matell

it seems to me the five principles - responsibility, perseverance, excellence, creativity, courage - are actually surface terms describing deeper motivation, which is our constant drive to improve our "mental model".

in our brain, we have a "mental model" of the world. it is imperfect, yet allows us to make predictions. Our goal is to improve this model (aka simulator, prediction engine) over the time. We seek for indicators which tell us if our mental model is improving or not. One of the indicators is money one our bank account, our praise of some master.

I'd be grateful if anyone of you can point me to some literature which describes the approach I outlined above. I use the expression "improve my mental model", but I guess philosophy is using some other (more established) term.

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I am not trying to deal with the question why we actually strive to improve our "mental model" :) though I like the idea that it leads to "less suffering".

my guess is, the world of music theory seems like an epic mess to a novice due to the fact that it maintains full backward compatility and is instrument agnostic. e.g. there is a concept named "octave", but it actually consists if 12 intervals (on chromatic scale), and "mysteriously" there is no B# between B and C, and so on. it is like leaving types and pointers in every programming language, even if the lang is Ruby which is "typeless" and has garbage collector.

I am freelancing via Toptal, and you have to pass the entrance exams (which are hard and include live coding), but that is the last time you have to do it... at least that is my experience with 5 different contracts in last 3 years there.. after entering, no one asked me to pass some additional quiz. The clients there seem to trust the system -- i.e. once you are in, you passed the bar and there in no need to waste time testing your abilities again.

I own two identical 2015 macbook's pro (I live in two places).. and I love to read articles like this one :)

instead of concrete blocks, they could be lifting LiPo blocks :)

I like the engineering side of the problem. if I understand it properly, the greatest danger is that even when two professional divers will accompany each boy through the passage, if that child panicks in a narrow underwater section, there is risk both three may get drown. I imagine that they can try to infuse each child with some calm-down preparate to prevent panick, in such a manner that child will be still able to use his own muscles to walk.

here is one project which is trying to solve the welth distribution inequality: https://merit.world/

they claim that root cause of inequality comes from the fact that signalling and exchange value of money is nowadays coupled together (i.e. dollar is used for exchange of goods as well as to signal to the public that you a rich person).

they try to separate this two ingredients, so that there will be sort of two currencies, one for exchange, and the other for signalling (kind of likes in facebook world).

not sure if I miss something, but I haven't figured out how to use the tuning knobs :( I tried mouseover, click, click+drag, in vertical and also in horizontal direction, but the tone didn't moved in any direction.

the (semi)automatic annotation never really happened. there are ontologies, there are amounts of raw data everywhere on the web, but we haven't discovered a way how to reliably turn those data into rdf triplets matching the ontology without doing it by manually hand.

or if taken to an extreme -- "he was an old, experienced kamikadze pilot".

first I hated those popups, but then I turned it into a funny game -- in every popup which asks for email I fill in email address like "f*ck-off@this-popup.com" :)

I was working 9-5 for five years as web app developer which allowed me to create financial buffer to live for several years without work if needed. I live in a cheap country.

At the end I actually took one year off, and during that time I learned to code mobile apps and then successfully joined Toptal and work as freelancer. And since I am in Toptal I receive also many freelance job offers from other sides, just because I mention I am their member in my linkedin profile. I was surprised that they have such a good reputation.

Anyway, I credit my success at joining Toptal mostly to the amount of free time I had during the hiring process (which took cca 1 month), so that I was able to fully focus on it.

such a facial-expression control may be interesting to integrate with the new facebook reaction emojis: http://www.wired.com/2015/10/facebook-reactions-design/

thank you for proposal, I was not aware of this interesting deity. But i decided to keep Stalker alive, I believe its name fits better the purpose despite its negative connotation.

thanks for feedback. to be honest, I was aware of the connotation, but no better word came to my mind at the time. feel free to suggest a better "brand name", if I will identify with it, I am open rename the project (and mention you in credits :)

I am team leader of a software development team and thanks to tolerance of my boss I have a 4-day work week for past 20 months (Monday - Thursday, 8 working hours per day on average). The rest of my team (and also rest of the company employees) is working 5 days.

Compared to 5 work days per week I feel my work is much more focused, better organized and prioritized. there is no space to spend 1 hour a day reading hacker news.

The team does not seem to suffer from the fact I am not there at Friday. they have the option to call me via phone if they get completely blocked in some issue (such a call occurs maybe once in two months).

I try proactively to avoid being the blocker any time by replacing email communication by issue tracking and shared intranet boards and documents as much as possible.

thanks for feedback. you are right, the battery life is poor.

the problem with the battery life is not the arduino itself - a bare atmega328 (the hearth of arduino) will live for several months from a 3AA battery.

the real power consumption comes from the ultrasonic sensor - I tried to completely cut it off from power between measurements, however the ultrasonic circuit is not recovering properly from these on&offs (I was looking for help on arduino forums but without response: http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=216079.msg1589123#ms...)

hello Alex. thanks for remark, you are right. However my "ultimate" goal is to count people passing a back-country skiing track, so I decided to emphasise the human-counting use case.