trominos

7 ms·

1.
by trominos 12y ago
There's a more generic term for what you're experiencing, which is "lack of motivation." On some level you don't care much about what you're doing; if you did, I guarantee you wouldn't be paralyzed. When y
2.
by trominos 16y ago
Thanks for the explanation. One thing that's confusing me: if the company gets a Series A round, convertible debt is worse than the equity you would've gotten because you've essentially chosen to invest as a VC rather than an angel (which m
3.
by trominos 16y ago
This is like saying that the entire universe can be simulated by using a fundamental theory of physics as source code. It's (to some extent) true , and potentially interesting philosophically -- but completely meaningless from an engineeri
4.
by trominos 16y ago
The flaw in the argument for switching comes in its second line: "1. I denote by A the amount in my selected envelope. 2. The probability that A is the smaller amount is 1/2, and that it is the larger amount is also 1/2. " If we're gonna b
5.
by trominos 16y ago
Taking your hands off of home row to get out of insert is also easily soluble -- you can map literally any key combo to esc. I use command-i (on a Mac), which is effortless to type and feels nicely symmetric to using i for insert.
6.
by trominos 16y ago
This is a bad idea. Even if we accept that no individual can reasonably spend more than $200 million non-charitably (which is false), super-rich people tend to care deeply about money for its own sake -- I say this from limited but real per
7.
by trominos 16y ago
This is a popular argument in support of mind-enhancing drugs in the "real world," and it's completely wrong. You could make almost exactly the same argument in favor of nootropics in schools: "anything that allows the sum-total of human l
8.
by trominos 16y ago
Meditation is learned skill in a way that "running" in your example doesn't seem to be. Ten days of practice is more than just "ten more days of meditation in my life"; it's a hundred hours of improvement. A more reasonable comparison would
9.
by trominos 16y ago
But... HN has nuanced discussions pretty frequently. Right now the top comments in this thread primarily serve to point out the blinkered view taken by the article. HNers love proving people wrong like nothing else, and until that stops bei
10.
by trominos 16y ago
I'd be careful about messing with points on comments (and with karma more generally). You might enjoy imagining a forum where smart people anonymously engage in civilized discussion without need for the kind of lowbrow pleasure-center-stimu
11.
by trominos 16y ago
This is great but (unfortunately) it's not quite right. The author seems to have forgotten the difference between a program without specified inputs -- which can't be said to "halt" or "not halt", because it might halt on some inputs and lo
12.
by trominos 16y ago
Even assuming that this "screwed factor" is something meaningful, you miscalculated it. I think you're trying to find (percentage increase in work over normal hours/percentage increase in pay over normal pay). If your pay is just a percenta
13.
by trominos 16y ago
The terminology is secondary; the important point is that it seems like smart people are unpopular, but it's not clear whether that's true and if it is true it's not clear why.
14.
by trominos 16y ago
What? I mean, of course, if you define "nerds" to be "people without social intelligence" you're gonna see that nerds are unpopular. The premise beneath PG's essay (and this one, I think) is that if you instead define "nerds" to be "people
15.
by trominos 16y ago
I'm in favor of sweeping decriminalization (and legalization), but the data in this article -- hand-picked, no doubt, by the Cato Institute -- barely suggest correlation between decriminalization and declining drug use rates and stop way
16.
by trominos 16y ago
This is pretty close to not having any regulation at all. The problem is that investors don't get "consistently burned" by companies with bad practices, they get inconsistently burned. And people are so bad at appropriately estimating and
17.
by trominos 16y ago
Apple's trying to use its near-monopoly of the handheld software delivery channel to perpetuate its near-monopoly of the handheld software delivery channel. I doubt this is illegal and I don't think it means anything to say that its somehow
18.
by trominos 16y ago
You've refuted a strawman, but you haven't given an actual justification for the original wording. Using the phrase "poor people" instead of "poor black people" is equally effective -- more, actually, because "poor black people" makes you w
19.
by trominos 16y ago
How so? If a mathematician is good enough to win the fields medal, he (she) can probably have the career he wants. I haven't done research myself, but I've spent a fair amount of time around researchers in math and the basic sciences and my
20.
by trominos 17y ago
That isn't the Poincare Conjecture at all... you're asking, essentially, whether a smooth, connected, finite surface has a single local minimum that's also an absolute minimum. That's not a hard question. The Poincare Conjecture postulates
21.
by trominos 17y ago
Worst comment I've ever seen at +7 on HN.
22.
by trominos 17y ago
> If my company paid me, they are poorer by $1. Yes. But presumably when you earned that dollar you somehow contributed to making something that somebody wants. Now that thing is slightly more common, so it should be slightly easier to
23.
by trominos 17y ago
Based on the stereotypes I've heard, I'd say that investment bankers are also outside the "social mainstream" of workers. EDIT: Okay, I sort of see your point. My feeling is that if you consistently work long hours you definitionally put yo
24.
by trominos 17y ago
"'Socially mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that’s what “normal” people do,' says one commenter. Honestly, I fail to see how this sort of argument differs from asserting that black people are lazy or Latinos are st
25.
by trominos 17y ago
I really think that this "only execution matters" thing is ridiculous. Startup ideas are worthless in the sense that you're almost certainly not gonna be able to get anybody to pay you for one. If you want to prove that they're worthless in
26.
by trominos 17y ago
> That was a very sophisticated formulation of "I don't listen to people whose politics I disagree with." It wasn't. It was an argument for believing that "in many cases it matters where the arguments that I hear come from." Let me be
27.
by trominos 17y ago
He is certainly attacking ESR's character, but I think that the old mantra that we should always address an argument and not the person delivering it isn't entirely fair. The strongest reason for this, in my opinion, is that most complex sy
28.
by trominos 17y ago
Based on my observations, experience, and intuition, I've found that a fundamental clarity of mind is extremely useful in trying to do good research and is the basic skill you need to be a good teacher. It follows that, statistically, most
29.
by trominos 17y ago
People who know what eigenvalues are don't misspell "eigenvalue" as "igon value," ever. Malcolm Gladwell doesn't know what eigenvalues are. That's the only point, really, but it's a pretty big one -- Gladwell's stock in trade is the popular
30.
by trominos 17y ago
If you have no idea what you're talking about, please don't use incendiary language.

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