It was introduced last August.
Most posts are not paywalled, because users need to apply to a partner program and make sure their posts adhere to particular criteria in order to have the option of putting their posts behind the paywall.
1,787 karma · joined April 24, 2014
Most posts are not paywalled, because users need to apply to a partner program and make sure their posts adhere to particular criteria in order to have the option of putting their posts behind the paywall.
There's a related category: technically-uninteresting posts about technically-uninteresting projects that are essentially advertising for some small business. This is probably, again, related to HN being run by a VC firm.
(For context: I browse HN daily, but I never use the front page -- the values of the average HN user are far away from mine, so sorting by newest produces more interesting content. If you find the HN frontpage devoid of posts about programming, try sorting by newness rather than popularity, since technically-interesting stuff gets fewer upvotes here than wide-audience stuff about cryptocurrency or large corporations.)
Obtain a lab coat and a bathrobe, and work on the same codebase in both outfits. See how/if code quality changes between the two.
I'm far from rich, but I'm comfortable enough that I can afford to stop caring about my employer's bottom line at quitting time.
I nevertheless spend a lot of my free time coding, and enjoying the freedom of not having to worry about anything I make being profitable. (If you've never written a big complex project alone for your own enjoyment rather than for someone else / as a resume padder, I highly recommend it. It's freeing to write code that you wouldn't want to put on a resume and couldn't sell.)
His work can be usefully classified into three categories: loose essay collections, fiction, and conventionally-structured non-fiction. Prometheus Rising & Quantum Psychology are the closest to conventionally-structured non-fiction (though they both flirt with the loose-essay-collection format) and so, for new readers coming at it from a self-help perspective, they're less off-putting. In particular, Prometheus Rising does a pretty good job of explaining RAW's 8-circuit model (which was also helpful for my emotional self-regulation) in an accessible way -- showing its origins as a doctoral thesis reworked into a textbook.
Of course, almost everybody starts with the Illuminatus! trilogy (and so did I). This isn't necessarily a good idea. There's been at least one casualty from somebody starting with the Illuminatus! trilogy and missing the point (documented in The Cuckoo's Egg), though I guess you can blame cocaine and soviet espionage in that case!
While I think RAW was wrong about a lot of things, the meta-lesson of erring on the side of agnosis -- trusting that, when the world doesn't behave in line with your expectations (and often even when it does) it's because of unknown unknowns, and that the world is stranger and more complex than any of us can imagine -- has helped me a lot. It's helped me rein in my control-freak nature, deal in healthier ways with unexpected events, and get rid of some of my ego-based fixations on particular mental models that don't survive collision with reality.
It's not so much that I'm overestimating music theory, but that the state of really concrete analytic structures in other arts (in terms of being well-positioned to produce new works from PRNG output) is pretty bad.
It's pretty straightforward to construct a program that produces mediocre music that really resembles human-written mediocre music. Computers are also really good at producing poetry that is indistinguishable from the work of mediocre human poets. Computers are not good at producing images that look like they were hand-drawn by a 12 year old Deviantart user or producing stories that read like they were taken from fanfiction.net
By that I mean, we have huge masses of music theory, applied across genres and focusing on differences between genres, in terms of heuristics for both analysis & composition, and because of a tradition of procedural generation of music that goes back a couple centuries, a lot of it is fairly easy to translate into computer programs. (For instance, end-to-end serialist composition is easier for computers than it is for people, while canons and other mechanisms for creating permutations of melodies are equally straightforward.)
This doesn't translate into a straightforward method for putting in two wav files and producing a third with transferred style, but it does mean that a sufficiently motivated person can write something that translates notes between two known genres with greater ease than they would with images.
(Text is somewhere in the middle. I've worked on a couple attempts at 'style transfer' for text -- mostly using word2vec.)
On the less STEM side, taking a look at what's around you and trying to reverse-engineer the reasons behind design decisions is also useful. Why do zippers have that little nub on them? Why is jaywalking a crime? Why are red lights red rather than blue? Sometimes this is a matter of path dependence, but other times there's some deeper reason.
Like, on HN, if I talk about certain things I get downvoted to hell. So I talk about them elsewhere. Every community has its own biases, and people have different personas they apply to each community.
The fediverse is not a community. It's an ecosystem of loosely-interlinked communities, in about three or four layers: you've got the whole fediverse, the people on your instance, the people you follow, and the people you interact with. (On most instance software you also have topics, though not on Mastodon. There are hashtags too but they aren't used all that much and rarely does a community form around one, though they're useful for discovery.) You've got more potential points of segmentation than on Twitter, and more levels of potential control over what you see. (Add the possibility of having an account on several different instances and keeping to local rules and topics for those instances, and you have even greater control over how you present yourself and how your discussion goes.)
On twitter, you're still stuck in a bubble -- only, one created by ranking based on projected interaction. (Functionally, this means an angry bubble: you see only things Twitter thinks will drag you into a flamewar.)
On the fediverse, you set your own filters and pick your own followers, see things in unadulterated reverse-chronological order, and nobody's pushing promoted posts on you.
(Ultimately, this comes down to having a non-profit-oriented, non-centralized system, favoring multiple independent identities. And, it's a throwback to the pre-eternal-september era of usenet, where you went online to have reasonable discussions and added people who annoyed you to your killfile.)
There's literally a whole section in this talking about how media depictions of the effects of priming are based on shoddy mid-century junk science. The article's premise does not rely upon such imaginary effects.
Form a team to implement it, or tell somebody who will, before someone else comes up with it independently. All else fails, shout your great idea in public (twitter works well for this purpose) -- otherwise, nobody will ever know that you thought of it.
Or, if you don't care about people attributing it to you, you can just keep it close to your chest. It's not like you're likely to make money on even a good idea anyhow -- the odds are against any new business making money, period.
I've finished four novel generators thus far this year:
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2017/issues/54 https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2017/issues/43 https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2017/issues/3 https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2017/issues/16
The story generator idea you described above is an example of templating, & it's used pretty often. It's easy to make a good looking chunk of story that way, but difficult to make a 50k word novella that's readable (the target of nanogenmo).
NaNoGenMo has been going since, like, 2013. Every year, a bunch of us get together in the issues section of a github page and discuss attempts to generate long-form narrative. (We've been able to generate passable poetry for years, but we have yet to figure out a way to get prose that remains engaging, coherent, and human-like for more than about a chapter.) There are a lot of very different techniques being used. (For instance, a couple years ago I wrote a planner that emitted debug output in the form of a first-person hardboiled heist story; somebody else that year produced a really good simulation of bad star trek fanfiction using a mixture of templating and object-oriented state tracking; somebody else made a great comic book by picking random sentences from public domain detective novels and then finding creative commons licensed photos on flickr based on tags taken from key words in those sentences and post-processing them to make them look hand-drawn.)
I'm working on a VN involving time loops, which is essentially an attempt to integrate the typical completionist play style of hardcore VN players (wherein people will often try for 100% completion of all dialogue and game devs will often hide the canonical plot threads behind options that only open up when you get all the good ends or all the good & bad ends) with the narrative -- i.e., the plot only progresses when the character dies and restarts.
I also write small projects periodically. (For instance, recently I wrote a script that superimposed Jenny Holzer quotes in white-on-red on black and white images, aping Barbara Kreuger's iconic style.)