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in 2014, [Graham] had recruited Altman to be his successor as president.

[Graham's] judgment was based not on Altman’s track record, which was modest, but on his will to prevail, which Graham considered almost ungovernable.

One thing I don't understand is why Paul Graham offered YC to Altman if he knew how slippery he was..

As a Pittsburgh resident who exclusively used bus for 5 years, this certainly seems like a reasonable take. In Oakland and Squirrel Hill the bus almost stops every single block - which always seemed kind of crazy. It's a _very_ common sight to see a beleaguered student miss their bus and successfully chase it down across multiple city blocks.

I will give the PRT (formerly Port Authority) a shout out though:

1. Bikes are quick and convenient to bring along

2. The numbering system is intuitive enough that you can almost guess how to get to new neighborhoods

3. Accessibility is clearly a priority, and they successfully serve many disabled people

The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll.

It's true that the technology currently works as an excellent information gathering tool (which I am happy to be excited about) but that doesn't seem to be the promise at this point, the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.

In many states private schools don't need the same certifications as public institutions [1]. I'm sure they would prefer it in applicants but beggars can't be choosers.

[1] https://www.pa.gov/agencies/education/programs-and-services/...

Ofc teens should be kept away from this for obvious biological reasons.

Why of course? Is the reason this is obvious to you unique to teenagers? When they turn 18 (or 20) do the reasons to restrict their freedoms immediately go away? Is there no possibility the 'obvious' reason in your mind couldn't occur for a different person in a different age bracket?

These are not fair analogies to wealth inequality unless you think all people who have more than you got it by cheating people. A better analogy would be the movie Moneyball, about baseball's inequality.

Effectively the problem is that wealth is an inherent feedback loop that naturally creates Pareto distributions instead of normal distributions. People don't have to be 'unfair' for this phenomenon to occur.

It seems to me that democratic society runs best where the distance is minimized between individuals with maximum agency vs. individuals with minimum agency. Agency is power, the ability to move other people to get things you want done, to make purchases, to amplify certain viewpoints over others.

In this regard, I usually think of wealth as a proxy for agency. There are other (negatively correlated) proxies that can be conveniently disregarded by certain political persuasions:

* Debt - effectively going into debt is sacrificing future agency for the sake of the present. In the moment of obtaining a loan you will of course have more liquidity at your disposal but after that moment in time your freedoms are limited due to your debt obligations. It's more obscured with purely financial loans - the way it negatively impacts democracy is more obviously seen in quid pro quo arrangements.

* Welfare dependence - like any other dependency relying on welfare decreases an individual's agency. They cannot afford to live without the welfare apparatus they depend on for survival.

In a democratic system we want every voting individual to have as close to the average agency as possible so that there isn't a non-democratic force continually applied corrupting the democratic process. Conversely we know that human beings are strongly motivated by agency maximization which society also needs for progress - in other words, humans need opportunity. The job of a statesman should be to manage these competing priorities.

So much of language opinion is based on people's progression of languages. My progression (of serious professional usage) looked like this:

Java -> Python -> C++ -> Rust -> Go

I have to say, given this progression going to Rust from C++ was wonderful, and going to Go from Rust was disappointing. I run into serious language issues almost daily. The one I ran into yesterday was that defer's function arguments are evaluated immediately (even if the underlying type is a reference!).

https://go.dev/play/p/zEQ77TIP8Iy

Perhaps with a progression Java -> Go -> Rust moving to rust could feel slow and painful.

Why stop there? EVERYBODY deserves healthcare and education too!

I would say in a perfect world everyone should have all of these things.

The problem is that the marginal cost to giving each of these things to everyone increases to infinity as we approach 100% of a sufficiently large and diverse population. For example, creating a city water system should efficiently deliver clean water to a large proportion of an urban population. However, not everyone lives in an urban setting and delivering clean water to remote populations can get astronomically expensive.

As rational citizens we must acknowledge this unfortunate reality and figure out how to deal with it fairly and equitably. Profit seeking enterprise has been astoundingly effective at driving down these marginal costs for a whole host of goods for centuries. Many of these things you mention only exist because profit seekers developed and distributed them!

You're under representing the sadness of lost artistry. For example, there is a marked degradation in the quality of fine art between the late classical period and the early medieval period. Civilization in a large region of Europe lost skills for centuries.

We as a society don't want to lose artistry that was painstakingly developed - there's no guarantee it will ever be developed to that level of sophistication again. I don't want future generations to look at my generation as we do the dark ages.

I think it's easy right now to think that progress is guaranteed or the opposite - that it's impossible to achieve. As population levels out civilization will need to become more about archiving what we know than pushing the envelope but no one wants to lose information.

I watched the final match after seeing the memes, another thing the commentators kept saying about the guy (Yusuf Dikec) is that he is 51, an age rarely seen at the highest levels of competition in any sport.

For those curious about solar powered fixed wing airplanes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Zephyr

One Zephyr can replace 250 cell phone towers. It can be used to perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) with a wide visual payload coverage of 20×30 km (12.4×18.6 mi) and can be equipped with radar, LIDAR and infrared technologies.

It's a 17 minute video.. that's quite the round up. Just saying because for me the difference from 15 minutes to 30 minutes tends to go from: "yeah I'll check this out" to "boy this is an investment".

How does the author dismantle everything? He literally concludes with:

Conclusion: I Genuinely Don’t Know What These People Are Thinking

Two things can be true at the same time (and are always true of 100's of aspects of modern life):

1. A devastating possibility is in theory possible, the likelihood of it happening is non-zero.

2. We can't live and make decisions catastrophizing given _we have absolutely no understanding_ about the real likelihood.

Is the coffee example a good argument? Of course not! But do we know the likelihood of humanity's ability to create super intelligence AND that that intelligence will cause unimaginable suffering? Uh I don't think so?

I was tracking with you till the last sentence - why is this bad? I tend to think it's a good thing that 40% of Chinese people (580 million people) aren't starving. Britain hasn't been able to feed itself from domestic agriculture for 200+ years, would you have their population halved so that they don't need food imports anymore? I don't understand.

Let's not blame the protestants of 200 years ago for our current problems - we have an inability to forgive. Punishment really has nothing to do with it. Part of the problem is that modern racism rarely causes obvious harm that can be undone, otherwise punishment could be helpful in restoring the racist back into society.

I have a duplo/lego question - is there a name for the combinatorics problem of how many structures can be built with N 1XM legos? I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about this problem and I'm unaware if it's been posed elsewhere.

Any piece able to freely rotate is considered the same structure. For example, for 2 1X2 legos the arrangement count is 2: top connected to bottom with both nubs, top connected to bottom with one nub because if you analyze legos you will find that such an arrangement can freely rotate over 270 degrees, and left vs right nubs result in the same structure when taking rotational symmetry into account.

For the problem I assume an 'ideal' lego with 0 manufacturing tolerance, no illegal building techniques are allowed.

Is there a name for the above combinatorics question? Is it well-posed?

Is there a closed-form solution? If not is there a generator program?

I should say that with a high enough N any generator would be very complex - imagine how degrees of rotational freedom give rise to the possibility of further structures hidden from other rotational orientations.

Go to the parking lot for Niagara Falls on the US side (Goat Island I think it's called?). You should see all the plates except for Alaska and Hawaii on an average day I think as well as a decent number of Canadian provinces.

We were there about a month ago looking at plates and ran into another family looking for plates while we were there!

I think this misses half of the purpose of 'rule of law'. Some laws are to protect interest of citizens in the state and the state itself, sure, and in that sense the importance of 'spirit of the law' could be cultural. But the other aspect of law is minimizing surprise. Efficiency of commerce depends on a certain amount of consistency around laws. The more consistent the interpretation around a body of laws the more efficiently commerce can occur. In this sense relying on 'spirit of law' is wildly unhelpful because in order to understand legal cause and effect you have to read tea leaves, understand the leaders in office, etc. The west is not immune to this problem but we depart from strict written law to our peril.

As a father of two daughters, I have to say conscription of young women is a barbaric logical outcome of egalitarian ideology. Perhaps in modern militaries there are less brutal work environments where 'sexism' could still come into play by providing differing roles for men and women - but that would already break the purity of the original conclusion.

Sure, for the sake of argument, if women and men are no different at all they should both be forced to go to the front lines in Ukraine and die for their country. I for one say men and women are different enough that conscription should work differently for them. I guess I'm sexist then!

In ancient Israel it was a law that land had to be re-pooled back into its original tribal allocation every 49 years, it was called 'the year of jubilee'. Not sure there's evidence this law was really kept, though it's an interesting idea. Sometimes I wonder how property value (and housing markets) would behave if everyone in the US eventually went back to some 'tribal' allotment every 50 years.

'majority group', 'cultural dominance', 'control of policies'

This is fundamentally a race-based conception of the world, a conception that defines power along racial lines, which groups and analyzes people fundamentally based on race.

We have the benefit in the last 50 years to move past this way of looking at the world, many of us have come to the realization that race isn't a useful way to group people, period. Any disadvantage you see in society that appears 'race' based can be better explained via other means. If people aren't treated justly, it's not because of racism except in vanishingly small amounts, in obscure and backwards parts of the US.

'Structural racism' falls prey to correlation is not causation, a misguided explanation for group differences, an oversimplification, and it won't generate progress as long as the cause is incorrectly ascribed.

I think I agree with this entirely. The problem is these disadvantages don't justify a policy of race-based affirmative action. To do this, you'd need to do one of three things:

1. Say that the affirmative action policy is temporary based on a time frame. This is tricky because any time you come up with will seem pretty arbitrary.

2. Say that the affirmative action policy is temporary based on a metric. This is also tricky because that metric is arbitrary (worse - it may never be accomplished).

3. Say the affirmative action policy is merited indefinitely which is in my opinion racist, because this is saying there's something fundamental about this group that makes them incapable of handling a level playing field. I simply don't believe this is true.

I think we need to come to terms as a society with the hard reality that all three above cases are morally and logically bankrupt, for any meaningful length of time. Arbitrary race-based criteria for determining 'disadvantage' just don't work. People have to be given the dignity of mastery over their own fate and it's patronizing (borderline racist) any other way, unless extremely limited in scope.

These ad hominems don't help your point, they just alienate - probably time to take a break from affirmative action commenting for a moment :)

I think we're equivocating with kajecounterhack on what 'disadvantage' means, and they chose an unfortunate analogy to illustrate their idea of disadvantage that is perhaps more fundamental to the disadvantaged person than they were going for.

The point is that 'disadvantage' does not take away opportunity, and disadvantage in the US no longer comes purely on racial terms, at least not when it comes to opportunity for education and financial success. You can get a degree by studying hard for the SAT and better your circumstances for a well placed $20 in high school, or you can join a trade school and say screw it to higher education and still better your circumstances. These opportunities exist for pretty much every black kid as long as they don't break the law and avoid addiction. They are in no way 'disabled' and have agency over their own destiny.

One issue is there's infinite metrics to measure outcome, and any measurement you choose will have certain groups excel in compared to others. Once we achieve equality in a certain metric we will always have new ones to work on essentially forever. This may be a good goal for people/institutions but it can't contribute to discrimination being indefinite in scope.

Another issue is we're talking about group level outcomes here - which means we're already accepting that there will be biases in measurements, otherwise the group wouldn't be a 'group' (unless it's literally just skin color which is - a pretty arbitrary/racist way to group people all else being equal).

Some people just need more help to get where they're going, and some of us will be just fine using the legs we were born to walk with.

This is exactly the issue at play. There's a fundamental difference between _unending_ affirmative action and temporary 'help'. If you believe in equality of outcome then you will never be satisfied and we will always be 'helping' the disadvantaged group achieve various metrics forever. Eventually people deserve the dignity of a level playing field, otherwise you seem to be saying they're incapable of handling a level playing field which would be.. racist (by definition).

Your example of handicaps is disturbing, I know you didn't intend it in a racist way, but read what you wrote from the perspective of an African immigrant. Just because a person is black does not mean they're 'handicapped'!

I agree that opportunity is a spectrum but I disagree that it's inherited in our country because I disagree with your definition of opportunity. It's a spectrum in the sense that people can succeed regardless of societal prejudice or discriminatory laws, even though they'd have more opportunity if that prejudice didn't exist. Equal opportunity does not necessitate an equal outcome, nor does it imply it.

Immigrants don't have the opportunity to become president of the US because of US law, but any natural-born citizen of the country does have that opportunity regardless of the likelihood. The US has always had immigrants achieve boundless success here which is why it was considered the land of opportunity, not because everyone did - or because it was 'fair', but because it was possible.

You're changing the definition of opportunity here to still mean outcome I think.

<Outcome> is somewhat inherited, therefore there cannot be real equality of <outcome>.

The US used to be a land of 'opportunity' for poor immigrants. They came to the US and worked hard to overcome their circumstances and make a better life for themselves and their children.

It would be insulting and demoralizing to them to say that opportunity is impossible because they're poor, because their uncle doesn't own the bank down the street. The point of opportunity is that it's _possible_ to succeed, the scales are not unfairly weighed against you by law or societal prejudice.

Many things make achieving outcomes hard - poverty, mental health, bad luck - these are sometimes affected by the past too, but they don't necessarily take away opportunity in that the hope in success is still possible. This hope is important to the soul is it not? This is why opportunity is so important, it's essentially hope.

The story is much deeper than you give it credit:

1. God promises Abraham that his descendants will be numerous as 'stars in the sky'

2. Abraham and Sarah have 1 kid in their old age: Isaac, the only chance for God to fulfill the promise

3. God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his compliance indicates his faith in God's promise (that it can happen outside of his control, and beyond his knowledge)

4. God stops it and provides a 'ram in the thicket' as substitute, note the sacrifice still occurs.

5. Sacrifice is required to save the Israelites in Egypt from the angel of death, Passover begins.

6. We see a whole system and culture of sacrifices instituted in the tabernacle and later the temple as a method of 'atonement'

7. Jesus presents himself as the ultimate atonement or 'propitiation', closing the circle

Essentially in the Bible sacrifice is integral to the entire story, beginning to end. In some ways the story of the sacrifice of Isaac is a peek into the nature of justice and how in the Biblical God's conception of justice wrongdoing must be paid for by blood, just not necessarily the blood of the perpetrator themselves. All members of Israel are responsible for providing their sacrifices indicating that no one is free from guilt providing the backdrop for Christianity's pessimistic take on the nature of Man.

True - thanks for the clarification. As long as the ISS is rotating at a constant rate anything oriented to it inside of it will not perceive it to be rotating. It's rotating relative to a stationary perspective on the surface of the Earth but by the time anything docks to it, everything in the system will be rotating at the same rate. Thanks for pointing this out!