personality, cultivating them, and applying different ones in different situations."

I agree, and I never said that, I was talking about faking these emotions, pretending to be interested in someone or that they're amusing, when they're in fact not. This is insincere, and it's not being "you".
> and we should respect that people believe X because they feel good by believing X, even without serious reasons to think X is true?

Yes. Why? Because everyone has such beliefs so harshing on folks who have them is like harshing on people because they have heads.

What? You think that you don't have such beliefs? Back when I was into being a serious jerk, I loved finding folks who thought like that because it didn't take much to find their "religion" and then I got to go to town.
"Startups often make money primarily by reducing costs, and cost reduction nearly always means job reduction."

It seems that is the crux of your argument against Founders Visa.

(1) The flaw of course is that you are only looking at job reduction--and not the jobs that were created as a result of blogs and online news.

And even if the jobs created were fewer than jobs lost, that is free market: sooner or later it had to happen. The worst thing we can do is be delusional that it won't happen. The best thing would be to figure out jobs that are not going to exist and re-train those people for more sustainable jobs.

(2) You don't seem to be so much against Founders Visa as against startups in general. You might as well be arguing against ALL startups--not just those started by immigrants--using this line of argument.
People who view programming as implementation-oriented grunt work (this describes a surprisingly high percentage of those who are smart enough that they "should" be able to program) have no interest in becoming good at it. Sucking at programming means that it never becomes anything more than grunt work for them, and before they become decent at it, they have enough authority to delegate their coding.

It doesn't help that they're trapped in C++ and an environment that rewards guts-'n'-glory over finely crafted code.