Ollinson

I was prescribed an SSRI for my severe anxiety and it changed my life for the better. If you take them be aware it can take months before you feel the full effect (it took me about 3 months).

I think you misunderstand. Survivorship bias in this context means we do not know all of the people who did LSD that did not go on to do anything significant. Therefore it is pointless to suggest LSD has overlap with "interesting people."

>the list of people who used LSD includes some pretty interesting people.

This is the definition of survivorship bias.

Unless you can link other eras of technological advance to LSD use this seems like a poor argument.

>Feynman was rumored to have used LSD in the late 1960s a handful of times. Feynman denied using hallucinogens, saying he was too scared to damage his brain, but there are credible reports that he did take LSD at least once around 1970.

The artsy waterfront areas that are now gentrified were originally large dilapidated work lofts that were not really intended for residents. Many of them lacked bathrooms or kitchens. There is a really good new york times article from the late 1980s that talks about how residents coped with the lack of such basic amenities (I can't find it now but I used it previously in an essay).

Rezoning paved the way for true residential housing and with that came the high prices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamsburg,_Brooklyn#Gentrifi...

For me Roosevelt Avenue in Queens between Jackson Heights and Junction Blvd on a 80F day is the real NYC. People of every ethnicity on the street, everyone in the shade of the elevated 7 train, street vendors selling everything and thousands of people strolling along.

Rents are cheap here but it is not glamorous and in some areas even borderline dangerous (around Corona, especially at night). People in Manhattan and trendy parts of Brooklyn don't realize it but they're paying high rents for safety. Gentrification brings police protection and in my area of Queens you're not going to see cops on that dark corner at 1AM like you would in Williamsburg.

There are many neighborhoods in The Bronx and Brooklyn that are still like this but people don't feel comfortable living there.

This will come off as glib but screw it: New York City is art.

20 minutes riding the subway from point A to point B will give you a better glimpse of what it means to be alive than any curated show or painting. Everybody but the ultra-rich ride together in the same cars everyday. In most other cities people are insulated in their car/work bubble and only the disabled and poor take public transportation. This mingling is what makes living in NYC significant to me.

Is there any particular reason you don't just backup all of the user's personal files/configurations, note what programs they have installed and then reformat/reinstall?

Doing this you would be 100% adware free and the client might even notice/appreciate the speed boost of a fresh install.

The New Yorker doesn't shy away from profanity. If you search the magazine archives you'll find many instances of fuck, bitch, asshole, etc.

A simple google search also shows this to be true (fuck site:newyorker.com).

A worthy contribution to this conversation would be Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

While it mostly focuses on the history of the Western penal system it also discusses the history of punishment and torture.

It's a dense book but the first few pages alone are riveting enough to inspire one to continue.

I don't know where you live but most of the food delivery people in my major US city are at least over 30, many even in their 50s. Lots of immigrants too.

For unskilled labor a career might be a job.

I hate to give just a wikipedia link but I really have nothing more to add than what is there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

While this might not explain "6-7 years of holding back the internet" it definitely was not beneficial.

There are hundreds if not thousands of artists who can recreate some of the most famous and technically difficult paintings of the past 1000 years and yet they're lucky if they can sell their original work at a garage sale.

Art has very little to do with reproducing what the eye can see, in fact some of the most renowned art does exactly the opposite.

If you're confused by Rothko I hope you never come across Duchamp.

Not exactly drug induced or a mental Illness but Ronald Fisher, arguably the father of modern statistics, went to great lengths to prove cancer caused smoking due to his personal convictions[1].

[1] http://www.epidemiology.ch/history/PDF%20bg/Stolley%20PD%201...

Even when you're talking about geniuses it's important to separate the wheat from the chaff.

r/all right now has 4/25 threads from the funny subreddit

no cat pictures, 2 gifs of dogs being cute

I check r/all because it's the breadth focused zeitgeist of the internet. Whether the comments are right or wrong doesn't matter. Once you can fix a point on popular sentiment you can interpret how it will ripple through more "prestigious" forums.

Seconding that this is a great publication.

A typical quarterly issue can contain excerpts from the Office Space screenplay to Schopenhauer.

Very possible a typo but the term is "princely sum."

No criticism but if you didn't know I thought you might want to.

I love that the NYRB is getting a lot of play on Hacker News recently. It's really a top tier publication and reminds me a lot of the higher quality conversations on this site.

I agree.

If everything on reddit interested me or was of the same quality there would never be any experimentation (foolishness) and I'd get lost in my own little world.

A lot of people love the way the sausage tastes but they stick up their noses at how it's made.

Also featured on Connections (BBC James Burke). A particularly memorable episode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itd-4lMoXgI

Your comment claimed that the quality of the show hasn't declined, that any decline is actually the result of the fallibility of human memory.

Even during the "golden years" of the simpsons the show changed, it just wasn't necessarily severe or negative.

You seem to be shoe horning some lifestyle philosophy you believe (mistrust of the "good old days") into how people receive a television series, which undeniably does change, especially one on TV as long as the simpsons.

Every simpsons fan I know watches seasons 2-8 all the time in any given year. The episodes don't have any real continuity so they can be viewed in any order for laughs.

>The tone changed over the course of the show

That is really the only argument rational simpsons fans are making. Anyone who suggests that the new show is TERRIBLE only feels that way because they're comparing older episodes which from start to finish were pure gold vs new ones which are merely funny.

It's unfortunate that you have such a negative reaction towards people critical of the newer episodes to say things like "the simpsons sucked and has always sucked." Clearly you enjoy the show on some level I don't really see why you would say that unless you were being intentionally inflammatory.

I guess me and all of my friends were sporting hipster affectations when we were 12 years old because we all noticed the change around 1999-2000 and correspondingly stopped watching. Interesting that I also had my VHS tapes of earlier seasons on repeat from that time until I learned how to pirate copies with XDCC on IRC.

The burden is on you to prove that the show hasn't changed. If TV shows didn't change they wouldn't be cancelled. Writers change, plot lines get exhausted, the network demands for a cash cow vs a dynamic new comedy influence the style. That's not even mentioning the famous quote by Mike Scully (show runner, conincedentially taking control right at the moment of supposed quality dip):

"When asked in 2007 how the series' longevity is sustained, Scully joked, "Lower your quality standards. Once you've done that you can go on forever."

I almost regret putting so much effort responding to a comment that contains troll bait like "the simpsons sucks, because it has always sucks" but the simpsons is a truly special show and what it was deserves to be recognized.

I'm curious about your lecturenotes negatives. It has so many customizable options I have a hard time imagining how it failed you. I've been using it for over a year for mostly math applications and it's been indispensable.

The only feature I would want integrated is the "infinite workspace" of papyrus. But even then who cares I can still have infinite pages.

Individual responsibility cuts both ways. You are responsible for picking up your friend. Your friend is responsible for assessing your reliability.

I would argue that most people who think they're talking about morality are actually talking about risk.

I live in Queens near the Queens/Brooklyn border and see huge racoons frequently. If you live near freight train tracks they hang out there.

I doubt it has anything to do with skunkworks or prostitutes.

My first thought was Skank as a verb, which fits best with the idea of a handicapped/faux iphone.

It's a shame that you have such disdain toward capital L literature because some of the best writing on fiction is done by people who share your criticisms.

I fail to see the difference between your dismissal of fiction and a mathephobe's statement "when will we ever use this stuff in the real world." I don't know how an intelligent person can argue in good faith that fiction is not only meritless but basically useless. It takes very little effort to look around and see how untrue that statement is.

NYRB reviews many non-fiction books. I would go as far as saying that 3/4 of the books they review are non fiction.

I chose an archived issue at random:

http://www.nybooks.com/issues/2014/jul/10/

There are only 4 works of fiction reviewed there. Everything else is either world politics, finance, or historical events. Science and philosophy are very heavily reviewed also.

If you never read an issue of the NYRB I highly encourage it. It is one of my favorite publications and it's bi-monthly so the quality is very high.

Daniel Mendelsohn's pieces alone are worth the price of a subscription