isolate

It's not a movie, it's a marketing event.

Some kinds of success are achieved through not doing things. And then we get into the question of "to do" vs. "not to do".

Sounds reasonable, how much tax do I have to pay?

What, are you some kind of socialist that doesn't believe in the free market?

You don't know that we won't escape the solar system and go on to colonize other planets outside of it. We've been nuclear for less than 100 years.

Do you believe God communicates with you?

Presumably you can imagine a somewhat stupid robot that does random scientific experiments, generating good beliefs and bad ones. Why would that invalidate the good beliefs?

Belief A has no rational basis. Belief B has a rational basis. If you believe A yet have proven B, that doesn't make B wrong. Even if believe that it was A which led you to the discovery.

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Either of you.

I think you can dismiss them as less sane, however. You don't have to treat wacky beliefs as equally valid alternative viewpoints. There's a lot of totally supernatural stuff religious people believe that didn't / doesn't happen. The moral and community aspects are generally okay.

> Science doesn't fit in a test tube.

Karl Popper begs to disagree. (By the way, I also believe we evolved from apes. I am not so sure about the Big Bang just because it's so strange and hard to comprehend, but okay, I'm not like against it or anything.)

> point blank denial of facts such as that of human-caused climate change

Science can't prove/disprove AGW because there's no control, which means that it isn't and can't be a fact.

(I believe we should assume AGW to be safe.)

Well I say forced in the sense of threatened with physical or emotional violence. To a child, even emotional abandonment by one's parents can be perceived as "psychological death" (this is a term I did not invent) because the child is dependent on its parents for survival. So yes, it's a choice, but the choice not to be injured is what I consider forced.

I liked BSG too... although it is looooooong. I even bought the board game, but then I had nobody to play it with.

Yeah, sorry, I graduated junior high a while ago. The guy probably assumed I was disagreeing with him, which is fair, I suppose.

(But anyway thanks for educating me.)

Social ladder climbing is mostly just morally difficult.

What's interesting is that this is actually how the human brain works. It was in the news and stuff a while ago.

I guess English is not your first language? I can't understand anything past "been", which is surprising given how easily I understood your last question.

Yeah, I agree basically, I was just disputing your claim that (all) sentient being choose their ethical codes. I mean, maybe, but sometimes it's a bit of a forced choice.

Based on my personal experience with being so, delusional people like to have as many conversations as possible about their delusion, because that's how they sustain it.

If everyone in government is a Democrat, why do you need elections?

Humans generally establish their initial ethical codes based on the rules set by their creators. Usually reward and punishment are involved. There are some people that never really sit down, think about their values, and choose new ones to replace the ones they learned in childhood.

tl;dr

Step 1: Get a piece of paper.

Step 2: Work your ass off.

Step 3: Never retire.

Pretty sure society has been drilling this into us since preschool, but thanks for the reminder.

Abstracting further, explicit and unprompted denials are usually protecting something.

> You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume.

You can't use Chinese tones, but you can still modulate your speech tonally to convey emotion while respecting them.

People write with pens often. Although characters per second is much faster on a computer, there's less total overhead to writing with pen and paper in many situations.

It's a snarky observation that hides an important insight: email is the most important thing that the internet does.

I think the emphasis is on the word "extreme", kind of like critically endangered vs. just endangered for wildlife.

You did call him a "cheapskate" though. Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.

Also Muchnick's book is good for the middle end.

Van Gogh shot himself because he was mentally ill, probably from bipolar disorder. The same thing that killed him (in a depressive phase) was likely responsible for his creativity (in a hypomanic phase).

+ reduced memory footprint and/or better swapping. It isn't practical to run Firefox on a machine with 2GB RAM.

"Don't open so many tabs!"

Swap my tabs to disk before the OS does!

(It's okay, I bought 16GB extra RAM so that I could run Firefox.)