BasilAwad

Sorry for my late response. Not sure if you will ever see this.

Not sure if it’s intellectual conflict [1]. I think it’s more of motivation. Do you care to keep exploring horizontal causes if you see causation vertically to the fullest (all causes, effects, and relationships between causes and effects are being upheld by God).

Also, we can’t evaluate occasionalism as a philosophy on its own. Occasionalism is a point of creed only after certainty of God’s existence. It’s irrelevant if you don’t believe in God.

One can still do science. Assume life is simply Conway’s Game of Life. This is an extreme example of secondary causation where “god” wrote the code - then evolution/causation is determined from an initial state without any further input. In addition to doing the science of discovering the patterns of scientific laws (in this example, patterns like oscillators, spaceships), a person that believes in traditional sunni creed may also raise the following questions: (1) Who is sustaining this cellar automation in every moment? In other words, there is constant “power” running the computer. (2) We can’t take stop at the simplest of observations as givens with their own creative agency. In this example, everything we observe was initially defined. Extending this example, things as simple as death can be perceived as a variable that was defined. Death exists because of God created it. It’s not a truth that exists independent of a Creator. (3) There is still creative precision in chaos. In this example, no matter how chaotic the patterns in the game become, the code that is constantly being executed is precise without a single character error.

Al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error [2], an easy read, may also be of interest.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-causation/... [2] https://www.aub.edu.lb/fas/CVSP/Documents/Al-ghazaliMcCarthy...

In terms of Avicenna's mentioned contingency argument for proof God, one way I think of it is a football analogy. You can’t have a series of backward passes into infinite, which is impossible. There has to be a first cause that doesn’t have a cause.

Also good is one of Avicenna’s biggest critics, Al-Ghazali. His view on occasionalism makes it easy to believe in miracles and is sunni orthodoxy in creed. Basically if you believe that God is the creator of causes, effects, and their relationship which is being upheld in every instance, then a suspense of such a relationship is possible. Al-Ghazali, unlike Avicenna, is also considered a heavy weight in sufism. For example, one critique I heard a while back from Neil deGrasse Tyson on Al-Ghazali was that his writings is basically what caused the end of the Islamic Golden age, because the focus became on more on spirituality than intellectual pursuits afterwards. There could be some truth in that. I got my first B in university when I started reading Rumi. This was probably just laziness and not some spiritual opening.

Also popular is Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. He said something a long the lines that if you hid behind a wall and threw a pebble in front of a baby, even a baby will turn around and see where the pebble came from. There’s a popular story that he was walking on the streets with a large entourage and some old lady asked “who is that guy?” and someone responded “Don’t you know! This is Fakhr al-Din al-Razi! He has 70 proofs of God’s existence!” To which the old lady laughed and responded “If he did not have seventy doubts for the existence of God he would not need seventy proofs!” Upon hearing this al-Razi said everyone should be like the old lady.

If you’re interested in islamic theology, Dr. Umar Faruq And-Allah is good. You can find lecture series for his courses on YouTube. This is also a good series by him (http://qadriyya.org/lessons/aqeedah/dr-umar-faruq-abd-allah-...). It’s a bit advanced as he’s giving the class to a muslim audience. Also good is TJ Winters/Abdal Hakim Murad at Cambridge. I found them both to be honest to the tradition and intellectually honest. For Quran translations, I was told Abdel-Haleem’s is the clearest.

Seeing theory is good.

https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/

couldn't see buttons so I had to make my screen smaller.

This is a great story. These are also the type of stories that should be shared to build bridges between different cultures and communities. The elderly are our nation's treasure.

inventory turnover also has to be taken into account

This is a great idea. Instead of settling in a retirement home, which always seemed so depressing to me, abandoned seniors (I know not ALL cases are the same) can at least enjoy travel and a constant change of atmosphere if they so desire.

The sad thing though is that this paper is from 2004. I wonder what action, if any, has been taken since.

As a side note, I also know that some people have family members that need medical care. I just hope I'm never put in a difficult situation where I would consider putting my parents in a retirement home. But if it was a cruise! Not so bad! That's like a permanent vacation!

there are better places than HN to get salary information. for example, glassdoor

Not being "in" or simply suggesting to follow twitter. It's just that when it comes to social mediums I blaze through things as fast as possible to get gists. And the vibe I got from the front site is that this is about gists (45 seconds or less).

If this was presented more as a curation of best audio submissions, probably with nice subheadings and short descriptions, then I'd probably spend 1-3 minutes enjoying each piece like how I do when I'm reading curated articles.

amazement. sorry for the ambiguity.

45 seconds is too long for me. I only listend to 6ish seconds.

Vine is 6 seconds and that's also visual. Tweets are read in 10 seconds.

$8.24 billion for 7 miles of tunnel

"To keep the soft ground from collapsing, engineers snaked coils of coolant through the soil to form a protective arch of frozen earth. That let crews work safely while traffic rumbled overhead. Cost: $1 million per foot."

Whenever I come across any post on Ayn Rand on Hacker News I think of Adam Curtis's "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace." I believe Rand's relationship with her lover, specifically how the relationship starts and how the relationship ends, summarizes her philosophy.

Journalists really like substituting 'correlated with' with 'predict'...

Yes, I do find it is interesting how much faith we have in something by it just being called scientific. But...

About the example of split couples finding themselves 95% or even 100% compatible with their ex's on dating sites: that can be used both ways. The ex's actually DID end up choosing each other and DID have some good times and were, day I say, "compatible" for a set period of time. Plus we're not even sure what drove the divorces in these examples. Did someone cheat? Was there a specific unforeseen event that happened? Heck, the ex's themselves didn't see the split coming in the beginning/match-making part of their relationship.

Summary: MOOCs have (1) really really low completion rates and (2) a user base that is already highly literate and educated. So MOOCs don't target the majority of students who actually need a person to direct their learning. (Author then mentions his tutoring directory company called Tutorspree).

Then the author cuts MOOCs some slack and says they are hiring TAs and encouraging meetups.

maybe visit mom?

Only 10 applications? How many applications do y'all typically apply before accepting an offer? I've been told around 40.

One reason for the conformity is car parts and mechanic shops. It reaches a point where it doesn't make sense to get any other type or model.

In Amman, Jordan there's a disproportionate amount of 30-year-old Mercedes. It's pretty amazing how long a car can last when that's the only option.

can you expand? as a person who enjoyed reading rumi, I have no clue what you are saying.

Visualization Summary: Scrooge McDuck use to dive into about 1/4 of a trillion dollars.

After that you can take the AI course on Udacity.

Saylor maps out all of the details of a degree plan with free online resources (they'll point to khan academy ,slideshare, lecture online, whatever).

For example, here is computer science: http://www.saylor.org/majors/computer-science/

I believe you already addressed your second concern. For your first concern, an individual can make an assessment of the VCs and investors already tied to the project instead of the entrepreneur.

Brain scans can be more honest and accurate than consumer surveys and focus groups but I don't think brain scans can be projected past the individual to nation-wide sales, unless the nation is made up of the same individual with the same experiences and associations...

To do such a thing would probably take a cross disciplinary approach with market researchers who can fragment society into similar buyer groups for testing and perhaps musicians who can identify different techniques and sequences in the song.

Why would Munch On Me take publicity so early in the game when they don't even have the volume to defend against copycats?

I read your about page and it looks like you would be privy to such a solution but I still think people really value branding, deliverables and personal training because of risk-aversion. If the idea is so simple, that's perfect. You could decorate it a bit and sell your support. Your experience selling balloons is probably much deeper than two sentence that share why type to sell and which businesses to sell to. And I'm sure you can think of a number of conveniences and types of support you would have valued in the beginning. And you don't have to share your secret upfront. You could probably get a down payment higher than $10 and then share.

Just because you wouldn't take the franchise or quasi employment opportunity (you've been doing small businesses since college!) doesn't mean the vast majority of people are like that.

The reason I was asking was to see if there are any unique sites or online communities you could target yourself, but I'm still not sure which ones those would be. That type of advertisement costs money as well, but maybe there would be a higher click and buy rate.

Is there any way you could create a brand and make it a franchise? Then you could list it at franchise listing websites and maybe take a small royalty with a fixed payment.

If there any way you could structure your balloon selling expertise as a quasi employment/entrepreneurship opportunity, you could post job ads, which can be free (for example, my university job board is free). If this business is not very time consuming, maybe you could target college kids looking for good side money.

Hey Samir, what do you mean by balloon distribution business? Like big balloons that go on top of retail buildings, those get well balloons or just regular sized balloons.