LucaDuval

I would say that the following comment is at least as good as the one provided by Quora:

"Here are some tips: Most guys have problems approaching strangers and seeming creepy. If you can strike up a conversation with girls, just drop a few comments that you're hanging out with "a really cool friend". It makes things easier when you introduce him later on.

When you do introduce him, drop a few conversation starters where there might be common interest or where he can demonstrate expertise. If he likes cooking, mention the mean casserole he whipped up for your Christmas party or something. Remember that this is an interaction, and you should stay until both he and the target female are comfortable in conversation. Participate in the interaction until then, and when they are warming up to each other THEN excuse yourself to get a drink, say hi to someone else or whatever. Encourage him to lead in the interaction. The more he does this, the easier it will be for him to seem attractive. Let him choose the way the conversation is going, when it ends, etc. It may take a bit of work to get both of you synced, but when it happens you'll be the best thing that happens to his social life."

I did an experiment. I put the same question in a sensible subreddit. I would say that the answers are pretty good.

http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/cg6zq/what_...

It probably also helps to be a talented public speaker and he is reputed to be a very good one.

http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2010/02/the-secrets-of-malco...

Generally speaking lot of bestsellers, fiction or non fiction, can be synthesized as:

- give to the reader pre-digested, easy, spoonfuls of information.

- give to the reader something to quote so that he can appear smart to his friends.

- try to be appealling enough to be interviewed on TV.

I need a little more from my e-assistant.

A few tasks:

- answer appropriately my e-mail

- selecting the events that I'm interested in and booking the tickets.

- calling at home to tell that I'll be late or out for dinner.

Conclusion: "We managed to get a healthy 1.2MB download speed, and 281Kbps upload in the office, certainly fast enough to power mobile web."

It is true that Italians don't care much about privacy but old and backward?

Italy is neither old (Italy was born as a state in 1861) nor backward. The problem is that our prime minister has a personal interest in shutting down as much as possible the web as a news/social service.

It is possible to argue that, as you said, "many people don't have a clue what is going on" but I believe it applies to most (all?) other countries as well.

Every time somebody express an opinion somebody else can call it a tautology if he decides that the speaker is willing to tweak the definition as he likes.

To point it out is pleonastic.

The following sentence is tautological.

The previous sentence is tautological and pleonastic.

I didn't explained myself well then.

My point is that, in my opinion, there is no progress in art exactly for the reason you have just given that there is no objective "better" to measure progress with.

About TV..., if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at all.

I believe that you can hope to find innovation in the arts but I doubt that you'll find any progress.

Joyce is not better than Shakespeare and Prince is not better than Mozart.

This is even truer for painting, would anybody say that we are doing better than the Altamira cave painters?

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Altamira,_bison.jpg)

There is a point that I don't see mentioned in any other comments, maybe because it applies only in my country (Italy). The main benefit of not watching TV here is that you avoid the relentless, hidden or explicit, endorsement of our right-wing party and the consequent manipulation of reality.

Thank you, I couldn't remember the title.

Here it is if anybody want to read it:

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm

It is strange the way in which a random quote stays in our mind for years, I still remembered the following almost verbatim.

"Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create.

In fact they do nothing of the sort.

They discover.

Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system.

For millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe—and telling ourselves that we `created' them.

To create implies infinite possibility, to discover implies finite possibility.

As a species I think we will react poorly to having our noses rubbed in the fact that we are discoverers and not creators."

I remember reading a sci-fi novel that impressed me as a child about the wife of a recently deceased composer corrupting a politician to not vote for a proposal to extend the copyright on the basis that there are only a limitited number of possible "interesting" combinations of notes. Hence an unlimited copyright is like a death sentence to the creativity of all future musicians. I believe that the actual limit of 50 years is already too much.

It seems that PLT Scheme it is still twice as fast, at least according to this language shootout. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

It is also personal. Berlusconi has a huge, and still growing, number of legal problems. He successfully hides them on the media he owns or controls (6 tv channels out of 7). The few newspapers that are not aligned to his policy are read by an handful of people. The only way truthful news about his misbehavior reach the Italian people are social network and similar. So it makes sense to shut them up.

From the FACTOR's FAQ: "Forth is untyped, not garbage collected, and close to the machine. For flow control, Forth code tends to use immediate words. Variables and arrays tend to be global, and programs aren't usually written in a functional manner. Factor is very different from this. It is dynamically typed, offering a high degree of reflection. Unreferenced objects are garbage collected with a generational garbage collector. Factor code is a little bit more distant from the machine, though the C FFI allows using words like malloc and mmap. For flow control, Factor generally uses quotations, allowing flexible higher order functions; parsing words are used mostly for definitions and data literals. Variables are dynamically or statically scoped, and arrays are just objects which don't need to be treated specially"

Sorry, but as another EU citizen, I have to say that applying your criteria lot of countries (beginning with mine - Italy) should not have been accepted either. I'm afraid that EU simply can't be that much selective without losing any change of counting for something on the world scene.

I agree wholeheartedly. I read it ten years ago and it answered a few questions I had been asking myself for many years. It is (in a healthy way) humbling for a western citizen as it implies that our (declining?) dominant position in the modern world is mainly a matter of luck.

He's not talking about fast typing. He is saying that is a big effort for his students to try out an idea because they have to struggle to find the correct syntax and keywords to express it.

I don't read the article this way. He candidly admits his bias towards functional languages and he says that Ruby and Clojure could have been his choice if not for reasons related to the specific time-frame in which he took the decision.

Overpopulation is a menace and family planning is the only viable solution. Two or three billions of healthy, nourished, educated human beings are more than enough to substain our economical, social and scientific structure.

As usual the single most important advice is missing:

* Don't have (more than one) child. *

We could build an everlasting eden for humankind if we could persuade everybody to limit themselves to one child for couple for the next two or three generations and then switch to two children for couple.

Lacking that we are doomed to damnation.

You are right. I was wrong.

I'm inclined to believe that lack of common sense is an exception and not the rule among geniuses, despite popular beliefs, but I could be wrong. Care to offer a few counterexamples?

Not an HN type but I like the Economist daily news. http://www.economist.com/daily/news/

I can name without any effort a few geniuses that didn't lack neither common sense nor social skills (Feynman, Darwin, Newton, Da Vinci, Leibniz, Pitagora). I'm sure that there are scores of them. I would say that the equation "Super-High IQ = Super-Low Common Sense" is simply wrong.

A lot less. $ 1,283,305,580,313,390