ktd

The odds that anyone will think "The Third World" is a good name for their virtual reality seem minimal at best.

Most of those people have no other options. You don't want to fund people (in general; obviously there are outliers with 150+ IQs and fucked-up careers, I was one and, who knows, may be one in the future) who don't have other options.

http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

I'm in SV/SF, and this attitude is completely silly. That isn't to say that it doesn't exist, but I would say it's far from the norm, even in tech circles.

It's obvious, since I'm 30 and not earth-shatteringly successful, that I have some kind of health story...

What?

Women don't face a severe loss of professional status if they put on weight, unless their employer enjoys being cleaned out in court.

You know, there are a lot of things that happen in the world despite not being legal.

I don't understand - when you made this decision, did you expect that you were going to be good enough so that these features of chess (draws and deep, well-studied opening theory) were going to be relevant to you?

Yeah. I played chess competitively as a kid, attending state tournaments, taking lessons outside of school, and so on. However, I found that the more I got into it and better I became, the less appealing it seemed.

Ironically, I felt that chess between relative amateurs was much more interesting than chess between more skilled players, because the improvisational component that I loved was much more relevant when people hadn't been going through the opening books.

This is actually a good example of why I'm not particularly interested in chess anymore-- a game that's that heavy on draws and where so many of the situations are adaptations of well-known positions simply isn't that thrilling. I really enjoyed chess when I was a kid, but the better I became and the more I learned about it the less I found it a compelling game.

It's why there is a centuries-old hatred of inherited wealth and position in all modernized cultures.

Isn't the opposite true?

We can certainly point to famous examples of heirs/heiresses behaving badly, but that seems largely the exception rather than the rule-- by and large, the terms nouveau riche and "new money" carry a negative connotation, while "old money" is associated with taste and sophistication (though certainly also snobbery).

One of the protections we have against unjust laws is that they are unenforceable.

"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." --Abraham Lincoln

This movie isn't misunderstood or clever at all. It was originally exactly as dumb as people think it is (working title: "Bug Hunt On Outpost Nine), but the studio realized they could get the license to Starship Troopers for free.

Verhoeven didn't even read Starship Troopers-- he skimmed a few chapters, decided it was depressing and that Heinlein was a fascist, and made the movie a parody of the book, and a lazy parody at that.

When people call this movie dumb, they're completely right, albeit not for the reasons they may think.

Good. Wearing Google Glass while driving should be banned. The people using cell phones while driving are bad enough.

I suppose the coming months/years will be when we see whether Facebook becomes the "backbone of the social Internet" or just another MySpace. I honestly don't know where the smart money is here-- it's an exciting time!

What kind of "ruin your life" failure do you think people on HN are at risk of undertaking? It strikes me that such levels of failure are very rare, at least among the set who even knows about HN in the first place.

To be honest if you think there is any chance at all that this would happen you are completely disconnected from reality.

The average person doesn't care about NSA surveillance-- just as the average person didn't care about Lincoln arresting newspaper editors and suspending habeas corpus, FDR putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, J. Edgar Hoover sending agents to spy on and harass suspected communists (or just people he didn't like), George W. Bush locking up terrorists in Guantanamo, etc.

When you get right down to it, historical precedent strongly indicates that the average person does not care whether the government actually respects the law in its pursuit of national security.

Roleplaying time! You've just been appointed to head the FBI-- congratulations, Director! Which of the following things do you want to send your agents after?

* An international marketplace doing millions of dollars of business in drugs, weapons, and fake IDs

* A few drug dealers in a public park in a city where you might not even have jurisdiction

If there are drug dealers in the parks, that's a shame-- but that's really not the type of issue that the FBI is supposed to handle. Take it up with your local police department.

We pour all our creativity, time, and passion into creating basically worthless products... we're in the business of making products that provide very little value to people.

Yikes.

What a devious headline. Imagine it as "Codebreaker for MI6 murdered after going to <FILL IN THE BLANK>" and you'll spot the trick here.

Most people in nearly every company from the PA to the CEO sits at a desk with a screen and makes clicking sounds 95% of the time. With the minor process of of 'talking' added, this is the basic description of ~all jobs.

Huh? Even if we restrict things to the civilian sector, there are a LOT of jobs that don't involve that-- police, firefighters, EMS, doctors, nurses, farmers, manufacturers, construction, etc.

The secret is that there is no secret. The more time you spend on generating ideas, the better you will be at it-- just like any other skill.

Terrible, sensationalist title. The actual quote from the article is "If we are not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era," which paints a very different picture.

Not everyone has a mortgage and kids later on in life.

A lot of people we've funded have said they wished they'd quit their corporate job sooner. I don't remember any saying they wished they'd stayed in it longer.

I feel like the fact that you funded these people constitutes a very significant selection effect here.

This is a refreshingly good post.

This seems like a pretty logical step. I'm sure we've all seen cases where dash cameras on police cars help clear up ambiguity regard what really happened during a police stop. The same for normal officers could help solve a lot of problems, though obviously it would be inappropriate for undercover operations, some detective work, etc.

That said, one potential issue with this system is that it might lead to people being less willing to talk to the police. The "stop snitching" culture is already a major problem in many cities and if this measure reinforces it, it could end up being detrimental to the public good.

Somehow I doubt full-scale military action is conducive to lowered emissions.

I really don't like this sort of intentionally-dense argument by definition. Certainly the police could be called a "gang" under some definitions of the word, but we all know that the implication of "armed gang" in this context is very different. Words have nuance.

Where does this "you only get one great idea" meme come from? Generating "great ideas" is a skill, and one that can be trained just like any other.

Yes. Instead, you chose an ad hominem attack, which is pretty much the definition of feeding the trolls.

Are you really claiming that saying "don't feed the trolls" is feeding the trolls?

One thing that many people don't realize about the Hierarchy of Disagreement is that going up the hierarchy takes more and more effort. If someone makes claims that are so hypocritical that they instantly fail the laugh test, there's no need to move up the hierarchy and develop more sophisticated arguments against their main points.

Now, the obvious rebuttal to this would be to claim that I'm only saying this because I can't rebut Assange's points on their own merits, so I have to attack his character. This is an appealing but dangerous line of reasoning, because it forces you to engage with trolls. The appropriate response to a troll is not to examine their argument and point out its weaknesses, but to classify them as a troll and ignore them. Is this ad hominem reasoning? Sure, but ad hominem reasoning isn't necessarily bad.

I can rebut Assange's points on their own merits, but I choose not to because I think doing so gives Assange attention and credibility that he does not deserve. Don't feed the trolls.

Does anyone else find it darkly funny that an international fugitive hiding in a South American embassy to prevent his arrest and extradition thinks he can lecture people on the rule of law?