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In general, I agree with that principle. However, egregiously stupid downmodding is damaging to the discussion. I wouldn't have started this thread over a post that clearly deserved to be downmodded; I'd just be embarrassing myself by drawing more attention to the post.
Given the downvote mobbage that has just occurred over an appropriate post, it seems as if HN is turning into Reddit.
It's celebratory, which is relevant to the context of falling rents/property prices.
Why was this voted down?
A person's reproductive goal, both in evolutionary times as well as by modern standards, is to raise successful offspring. Parental investment is a strong predictor of this.
Thus, a woman benefits by selecting a loyal man rather than a promiscuous one. For her to marry a loyal man with strong genetics (e.g. an attractive man with a limited sexual history, indicating a low disposition toward promiscuity) is optimal. A woman who disqualifies men because they've had a low number of sexual partners is never going to accomplish this.
Anyway, the obsession over the number of past sexual partners means nothing in an evolutionary context, since the whole concept is a social construct. Pre-numerate cave dwellers would have lost count pretty quickly.
Ok, but:
1. More women should be thinking for themselves and making their own decisions. Are they that unsure of their own judgment that they need to evaluate a man based on the imputed opinions of people they've never met, many of whom are in his distant past? I, for one, like finding a great girl who men have underrated in the past.
2. A low or high number of sexual partners has, in general, a lot more to do with lifestyle and values than ability.
I think resilience is the most important trait; a resilient introvert can do fine.
A high-IQ person is going to have difficult socialization early in life, and be behind the curve on a lot of social milestones. However, this becomes less important as a person gets older; most people would consider it a good thing for a 40-year-old to be mistaken for someone in his mid-30s.
My IQ's about 150 and I've definitely had a problem with girls I've dated not taking me seriously (to the point where I've had to dump them) because I'm 25 and my "number" is in (gasp!) the low single digits, as if not having done a Sherman's march in my 20s were something to be embarrassed about. I'm sure that a significantly more insecure version of myself would internalize this and have problems, but actually I just look at these sorts of experiences as incredibly funny.
This sort of "freedom" has more to do with upbringing than IQ. A 115 IQ is more than enough brainpower to become a doctor or attorney and a person born in that range in a family with high expectations will be expected to perform at that level. Conversely, there are people with 140+ IQs whose families expect little or nothing of them, although that sort of "freedom" isn't desirable either.
For maximizing life success, I'd say that an IQ in the low 130s is optimal, but anything above 140 is dangerous and rather useless unless you want to "swing for the fences" and achieve something that will be remembered after you die (something that, in my mind, is overrated). People selected as leaders are usually 75-90th percentile (intellectually) within their reference frame, and almost never 95+. The upshot is that the frame of reference gets smarter as one gets older; people with 130 IQs are virtually never popular in high school, but can do well in adulthood. In general, the smarter you are, the later in life you hit your stride, socially speaking.
The risk is that not everyone recovers, although most do, from the negative experiences earlier on. A 30-year-old with a 145 IQ has probably recovered from any innate social problems and become socially normal, neurologically speaking, but in the corporate world he's going to be competing against people in the 120-130 range who have the advantage of positive past experiences.
The housing bubble would have crashed regardless of oil prices and availability. The severity of the crash might have been less if oil were abundant.
This is a great point. Given how I tend to get annoyed when people reflexively associate static typing with Java, I shouldn't be so quick to make the leap from OOP to mutable state. Many OOP concents (e.g. inheritance) are mutability-agnostic.
-1 for making me lose the game.
The answer to this question depends on how you define OOP and FP. I think the answer is "sort of".
The problem with OOP is that it encourages the proliferation of mutable state. If each object has mutable state, then a large object-oriented program has distributed mutable state, potentially in hundreds of different silos. Problems like concurrency become impossible to reason about.
FP encourages the careful sequestration of mutable state. It's false to say that FP outlaws it entirely, since it's hard to do anything useful without side effects. However, functional style limits and sequesters mutable state to such a degree that it's usually easy to reason about what side effects are happening.
I've always thought it to be the exact opposite. Experience for a child is intermingled because children can often only perceive one plot-line. I remember that, when I was 5, I would watch reruns of various TV shows and think that prior episodes had been taken apart and combined. In fact, they hadn't been, but in my mind the 2 or 3 plots in each episode were stored as separate entities.
When you're older, you're more able to process concurrency and your sense of self is more compartmentalized. You have a work-line consisting of your career and job life, a family-line, a vacation-line that emerges when one travels and is otherwise ignored, and probably several friends-lines (college friends, work friends, friends of the families) corresponding to various distinct social groups. Each plot-line is allocated only a fraction of the time given to the single plot-line a young child has, and thus each progresses much slower per year.
For a child, a year is an eternity. For an adult, it can be very short, because many plot-lines advance very little in this time. If you have a vacation spot you visit every year, every time you go you are bringing up year-old memories that seem as if they occurred yesterday, so time seems to be going extremely fast.
The issue with Wall Street overcompensation has more to do with what has happened to nearly every other profession in the past 3 decades: utter fucking meltdown. Academia: the job market for PhDs is so terrible as to constitute a glaring and likely mortal embarrassment to the profession. Law: big-firm ("biglaw") attorneys now face a single-digit percent chance of making partnership, but are still expected to work hours that would be reasonable only if eventual partnership were guaranteed. Medicine: doctors' standards of living are being continually eroded by the scumbag bureaucrats who staff the health insurance companies. Manufacturing: in the Midwest, the recession began in 1980 and hasn't stopped yet. Infrastructure: falling apart due to low investment. At the same time, housing costs, medical bills, and tuitions have skyrocketed while commodities like food and gas have been more expensive. Enough numerical gymnastics are employed to make inflation appear low (and, thus, real GDP growth seem high) but if the numbers were accurately reflected, inflation would be closer to 5-7% and real GDP growth would be flat or slightly negative; the entire 2000s decade would appear to be a recession, which is what it has been for most Americans. What changed in 2008, for most Americans, is that the rich fell down too, and quite visibly; thus, people became less embarrassed to talk about it. It's no longer an admission of personal failure to talk about how bad things are.
The result is an economy that shows a lack of pluralism: finance dominates, all other professions suffer. Most Americans don't understand the complexities of the situation and liken Wall Street to a cancer responsible for the atrophy of the real economy.
I don't want to see finance get destroyed, but a return to a pluralistic economy where people assume roles appropriate to their abilities and behaviors. The perverse irony here is that capital markets are supposed to efficiently allocate resources, yet the era of the market-state has utterly misallocated the nation's talent, strangling academia while directing a disproportionate share of talented people to finance, one of the industries in which they're least useful.
I'm obviously joking, but those kinds of "offers" have been given (and presumably accepted) in the writing world. A common scenario is an offer (usually given by scummy, second-rate magazines) where the writer is required to use a pseudonym and forbidden by contract to disclose her relationship to that name. They don't want the writer to develop a reputation and suddenly demand a salary.
For a more serious analysis, here goes: a person who works for deferred or no salary is a founder and should be paid with some equity (a percentage of the whole company, not just a small percentage of what he produces) in the venture. Understandably, you don't want to give equity to interns. So you probably shouldn't have interns until you can pay wages.
In general, if you develop a platform and someone develops an app on it, the application writer gets more than a 50% share of the proceeds. I believe iPhone and Kindle developers get 70%.
I have an idea for a novel that is truly earth-shattering. It might be described as "fucking brilliant". I'm very busy and therefore don't have time to write it myself, and I obviously can't discuss the concept here; I have to safeguard this earth-shattering idea so it isn't stolen. But if you've scored at least 700 on your verbal SAT-- formal score reports, please-- and can pass a 4-hour writing test I will administer on-site in New York, you can ghost-write my novel. You'll be expected to fill out at least 900 pages, because my idea is just too epic to implemented in fewer. You'll have 2 months to complete the task, revisions and editing included, and you'll be expected to live in New York during that period, with full responsibility for accommodations being yours. If you're successful and on time, I'll offer you a full 12.5 percent of the proceeds between publication and April 20, 2011.
Your name will not appear on the novel, though mine will. However, I'll forward your name to a couple of literary agents and, without getting specific, tell them that I know you to "generally do very good work".
How does this deal sound to you?
Wouldn't this depend on vesting?
A grant of equity or control, however, is irreversible.
Mark Zuckerberg is great for media PR, because he reminds the old guard of the '90s, when a talented but generally unimpressive 2x-year-old could sell a money-losing company for billions. He's a massive liability for recruiting PR, though, because only a masochist would want him as a boss.
Simpsons did it.
(* Well, Mr. Burns didn't technically buy it; he merely blocked it out.)
Founding a company would be the wrong way to go about exploiting this time hack. Too much relies on execution, so the possibility for failure is substantial. There is a much easier way to make money if you can time-travel.
What I'd do: ask for 30 minutes before I go, and log into Yahoo finance. Find a 2% gainer for each day on the stock market. Each day, move half of my net worth into the gainer (only half as a measure of caution; I might inadvertently alter the future and screw myself). The reason to aim for +2 is to avoid insider trading suspicion; putting my money into a +10 or -20 (shorting) every day would land me in jail; no one would believe I could tell the future because of time travel. Each day, I'd earn a 1% profit.
Starting from $10000, I'd get to $10 million within 720 trading days, or about 3 years. At this point, I'd limit my profits to $100k per day because otherwise I'd be at the level where I could actually change the future, eroding my gains. So I'd gain "only" $25m/year for the next decade, cashing out at $250m.
So your argument is that women don't have shitty, infantile tastes so much as shitty, infantile priorities, then?
The people who think this way are the ones that the rest of us are hoping the recession will push out of New York.
This has more to do with misinvestment of resources than any fundamental ceiling to demand for better technology. Scaling up existing capabilities to be slightly better reaches a limit at some point; increasing capabilities does not.
Consider games for an example of poorly invested resources. The graphics have improved dramatically in video games between the era of Chrono Trigger ('95) and now. The quality of the games has declined. These two trends are linked together. Now that the budget for a game is in the 7- and 8-digit range, business people have creative control over games, and games are more likely to be designed by committee. Thus, they end up sucking. Improving the graphics will not solve this problem, but there's still demand for high-quality games that is not being met through traditional channels.
How to read code, use version control, write code in a professional environment, find libraries that can help you, and keep abreast of current technology. I think that CS grads should be expected to be contributing to open source projects by senior year.
The marketing, business, and work/life balance problems are important, too, but they don't really belong in a CS course, and CS professors are not experts on these topics anyway.
1-2 have no relevance to CS. 3 is important.
Asking "aren't women allowed to prefer an alpha male without being accused of wanting to be degraded?" is like "aren't red octagons allowed to have 'STOP' written on them without being accused of being stop signs?"
No one is accusing anything. You don't see the red sign and "accuse" it of being a stop sign. You realize immediately that it is a stop sign (pattern recognition) and behave accordingly. Behaving accordingly with respect to such women is avoiding them entirely.
It's obviously not. It seems to be more common in American culture, but I don't have enough experience to evaluate the accuracy of this perception.
The concept of "alpha" is highly variable among species and therefore doesn't generalize easily. In humans, it describes the type of man who would have a large number of wives in a pre-monogamous society-- narcissistic, brutal, detached, and without conscience.
Healthy women don't want to be anywhere around those sorts of men, who tend to be abusive husbands and terrible fathers. However, a certain class of psychologically damaged woman does tend to find that type of man sexually attractive.