ThrowMeDown01

Since the major component of Google's profitability is its search business you would have to filter for that. Much of the rest that they do isn't exactly a shiny example for profitability. Also, it's not exactly easy to say who and what exactly contributed to profitability, it is way too complex and environment also plays a role, as well as competitors (if they mess up big time, does that mean you are good?).

Sure, an accountant will be able to give you an answer how one individual human or piece of equipment contributed to the result. It will be a different one depending on what you need the number for though (to calculate taxes? to make an investment decision? to allocate production resources?), and it is quite arbitrary.

I on the other hand think being shown the randomness in hiring is beneficial.

> there is almost no temperature where I say that it's too hot

Did you ever ask a doctor about this? Especially an endocrinologist. One example of many possibilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothyroidism

As for cold showers, I dreaded them but at some point in my life I just relaxed. I would call it "acceptance", in general, life throws bad stuff your way and all you can do is "exist", i.e. nothing, really. So if I want to or have to have a cold shower (e.g. when hot water was out once) I just turn on the cold water and get in and accept that it's uncomfortable, especially at the very beginning. Nothing I can do about it - and, more importantly, since I know it's only uncomfortable but not threatening, nothing I have to do. All I have to do is stand there and do nothing and feel whatever there is to feel. At that point I'm just an observer of my own body, with no active role to play. The conscious part does nothing, the forces at play are all controlled by lower level brain functions.

> maybe they would benefit from an earlier bedtime?

One can try but you will be limited by biology: The problem is that our internal clocks are reset by daylight. You can't just shift yourself to another timezone, since your circadian rhythm will always set itself back to the respective local time. So if your brain prefers you to go to sleep and to wake up at certain points it will always be relative to "local (sunlight) time", not relative to human clock time.

You may enjoy this blog post, "I no longer understand my PhD dissertation".

A sample quote:

> This was not the casual read I had in mind. The notation was alien. I even had to scour the examiner’s report to direct me to the key results. And while I could have sworn this was a well-written thesis, I repeatedly found myself bamboozled by my own prompts. “The result now follows easily…” may have made sense back when, but now the author-turned-confused reader can profess that it most certainly does not follow easily, at least in his own mind.

They did?

> And they repeated those experiments many times over, with volunteers from 36 different countries, to see if the studies would replicate in some cultures and contexts but not others.

So different sets of people, and different researchers (the article doesn't say it, but I doubt the same researchers traveled across the globe repeatedly).

There is an article on the German satiric website "Der Postillon":

"Study: Wages cause billions of damage for German companies"

https://www.der-postillon.com/2014/08/studie-lohnzahlungen-v...

> if only all the lonely people could find each other, and had the social skills to initiate contact, all would be well.

I'd say I have very good social skills, never have a problem getting to know people when I take the time. The problem is I'm simultaneously a bit lonely (not a desperation level though) - but also not interested (in meeting people). It's really weird. Note that the "not interested" does not come from a(ny) level of depression, there is none (I know because I used to have a noticeable level of it many years ago, so I know how it feels to be incapacitated by even a small bit of that affliction). I just don't find most people interesting enough. That's not a "looking down" kind of feeling, but merely a mismatch.

A big part of it is the way we all live our lives though, I think. I want (a larger) community and cannot find or even see it, no so much "the one" friendship, or even "just friends". Having superficial talks now and then just isn't enough for me, I'm looking for a larger purpose.

Funny, the linked article itself links back to HN when this was previously discussed (Jan 2017):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13451310

No, why? The expat money went into local markets (very unequally but that's another point). Vancouver, London, etc. But even in small towns real estate investors are not necessarily local. My mother just moved into an apartment owned by a lawyer living a few hundred kilometers away.

It depends on what you understand when OP says "all real estate is local", I assume that it's the thing itself and its customers. It can be seen as inexact because yes, the investors often are not and that is that second statement, but we all know what OP meant, so no need to start nitpicking over nothing. I see no merit in arguing over words whose meaning everybody understands just for the sake of it.

Then you are going to like this short study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1121900/

> I still think it's roughly correct to state that humans are a pretty dumb animal that juuuuust manages to pass the threshold of traits required to develop technology.

I think what I wrote is pretty much in support, or at the very least not opposed. Individually, alone and without our "tools" and man-made environment, we are not much, as movies or games like to show us (e.g. when a guy with only a knife is dropped into the jungle).

In those environments we are actually a lot dumber than those living there, including many animals. So what does "general intelligence" even mean?

I think most of our intelligence is social: We manage our interactions, which enables the network effects. I think we spend most of our efforts managing our relations with one another, more than anything else we use our "intelligence" for.

There is more to it - the environment, and networking effects (so., the environment, which causes or prevents them). Only some of the human civilizations went all the way to the Internet, we still have people living as hunter/gatherers even today. So the advancement does not come from "inside" alone.

In any case, I like to think of humanity more like a brain, human = neuron. There are huge differences, for example, the human network also extends deep in time, not just in space (we manage to "network" with our ancestors, one-way from them to us, they gave us knowledge as well as all their tools). My point is "humanity" to me is a network effect. Place any modern human, adult or baby, in an prehistoric setting (20,000 years ago). Even if you gave them, let's say, an iPad-like device with all knowledge we have as of now, they would still not be able to do anything - because without the tools it would take quite some time to bootstrap. So "humanity" really is a lot - a lot - more than the sum of all humans, it's a giant ecosystem on its own.

I think depending on the environment you can have creatures with far higher intelligence than the average human and they still won't come up with modern technology. I think individual intelligence is clearly necessary and beneficial but overrated, that network effects are the main contributor, and that they don't appear automatically. We still have plenty of human societies right here and now that seem to be stuck.

Here's a Google Talk I once bookmarked: Joseph Henrich, professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology of Harvard University, "The Secret of Our Success" https://youtu.be/jaoQh6BoH3c

An aside, arising from those thoughts, more of my own thoughts about something else: Each time you think about who "deserves" something, e.g. high pay, consider that most people who actually contributed so that the person even is in the position to achieve anything more than building a mud hut are dead, and another large amount of the contribution is "everybody else". That somebody can create a Dell or Microsoft, or invent theory of relativity, is because they are placed at the right points in the human network in time and space. What would they achieve by themselves in the forest? So much for "self-made" people. Self-made just like Newton who made the (much older) "standing on the shoulders of giants" famous. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...)

> From a moral standpoint,

You mean from your (current) moral standpoint. "Moral" is not exactly something fixed, it is varies greatly depending on both space and time.

> I don't usually explain this because, as you can see from this post here, it takes too long.

Wouldn't the solution for this type of problem be to write it down only once and thoroughly in a blog post, and then refer to it? Or a number of posts, and you only post the pointer.

I've had that idea in general for public forums, that there should be one thoroughly explained list of aspects and view points, and when there is a problem with a post you simply moderate it with "That is a #42".

> the horse does not enjoy it

That's a bold statement. I don't even know where to begin, there are so many levels here. Like, why would you even make such a claim? I mean I'm not against the claim per se, but it does not seem like you have any evidence, or that you even looked for it. Seems to come right out of some human moral position instead, one that is not rooted in nature, given how many "weird" sex stories and video documentation we can find easily these days about all kinds of animals. Like dogs humping pillows, chimpanzee "using" a frog, quite a few stories about dolphins, etc.

Back to the human/dolphin story here, there also is a pretty well-known (or at least well-published) "man had sex with female dolphin" story, example article: https://www.unilad.co.uk/animals/guy-who-had-sex-with-a-dolp...

Original title was too long, HN asked me to trim it, so I cut beginning and end.

Actual title:

> Trump administration's reported effort to 'barter' a US resident to convince Turkey to ramp down Khashoggi probe stuns foreign-policy veterans

The information is not in the thing itself as you say, it is in the first derivative, or in plain English, it is about the change. Not the presence of this or that perk, but when it was there and is taken away.

> I use the Plume Flow

Uhm.. how?

"Shipping November 2018" and the order button is labeled "Pre-Order".

I'm a bit amazed - and disappointed - by how little information there is on that product page. The "tech specs" are size and weight and that's it, for this kind of product? Pretty much everything is missing that I would expect to know for this kind of product specifically. I even played the clip, still not a single piece of actually relevant information. The only sentence that says anything regarding the intended use is

> Flow measures real-time concentrations of NO2, VOC, PM2.5 and PM10: everything you need to understand your exposure and build healthy routines.

Given that they seem to target the "average person" they should probably explain somewhere what those abbreviations mean (I do, but what "average person" knows what VOC is?).

No way I would order given the lack of information, given that the price is $139 (or Euros).

After a quick search for similar products I found this comparison of several products (2016): http://energysmartohio.com/indoor-air-quality/which-indoor-a...

> before getting actual integers

Javascript has always had "actual integers". As long as you stay within Number.MIN_SAFE_INTEGER...Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER (-9007199254740991..9007199254740991) the internal representation is an integer representation.

http://2ality.com/2013/10/safe-integers.html

That's a non sequitur if I ever heard one.

Or, for those who prefer to listen to a lecture:

Lenin and the Russian Revolution - Professor Catherine Merridale FBA -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRIzW7A9lhs&feature=youtu.be

The Fate of the October Revolution Under Stalin - Professor Bob Service -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5eP_HoNUx8

If you only want to listen to one choose the first one, it's really good.

You are taking this way too far as an argument. Russia at the time was miles and miles behind any Western nation in terms of development. They knew it, which is why they thought their revolution would fail unless Western nations, German workers in particular, would start their own revolution.

So they already started with a huge handicap - on top of that WWI and the civil war after the revolution, which was a fight tooth and nail, as bad as it gets, put them down even further.

So even if the "experiment" would have stopped right then and there and they would have switched to pure capitalism, what kind of development would you have expected?

This is not to take anything away from your mention of their propaganda efforts to appear a lot bigger than they are, but your argument leaves out some important "details".