zupatol

There is some sort of rent control, but at the same time I have the impression that rents are going up fairly quickly.

Offering to pay more rent than advertised is a good idea, I might try that.

Unfortunately this is of no help to me. Here in Geneva, Switzerland, the problem is not choosing the apartment, but being chosen among all the other people who want the same apartment you do. I've seen people stand in line just to visit one apartment. I hear there are even worse places than Geneva for finding an apartment.

Businesses have sprang up to help people find apartments, so it is possible to outsource your apartment hunt too, but it costs much more than 90$.

You just made me look at that page. I was about to email it to a friend when I realized that newspeak's real home page doesn't have any dead chicken pictures: http://newspeaklanguage.org/

I have a programming job somewhat like that, except that I work full-time for (approximately) 9 months followed by 6 months unpaid leave during which I make comics. The people I tell about this arrangement usually say they would love to the free time but could not afford to earn less. Some would not mind reducing their expenses but are afraid to ask their boss because it could hurt their career prospects. In most jobs the idea of working part-time is unusual, does not bring direct benefits to the employer, and requires some coordination effort, so why would they do it? The one big upside for the company is the employee's higher motivation, but unfortunately this is not easily quantifiable. I was lucky to be hired by a director who was also an artist wishing he had more time to paint.

During the dotcom boom I had an interview with a software company founded by students where many programmers worked 60%. They had some coordination problems. The company went down in the dotcom bust. My previous job was with a company where everybody worked 4 days a week. They wouldn't let me work 3 days after they had tried it with one employee and were not satisfied with the results. Before I worked 3 days a week as an economist and it went pretty well.

There are other jobs where part-time is more usual or even the norm. Many artists become part-time teachers.

This argument is all about what's good enough to be art.

If the first film ever made was boring, film was not yet art. If the second film was good, film suddenly became art. Including the first film?

Is a really really good film art, or must it be at least really really really really good?

There is no film everyone likes, so the only way to recognize a good film is by majority. Must it be filibuster-proof?

This debate makes no sense.

No semblance to me neither.

I know one guy who behaves like that. I found this out one day my wife was mad at me and I needed to talk to someone but he just pretended not to hear. I felt insulted until a mutual friend explained to me he always does this. Since then I have thought of him as an emotional cripple. This article actually makes me more tolerant. There are apparently many more guys like that out there, so many that it seems like another way of being normal.

I don't know how much of this is cultural. This friend obviously comes from the same culture as me. I'm swiss, so I would expect to have less in common with an indian than with someone from the wall street journal.

Yes, it almost isn't a thought experiment. The only difference is that friendship is not as easy as pressing a button. The button would only work if people you like would press it, and it would have to stay pressed for a while before having any effect. This is enough for many people to be lonely, regardless of any irrational social rules about pressing buttons.

This morning my wife flew back to her country for a 3 week holiday. I suppose I'm going to recover soon but right now I'm still having depressive thoughts.

Ficciones, by Borges

Very imaginative short stories bordering on the philosophical, some of them hilarious.

I don't know about his country, but this is done also in my country, Switzerland. There isn't much growth, but unemployment is usually lower than 4% I think.

I think they don't try to shorten recessions, but they intervene in case of crashes and bursting bubbles in order to keep the financial markets functioning.

I'm not sure there is much evidence that lowering interest rates help the economy to come out of a recession. I studied economics almost 20 years ago and then the prevailing opinion of economists was that you can't know when a recession will end, so lowering interest rates to spur growth is likely to just cause inflation after the recession ends.

Anyway, if the central bank targets inflation, it also has lower interest rates in a slow economy that doesn't risk overheating.

The book is a classic, its advice looks sensible, but I always found the title dreadfully cynical.

Having a friend is something else than knowing someone you can influence. It seems to me that finding real friends is much harder than applying this sensible, but limited advice.

I think it's really sad to change jobs without a period of a few months doing nothing in between.

We have this too in Switzerland. If a separation period is not mentioned in the contract it's automatically 2 months (or 3 I don't remember).

If you get fired, the company has to tell you the same number of months in advance.

Advertisement, like any art form, is made of 90% garbage. The difference with all the other art forms is that there is a whole industry that works towards force-feeding the greatest number of people with that the garbage.

A few times I was so disgusted by a movie that I walked out of a theater. I don't have the choice to walk out of most advertising, I don't have a choice which advertising I see in the first place. Most of the ads are in the worst possible taste and dripping with hypocrisy. I guess you get used to it somehow, after all those years. I bet you could get used to eating shit too.

If your strength is to be creative, maybe you are most useful at the beginning of projects. Maybe you could get someone else to finish them?

I have the opposite character flaw of finishing everything I start. This is not very good either because sometimes it's better to throw things away. For example I spent 4 years studying economics although I find the subject rather boring. Also the personal projects that I've started stop me from starting other personal projects which also interest me.

My personal project takes so much of my time that I don't work full time as a programmer. I work about 9 months, then go away 6 months and conme back to programming. If the project I am working on is not done after 9 months, another programmer takes over. This is one way in which you could get other people to finish your projects.

I'm in a similar situation as the original poster, but with less money. I have been thinking about passive investment, but I live in Switzerland, so I wouldn't want to have all my money in Dollars or even Euros. So if I want passive investment, I first have to take the active decision of what part of my money I invest in which currency. It's probably not a good idea to have everything in a swiss franc index, this would mean a big exposure to very few big swiss companies.

Do you have any idea if there is a 'passive' way to choose between currencies?

Some novelties are newer than others. Those you remember best are those that don't fit with your generalizations about the world. As you grow older your generalizations get better and less things surprise you. The more you've seen, the more generalizations you need, because you don't have time to review the whole of your experience everytime you take a decision. The generalizations become a gut feeling, you know how to react but you forget why. The gut feeling makes you more efficient but by unconsciously generalizing from what you perceive you lose sight of the details. If this explanation is correct, there must be ways to reverse the process, at least for some events. Try meditation maybe, or drugs? I haven't. Tell me if it works.

On the other hand it might just be your memory getting worse at recording new things, because your brain gets old and no longer works so well.

Or maybe your brain is becoming more careful about what it records because there's not as much free space as there used to be.

Or maybe your brain is just bored, at first it really loved this shiny new recording thing and played with it the whole day, but then got used to it. Nowadays it only gets it out for the really big occasions.

Anyway, this is really about the pace at which you record informations, and about the amount of informations you discard. I'm sure these questions also arise in algorithms or machine learning. Certainly some knowledgable scientist on this forum is going to point out a parallel with some machine learning algorithm or information processing theorem?

I take that back. It turns out the journalist is a former college cartoonist.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/comic-riffs/2010/02/bill_wa...

And so few questions!

Watterson is so modest that he gives his only interview to a local journalist with no particular interest in comics who mainly asks questions about celebrity. This is like Einstein being interviewed by a sports journalist.

I think it's an advantage of the phone that there are less visual cues, so you can concentrate on auditive cues. A non-geek on the phone is somewhat in the situation of a geek, because he is aware of less non-verbal signals. He will tend to compensate with more auditive signals and clearer indications in the content of what is said. Fewer signals with more significance are easier to see for the geek.

At least that's what I used to think when face o face conversations were still a big problem for me, but phone conversations felt easier.

It seems I have become much less of a geek over the years.

I've worked with ivy on a project a few years ago and the integration with eclipse worked fine for the classpath and sources. I didn't check about the javadocs.

Ivy is mainly a tool to work with ant, so it makes some sense that IDE integration is not in the same project, but as far as I could see, ivy and the eclipse plugin are written by the same people.

The eclipse plugin was actually one of the reasons for choosing ivy over maven, because at the time maven was moving to 2.0 and its eclipse plugin was not yet available or stable. The other reason was the documentation. At the time there seemed to be more documentation about ivy than about all functionalities of maven together.

It's generally a good attitude to try to see what problems need to be solved instead of just doing your best at what you're told to do. If you identify problems and suggest solutions, you will have more influence on the content of your job regardless if you want to move up the hierarchy or code cool applications. And if you get to implement a solution that you suggested, it will be much more fun than realizing other people's ideas.

Being in a job makes it relatively easy to see processes which always need some improvement. I wish it would be as easy to see how to improve things on the level of the society or the country. I can see many things that are wrong, but I have no idea how to fix anything.

Oh don't be sad. I'm overdramatizing, there's really no way to be sure that I would have continued programming if I had got past that hurdle. Or I might even not have enjoyed it. Maybe I needed to see the ugliness of economics very closely before I could really appreciate the beauty of programming.

Luckily the internet bubble came along just at the right moment, made it really easy to become a programmer on the job and now everything is fine.

For me it was exactly the opposite. I started learning programming at 13 reading the zx spectrum manual chapter after chapter until I came to sin and cos which I did not know. My parents hadn't studied, so they could not tell me. Instead of just skipping that chapter, I gave up programming. Much later I studied economics. Working as an economist I discovered the fun of programming with visual basic, and then decided to become a programmer.

If in 1983 I could have googled sin and cos or read about it in wikipedia, I would have wasted much less time.

It looks more like a reply to the guy who ran out of space in his gmail account. How did it get here?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850827

Sometimes people ask me why programming is fun. I tell them programming is like building a sandcastle or writing a story, with the added pleasure that what you build reacts to your inputs. In fact some of the pleasure of writing in a natural language comes from striving for clarity and succintness, just as when you write code.

Some people don't understand how it's possible to stay in front of a screen all day. I tell them it's not like watching tv which gets boring because you are passive, it's active because you spend the day thinking.

In Switzerland it used to be the case that a career in the military helped having a career in the private sector. I don't think this is true anymore.

At the same time, no one ever needed all the qualities you mention in the swiss army. It never fought a war.

So any reason for staying at home is a lie?

Many people get a sense of purpose from doing things that are done more easily by staying in one place: write a book, build a house, educate yourself, create a company, raise children, withdraw from society...

One way to make banks boring and predictable would be to define precisely what kind of products they are allowed to sell. This sounds like what Taleb would want, but it don't think it would be good to entirely eliminate innovation.

But if regulators would forbid any product valued by models they don't understand, it would probably be a good start.

I'm at a point where I notice how much time waste on the internet but I don't yet have the discipline to resist distractions. Other than turning the router off every second day. But I grew up without the internet. It makes me sad to read about someone who couldn't even imagine his life without internet distractions.

Suddenly the idea of one laptop per child seems much less attractive.

Oh I saw your question only today.

Alice's pronunciation is correct, but I say the name slightly difference. She pronunces 'Ex' like ecks, while I say eggs.