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So ... Your response is basically YOLO?

So uhm, mind explaining what the hell Godel's proof has to do with God?

Someone's insecurity is showing; might wanna hide it buddy

I'm not exactly a Musk fan boy, but it's clear he's just showing off a setup that they're working on over there. He says in the video, in case you're hard of hearing, that they put together existing technology to experiment with this UI. I didn't here him even insinuate that they're inventing it let a lone claim it.

Your mal-a-tete with people like Jobs and Musk isn't that they're taking all the credit - can't say the same for Jobs, but Musk seems to big up his team whenever he can. Your problem is that they demonstrate that the engineering isn't everything. At the end of the day you still have to attract people and people don't just drop their panties at the sight of new tech without the nuances of good presentation. Rather than PMS on hacker news, may I suggest some life coaching, sir?

Are you saying there was no other way to pass on the exact same message with the exact same effect without being a total cunt about it?

Am I the only one who thinks this is unnecessarilly rude and abhorent?

The lady was just doing her job for duck sake. For someone whose main point of argument is that they show humanity, you seem to have very little of your own.

You know guinea worm is more frequently contracted from drinking water than through the skin, right?

because?

I think the point of the concept is actually an antithesis to doubt. It basically says you can believe x is x, yet continue to treat x like y. You could say this is "doubt", but then you contradict your belief that x is x. Just like the sterilized bedpan example. If you truly believe that it is indeed sterilized, why are you hesitant to drink from it?

> "fellow man"

hahaha, that's rich; "fellow man"

Apparently, you're the less learned one. Hong Kong was a former property of HRH and still maintains, both culturally and politically, the civic values from their predecessors. As a matter of fact, judging from what I saw last time I was over there, one could reasonably argue that they handle civil dissent much better than us here in the states, both on the protesters' side and on the government's side.

I think people have invested themselves emotionally to this 10000 hours nonsense, so any mention of natural gifted-ness sets them off in a tirade, not because of any analytical opposition, but because their egos are somewhat threatened by the prospect that someone may be naturally better at something than they are.

Unfortunately, 10000 hours yadah yadah is not a "new finding" beyond putting a nice round number on a phenomenon that I'm sure your mommies and daddies told you when you were a kid - PRACTICE. Deliberate practice? Does "try doing the harder stuff" sound familiar? The fact that if you practice areas that you're not very strong at you will get stronger has been known for centuries. "Naturally gifted" people aren't those who are experts, neither are they those who have the best technique. 10000 hours on the piano will not make you Beethoven, neither will 100000 hours. Beethoven was Beethoven for many reasons - well known as a prodigy, highly regarded by the culture of his time, etc - merely playing the piano well didn't make him remarkable. For a less ancient example, take Jimmy Page. Anyone who plays guitar will acknowledge that Page's playing was quite sloppy. It's not technique that I would teach to someone. But he's Jimmy freakin' Page. The genius of Zeppelin was in the innovation. They brought a new sound, at the time - and they were really cool too, but don't tell anyone.

So, to wrap up, practice makes perfect, but perfect isn't genius. Which isn't to disparage anyone, but to see such pettiness automatically raise its head whenever someone brings up this 10000 hours crap as if it's something new - one guy goes boo-hoo people won't think I'm a genius anymore, the other guy goes, yeah I could be a genius too if only I practiced it - is just sad. No one cares about what you could be. I could be a freakin' Navy Seal if I just enlisted and worked hard and blah blah blah; I'm not a Navy Seal, so all that's irrelevant. All that matters is what you are, so if we're reveling in the fact that we could be better at something if we practiced, rather than actually practicing, well that says more about the human ego rather than human talent.

So you're comparing common decency and common sense to overbearing vanity imposed on people? If I remark about someone's weight to demean them, that's simply dick behavior. Wearing whatever the hell you like is not. Now imposing that one may be somehow inferior for not paying an exorbitant amount of attention to dress (for vanity, no less), that's dick behavior - which was the crux of OP's comment.

And please, tell me how "if you strip away the pretensions from these things, more people would take to them" is the same as "the pretentiousness is necessary and the untraveled, uncultured, blah, blah, don't understand that, because, you know, uncultured".

So basically, we need to engage in superficial nonsense, because people are so immature that they can't settle their differences amicably? I'll make sure to teach my child that.

I second this! or something similar, at least. Having not really gone to college, myself, I was lucky enough to have had so many varied life experiences and interests before I took up tech; so when talking to my colleagues who are cs-equipped, I find their methodology is often very CS oriented, and focused more on the tech than on the problem. I think that's why "design" has become such a big fad these days - it's almost as if we just figured out that people buy products, not tech.

That being said, after speaking with quite a few tech-inclined people, I feel they would be a lot more comfortable with less technically inclined subjects if they were stripped of the general cultural pretensions that they come with. There is a very strong resistance to "acculturation" among techies, as it is usually seen - rightly, for the most part - as a mechanism of enforcing a "cool kids' club", so to speak, rather than an actual venue for intellectual exploration.

I think, that as techies, we are in a unique situation, as far as intellectual development is concerned. The vast majority of the population can't appreciate technical phenomena because it is culturally viewed as "too hard" or "robotic" or "blah blah, boring". We, OTOH, actively refuse to engage with humanistic pursuits, but not out of any perceived difficulty so much as discomfort with the pretensions that come with "cultured society". If effort can be made to induct some history and philosophy, and heck, maybe even theology into the the techie culture, we could have the best of both worlds and possibly even have some truly fresh ideas put out.

In short, it's easier to teach a physicist to write essays than it is to teach a poet Diff Eq

a) OP had nothing to do with linguistics or math; it was simply pointing out that Lisp's approach to being general purpose was interesting in that you could take basic rules and restructure them to fit your domain.

b) I have read "The Math Gene" and many claims made vis-a-vis maths and linguistics are dubious, at best.

c) There is no "linguistic" way to attack anything, unless what you're attacking is a linguistic problem.

Is your rationale that when given a problem "mathematically overdeveloped" - by the way, if you were wondering about your perceived defensiveness, saying someone is "overdeveloped" in something you claim to not have ample ability in is a dead giveaway - people will first parse it for nouns and gerunds? Because most people think about the problem and only consider your diction if it is relevant to the problem itself.

>> "It's one thing to be a recluse who scorns 'normal, social people'"

This is not a stigmatizing statement at all. tone = {sarcasm: "implied"};

Perhaps people who would feel the urge to be reclusive would be more social if people like you kept your mouths shut every once in a while and didn't say pathetically pretentious things like "us normal, social people".

>> "so those with an overdeveloped math functional unit in the brain also have an overdeveloped linguistical unit. This leads to treating every problem as a linguisic problem, because that is what their brain is best equipped to solve."

Seriously, math envy much? Where is it that people formulate these absurd conjectures about mathematics and people who understand mathematics, because every time I hear one it sounds more like defensive attempts to disarm one's feelings of inadequacy by making another group seem inferior or "different" in some way. Furthermore, mathematical capacity and linguistic capacity have no strong links that I know of, so I'm going to need a citation before I swallow that claim, sir.

It's not a problem. I was after as much detail as possible. Very helpful, in fact!

Thanks. I've never freelanced before, so I think I'll start off with $2k projects, so i can begin some kind of portfolio

Sorry to piggy back on this thread, but can anyone give me an estimate of how much a freelance gig can earn per project? Also, do you take on more than one project at a time, usually?

I read this about 2 hours ago and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Growing up in a Latino/Black community and being of mixed heritage, it was never socially easy. My parents divorced, so I'd spend half the year with my dad - who was Jamaican - in Patterson, NJ, and I'd spend the other half with my mom - who was Italian - up in Canada.

I always found it interesting how I felt more comfortable in white-as-the-clouds Ontario, than in Patterson, where there weren't just more black people, but a lot more mixed race people. I didn't quite like Star Wars or Dr Who, but I did read a lot of Tolkien, and science, tech, philosophy, or anything, really, wasn't just something I learned in school so I could do homework; they were actual things that I engaged with - not that school was any less boring for me; believe me, it was. It wasn't enough to read Catcher in the Rye, I had to find out about Salinger, the times he lived in. I liked to talk about things. What was mostly just school stuff to people were things I actually liked to think about or talk about or even do. This never really fit very well into Hip-Hop and girls, and "looking cool" Patterson - though I did rock this sweet leather jacket once, but I drew some blanks when I channeled my inner James Dean. Brampton, OTOH, was interesting. It wasn't that people were any more like I was, or that people automatically liked me any better - though there was a weird fascination with my hair - but the fact that I liked the things I liked wasn't something I had to hide. It wasn't that they understood everything I said, or that they were even all that interested, but very rarely did anyone ever alienate me for dropping a Hume quote, no one ever told me to "shove that nerd shit up my ass" when I mentioned the possibility of planting a radio in someone's skull; no one ever tried to make me socially handicapped for being interested in any intellectual development.

Reading this, I felt like this girl had just touched my mind. If only I could touch hers. The feelings of isolation when people who are physically like you aren't just behaviorally unlike you, but very actively alienating to you. The feeling of shame when the teacher calls you to give the answer and you don't know what to do - give the right answer, contribute to the stigma; give the wrong answer and have others spitefully mock you for "not being as smart as you think". The absolute feeling of insecurity when innocently mentioning you don't know something, a privilege available to everyone else, is met with mocking comments about how they thought you knew everything. If only I could meet this girl and let her know that it gets better in the end. Hopefully she finds her own Brampton, ON - somewhere she can be herself with other people without the feeling of being an artificial limb, rather than a part of a fully functioning body.

I often see arguments like these that basically go "well if only some extraneous event would have gone slightly differently said person would not have had to resort to this". The propensity to lay blame to pathetically extraneous phenomena, and remove all idea of human agency from analysis is representative of our modern "touchy-feely" idea that if only we'd all love and hug and sing kumbaya, bad stuff wouldn't happen. WRONG. At the end of the day, this guy - of his own will - decided to harm others by the multitudes. They strategically picked a venue with an incredibly large gathering and they CHOSE to commit this horrendous act. Now I'm not saying you're wrong and that the stigma of being a "loser" in immigrant communities may indeed been a factor in leading them to commit such a heinous attack on other human beings. What I'm saying is it's no excuse for it and if that's the case, then every homeless guy, riff-raff, and just anyone who plain isn't satisfied with their lives should feel free to commit mass murder 'coz y'know "they made me a monster". At the end of the day, while extraneous phenomena should be taken into account in analyzing a situation, the deed that gets done, usually is done out of one's agency.

Sounds pretty cool. Mind sharing what your typical day as a freelancer is like?

By the way, are you from the Philippines or do you just live there?

Thanks for the heads up. How slow are we talking here? And is ssh 100% necessary all the time? or only when it's time to push to production? Sorry if these seem like pedestrian questions; I've never done freelance work before, so I need to understand what I'm getting into.

Also, what do you mean it's the other way around for you wrt taxes?

hahahaha i just spilled my coffee after reading that, screw you!

I don't know if you even read the post fully, but the post was about the hype of Elon Musk's personal life, not the hype of personal life. And yes for the most part, it is. The reality is he's a busy man, with a busy life, anyone who thinks that his family life is somehow supposed to be like that of a traditional "as seen in social studies" textbook either has their head up their you know what or is trying to mask a certain insecurity with a veneer of self-righteousness.

>What could be more important than a happy family and personal life? How on earth is this considered "hype"?

That may be all well and good for you, but first, you have a terribly ethnocentric and rather simplistic view of life as seen only from your perspective. Some people want to get enough and retire and frolic. Other people want to discover. Your ideal life may be sitting on the porch waiting for little Timmy to get back from school so you can build a go-kart; that's great, but that's not everyone's ideal life - and it doesn't in any way mean that little Timmy is any less important to anyone else. So if your thesis is that your vision of life is somehow better simply because it's the most traditional, you're going to need a more robust argument for that.

>I would trade any amount of billions for that, in fact I probably have, because I decided long ago that family and my personal happiness are more important than millions in the bank.

Also, you make the assumption that the man is somehow concerned about money. Whether you do that on purpose to further your point, or whether you didn't take full stock of the situation, I don't know. But the man is rich. And if he wasn't rich before, he's certainly "fuck you" rich now. He could be earning multiples on his money without even lifting a finger. It's not about money, it's about interest, and apparently, for him, about vision. My comment was about people self-righteously trying to compare the amount of time and the way they spend time with their families to someone who - regardless of how you feel about him, and I don't feel as hot as everyone else about him - is taking on two immensely difficult tasks. So when John Battelle, and everyone else self-righteously comment about not using email when spending time with their kids as if they were some martyrs of child-rearing, I'd have to say there's some insecurity involved.

So it's great that you wouldn't trade money over your children. That's great and I'm sure no well-adjusted person would. However, there are things in life that do not fit in to the inane work-life paradigm, and people expecting it to, either have very limited scopes of what life is and how one should live it, or they have their eyes glossed over by nicely packaged institutions of socialization. The truth is, a lot of people have very complex family lives. It's nice when you look at social studies textbooks and see two parents, one son, and one daughter, but life's never been like that and a happy family can't simplistically be reduced to "one that doesn't check email and text while spending time with each other - which, by the way, must be x amount of hours if you really want to be considered a close, happy family"

Yeah, it is fairly rare. I think it's because , to some degree,people try really hard to make families conform to a certain idea of family life, so you get a lot of noise like "can you have it all?" - what exactly does that even mean? - or many a fodder for Dr Phil specials. Really the best thing my parents did was treat us like people who had their own lives, not some dogs that were supposed to be domesticated and bred.

Indeed. As far as we can tell, Gates is quite the family man. The reality maybe opposite, or it may be in line with what we see. Either way these are people with lives that don't or shouldn't fall into any static schema that we formulate in our heads. I think everyone has a little TMZ in them. While we like to look at the Hollywood and People magazine set and decry them for being trashy, we do the exact same thing; we just have our own celebrities that we pester.

I think people who hype on and on about his personal life are just grasping at straws to mask their own insecurities.

As someone who grew up not spending that cliched ooey gooey version of "family time" that we always see on television and someone who has been married once, I'm fairly sure it's a lot more complicated than "oh always working, and doesn't care about his family? --insert underhanded "I'm better than you statement here"--. My parents worked hard to take care of me and my sisters. Did I see them all the time? nope. Was I bothered? nope. At the end of the day whenever I needed them they would drop everything and show up. We never had dinner at the table, as a matter of fact I pretty much up and moved out when i was 17. But we're a very close family. As for my marriage, despite how hard we tried to maintain it, one can't control feelings, and eventually we realized that even though we were comfortable with each other, we couldn't get those feelings back.

Now, I don't know Elon Musk, and quite frankly I think there's a bit too much hero worship surrounding him - don't get me wrong, he does some crazy stuff, but he's not as much a sage entrepreneur as we make him out to be. Having said that, the reality is that life is a lot more complicated than what it looks like on Little House on the Prairie. A "close family" doesn't have to sit around the table and chat, a close family doesn't even have to have members who live in the same country - I'm a case in point. So people talking about how he's some bad father as if they live with him or know him personally should go focus on their own personal lives. And to John Battelle's, quite frankly rude statement at SXSW, well he works at a media company that hosts conferences, not running and re-imagining two pillars of heavy industry.

I couldn't help but detect a certain level of bourgeois elitism in the article, which in some part is why the rift is large as they claim, but in a larger sense, is why the rift is as large as they claim.

That may seem a bit confusing to read, but when you look at the typical tech-rich set, there is no inherent need to fit in with the crowd, simply for the sake of fitting-in. "The art scene" for the most part is exactly just that. Speaking as someone quite interested in art history, I can attest to the fact that the "high art" world is very much a relic from old times - when children were raised to watch their status and life was a giant popularity contest. Now that's not to say that the tech-set are impervious to elitist behavior, but tech elitism is based more heavily on talent, intelligence, and creativity. So in a way, it's a kind of elitism that is forced on the culture itself, in a pursuit for the most "innovative" way to do something. Where the art crowd admires "witty" quasi-intellectual banter, the tech-set are more likely to be interested in something, more demonstrably cool or unique to their interests. This obviously poses a dilemma for art dealers from that standpoint - how do you interest someone in something they have no interest in. It is a dilemma that art dealers face, not just with "nerds" but with anyone, really. But convincing the average Joe to be interested in your activity because "it's what the cool kids do" is a lot easier than convincing someone who may not necessarily care much for sitting at the cool kids' table.

So in a sense, the tech crowd doesn't buy into high art because it's a group that generally doesn't have any particular need to fit-in for fitting in sake, but in a larger sense, the elitism in the high art world is reliant more on popularity and everyone reading the same books and speaking the same language, which is complete anathema to a group whose principles are based more on "cool shit" than club membership.

But then again, these are just my generalizations :)

where exactly does he allude to "nerds" mandatorily being interested in "nerdy things"?

his point was that the article had a very old world elitist attitude where "art" = "culture" and if one is to be considered cultured and is rich, there is somehow some obligation to purchase art.

it smelled more of, "give me some of that hi-tech money" than any serious exposition about the rift between the tech rich and the art world.