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Building in an interrupt "Hey, pay attention to the real world now" feature would seem important. On the other hand, it'd still be awkward when you had to climb over someone to go to the toilet or something.

I'd be interested to try inflight VR. It could be really good, or it could just be a one-way ticket to airsickness.

What I'd really love would be a feature that lets me see the scenery currently around me, as if I were flying in the air without the plane. You could just use Google Maps data at first, but if someday they installed a few cameras on the exterior...

If my lottery tickets had anything like the rate of return of YC's, then buying more would be an extremely sound investment strategy.

I'd also like to see estimates from the 1990s of how much sea level rise we can expect by 2016.

I seem to remember reading a book back in the day that said New York City would be completely underwater by 2010.

Why? They don't have anything to destroy anyway.

Well, it's too damn crowded on this planet.

Even out there, it's a pretty rare use case. If you're somewhere so remote that you can't get there with any kind of land vehicle, then... what are you even doing there, that you need a semi-permanent solid structure?

There's no good solution to running a large organisation. Instead of complaining that large organisations are badly run, we should instead marvel that they run at all.

Unfortunately the indispensible employee generally isn't the one getting fed hard technical problems, he's the one responsible for maintaining the complex, mission-critical thingy that only he understands and which seems to break down on a regular basis.

I do not envy the indispensible employee.

The degree to which pre-modern Britain included people of African origin within its population continues to be a topic of considerable interest

Why?

Also, aren't all people of African origin?

Given the ongoing mess that was the onlineification of the 2016 census, I don't think anyone (the people or the government) would have any interest in this.

The Australian election system is pretty damn good, and very trustworthy, because it works with pencils, papers, and lots of eyes on the ballots and the counters.

Well, I stick all that under the heading of eugenics anyway. I don't care how it's achieved, but we need better people.

The answer is eugenics.

Good luck getting anyone to take that seriously though.

Many people come to realize their mediocrity after spending enough time under the sun. Accepting this realization and learning to be happy with it takes time -- especially at the beginning.

I don't know, I think it only bothers those of us who were brought up being told "oh, you're so special". Those who were never told that in the first place never expected to be special, so it doesn't bother them when they grow up to find that they're not.

I think you're mistaking someone who's happy but ignorant of their mediocrity, and someone who's aware of their own mediocrity

Not really, I don't think people are unaware of their mediocrity, it's just that it doesn't bother them.

For instance I'm not unaware that I am mediocre at the 100m sprint, it's just that it has never occurred to me to be in the least bit bothered by this fact. There's plenty of people out there who are mediocre at sprinting as well as everything else, and are not bothered by their mediocrity along any of these axes.

The vast majority of people on the planet are mediocre, and many people seem happy about it; or rather, if they're unhappy then they're unhappy about other things rather than their own mediocrity.

But then you've got the interviewee for this article, who is probably not happy with her own mediocrity. You can tell this by how hard she insists that she is. People who are genuinely happy with their mediocrity don't go around blogging about it -- in fact, they don't think about it.

Restricted to the publically-available data from one particular and rather odd site, but probably not crazy.

At first it seems counterintuitive, shouldn't it be roughly 50% gaining and 50% losing? But I guess that people typically put in a modest amount of play money, and then tend to trade until either they run out or get discouraged from losses.

Which still has nothing to do with value, which is why I value more highly a Stradivarius violin than the pile of ashes which you could obtain by burning a Stradivarius violin.

Even crazier, the physical size of your font can influence peoples’ understanding and feelings about it.

Now, I wonder if I can make this work the other way around. If I'm making an offer on something, I wonder if it's more likely to be accepted if I write it in giant numerals.

I don't think the many-syllables thing is likely to work, though, if I offer some crazy non-round number then my bargaining partner is likely to just come straight back with "How about we round it up to...?" -- though I suppose that could be useful if even the rounded-up number is a nice low one.

I don't know if game theory is the branch of mathematics that can help you out here. Game theory usually rests on matters of "If I do X then my opponent(s) will do Y", but in this situation you don't even know how many opponents you might have.

Your best shot would probably to be just to sit there and collect a shitload of statistics about under exactly what circumstances you're most likely to be the final bidder, and then only bid under those circumstances... and then hope nobody else has been collecting the same statistics and coming to exactly the same conclusion.

What's the argument that this is gambling?

I suppose because you pay a small amount of money and you may or may not get something valuable out, which makes it effectively gambling from the bidder's point of view.

but I don't see where this is a game of chance instead of a consequence of who is participating

From the point of view of an individual bidder, "who else is participating" is a matter of chance.

I don't know whether they're typically introduced with malign intent, or with good intentions that inevitably go bad, but I don't really think it matters much -- open vacation policies are a terrible idea from the employee's point of view... and in the end probably a terrible idea from the employer's point of view too.

Okay, fine, but why am I in here experiencing it?

I would be willing to code in a not-so-beautiful language for a summer

Career advice: don't be a primadonna.

Even actual literal primadonnas don't start out as primadonnas.

The "trap" that is the Labor Theory of Value may not be the most profitable but maybe it's the most ethical

The labour theory of value doesn't even logically hang together in any way, when you think about it.

Okay, let's suppose I spend a whole week making a giant sculpture of a dog turd out of macaroni and glitter (suppose also that I've done a terrible job even within those parameters). What is the value of that dog turd? According to the labour theory of value, it's worth quite a lot... but nobody is actually going to be willing to exchange anything else of value for it. So in what sense does it have value?

This is why you should never rely on any government to take care of you in retirement. Save for your own damn retirement and retire on your own damn schedule.

Impostor syndrome isn't always a "syndrome". Some people really have lucked into positions which they don't deserve.

Instead, I'll say that just as people walking need physically protected infrastructure on essentially all roadways - these are called sidewalks - so too people on bicycles need physically protected infrastructure on essentially all roadways

Where do we stop? Should we have skateboard lanes as well? Unicycle lanes? Lanes for people who wish to taxi down the road in a Learjet?

We can't accommodate every form of transportation with its own infrastructure.

Bicycles are a tool for turning ordinary people into selfish jerks, jealously guarding their precious forward momentum. A pedestrian doesn't mind if they have to stop for a moment, it's no big deal. A driver doesn't mind stopping for a moment either, it's easy to get back up to speed again. But for a cyclist, having to stop is a minor disaster requiring a massive effort to get back up to speed, so they start behaving like desperate people, and desperate people have little regard for the rules or for the wellbeing of others.

Combine that with the feeling of moral superiority which inflicts those of an environmentalist bent when they're doing something which they consider virtuous, and you've got a recipe for major jerkhood.

I thought toothpaste was fine because it's a paste, not a liquid, gel or aerosol.

Unless of course you buy the "gel" type.

Oh sure, I could do that. Or I could stay in a normal hotel, where they provide it.

(Or if I'm roughing it in the wilderness or something then I probably don't care that much about clean hair.)