robobenjie

relevant pg essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

This is a complicated topic, but my take is that the downside of political correctness is a potential for a loss of absolute correctness, while the benefit is respect and erring on the side of not doing harm. Those things need to be balanced and we have do decide as individuals and as a culture how we make those trade offs.

Add a call to action. I got to the bottom and was like "Where do I put my email?" I want to read this, but I worry I will forget about by the time it is done.

The dollar value at the time it is awarded matters zero. As an employee the only time a dollar value matters is when I can cash out. The problem is that you have to predict the percentage contribution of an employee from now until liquidation before they do any work. (This is why we vest options, so that if they don't contribute they don't get anything.)

It replaces minimum wage in that McDonalds is welcome to offer a job flipping burgers for $1 an hour if they want. However, because no one _needs_ a job to live (because they can just live on the basic income) someone would only take that job if it was worth it/fulfilling to them.

I like this a lot, my only request would be a slightly longer pause at the end of sentences. Right now it pauses on long words so I mentally chunk all that together.

Wow. I had already started the (first, tiny) steps in creating something like this for my game. This is amazing. Take my money! :)

Surely if we are changing the law to require districts be chosen by shortest line method we would change the law so that it was legal to do so.

This is really depressing. The system seems to be designed to be strong but not infallible, with the assumptions that the people trusted to run the government would do so competently with the best interests of the nation. It seems clear that a slow process of radicalization has replaced the interests of the nation with the interests of the party and it's unclear how to fix it.

If one group defects to block voting and no compromise the other side has to also defect or be run over. This is the prisoner's dilemma writ large, only we citizens are the ones paying the penalty for dual defection.

Another way to put it: Places with high violence tend to adopt more gun control. When stated that way this study's findings sound obvious.

There are two things to like here: 1) No one like solicitation calls and its nice to see someone stick it to them and 2) he is shifting the economics to be more representative of the costs to all parties. There is a cost to the person being called (being annoyed, interrupted etc) and by charging that cost to the caller only callers who still have a positive return will call. The price to make a call now more accurately represents the resources it consumes to the calls should get both more infrequent and higher quality.

I was disappointed it wasn't.

To pay for the development of children's entertainment. Public television is wonderful but I bet all of us look back fondly on a show that we loved as children that would not have existed without ads to pay for its production.

google has a search app: (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-search/id284815942) and facebook has a "just share photos with your friends" app: (https://www.facebook.com/mobile/camera).

While you can bemoan feature creep all you want, the truth is that its hard to remove features one they are in (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html). On the other hand having a specialized tool for a common task is really handy. I like these specialized apps, (though I can't comment on LinkedIn's in particular).

How can you possibly say that you aren't willing to spend more than $200 dollars, but would wear it on your face every single day? People pay more than that for sunglasses which provide no functional utility above the $5 sunglasses.

"Pump 6" is a fantastic book. I find the genre of Science Fiction short stories is very hit-and-miss. Pump 6 is a hit.

They do complain about it, they just don't do it on Hacker News! My wife teaches preschool at Stanford's Laboratory School and they often talk about the teacher gender gap and what they can do about it, especially at young-children education conferences and the like.

I love things like this, but I really feel like putting it on the back of the shirt is really socially awkward. "Hey can you turn around and not face me for a while so I can play your shirt"

I have gradually increased my airbnb rates while maintaining a constant level of occupancy from $35 to $90 over two years, so at least from where I'm standing it doesn't seem like a race to the bottom.

Does anyone know how to pronounce the name? I see ooh-duh-CITY, but I presume that they were trying for you-DAH-city or maybe OOH-dah-city...? (like University + Audacity).

Regardless they picked a hard one to figure out.

more details in this (slightly) older article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/technology/googles-autonom...

I think I wasn't quite clear in what I meant. d is the distance that your center of mass changes while your feet are in contact with the ground (While you are doing work) and h is the height that your center of mass changes while you are in the air.

Saying a force is impulsive means that you making certain assumptions to make your calculation easier. It doesn't change the fact that W = integral of force dotted with displacement. It is true that I am making a big approximation where I say that the force is constant over the jump, making the integral evaluate to f * x.

Thanks for the link. I think this kind of stuff is very interesting.

Here is what I have come up with.

Using conservation of energy:

When you jump your legs do work that gets converted in to kinetic energy and then potential energy.

Assume that when you are shrunk down you maintain density. The potential energy that you have at the top of a jump is mgh. (mass * gravitational-constant * jump-height). When you scale your body down your mass goes down with the cube of the scaling, which I'll call k. So after scaling your energy would be mgh/(k^3) (m is your original mass).

So how does the initial work change as you scale. The force (F) you can apply is roughly proportional to the cross section of your muscles. This changes with k^2. You integrate this over the path that your center of mass takes, which is going to change linearly with your scale k (d). That means that the work going in should be proportional to 1/k^3 as well!

So we can make two equations: one before scaling:

F * d = mgh (Leg force * leg movement = mass * gravity * jump height)

and

F * d / k^3 = m * g * h' / k^3

Which means that, to first order approximations jump height is independent of scale (h - h') and you should easily be able to jump out of the blender.

about the same number of calories, (224 calories in a donut, 207 in a bagel) but those calories come from sugar and fat in the donut (4 times the sugar and 12 times the amount of fat).

Sources:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+a+donut http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+a+bagel

In fact, my wife works in Early Childhood education at the Laboratory School at Stanford, and they do think and worry about exactly those kinds of things.

And I was pleasantly surprised to find that (this time) I hadn't noticed until reading the comments.

If we live in a world where one group of people is the norm and other groups need special distinction to identify them ("he" is a generic hypothetical person, but "she" means the person has to be female) then we have to undergo social change to bring us to center. This is likely to be uncomfortable.

Thank you do much. I have wanted this for years. I know that Netflix is interested in predicting what I will like, but I basically never like movies with a tomato score below 75 or so, so before I always browse netflix with a rotten tomato tab open.

I agree with most of the points in this article, but saying that all people who forge boarding passes will use latex gloves seems false.

From my point of view the point of multiple screenings is to increase the difficulty and complexity of pulling off a particular attack. Sure, individually you can think of a way to counter each one, but as you add constraints you reduce the pool of people willing and able to pull it off. (So now you need a person who wants to cause terror, who is willing to blow themselves up, who can forge simple documents, who remembered to wear latex gloves, who can act cool enough to avoid extra screenings when walking past guards with machine guns, etc, etc, etc). Sure some eliminate more than others, but you multiply enough .95s together and you get a small number.

http://projecteuler.net/problems is a nice source

We use these types of questions to allow an applicant to show us that they can, in fact, write a simple program (see http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...) and we use programming puzzles to make it more interesting for the bright candidates.

The pdf he links has more examples and greater depth about implementing diffusion ai. Recommended.

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/OOPSLA06antiobj...