throwaway1980

Side note: it used to be that Mexican Coke contained cane sugar instead of HFCS. Not sure any more.

Do you have a specific example where "stop being such a crybaby" is a good thing to say?

Things which are polar opposites are actually identical, in this case 0% ego and 100% ego, because 0% ego is all about how spiritually pure you are, a.k.a. 100% ego. I'm sure you've met some of the seemingly enlightened meditators I'm talking about. Buddhism teaches you to deal with this paradox or duality and others like it by seeking the middle road. Some ego is good, not too much, not too little. That's all I was reacting to, I probably could've been nicer about it.

This gallery was going around recently:

http://imgur.com/a/mN8Zs

Apparently a journalist asked one family in each of 20 different countries to gather all of the food they bought in one week and take a picture. It's a fascinating look at global diets. The UK is even more disturbing than the US.

When Google first came out with "don't be evil", this was exactly the kind of thing I thought they wanted to avoid, especially since the corporate bogeyman of the day was Microsoft and they were doing exactly this (Apple too). Turns out I don't really have any idea what Google thinks don't be evil means. It looks like they operate like any other corporation, where the only people they truly care about in a bottom-line sense are shareholders. May as well be up front about that. From what I've seen, a better motto is probably:

  Don't be evil unless it makes money than being good,
  but never admit to evil or talk about it in any way.

Yeah, be wary of anything that is basically code for "stop being such a crybaby".

You can't reject your ego, you can only detach from it. Egolessness and egofullness are two sides of the same coin. And fabrications of the mind, if you will, are all that there is. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Reality and illusion are the same thing. Buddhism is really trying to teach you to honor and understand your thoughts, emotions, and ego as fundamental parts of the human body you live in, not to destroy or be impervious to them. It's not about escaping from your life but living more fully within it. If somewhat is afraid, ask why? How does the experience of fear feel? Is it connected to other emotions? What thoughts accompany it? What experiences from childhood are connected?

What are loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity if not emotion?

Look, the non-essential details here are all the particulars of this conversation about some religious precepts. The essence is that you and I trying to connect on a human level to each other across the internet for some reason or another. Both the essence and the details are important.

It's not really about what you do, it's about what you see and how you do it; the essence is always there, even if you're fixing idiotic bugs in some obscure corner of your codebase.

Well, ok, two things. First, it sounds like we basically agree that legal theft is possible. Second, even in the US there is corporate lobbying to influence government spending, which amounts to taxation without representation (i.e. theft), and moreover there is a revolving door between government and industry, particularly with the military which is where 50% of our tax money goes. At least, it is bad enough that Lawrence Lessig has moved on from fighting copyright concerns to fighting corruption in Washington.

From my perspective I was giving a counterexample to challenge the claim that all theft is unlawful.

You're saying that if legal money collection benefits society it is "tax", but if it does not benefit society it is "stealing"? Sure, if you split the words that denote legal money collection into these two forms, then tax is not theft. I simply define tax as legal money collection.

I'm not anti-tax, btw, but neither do I subscribe to the view that just because a government passes a particular money collection law that it's a just law.

Does anyone else feel kind of confused and guilty when they read this? It just seems so condescending to me.

I like eating and sleeping. I pay a lot of attention to these things. If you're eating well and sleeping well, your life is probably going pretty good. Sure, I'm going to die, that's why food and sleep matter even more. This planet would be a pretty happy place if everyone was eating and sleeping as much as they needed.

Second, what the heck. Too lazy to work on perfecting myself? I thought spiritual enlightenment was about having a smaller ego, not a bigger one. I'm going to feel more motivated if I focus on how awesome I'll be if I do the inner work? You can't do this stuff for very long because you want to get something out of it, you only do it in the long term because circumstances push you into it and you have no choice.

Third, details vs. essentials. Details are bad now? You won't get far with only one or the other. Yes, essentials are important, but so are details. In startup terms, a great idea is essential, but you're dead without a great execution.

Anyway, "laziness" is such a crap word in a spiritual context. As if enlightenment was an achievement, when the point of just about every religion is being, not doing.

Eat. Sleep. Give yourself a break when you hit a wall; perhaps you ought to re-evaluate your priorities. Do a thorough and meticulous job on all of your little projects. Pay attention to what you're doing, and you'll come out of it all the wiser. Lack of progress in any one area is not laziness, it's a signal that you need to try a different course of action.

So by definition a dictator cannot use the courts to steal from his people?

I have never encountered this distinction between activity and computation before. Assuming that you are okay to define (sequential) computation as transforming an input sequence of 1's and 0's into an output sequence of 1's and 0's, can you give me an example of something that a computer does that is not a computation and explain why?

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I was referring to this sentiment by Millennium, who started this thread as far as I can tell:

"But once you stray from awk's niche, things start to get awkward, and the further you go, the tougher it gets."

It is important to understand the distinction between possibility and feasibility. Or the difference between theory and practice, if you will. Even though they are opposites, both are important at the same time.

While it's not feasible for humans to move Mt. Everest, it certainly would be possible.

I used to think the split between vim and emacs users was roughly 50/50, but reading posts here it seems more like 90/10. Why is it that people here prefer vim to emacs? I'm not asking why is vim better than emacs, but what is it about HN that means more vim users. Certainly in free software circles emacs is equally popular. Is it just a cultural thing where people tend to stick with what they first learned and what their coworkers are using?

I'm sure you've heard this before, but all you have to do is ask whether you can build a Turing machine in whatever language. If you can do this, then you can compute answers to the same things computed by any other Turing complete language.

This says nothing about practicality, but nobody ever said it did. Of course practicality is important, but a conversation about Turing completeness is a conversation about "can compute", not "can easily compute". If you look at venues such as POPL, ESOP, and PLDI, fairly often you will find proofs for some abstract representation that is then implemented in a real world language. Thus while it would be impractical to compute something in the abstract form, it is often more elegant for proof construction, and then proof results are transferable if you can demonstrate bisimulation between the two forms. All this to say that "can compute" is nevertheless an important determination with respect to equipotency.

If you had an Unlambda OS (or VM is better perhaps), then anything running on it would be an Unlambda program, including C programs, just as anything running on an x86 machine is an x86 program.

I understand when it comes to something that is normally bought and sold, but I guess it changes for me when it comes to something that is normally given away for free and never sold, except as part of a larger system such as OS X or enterprise Linux.

> The SKI combinator calculus is Turing-complete, but you can't read a CSV file with it.

Of course you can, it's just a matter of input handling. For that matter you can read a CSV file with any Turing machine. It's just easier elsewhere.

So you're saying that this person was implying that even though the price is 0 euro, the consumer surplus is greater than 100 euro? I can understand this reasoning, so thanks for explaining it. I'm not sure I believe that consumer surplus can be measured outside of controlled psychology experiments, since it's only speculation and talk is cheap.

I guess I always thought that the value (or worth - these are the same, right?) of something in an efficient market is its last sale price, and because vim is widely available for free it's an efficient market with a last sale price of zero.

I would agree with, "The value / worth you derive from your use of vim is greater than 100 euro, assuming you actively use at least one of your vim installations." But then again you could say something similar about most common free or nearly free tools and consumables, for example cutlery, oxygen, and linux.

Not if we are talking about monetary worth, which is what 100 euro denotes. Unless I am severely mistaken in my understanding of economics.

> Vim is certainly worth more than 100 euro (original title)

The monetary value of a copy of free / open source software is effectively zero, provided that at least some people are distributing it without restrictions and free of charge such that it is readily available.

> I believe in our product, but I don't believe in our business model.

This sounds like you'd be okay if the business model was different. Tell them that either the business model changes or you're leaving. Then it's up to them whether you leave. You may or may not be able to negotiate interpersonal problems.

What I meant was, why don't browser implementors balk at it?

What about JS?

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/01/art-is-useless-because....

I'd found this before posting:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2497146/is-css-turing-com...

where the top answer gives a Rule 110 solution, but I was satisfied with this comment:

"BRILLIANT!. However, I don't think this qualifies as turing complete. CSS is only able to calculate 1 iteration of the state-machine. Your example relies on the human repeatedly clicking all the orange boxes in order to feed the "output" (pixels) back into the input (page state) and "pump" the state machine. Because there is no programmatic way to use the output of CSS as input, it can't be used to calculate any multi-step loops, the hallmark of turing-complete languages."

Also browsers. Also JS and CSS both have at least one 'S'.

I like this idea of a classical quantum computer. Do we also have CC, QC, and QQ computers?

So that's my understanding of figure drawing too, but in his final paragraph he says it again: "Figure drawing isn’t easy." as if he was talking about figure drawing the entire time. I guess it just needs clarification or something.

Sounds neat, thanks!