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Which, of course, helps Amazon figure out what it doesn't sell, but should. I'd say it's a brilliant idea, but I can't help thinking, what took them so long?

It happens even if the comment I'm downvoting was posted a minute ago.

Thanks for pointing this out. I suspect there may be something genuinely broken with my downvoting, though, because despite having only upvoted for a good while, my downvotes continue to not count.

Alternatively, HN is keeping a backlog of my uncounted downvotes, and counting them in order as I make more upvotes. Thus, as long as there's a backlog, any new downvote I make will initially not count.

Personally, I think the >=0 net karma rule goes too far. I've tended to downvote more than I upvote because I drift towards policing behavior (not "grumpness": not all people who downvote more than they upvote can be classified as grumps, which is a highly subjective notion anyway), and generally have high standards for what I consider worthy of an upvote. Social moderation systems have to account for the variety of sociological roles. Not to mention, the net karma of the site may be negative, but a >=0 rule will never allow this state to be represented.

It is also impossible to determine what my net karma contribution is, and thus that the >=0 rule is even in effect. Net karma contribution should appear on a user's profile page, or at the top menu bar. I shouldn't be expected to track my karma contribution manually.

I have downvote arrows on comments, but at some point they ceased to affect the score. Which is to say, I click on the downvote, and the points go down by one, but upon reloading the page, the score is the same as before.

(And yes, it's happened enough times that I know it isn't just someone voting the comment back up in the intervening period.)

> it gives a sense of surety in an uncertain world

In particular, a false sense of moral certainty derived from an elitist denial of social complexity.

His wife, Anna Kang, definitely is (started Fountainhead Entertainment). That practically guarantees that Carmack is, because it's highly unlikely an Objectivist would marry a non-Objectivist.

What baffles me is, how on earth do id and Fountainhead games exemplify Objectivist ideals?

'Envelope' in this context just means 'edge'. Taleb is just saying that some of the best things may come from those most accidental, least expected of serendipitous events that parties are, in a sense, designed to generate in the first place. By going to more parties, you increase your exposure to that edge.

It's also not uncommon for individuals who are people-shy to have friends, partners who aren't, nor is it always necessary to "order around" these people to convince them to go.

It's called being charitable. In other words, don't assume that a stupid interpretation of what someone said is what they actually meant. If that's what you're looking for, it's easy enough to find. Fox News talking heads are great at this.

Without a doubt, Heidegger's explanation of readiness-to-hand in Being and Time has done more for my usability and process inefficiency evaluating skills than even Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things or any HCI book I've ever read. While Norman's book comes in a strong second, the benefit of the first few chapters of Being and Time is the incredibly low-level cognitive access it gives you to the work your brain does when engaged in a task. (If you're interested and don't mind slogging through some tough writing, pick up the hardcover version and Dreyfus' Being-in-the-World and read them together. Reading a Wikipedia article or some other summary fails to deliver the same degree of low-level access.)

I'll also mention Ayn Rand as someone who wrote inspiringly about the entrepreneur as a (potentially) heroic figure, but hasten to add that her sociology of looters and movers is way too simplistic to ground some of her views on ethics.

John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism" was my first assigned reading in a political philosophy class, and remains my favorite.

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals prompted me to question whether the values I had always held were really all that valuable.

Eleanor Rosch's work on basic categories and prototype theory (without which Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things--not to mention Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous--would likely not have been written) is fantastic, debunking empirically the Aristotelian theory of categories as being defined by necessary and sufficient conditions (they can be, where we intentionally define them to be from a top-down point of view, as in geometry, but bottom-up the construction of categories is much looser and based on family resemblances with one or several prototypes serving as the central point of comparison: hence, when I say "bird" you're more likely to think of a bluebird-type bird than a penguin or an ostrich). Knowing this does a lot to help loosen up your understanding of things, which can become rigidified by traditional mathematical, scientific, and analytic philosophical education.

Several others worth mentioning, but I've got to get back to work!