ericsoderstrom

Any memory you form, skill you learn or experience you have will change the structure of the brain. Changing structure isn’t in itself a good thing.

1.024^4 = 1.10

Inflation is usually targeted between 2% and 2.5%. So an estimated 10% over four years seems reasonable.

No, this article is not a criticism of PowerPoint specifically.

I enter my email in the "getting started" field, click "getting started" and then never received a sign-up email. Anyone else having trouble with this?

Interesting! From the title I assumed they were put in situations where they had to operate near very loud equipment. Didn't realize deafness can sometimes be the result of meningitis and accompanies motion sickness immunity.

I can't quite tell what this adds on top of vanilla Google Drive.

> Documents in Library are searchable, taggable, and can be grouped by desks or categories.

Drive documents are already searchable, taggable, and can be grouped by folders.

> Kubernetes is an Ancient Greek word meaning "More containers than customers." [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/srbaker/status/1002286820078571532?lang=...

I've never found a light color scheme I really liked either. Was using base16-ia-light for a little while though.

For anyone who is very particular about their color schemes: I'd recommend checking out the base16 project [1]. It's a collection of well-maintained color schemes (including solarized) for basically every text editor and terminal emulator. It makes switching between different schemes very easy, and includes tools for keeping your editor colors in sync with your terminal.

[1]: http://chriskempson.com/projects/base16/

> Some of the comments in this thread is a master class of how discrimination and gatekeeping work

All the top comments I see are supportive and encouraging. Maybe there were some negative removed comments, but overall this thread doesn't seem to demonstrate gatekeeping and discrimination.

Most of the world gets by fairly well with much lower car ownership rates than the US (apart from San Merino which has more cars than people, the US has the highest car ownership per capita in the world). If you live in a country with very good public transportation, I think it's not hard at all to imagine a future in which individual car ownership basically goes to 0% at some point in that not too distant future.

"A technical leader should also make time for growing and mentoring others."

I like this. From reading The Idea Factory, I learned that at Bell Labs it was compulsory for even the most established scientists (e.g. Shockley and Shannon) to mentor newer recruits from time to time. Mentorship is one of the highest leverage activities one can possibly do. Even if you're a high muckety-muck, you're mission is still well-served by teaching others part of the time.

Yeah that's probably it. Was wondering whether half a screen of 1080p would be enough to properly show the difference

I don't see a huge difference between the two. Mostly the Ferengi forehead creases are sharper I guess, but unclear that the overall effect is much of an improvement. Cool proof of concept though!

To be fair, airpods ended up being a lot more convenient than I imagined before trying them. I still carry around my tin audio t2s for when I'll be listening to music for an extended period of time. But in most cases, the convenience of not dealing with a cord and being able to pause/skip with a tap outweighs the loss in sound quality.

In what sense did your cognition improve, and how do you know?

Agreed. I think HN in general is too quick to dismiss the potential dangers of psychedelics. I know at least a couple people who have essentially lost their minds as a result of frequent psychedelic use. It's pretty terrifying to see someone slowly become more paranoid delusional and incoherent when they once were an intelligent and charismatic friend.

This advice reminds me of an anecdote from Art and Fear [1]. A ceramics teacher divided his classes into two groups. One group he told would be judged only based on the quality of the best pot they made, the other group would be graded based only on the number of pots they made. After the two classes had finished, the teacher noticed that all of the highest qualities works came from the class that was aiming only for quantity. It seems, at least for artistic/creative activities, simply diving in and making lots of attempts is the key to rapid improvement.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187633.Art_and_Fear?from...

Isn't basically every moderately expressive system Turing complete? Even the Magic the Gathering card game is turing complete

https://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/HowItWorks.html

Is there any finite initial condition for Conway's game of life that will expand to fill an arbitrarily large area of the plane with density that does not approach zero?

For me, this was the most interesting line

> [Bergstrom] let Binion know that if he’d lost the bank’s money, he’d planned to kill himself by swallowing seventy pills.

I wonder how many people out there have done something similar, but had the dice not land in their favor?

There are 50,000 suicides in the US each year. I imagine a not-insignificant percentage of those are at least indirectly related to money. What if everyone who was suicidal adopted the attitude "I may as well take out a loan and bet it all on black. I was going to kill myself anyway so why not". There is definitely a cold logic to it at least.

This is great! Looks much sleeker than Across Lite.

Is there any way to change the keyboard shortcuts? Or even list what the current shortcuts are? Both `space` and `return` toggle between across and down. It would be nice if I could make `return` advanced to the next clue instead, which is the default behavior in the NYT app.

Video or audio books sound a lot more distracting than music

I recently read The Idea Factory [1] which covers Bell Labs in its heyday. Many of the most brilliant human beings of that era worked for very modest salaries, and seemed content to do so. I wonder why it is that nowadays the "smartest" people tend to work in tech or finance and mostly pursue wealth. A few possibilities:

1. The rate of meaningful new discoveries in basic research has slowed significantly compared to the mid 1900s. Most important advances now involve enormous groups of researchers, and require decades of work. So the basic research route is less appealing overall.

2. Technology and finance provide clear avenues for outsized financial returns that simply weren't available in the past. Enrico Fermi, for example, was fairly enterprising. He wasn't an academic ascetic at least, and made some effort to amass wealth. But the best strategies he came up with were publishing textbooks and maybe some dabbling in the stock market (That is if I remember my details from The Last Man Who Knew Everything [2] correctly)

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factor...

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34746094-the-last-man-wh...

(Clearly you're joking) but this isn't an extrapolation. Lines that make up characters in a font don't have any semantic meaning related to the words. Lines in a graph do have semantic meaning related to the data they represent.

[edit] maybe you could make this argument for a language like Chinese. At least for characters with semantically meaningful radicals.

I enjoy Farnam Street Blog, in part because the author does such a good job of stepping out of the way for his subject. Here's the FSblog post on the same Feynman letter:

https://fs.blog/2013/08/richard-feynmans-love-letter-to-his-...

Your overview page appears to have two copies of the same image.

Why's that? (Not trying to be snarky, generally want to know more)

I'm pretty sure it's just the width of the path that corresponds to how popular it is.

Planet Money episode #886: The Price of a Hack [1] interviews a supervisor at a company who instituted required anti-phishing training, with good results.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...