v3rt

What kind of work has exposed you to so many areas; are you a data consultant (and if so do you work for yourself or a bigger shop?)

People take stock of their lives in many different ways: using happiness as the unit of measurement is called hedonism. Pursuing hedonism is a defensible position to take but I'm alarmed by its rise as the default system of value in the educated/cosmopolitan world that most HN readers presumably inhabit.

Things like raising children well, championing unfashionable but important positions, fighting injustice and poverty - the really worthwhile things in life - are often extraordinarily difficult and can cause more despair than pleasure. But I choose to believe that they are nonetheless important, and not only because there is the promise of the glow of contentment in the case of a possible future triumph.

Many in the tech industry achieve extraordinary success in modern society. But when someone rises to that position, the single-minded pursuit of stimulating one's own reward circuits can look quite callous in the eyes of those who haven't been able to rise to wealth and power. In the days of the hereditary aristocracy, there existed the idea of "noblesse oblige", or the obligation of the upper classes to be a positive force for all those who lived in their society. It might do us some good to revive that idea.

Probably because it's a just-so story not based on reality. Building a career and finding a mate surely must be more influenced by the breadth of your social network than is your ability to help your children and grandchildren. Think about how many people you know who have gotten jobs or met their significant others through friends or acquaintances. I think anyone who sees interactions with strangers as adversarial should take a closer look at why their own stance is so suspicious. Getting to know new people definitely isn't easy, but it's incredibly rewarding in itself and opens so many doors.

I think he's getting at the fact that the iPod and iTunes were what first made people think of music in digital terms. An audio CD might as well be analog as far as people's perception goes, since until MP3 players came around, ripping CDs was not the typical use case.

I for one would still appreciate a link - I think those of us on academic networks should be able to see most papers behind paywalls

In this case, probably because when you're being tortured, it's small comfort to know how the synapses of your tormentors' brains are firing. Things like defiance in the face of adversity or finding meaning in life seem to be universal across cultures, and a lot more fundamental to the way our brains work than something like scientific understanding.

Not at my university, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhat true generally. I think a valid comparison might be between a hard sciences student at a top school who's also involved in a lot of extracurriculars and up at all hours just to stay on top of everything, and someone working on an early stage company where there's always something burning. The opposite end of that would be the investment banking intern spending 100+ hours a week at the office spinning their wheels or college student who does nothing all week and then stays up to make themselves feel better about failing the exam. That's sleep deprivation for the sake of appearances.

I'd like to disagree - at least for my university, which to be fair is notorious for being brutal in terms of workload. It's not unusual for me and many of my friends to have so much work for classes and extracurriculars over the course of a week or month that there literally isn't enough time to do all of it and also eat and sleep in the 168 hrs/week that you have.

Thanks for that point of view, and that's totally how I'd approach it, but because of the new joint program I'd be able to get the master's in the same amount of time that I would spend on a bachelor's anyways, sorry if I didn't make that clear. I definitely wouldn't spend an additional year or two doing a master's otherwise, but this program reduces the opportunity cost pretty significantly.

I am (or was, a couple of years ago) fluent in Javascript/AJAX and PHP so I could definitely hack something together with that, but Django sounds like a cool technology to learn as well.

The app is basically a service for ordering/dispatching couriers/deliverypeople, so it's definitely real-time(ish) - the core functionality is for users to be able to order a delivery (with real-time cost estimate) and for human dispatchers to be able to process the deliveries through a private portal. At the bare minimum I could honestly just do it through a basic form that sends emails to a dispatcher account, so I might do that for an MVP (didn't know that term before), although that would be a very, very temporary solution. You guys have suggested a ton of useful options, so I'm going to have to spend some time just reading up and seeing what would be a good approach. Thank you for the help, everyone - it's been really useful information, and I'd appreciate it if anyone has more to add as well.

How are the different online-education websites in terms of being able to take courses at your own pace? I'm interested in trying an online course out to pick up some statistics and machine learning, but I probably wouldn't be able to follow it week-by-week (and not having to wait for a given start date would be great).

If a big proportion of business-travel-miles are flown over oceans (which seems reasonable between the most common routes like New York-London, SF-Tokyo, SF-HK...), would it not be cost and time efficient to use low-drag but noisy planes and just hit the speed of sound over the ocean? Flying .9 Mach over the land and 1.5 (or whatever was reasonable) would still save a lot of time and wouldn't disturb anyone.

Continuing in the evolutionary psychology vein, though, the two viewpoints can be reconciled - humans evolved in an environment where it would likely be more acceptable for women to reproduce without a steady partner, so it would be advantageous for groups to protect women more than men for the reasons cited in the original article. However, in modern society, those tendencies could well be unjustified, since contraception and the increased payoffs of committed parent pairs in a society where it's expensive to raise children have made it less likely that a single woman would have children by a man that hasn't committed to her. So we may well be in a situation where we're wired by evolution to protect women more than men despite the practice not being demographically justified in a modern society.

I believe the predominant evolutionary theory actually does have an explanation - sexual reproduction serves to produce offspring that are different from their parents and have a better shot of being adapted to a constantly changing environment on average (particularly relevant to parasites/diseases). These children still carry their parents' genes, though, so it is in the parents' best genetic interests to die once the kids are self-sufficient so as to avoid out-competing their own offspring.

This is a cool engineering project, but hardly seems like an efficient approach, at thousands (hundreds at best) of dollars a pop. Traditional chemical elimination methods (C02 traps, pesticides) seem much more effective, and biological approaches are probably the most promising (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique).

That's the one! Thank you :)

Apparently, it's incorrect that the winning strategy is to move second - while the drawing motion take ~20ms less when reacting, it takes ~200ms to react in the first place, leaving you quite dead. See http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/02/why_does_th...

Did the BBC misinterpret the data, or did the scienceblogs article make a mistake?

Since when is HN new-world-order-conspiracy-central?

We live in an economy with a certain amount of economic activity and overall wealth, which tend to go up over time (barring recession). To facilitate trade, the central banks of nations issue currency, which acts as a "dual" of the economy (or more precisely, a piece of it - there aren't enough dollars circulating to buy every good and service in the US simultaneously), a pure trade good with fiat value. If the economy kept growing and the supply of currency stayed constant, deflation would result, as previously noted. However, by Keynesian theory (which is not absolutely proven be right, but has worked pretty well over the past 75 years), inflation (at reasonable levels) is more conductive to investment and consumption and overall economic vitality than deflation, due to people being more inclined to spend and invest money that would lose value just sitting there.

Thus, the government prints more money every year than would be necessary to match the growth in the economy. This is not some ridiculous plot by the Swiss and the Jews to enslave us all; it's simply a tax on everyone who holds dollars (or, in other countries, other currencies), since the government dilutes the overall pool of currency to grant itself spending money. This "inflation tax" is always a very small percentage of overall government revenues in the US, and even if Keynesian theory were totally wrong, the policy would not be particularly harmful. It would just be another tax, although somewhat regressive, since the poor tend to have more of their net-worth in cash than the rich.

And, it makes absolutely no difference who gets the money straight from the printing press, aside from the value of enjoying crisp, shiny new bills. The government spends money it got from printing in exactly the same places as it spends money procured from taxes.

I understand what psychological processes drive people to conspiracy theory, but it still frustrates me to no end that so many people believe in the laws of cigar-munching cabals instead of those of economics.

The purpose of the estate tax is not so much to ensure that the capital being taxed is put to better use (which I'm not sure would be the case on average; the government would surely be a better entity to entrust with the money than a profligate son, but those are not the norm from what I can tell, and wiser offspring could be better investors than Uncle Sam), as to ensure the continuation of the meritocracy in our society. By their inherited wealth, scions of prominent families can exercise significant power over the rest of the nation, and this power will tend to be exercised to the detriment of meritocracy, since a system that rewards talent and energy runs exactly contrary to the interests of the inherited-wealth class. (Humans care about relative wealth and power socially, even though absolute wealth production is not a zero-sum game)

However, it is true that being able to pass on wealth to one's children can be an incentive to produce more, so that on the other hand points to the benefit of a lower estate tax.

So, I think the best compromise is somewhere between the pro-meritocracy 100% tax and the pro-short-term-productivity 0% tax; that way there is still a significant incentive to earn for one's offspring, but if 1/x of the money is taxed away in each generation (and the important thing is not where it goes, but that it is taken out of the hands of the rich family), there is an exponential-decay curve for the wealth and power of the family. However, it's important that the tax is high enough to counteract the interest gains that even uninspired investing can bring. I won't venture to propose a sweet spot, but I think that approach should provide the most balance and social benefit overall.

The article mentioned that closing main roads temporarily could have a similar effect - could teams thus experiment with benching star players , or altering plays to "mix it up" more, without actually losing the player? This would seem to be the best of both worlds, by using the star optimally.

In general, this seems like a lesson to not focus so much on the "strongest point", but try to squeeze out more returns from weaker points before diminishing returns set in so heavily. E.g. - don't make your strongest developer in a small team do all of the hard work, even if his code is much better than others'. His ninth hour of work is less productive than another developer's second.

I seem to remember reading that using actual IQ tests is against hiring laws (although job-specific tests that happen to measure IQ are fine), is this not the case?

I suspect the foundations of my mathematical problem-solving skills were laid when my parents signed me up for extracurricular math classes with teachers from the local Russian community, when I was in elementary and middle school. I started on competition-type problem solving with my middle school math team coach, an extraordinary teacher contrasted with the largely incompetent ones in the curricular program. However, the majority of the techniques I applied to competitions, and I suspect the majority of my overall problem-solving skills, I accumulated through self-study, not a small part of which was from the Art of Problem Solving books from the website linked in the original post. If those were used as textbooks and the teachers knew (and felt) the material, then I think the mathematical education in this country would get a significant boost. If some of the material turned out to be too hard for those less talented at mathematics, the approach would still be the one to use in simpler textbooks.

(Disclaimer - I am most likely biased since I suffered through twelve years of US public school math, often racking up low grades from boredom even while distinguishing myself in math competitions)

I agree that the US system teaches mathematics in too formulaic and granular a way. The way I see it, a good way to divide math students into two categories is to look at those who will use math in their future careers as scientists, engineers, etc, and those who will not and are only studying math to "see the world from another angle".

In either case, a spitting-back-of-formulas approach is counterproductive: Scientists and engineers need to (or at least would do very well to) understand how the mathematics they use works. On the other hand, those who will not use math in the future have no real need to pack their brains full of formulaic tidbits; they will get the most value through pursuing a problem-solving approach that generalizes well to other areas of life.

In short, no matter what the class's level, mathematics definitely needs to be taught from a more problem-solving, integrated perspective. "Pre-med math" that consists mainly of memorization and regurgitation does nobody any good.

The main problem, I imagine, would be recruiting teachers that can actually teach mathematics in this way. That raises a whole different question, though - why do we have "teachers" and not mathematicians teaching math; why do we have "teachers" and not historians teaching history? It seems that much of what education school teaches is how to keep order and run a classroom of bored and antsy students, but wouldn't it be more effective to simply teach interesting material and keep the kids engaged?

However, all Chinese languages use the same written representation, so any Chinese person speaking a dialect of Chinese that is literate is as literate as a Mandarin-speaker.

The rain wave going on in the Northeast raises the question - is the reduction in crime on rainy days a temporary phenomenon, or is it something more fundamental? In other words, would an extremely rainy decade see a reduction in crime due to the rain? I'm guessing it would be a reduction, but not as great as the daily ones seen. After all, people adapt, with umbrellas and such.

A similar phenomenon to look at is the increased birth rate observed nine months after blackouts. Blackouts probably cause some births that would have occurred in close proximity to the nine-months-later period to move to that time period, as well as causing others to occur that would not have otherwise (accidents).

I found "The Definitive Book of Body Language" very helpful. (http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Book-Body-Language/dp/05538...)

I was seriously considering Olin before I visited, but it just didn't jive with me. The small size and 100% engineering focus made it feel like such a narrow bubble that I couldn't see myself enjoying more than a semester there, which is too bad, because it seemed like it would have been perfect for me in all respects other than the claustrophobia.

I'm into less technical subjects almost as much as science as engineering; most of the "too-intense" stuff I think comes from me being overall achievement and knowledge focused. So, I'd hopefully be far less out of place at Yale than at my high school, or even Tufts.

Thanks for the advice on the course catalog - I'll definitely do that.

I'm sure kicking back a bit has its merits (and I'll give it a shot), but I can't shake the impression that if I say "OK, I'll stop being relentlessly hungry and relax now, I can work later", there goes my inertia and my expected level of success plummets. Am I wrong?