Raplh

Arno Penzias when he directed Crawford Hill Laboratory at Bell Labs is said to have sent a memo to the scientists working there. In the memo he said that a VP had visited Crawford Hill and noticed that there were cars arriving in the parking lot late, between 8AM at least until 9 AM, and leaving early, at least between 4 PM and 5 PM.

Arno asked all staff reading his memo for the following. If you have to come in late, please try to arrive after 9 AM. If you need to leave early, please leave before 4 PM.

I never saw the memo myself, but I did have the pleasure of working at Crawford Hill for nearly 2 years in the late 1970s. I find the existence of this memo easy to believe. So at minimum, it is a good story, might even be true. My own meager google skills do not turn up any corroboration on our universal consciousness.

I have a PhD from Caltech in Applied Physics/Engineering. I worked for a physics prof when I felt like it. He didn't even KNOW when I was working for the most part, and I took great vacations.

You payz your money and you takez your choice. Different profs, different groups, had different cultures. I was in a group where the cultural values were being really smart and having a great time. This letter is clearly from a group where the cultural value is devoting your life to climbing the ladder.

Rejecting the work your butt off model is the wiener way out. Maybe it works better, maybe not. Maybe it works well for some people, and that's why many of them are represented among the full professor faculty at Caltech. I don't care if it works that well, it is not my choice, and I had no problem finding full professors at Caltech who asked for nothing of that kind.

R:

There is a rather strong and noble tradition among great physicists of being a little bit off the beaten track. Read Feynman. The bets between Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne at Caltech. There wasn't a lot that was conventional about Einstein.

That nothing I believe can be proved.

I didn't have my first personal computer until I was 30. It was a Sun 3 "dickless" workstation on my desk, POS. I gave it to my grad student and got a Mac II the next year.

I read a Fortran (66?) programming lesson book when I was 15, and wrote some programs on paper, but had no machine to try them on.

I wrote Basic on a dial-in (120 bps acoustic coupled) teletype (with paper tape for saving/restoring) at high school when I was 16 (1973).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600968 is the Chomsky link that prompted this poll. In case there are anybody besides me who would want to see the link before blessing or damning it.

"showdead" should allow me to follow links in killed submissions. Right now I can see the title of the dead links, but there is nothing I can click on to actually go to the page which was originally linked.

It almost certainly correlates better with how recently you leared English than with your ability to structrue thoughts.

Sure, you can't evaluate every dingdong idea. But when you find one you are going to skip, you can either do so respectfully, or you can declare to everyone around you that even in the absence of any thought on the matter, you happen to know (how?) that this is just wrong and BS and worthless.

Sure its frustrating when you stop trashing all the ideas you reject. But it has some good results too. Like you get a more realistic idea of how limited what you know (vs what you think) is.

You are not only ashamed of getting caught. You INTERNALIZE the shame. You BELIEVE you are no good. I was just watching a youtube video that had a clip of a "youth minister" in a charismatic church getting a room full of what looked like 10-13 year olds in tears and on their knees talking about how they had disappointed jesus with their behavior, exhorting them that "YOU know what you must repent. Say it out loud."

If only we could keep the external external. If you have managed that you are way ahead. Don't miss what is happening with those who haven't managed.

Excellent observation about the larger openness of the debate in Israel. I have seen that as well. Indeed, when in Israel I have talked to people on both sides of the issue and never had it suggested to me THERE that I was anti-semetic for my opinions.

The closedness of national debate may be something which varies across the world, and the U.S. may be on the more-closed-than-you-woulda-thought side of that. As I read some other comments in this thread about not being able to discuss capitalism, I was thinking "they sure can in Europe." I think the Europeans are a little less self-conscious about their kinkinesses :)

I think many European countries have stricter laws against hate speech than the U.S. Which on the face of it may make us U.S.ians think we are doing better at this free speech thing. When in fact it may just be that we do a better job of unofficial suppression of free speech than the foreigners do. It reminds me of Fred's explanation of the high gun-murder rate in the U.S. in the great movie Barcelona. "It is not that Americans are more violent than Europeans, we are just better shots."

This discussion provides great source material for investigating the things you can't say, and what happens when you say them. You fall down a rabbit hole. Or rather I do, and I get very confused when I am down there.

On the face of it, Israel is a state which controls a group of non-citizens through the use of tanks, walls, and laws (they are non-citizens with the limits on legal rights that go with that).

Yet there is a group, including brilliant people, who label objections to any of these policies as anti-semitic, even when those objections come from Jews, and indeed even when they come from Israeli Jews.

It is hard to believe hearing these responses that they are "honest," because it looks so much like exactly what you would do if you had a plan to shut up your opponents. It is enough to make me question the very nature of rational discourse.

And indeed as I read this, I wonder will this comment be downvoted? And if it is, will that be because it is too political, off-topic somehow? Or will it be because the agreed upon fantasy that dictates what can and cannot be said is on the wrong side of this comment?

I would agree that anti-Israel opinions are not anti-Semitic, I would agree that anti-Pakistan opinions are not anti-Islamic. I would agree that anti-Napoleon comments are not anti-French. I would agree that anti-Nazi comments are not anti-German. I would agree that anti-Bush comments are not anti-American. etc.

I'm particularly interested in your reactions to the section describing the 8 Day Workshop.

Your post reads like a red herring (in the stock sense). A "story stock" has to have a good story, it doesn't have to have numbers behind it.

Anything's reproductive "goal", in any times, is to show up a lot in later generations. Promiscuity and particularity both show up as strategies in humans and broadly beyond. Anybody studying reporductive strategies many generations later will have a strong survivorship bias in their results.

A woman who selects a man who isn't very promiscuous is unlikely to get her genes spread very far by her son(s). This trades off against the part of the story you tell.

Arrested, but not convicted, the only way to talk to my brother in law in jail was to pay a few $ per minute when he called us collect. I have read descriptions of why the jails should limit calls thusly, with contracts to providers that pay a lot of money to the jails to give them the monopoly telephone service, and they are BS!

I'd love to see how much problem jails had with contraband cellphones if they provided monitored telecom to any prisoner on a fairly abundant schedule for free. I bet most of that contraband cell phone is there at all because the "legal" communication is so onerous.

I loved that even in the midst of being hassled by the police, he gives the one policeman incredible credit for his approach to other humans. There is beauty everywhere.

I would consider that this guy, being actually homeless, is at least as valuable a source on homelessness as a woman you knew who worked with them.

I suspect that more generally than being alcoholics, these are people who are mentally ill to some extent. I liked this essay (and others from this writer) because this is a homeless guy I could identify with. I could read his stuff and not think this was some situation which could never come close to happening to me or someone I would care about.

There are hints of it, how to deal with authority, even where to be homeless (CSU campus good). Also, if you are interested you would start to explore the directory tree this doc is in and see even more details.

It seems to me that homelessness IS a hack on the regular system. And the way he writes about what happens is informed by his intelligence and his programmer background. To me, the idea of a homeless guy running sims to develop his solution to efficient routing of a traveling salesman while not having a place to plug in his laptop which is his own is pretty hacky.

Maybe this article isn't EVERYTHING you would want in a clever and enjoyable read from a homeless programmer, but it may be the best out there in this genre. This was not a New York Times reporter playing a homeless person, this is the real thing. BTW, I worked with this guy briefly, so I know he is the real thing.

The premise of this question confuses freedom with entropy.

A smart person who does all sorts of stupid things to screw herself up, drinking, who knows what else, can easily live the life of a stupid person.

But what can a stupid person do to live the life of a smart person?

Clearly smart people have more choices.

"Should"? Evolution laughs at should. Lemmings follow each other because 99% or more of the time that is EXACTLY the right thing to do, and 99% is more than enough to win in evolution.

And what we learn from evolution is we should laugh at should too. My theory: should is a gambit to control you on the part of other people trying to win in the game of evolution.

Suggestions of negative interest rates are clever in the same sense that Swift suggesting eating Irish children is clever. Its GLARINGLY wrong, but you might learn something figuring out why. And there isn't just one reason why. There are plenty, so everybody can play.

Here's my reason: A negative interest rate is the fed giving away money. Now the fed rates are not available to everybody, so a negative interest rate is primarily the fed giving away money to banks.

Once you REALIZE it is a subisidy, then you realize the government is just giving money away to some people. You can then get over the stigma of the government giving money away to people since you are doing it anyway, and you can give up on the relatively ineffective plan of giving the money away inefficiently to rich people (banks and bankers), and proceed with a much more efficient giveaway.

The fed could just mail people money. Maybe $1000 each every man woman and child. The poorer amongst us would almost certainly quickly spend it. The richer amongst us wouldn't, but what the hey, when you are giving away money you can't expect perfect efficiency. The advantage here: people spending $1000 bucks they got free and clear is a lot less stupid than going into debt to spend $1000, when they already have too much debt, generally.

See http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+i... as this has already been asked and answered.

It won't seem much different to me than programming your children to believe in their preferred god.

I have discovered the reason. TARP requires that until it is paid back, all sorts of other optional uses of cash are ruled out, such as pre-paying off other debt.

R:

Whatever else you can say about the original post, WHEN will people putting things up on the web realize that "Today at 6:00am," becomes ambiguous real fast on the web, when nowhere else on the page is there a date? I see this constantly, even on news sites. Gag.

Rather than ranking the proposal against some version of protection, I evaluate it in terms of: would more good stuff happen with the proposal than without it?

Clearly it would. Clearly having SOME additional number of people admitted who are at least doing SOME version of a startup would be a positive step.

The number of things that have to go wrong to make this proposal a net negative are unrealistically perverse and pessimisitc. If EVERY policy proposal is held to a standard of "we will only do this if there is NO CONCIEVABLE WAY of ever making it be bad," then no policy proposals would ever be implemented.

Think of it like a business. It is better to do something that is approximately right in a non-optimal fashion then it is to do nothing until you are exactly right or, as the poet says, to optimize too early.

I'm surprised GS wants to pay back the TARP $10billion so quickly. They are paying $500Million/yr to keep that $10Billion.

GS also "borrowed" $5Billion from Berkshire Hathaway, giving BH preferred shares for its $5Billion. The preferred shares pay 10%. So GS is paying $500Million/yr to keep that $5Billion from BH.

The BH preferred does have a 10% premium that GS must pay to retire it. But this means GS has the choice: 1) Retire $500Million/year of interest payments by giving $10Billion cash to TARP 2) Retire $500Million/year of interest payments by giving $5.5Billion cash to Berkshire Hathaway.

It makes you wonder just what is so bad about holding TARP money that it is worth $4.5Billion to buy your way out from under.

I upvoted this because clearly, if something can hurt you you should know about that before trying it.

But I am interested: was your problem a fundamental one, or were you perhaps not adequately prepared to try this? How much "training" did you do on the concept before trying it? Did you read his books? Go to his workshops?

I have done tremendous "work" (i.e. therapy, workshops, "New Thought" classes) and when I see this, I am intrigued, but my response was to send notes to my friends and to order some books on it. I'll discuss it with my "New Thought" class tonight. I'll discuss it with my wife before telling her about all the magnificent and desirable... etc. But I mean its like all the time, you know?

I have been wearing this bracelet for around 30 days. It is educational to discover, in my case, that there are certain types of family gatherings where the default behavior has me moving the bracelet back and forth across wrists many times.

I got a hold of it through United Centers for Spiritual Living, which talks about a lot of stuff along the lines of "Change your thinking, change your life." I've been working with it for a few months. If it turns out to be great, I'll let you know. So far, so good.

They do trace themselves back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Franklin, and generally call themselves the "New Thought" movement.

I'm not in software, but rather algorithm development for determining radio positions (like GPS but including other methods for cell phones). I have used eigenanalysis a number of times, a lot of orthogonal basis shifting of various kinds, implicilty a lot of matrix inversions and pseudoinversions to solve things. I do most of my R&D using matlab, and have learned a lot of linear algebra reading their helpfiles. I use hilbert spaces and what I learned about them 30 years ago almost constantly.