ideonexus

This problem can be projected out to Federal Spending as well. We can see this in the taxes paid versus tax revenue spent on urban states compared to rural [1]. Alaska gets $1.84 back in federal spending for every dollar they pay in taxes compared to the $0.79 New York gets back on its federal taxes.

[1] http://taxfoundation.org/article/federal-spending-received-d...

One quibble I have with the article though is that suburban communities did not start out as luxuries or inventions of convenience. Suburban growth was actually promoted by the federal government with tax incentives in response to the threat of nuclear war. The idea was to spread populations out away from the cities, where a single bomb could kill millions. Shawn Otto's book The War on Science covers this development in great detail, which I've clipped here:

http://mxplx.com/meme/2504/

Too many replies for me to reply to each individually, but I did some further research and stand corrected on my understanding of Amsterdam and safety. The crime statistics do not support what I was (mis)lead to believe. I appreciate all of the feedback.

Fascinating from the perspective of someone who lives just outside of Washington DC, where marijuana has essentially been legalized. My friends who smoke tell me that, while it's illegal to sell weed, it's not illegal to give it away. So there are now shops that sell old newspapers for $50 each, but you get a free bag of high-grade weed along with it. It will be interesting to see the effects this has on other crimes and illegal drug use in a few years of study.

Having toured Amsterdam on a business trip, I was surprised that, even with the easy access to weed and prostitution, taxi drivers would not take me to certain historical sites in the city because they were too dangerous. The "safe" section of the city was fairly small, with the rest of it overrun with harder drugs and crime. With more American states legalizing and decriminalizing, we'll soon get to compare with the Dutch experiment.

It's unfortunate how defensive people get whenever the term "privilege" comes up. The author is merely acknowledging the beneficial circumstances of his birth and lack of obstacles to his success, but somehow people manage to read this and think it implies they should feel guilty for their relatively easy lives.

I admit it. I am privileged. I thank the Cosmos everyday for the incredibly wonderful life I live and my biggest fear is of losing it. I support social services that try to raise those people up out of poverty, homelessness, or institutional racism. I don't do that out of guilt, but for a genuine concern for the well-being of my fellow human beings who I rely upon every single day for my own well-being. That fast-food work who serves me meals is working much harder for less income than I am, and I appreciate and respect that.

Before I became a parent, I didn't understand Lego. Now I love Lego. My kids love Lego. We'll spend an hour at the Lego store every few months filling up a bucket of parts and spend hours piecing different inventions together at home in quiet focused play.

The only complaint I have about Lego is the price. The kits are very expensive, even the basic kits that don't feature licensed superheroes or star wars. A little police truck or car is $20. My understanding is that the expense comes from the precision with which the bricks must me manufactured, but $160 for a robotics kit is still prohibitively expensive for many people.

That said, this kit does appear awesome.

I think one of the most ingenious political ploys in American history was when the wealthy convinced the working class that capital gains should be taxed at a lower rate than income taxes.

I'll never forget having lunch with my co-workers, all of whom were paying 30-35% in income taxes, lecturing me that a 20% capital gains tax was unfair because the investor, "already paid taxes" on that money when it was first income, so taxing the gains amounted to double-taxation.

I've never understood the argument that raising the capital gains tax would slow economic growth either. Why would people give up free money just because they have to give a little more back to the government that makes the marketplace possible?

I enjoy exploring these patterns, not just for primes, but for factors as well. I made a little JavaScript app for creating "Number Mandellas" that my kids and I use to enjoy different patterns:

http://ideonexus.github.io/Explorable-Explanations/math/numb...

Our favorite thing to do is set the Preset to "Randomized" and click "Render Preset" over and over again to see what comes up. Sorry for the clunky interface, but the source is on github if anyone wants it.

https://github.com/ideonexus/Explorable-Explanations/tree/ma...

Absolutely. We have to constantly evaluate our efforts for their effectiveness. When we coach our children, we should coach them to be mindful of how they spend their time on their effort and not just the effort itself.

Thank you both. I think the reason myself and others had a hard time with Dweck's explanations is that meaningful effort is a much more complex concept than just being "smart." You not only have to try, but also evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts. Both of your comments are insightful on this point.

I hated the way the Dweck's explanations really didn't clarify what it is either. The Growth Mindset is making sure students understand that their brains are plastic and that we can grow smarter through effort. This understanding has been shown to improve student efforts and get better academic results.

The old way of doing things was to tell kids they are "smart" or "gifted," which resulted in many of those students simply giving up when they failed because smart and gifted are static qualities. So when a smart or gifted child fails, they simply weren't smart or gifted enough. I know many "gifted" students who never amounted to anything because they failed to work at life and simply expected their "gift" to bring them everything.

Based on this article, the "false growth mindset" appears to be rewarding effort for effort's sake. "Effort" is replacing "gifted" as being associated with inevitable success. Just because you put effort into something doesn't mean you will succeed, and we must be careful not to, as Dweck provides as example, praise a student who failed a test on their "effort." If a student fails, they should be motivated to work harder. I try to do this with my kids. When they fail, I do praise their effort, but I stress the fact that they must now put more effort in to overcome their failures.

California's federal taxes subsidize the rest of the country, not the other way around:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-st...

I find myself more than a little disappointed in this "todo" list. It looks more to me like an "ambitions" list. These are future long-term projects. It doesn't look much different to me than someone with a todo list that includes multiple long term software development projects.

A much more insightful todo list for me would be to see one of the day-to-day todo lists I find myself writing for every weekend. These include things like "Finish writing chapter 15" or "Refactor [component] into [design pattern]." I want to see the granular tasks Edison and other "great men" worked on in the day-slivers of their lives.

Seeing a big list like this reinforces my impression of Edison as a less of the hands-on inventor our society tries to make him out to be and more of a high-level manager who put mostly signed the patents for everything his workshop of inventors produced.

If FB outright banned your post and it did not contain graphic content, then that was wrong and an abuse on their part. But this modification isn't taking content down, they are adding a flag to posts identifying the source as suspect and, more importantly, why it is considered suspect. This is a much more transparent solution because we can see what FB is flagging, why it is being flagged, and openly discuss whether the flag is fair or not.

No fact-checking system will be perfect, but the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. Is there a gray area of what constitutes fake news and what a valid fact-checking body is? Of course, but flags don't stop the discussion, they enable discussion. If someone wants to go ahead and post something knowing it will be flagged, they can also post their argument for why they think it is being wrongly flagged.

I am all for this. I've given up on posting snopes links to posts from friends who either tell me snopes is wrong or outright delete my comment. I live near DC, where a man recently opened fire in a restaurant because he read a fake news story that Hillary Clinton was running a child prostitution ring there. I'm sick of this. We are entitled to our own opinions, but we are not entitled to our own facts.

The people in my feed who post fake news tend to be obnoxious and not very bright. It's a good customer service move to make the social network more pleasant. I know that the majority of my thoughtful friends on Facebook will greatly appreciate this.

This is magical. Thank you for this experience.

One of the contributors of FiveThirtyEight made an observation that, along with this article, has convinced me to start filtering out the news. They were discussing what public policy initiatives we could expect from the incoming administration, and she said that she could not speculate on the subject because Donald Trump's signal-to-noise ratio in his public statements was so low as to render forecasting initiatives impossible.

That's the problem here. The signal-to-noise ratio is too low in the news in general. I've spent the whole last year reading speculation about Clinton's emails, Trump's cabinet picks, and shocking news from "anonymous sources" that turned out to be 99% noise when the final draft of the news came out. Why did I waste so many hours reading baseless speculation masquerading as authoritative information?

I'm not wasting my time on noise anymore.

There's a bit of irony in this quote coming from Michael Crichton. When I started hanging out with the Science Online community in the early 00s, I learned that Crichton was widely regarded as spreading bad science by regularly citing discredited studies or fringe research in his books.

He was also known for getting even basic science wrong, like in "Jurassic Park," where the scientists fill-in missing dinosaur DNA by splicing it with reptile and amphibian DNA. Anyone who has studied dinosaurs knows that their closest living relatives are birds. How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact?

Then there was that embarrassingly awful book attacking the idea of climate change... but I think Crichton is a great example of this Gell-Mann phenomena. I know many people, even academics, who have read his books and will bring them up as having a degree of science fact.

Living in urban Northern Virginia (NoVa), I had a similar culture-shock when I moved to NortheEastern North Carolina, a very rural area. All of my coworkers and neighbors were obese, I quickly became known around town as the weird guy who walked everywhere, and at restaurants my friends would make fun of me for eating salads while taking pride in showing off how much food they could eat at one sitting. I once made the mistake of making a critical comment about McDonald's and was accused of "pushing a liberal agenda."

Back in NoVa years later, and the mindset down there still baffles me. Heart disease and diabetes are just kind of accepted as inevitable natural outcomes of aging, and are not seen as the consequences of overindulgence.

The cost of a lawyer was more than the amount of money under dispute. It may have felt good to take the company to court and win, but the cost of representation plus the leave time I would have had to burn to spend time in court and satisfy all the discovery paperwork requests would have cost much much more than what the company was charging me. How does it make sense to spend so much time and money over such a small claim?

And what about people who can't afford lawyers? Why does any American citizen have to spend exorbitant amounts of time and money disputing something that should be resolvable with a phone call?

I have run into this kind of automated bureaucracy several times in the last decade. It is both infuriating and frightening.

My mortgage was sold to a new company that had a weird computer-directed policy that rejected my home owner's insurance. They then flagged me as not having insurance and charged me over $1,000 for providing insurance. I spent hours on the phone speaking with people in India who absolutely would not send my proof of insurance up the chain of command. It wasn't until I was able to find the CEO of the mortgage company and contact her directly to explain my situation that it was finally resolved... for six months when the automated system rejected my home owners insurance again. I eventually had to refinance the home to get out from under this soulless company's grip.

Institutions like the Better Business Bureau used to protect consumers from this kind of abuse, but the complaints I have registered with them have achieved nothing. If I was poor, this situation would have financially ruined me. I would have missed mortgage payments, my home would have been foreclosed on, and my credit would have been ruined for years.

I highly recommend the science fiction film "Brazil" to anyone who wants to see the dystopia this kind of automated rules-enforcement could create. "Brazil" is the book "Nineteen Eighty-Four" but the totalitarian government rules with a system of overwhelming bureaucracy. The problem here is that it is the Capitalists who are the oppressors.

HN isn't a constructive forum for arguing politics anyway. I don't know that such a forum even exists.

If you want to influence people, take Confucius' advice and live a model public life that inspires (or shames) others into behaving ethically. Don't waste time dragging yourself down into arguments with base people, live a life that contrasts yourself with base people in the eyes of others. Let you successes, your intelligence and your quality of life, sell your politics. I make sure all my friends, especially my politically- and religiously-extreme ones, know how great my life is. Every time I post a picture of my smiling happy family and our successes, I am advertising my moderately-liberal politics and my Humanist philosophy. And when my conservative Christian friends do the same, they are successfully influencing me to have a more positive outlook of their politics and religion. Be a friendly, caring representative of your side of the aisle and you will constructively influence others.

3D printing is very much like coding, promising a revolution for those with the mindset to work with it. My wife, a coder by profession, is extremely active in the 3D printing community, and her ability to research and stick to problems is why she is successful at it. This is not an accessible hobby, as is evidenced by so many of my friends who own 3D printers that started gathering dust the moment they learned it's not simply plug-and-play. You have to figure out your infill settings, watch your inclines, your print-speeds at various points in your prints, know what temperatures work well with what materials, know how to replace the parts that go bad every few hundred hours of printing, etc, etc, etc. It doesn't help that you will sometimes be hours into a print before you realize you screwed something up.

The 3D printing community, like some coding communities, are very supportive and incredibly welcoming to beginners, but the skills we use in coding, the ability to research, experiment, and stick through extremely frustrating problems, are skills most people don't ever really learn. Our public education system is actively trying to address this with the much-misunderstood Common Core standards, but until such a mindset becomes more prevalent in our culture, things like coding and 3D printing will only continue to grow slowly in popularity.

In the meantime, nerds should see 3D printing as a still-uncharted territory for innovation and opportunity.

It's nostalgia. I have a great fondness for Zork because it was one of the few games my friends and I had on our Apples and Commodores in elementary school, but one thing this podcast really captures is that much of the game isn't logical at all. I remember picking up cheat books and getting outright angry at some of the solutions to the puzzles, like "touch mirror with crystal skull." Really??? How the hell was I supposed to think to do that???

So no, I don't recommend playing Zork, but I do recommend reading the wikipedia and other articles about it so you can know the history, but there many great modern text-adventure games out there (or you might even try writing your own) for enjoying the medium.

3D printing is very much like coding, promising a revolution for those with the mindset to work with it. My wife, a coder by profession, is extremely active in the 3D printing community, and her ability to research and stick to problems is why she is successful at it. This is not an accessible hobby, as is evidenced by so many of my friends who own 3D printers that started gathering dust the moment they learned it's not simply plug-and-play. You have to figure out your infill settings, watch your inclines, your print-speeds at various points in your prints, know what temperatures work well with what materials, know how to replace the parts that go bad every few hundred hours of printing, etc, etc, etc. It doesn't help that you will sometimes be hours into a print before you realize you screwed something up.

The 3D printing community, like Stackoverflow and coding communities, are very supportive and incredibly welcoming to beginners, but the skills we use in coding, the ability to research, experiment, and stick through extremely frustrating problems, are skills most people don't ever really learn. Our public education system is actively trying to address this with the much-misunderstood Common Core standards, but until such a mindset becomes more prevalent in our culture, things like coding and 3D printing will only continue to grow slowly in popularity.

In the meantime, nerds should see 3D printing as a still-uncharted territory for innovation and opportunity.

Ironic that you've made this comment on HackerNews, a site, it can be argued, whose appeal comes from its pretty substantial moderation. I can't tell you how many links I've seen flagged and banished from HN that I thought were important, but... once I cooled down my outrage, I realized the conversations occurring on them were pretty toxic. I come to HN because of the focus and constructive dialogue. I stay away from Reddit (and long ago abandoned /.) because of the toxicity.

Yes. The alt-right and the_donald reddit community members can move to a less-popular platform, but that doesn't necessarily mean that platform has just become more popular. It means the loudest, most-obnoxious people have just lost their Reddit audience. When 1% of commenters are making 90% of the posts, that's no longer a dialogue and that drives away readers. Encouraging polite dialogue and policing abusive behaviors are smart business moves for Reddit and Twitter.

I'm not sure how a photo-print of the manuscript will help cryptographers. Doesn't the digital version available at archive.org provide better opportunities for analysis?

https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript

For example, a friend of mine is fascinated with the Zodiac Killer's unsolved ciphers, so he put the note into a program, where you can replace the cryptic symbols in the serial killer's note with various letters:

http://www.oranchak.com/zodiac/webtoy/

A printed-book of the Voynich Manuscript--to my mind--actually reduces the ability of cryptographers to decode it (if there's even anything there to actually decode[1]). I would love to see the symbols in this book broken out into a font where we can run statistics on them, replace them with various letters from different alphabets, and seek patterns in their occurrence.

[1] An analysis of the manuscript found the distribution of words " is not compatible with natural languages": https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07435

Coincidentally, I was on FB today and started seeing a red flag on two friends' posts reading, "This website is not a reliable news source. Reason: [REASON]" with reasons like state-sponsored news and unclassified. The flag appeared on an article about Pokemon Go that was clearly sensationalist speculation and a conspiracy website about George Soros. The div tag in the post had a class "bsAlert" and, my favorite part, a poop icon beside it. None of my other friends are seeing the flag, so I suspect I'm one of the lucky A/B testers.

This article notes that consumers want fake news, but I want to see more of these flags. I realize it's a huge risk for FB, as the article notes, but I've unfollowed (not unfriended) so many friends for posting this nonsense that it's really hurting my own end-user experience in the network. When you're dealing with people for whom snopes and wikipedia are "part of the MSM," you are dealing with people who are living in a consensual hallucination. It's simultaneously infuriating and frightening to be exposed to that on a daily basis.

I really appreciated Colbert's words that night, but I don't know how true his quote was. There was a great article I read a decade ago that I could never find again about, "How People Talk About Politics," and it matched my own experience.

Standing in long lines at the DMV in Virginia in 2000-something, a man says to me, "See what happens when you let the Democrats run things?"

Watching the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, a woman told me, "My grandmother said this would happen. She said the economy always collapses under Republicans."

Working IT at the Coast Guard for ten years, people talked politics all the time. All of that talk about as informed as the quotes above, but I try not to think less of people who are misinformed. Politics is hard. It's complicated, but we are all expected to participate in it and try to stay informed while most of us are unaware of how much or cognitive biases cause us to misunderstand and misremember the things we learn about the whole complex morass that is almost entirely run by lawyers.

For me, this election is now an exercise in compassion. I overheard two coworkers talking yesterday about how they both voted for Trump because they hated Clinton so much. What surprised me was the tone of fear and uncertainty in their voices at having won. They want what's best for America, just like their political opponents do, and they honestly thought their candidate was the better choice--with strong reservations. My life is great at the moment, so I sincerely hope their candidate delivers what they feel is missing in their own lives.

Further reading, youthful mental characteristics appear to keep the brain plastic and adaptable to change. Remain childlike, with the accompanying sense of wonder and engagement in the world to retain your intellectual vigor:

https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/ed-boygenius.html

From an evolutionary perspective, humans very much resemble juvenile chimpanzees physically. There is something about this neoteny that might give insights to our highly adaptable intelligence.

This whole discussion reminds me of how all MySpace content was destroyed in a rash corporate decision years ago. Just like that, five years of the most popular social networking site on the World Wide Web and all its history were wiped out:

http://activehistory.ca/2013/06/myspace-is-cool-again-too-ba...

Unfortunately, the Internet Archive was only able to get the non-logged-in version of the site. All those loud, obnoxious profile pages users spent endless hours working on? We only have oral histories now to remember them.