mareofnight

In art, it looks like people on the outside think of "talent" as something you either have or don't, but people who are artists themselves and involved in an art community (online, in a school, etc.) tend to focus on practice much, much more.

It's supposed to stand for Not Only SQL, I think.

I don't think there's anything actually "leaner" going on here. If anything, it's the reverse - much higher investment of effort up-front for supposedly avoiding risk of bad hiring choices and effort replacing them later.

I think the word they're looking for here is "internship". That's a longer duration and more expensive, but probably(?) less distrustful to the regular team.

This is reminding me of my first intern job, when I'd gotten an email about "donating vacation days" to someone with an extended illness who'd used up theirs. I didn't have any vacation days anyway because I was hourly, but I was kind of confused why taking sick time when you're sick required having coworkers "donate" it, so I asked a coworker why donating vacation days was even a thing. Coworker seemed a little dismayed, thought I was saying that it didn't make sense for people to help out a sick coworker. I had just assumed that the company wouldn't give people a hard time about having cancer.

I imagine that how organized the unused stuff is would be a factor in how high the tax is. If you can't remember that you own it and where it is when you need it, there's no usefulness to having it. If it's getting in the way of finding other stuff, the value becomes negative.

In large quantities, stuff taxes also include how large a dwelling you need and how difficult it is to move.

Studying abroad made me more aware that there are penalties for not having stuff, too. It was mostly basic cooking implements that I missed, and also things that are just useful to have around, like tape and plastic wrap.

22, and remember being a kid and finding sentimental value in many, many more things than I do now. Part of it might be that the novelty of having things at all wears off over time.

This sounds very similar to Alicorn's How to Have Things Correctly http://lesswrong.com/lw/eyt/how_to_have_things_correctly/

Probably halo effects have something to do with it?

I do think that personality and behavior can influence attraction really, really strongly. And I suspect that how much each factor matters, and what kind of personalities and behavior are attractive, would vary a lot from person to person (given the variety of reasons why friends have said they're attracted to people). But I also think intense attraction to personality is something that wouldn't show up on a test like this. Personality doesn't really come to life just from a description, and for most people who've told me about being really strongly attracted to a personality, it was something kinda unusual, or that would require really getting to know the person before it was visible. Then again, I also wouldn't be surprised if my friends' ways of being attracted to people aren't a representative sample.

For me, reading this kinda felt like a reminder that I was in a space that's mostly men - a reminder that I'm a minority here, but not that bothersome. I can imagine it being more bothersome to other women, and the general pattern does make me feel a bit more like an outsider (when lots of these comments happen). Just one data point.

Critique groups and beta readers?

This is a good point. Though there do seem to be a few lower-stress workplaces out there - Vanguard seems to be one of them, in terms of not having much crunch time or overly-long hours. They're pretty sociable people, though, but it might still be something to consider.

(I'm a former intern and not currently working there, and not a recruiter; pretty sure their hiring managers don't read Hacker News.)

The reason why artificial flavors in general are different, is that a plant's flavor is made of a lot of different chemicals, and artificial flavorings only include the most noticeable (and least expensive) ones - so all the subtleties get left out.

No idea if the change of banana varieties also affects it, or not.

Basic meaning: doing a thing to send a message about yourself to others. Like wearing expensive brands to signal that you're rich.

But good signalling involves some additional factors. Signalling is usually used when you want to say something about yourself, but it's something that people would want to say about themselves whether it was true or not, so you have to say it in a way that is difficult or impossible to fake. A good signal is one that is highly visible (in the context where it matters; clothes are good for in-person signaling, profiles or photos are good for online signaling), and either cannot be sent without having the quality they're supposed to signify (you can't afford expensive things to show off if you don't have money), or are much easier to send if you have that quality than if you don't (it's easier to get a high StackOverflow score if you're good at programming and communicating than if you're not).

If you're giving employees extra stock to signal loyalty and trustworthiness, it's "cheaper" to do that if you actually value being loyal and trustworthy (rather than just wanting others to think that of you), because then you get value from being the sort of person you want to be and being thought well of by others. At least, that's the theory; you could just want other people to think you're a loyal person really, really badly.

Or in the case of VC firms, would like their investors to believe this.

Maybe a color picker that includes all colors isn't the goal?

When people first start learning digital painting (painting in Photoshop, Gimp, etc), a lot of them draw landscapes with chartreuse grass, because they used the greenest green on the color picker. Artists in other mediums don't usually have this problem, because rarely-useful colors like #00FF00 aren't included in the typical pigment set.

It really depends on your priorities for the use case. Sometimes you want to give as many options as possible, sometimes it's more important to make it really easy to get something that looks ok and hard to accidentally get something overly neon.

This is my problem too. I've mostly given up trying to nap because falling asleep takes so long that it's not worth it.

I like this idea. I notice that I tend to get more ideas when I'm stuck waiting for something or doing chores, than when sitting at the computer and reading things is an option.

Is that compared to the general population overall, or a subset? It might be more informative to look at the subset that actually starts down the road of making discoveries in mathematics - maybe just people who attempt bachelors' degrees in math?

That's basically what it is, and maybe also a mindset of believing you matter as your own person, rather than just a means to and ends. Having at least some selfishness of that sort (at least when living in a culture designed for it - maybe things are different in more group-oriented cultures) is really important for things like being confident, being able to say no to others' requests, and not getting depressed.

I don't think this is necessarily the case. You do need to understand the idea's domain really well, but that doesn't have to be because it's something you do already. You could try to solve the problem of someone you know well, or have a cofounder who knows the problem domain better than you, or pick a market that seems underserved and learn about it until you get an idea and can make sure it's not a bad one.

There are benefits to picking something you don't already do - or rather, something that most people who start startups don't do. People naturally think the most about optimizing things they do often, and when most of them are being told to "scratch your own itch", they do even more of that. So most software startups will be about things that people who write software and found startups do a lot of, and those markets will be the most competitive. If you solve your grandmother's problems instead of your own, there's a lot less competition.

I think the actual issue is their approach to learning, rather than their approach to math. The exercise with probability was meant to help them understand what probabilities are, so the process was more important than the result in that case. When learning math, it's often more important to make sure you're taking the right path toward the answer. And there's also a place for exploratory activities like this, where you figure out what your assumptions are before worrying about whether they're right.

I have some problems that I don't have any particular diagnosis for. Is there any way I can find out whether it's worth trying this? Is it a problem for someone to get a transplant when they don't actually need it? (The article writer seemed to think it was a bad thing, but if it really is "as dangerous as changing a baby's diaper", then it doesn't sound any worse than taking unnecessary vitamins.)

(Problems are food intolerances, some cause unusually painful gas, others affect my mind. My doctor has no idea what causes it, and some of them are to really common foods, so staying on my diet is difficult.)

I was a bit confused about the spam thing too. Was the intended meaning that URL shorteners indicate the link is spam, or that trading off user experience for analytics makes it spam? (Or in the spirit of spam, or something.) I'd think they meant the second one, except that it doesn't actually make any sense.

I also got a really strong gut feeling of "spam" being used as a "boo!" sign, for some reason.

I'm working on a school project using salesforce right now, and it's basically what you describe, with making a web application through a GUI. It seems like it's probably a good solution for a business that needs an information system without much customization required, since it does make assumptions that can be constraining. I didn't enjoy working with it; it's less fun than programming with text. And I'd tend to call it "application building" rather than programming. Warcraft III's modding tools are similar - they let you build a game without very much typing. (In that case, though, the GUI didn't sap the fun out of it - probably because there was more room for creativity in Warcraft.)

I think there may be technical constraints in making such an interface customizable enough, though. Salesforce and Warcraft make a lot of assumptions about what sort of program you're making. An application-builder that's as general-purpose as a programming language sounds like it'd be really hard to build. (Although I'm not sure how much harder that is than just building something like Drupal.)

We also don't have a graphical way of describing behavior, that I know of. Even in tools like Salesforce and Warcraft, custom logic is shown as plain text (though Salseforce gives you some buttons to insert variable names and operators). It sort of makes sense to just use text, if the alternative is making people learn a new set of symbols.

I once saw some meta-advice, that for almost all advice, there's people who need to hear it, and people who need to hear the exact opposite. I suspect that applies here; some teams communicate too much, others communicate too little.

(The original example I heard of for this is that people are usually advised to be less selfish, but some people have heard that messages so much that they think it's never ok to do things for themselves. If you're more selfish than you want to be, advising people to be more selfish sounds evil. If you're so unselfish that it's hurting you, advice to be less selfish might seem kind of unnecessary. So when advice to do more or less of something seems like bad advice, sometimes it's just because you're not the target audience.)

I'd imagine a lot of that increase has to do with fewer people going diagnosed, rather than more people having ADHD in the first place. People become more aware of the symptoms and realize they can get help, they're less scared of being called crazy, etc. Given how hard it is to tell mental conditions apart (I think I remember reading that somewhere around 40% of psychologists' diagnosis are later changed), there are probably some false diagnosis in there too, where the "true" diagnosis is something else that's less top-of-mind, or that hasn't been discovered yet, or is something other than mental disorder.

It's fine to say "change the environment" but that's not always an option. ^ good point.

I'm curious - does anyone else have a mental habit of trying to notice bystander effect situations and taking it as your job to handle them if you're able?

I've had this habit for about a year. So far, called the police too late to do anything about it twice (once because my phone was dead, once from a combination of negligence and not knowing the right number to call), and once called the emergency number for a guy who fainted in public (but ran off before help could arrive). In the last case, a handful of other bystanders also stopped to help the guy, so bystander effect mysteriously didn't work that day. So I haven't been terribly helpful to anyone, but I was surprised how often I saw problems once I was looking for it.

(I don't think I would have been terribly helpful in this situation, though - I don't know how to break up a fight without being hurt, and probably wouldn't have thought of some of the better ideas like trying to single out a strong-looking person in the crowd and get them to help.)

I'd been thinking of generating fitted sewing patterns once, and did a very basic search of what existing software already does that. Based on the (bad) reviews of existing products, I suspect the problem of making clothes fit is harder than it looks. http://wildginger.com/ is one company to look at.

Of course, on the supply side, the best way to validate this is talk to some tailors about what their job entails, and learn how mass-produced clothing is made. I suspect that making this work would require finding a way to hire tailors very cheaply, in a location that's within 48 hour shipping distance.

I'd consider buying from a company like this, if I were confident that it actually would fit well, and the style I wanted was available in a lot of different colors. (Some parts of fit are personal preference - like the tradeoff between freedom of movement in the arms vs. clean-looking sleeve caps.) Also, as a woman who'se been shopping with other women, this should also work for womens' office clothing if it works for men. Differences in bust sizes add an extra variable to finding things that fit, and in certain styles (like fitted shirts and dresses that don't stretch), it can make things hard.

Ooh, point.

Dogecoin managed to be pretty easy, though. (I've never used bitcoin, so I don't know how much difference there is.)