icandoitbetter

How long before an ignorant humanities scholar writes a book claiming that the "Rathke Affair" proves that all math is nonsense?

    It may not scale, but the chances of it making (any/more) money are much higher ("riches are in the niches") than a "fast startup" as it's very rare for a startup to grow fast and monetize quickly at the same time, because most people just won't buy immediately, sometimes even if it solves a problem for them.

That is the exact point of the essay. An average niche business makes more money than an average startup, but a successful startup makes many orders of magnitude more money than a successful niche business.

Why would you try to implement this with WebRTC? WebRTC is for real time communication. It's in the name. Social networks don't have to be real time. How would you do persistence in a WebRTC-run social network? E.g. how can I visit your profile when you're offline?

Piecemeal compilation:

    // beginning of file
    Coffeescript = require('coffee-script');
   
    // compilation    
    Coffeescript.compile(line, {bare: true});

e.g.

    var f = eval(Coffeescript.compile("(x) -> x + 1", {bare: true}));
    f(1) // ==> true

> I detest politically motivated scientific theories

Then you detest every scientific theory ever devised.

I assume everyone has the same amount of equity then?

Is it impossible to imagine a system where fellow human beings would help you even if you didn't produce anything of value?

Yeah, that's exactly what Marx advocates.

Well written, but I completely disagree. Behind your reasoning lies the classic libertarian argument about epistemological complexity (not saying you are a libertarian, just that you are using Austrian school reasoning): because we can't know what can potentially save lives, we should just let people do their thing without making any judgments on what should be our collective priorities. I, for one, have no doubt that a doctor saves more lives than a car mechanic. There are a lot of outcomes we can know, be certain about, do something about. If we concentrated as a society on defeating aging, for example, we would perhaps get rid of jobs that could very indirectly help in increasing our longevity, but we would replace them with jobs that do so much more directly and effectively.

You also completely misinterpret Maslow's hierarchy. It's not a prescriptive, but a descriptive one. An individual who has to struggle daily to survive usually does not have time for poetry.

Stop putting words in my mouth. I never said that this is a solution for labor rights or unemployment right now.

It's not a flaw on your part. Stop being so moralistic. That kind of job is something that NOBODY needs to do. If we really tried, we could automate those jobs within a couple of decades or less. But we won't because those workers are possibly even cheaper than the maintenance of a potential automation solution, not to mention the R&D that would be needed to arrive there.

People would still want to work. But they'll start working on things they actually care about, because they won't be enslaved by their fear that if they quit their jobs they'll end up homeless or without health insurance. Right now so few startups dare to actually imagine new things because investors must be pleased and profit must be made. Plus, if we escaped the job-for-survival mindset, we would actually start focusing on automation. It's a mistake to think that automation hasn't come at the scale we expected because of unprecedented technical challenges. It hasn't come because the government has stopped throwing money on basic research. We need to focus on wild, idealistic, big-scale projects. And admit that the private sector isn't good at radically innovating, because, to radically innovate, you need to have been failing for many, many years, and have someone sustain you throughout those years. The best the private sector can do is catch up and minimize costs, like SpaceX does.

With a wealth redistribution mechanism like basic income.

There's always work to do exactly because there are always people looking for work. It's not the other way around. Most jobs aren't necessary for our survival, so people who don't want to work shouldn't be forced to work.

It's not Utopian horseshit. Please be less dismissive of ideas.

> One may argue that Europe went too far with their "social" expenses (hence, the current financial meltdown)

One may argue that if she has no understanding of the European financial meltdown, and just wants to find evidence for the failure of the welfare state where there is none. The crisis happened primarily because of the Spanish real estate crisis, and it became exacerbated because of (1) structural flaws in the monetary union and (2) imposition of rapid austerity.

As for the rest, I agree.

That's textbook Reddit garbage right there. When you don't have good insight on people, they all look the same.

The state gives you the "moral right" to your property by protecting it from others using violence. There's no such thing as private property without the state. That was my argument. I'm not taking a position on whether Saverin should've retained his citizenship and paid taxes or not.

> listen, the state doesn't have a "moral right" on your money, energy, or time

Of course it does. Without the state, there would be no property rights.

No, it's not.

The European crisis has nothing to do with the inflated public spending. That's just the spin that American and especially conservative media have pursued for obvious reasons. Greece does less public spending than Germany, for example (check the OECD data).

Things that actually caused the crisis: a flawed shared currency system that lacks risk sharing mechanisms, an unregulated government bond market riddled with moral hazard, state corruption.

Similar experience.

This person is ostensibly is in favor of gender equality, but he believes that the problem has been overstated and it will simply solve itself. He believes that the world has become more gender-equal in the past decades not because of the relentless struggle of radical feminists, but because somehow men decided to become more civilized. Power struggles are a concept that's alien to him. He's too young to know about a society just a few decades ago in which women weren't able to go to the banks and receive loans without their husbands' permission. He doesn't realize that Mad Men really takes place in our 60s, that is, two generations ago. He hasn't spent enough time trying to picture how it'd be like to be 1 woman in the company of 10 "brogrammers". He doesn't understand that the "brogrammers" are more likely to hire more "brogrammers" until some exogenous force (like Etsy's initiative) fights against that.

In the end, I think that he doesn't believe that women's oppression is real. It reminds me of that Kurt Vonnegut letter that was in the front page a few weeks ago. And also of the following (taken from a talk by David Graeber):

"Women are always expected to imagine what things look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to reciprocate. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to the suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were an act of violence in itself. A popular exercise among High School creative writing teachers in America, for example, is to ask students to imagining they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex, and describe what that day might be like. The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Half of the boys usually refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and deeply resent having to think about it."

Light Table was actually heavily inspired by BV's work by his own admission

>Who wants to spend 30 hours speculating on the psychology of an alienated prude with a bunch of pseudo-philosophical garbage about the meaning of life slapped on as affect?

How can you even make that claim when the game isn't out yet? I seriously have no idea what to make of your comment.

oh come on. the article is dripping in journalese. you can hardly make any judgments about his character based on it alone (it even features the Beautiful Mind-esque cliche of "doesn't understand the social conventions of how to act around women"). you can't really tell if it's an off-hand remark about how his life hasn't changed by being rich or whether he actually went into long tirades on the banality of being rich.

It's not "crappy foreplay" - it's a presentation.

Can't tell if you're joking.

Godel doesn't talk about space, time, human experience, truths that exist independently of human experience. I fail to see how he's relevant.

Its relevance in philosophy/epistemology/science/computing has been inflated out of proportion by the confused arguments of Hofstadter, Penrose, etc. Just because it's difficult to understand doesn't mean that it will tell you the meaning of life. Of course it's a mathematical theorem of profound importance, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the limits of rational thought.

Being the famous guy in the graveyard isn't particularly appealing either.