After receiving a BA in political economics at Bocconi University, Milan and a doctorate in international economics at Harvard University, he became an academic at Yale and a visiting researcher/advisor at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and Bank of Israel. Much of his early research focused on emerging markets. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, he was a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, later moving to the United States Treasury Department as a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner, who in 2009 became Treasury Secretary.
Yes, clearly Nouriel Roubini is not an educated, well-read academic. /s
Yeah, this doesn't really seem that groundbreaking to me. You just try your best and take new information in as it becomes available (assuming the information is trustworthy). Then again, I build software. Even when there are competing ways to do something, you just weigh the pros and cons (that you are aware of) of each solution across various dimensions to determine which is better (assuming you can weight the relative importance of each dimension - which itself isn't always easy to do). The more information you have, the easier it is to decide on a course of action.
I think for stuff like religion or philosophy, you really move away from the domain of "correct/incorrect" to more conditional arguments: philosophy Y makes sense if your values are X. One is only better than another if it more aligns with your values and experiences. Your values are going to be determined by the totality of your life experiences and genetics. You can dispute that holding a certain position isn't necessarily pragmatic within a given context, but you can't really say it is wrong, in my view. Of course there are lots of smart people on this site, so I'm curious to see what others may think of my views on philosophy.
I don't really follow your logic. Bad parents are usually bad parents because they don't care about parenting or they care about other things far more than parenting - parenting just isn't their top priority. Their children's success in life is not top of mind, and some may not care how successful their kids are unless there is something in it for them. From my own personal experience, bad parents get annoyed when their kids are successful and they don't benefit directly in some way i.e. money. Or they are resentful and try to minimize your successes. Either way, bad parents think more about themselves than their kids - their kids being successful is not a reward.
If anything, perhaps it punishes good parenting. But I'm not sure it rewards bad parenting.
All I'm saying is, with something like love, for most people it matters if the other individual can actually feel something too. Suppose there are two guys, both in a relationship with someone. One is in love with their significant other, the other is not, but their actions are exactly the same. If each of their significant others asks "do you really love me or are you just pretending?" and each guys answers honestly, you can be sure that the significant other of the guy who is pretending is going to be pretty let down. That guy's SO thought the feelings were mutual, but they weren't.
Now imagine that you know up front that a machine can never actually feel love, just act like it loves you. This is a similar situation.
I think it would depend on the person. For some people, if you know a machine is not capable of feeling anything in spite of it acting like it loves you, then it simply won't be the same as the reciprocal affection shared between two people or even a pet and its caretakers.
So I've read "Why We Sleep" and my understanding of Walker when he says "sleep loss is not a debt that can be repaid" simply meant that sleep does not work like an accounting system - if you slept for 3 hours less last night, sleeping for 3 hours more tonight will not "catch you up" and bring you back to baseline. You're just going to have to sleep your regular number of hours for a while until your body recovers. The damage done by one night of poor sleep is not going to be irreversible. People lose sleep all the time and are fine after they have had enough consecutive nights of normal sleep.
Have you ever tried keeping a journal? We all make decisions based on what we know and how we feel and both of those things change over time.
With that in mind, does it really matter why you studied computer science? You're allowed to feel differently now than you did when you made the decision to study CS.
2. Being asked to do something too quickly (or the technical team not asking for enough time up front).
3. Being asked to do something dumb and giving in.
The second point happens everywhere to varying degrees, so I just see it as part of the job description of being a developer. You will always have to fight for more time since everyone who requests you to build something wants their software features now and not tomorrow. Points 1 and 3 can usually be solved with better communication and some education.
All of these problems are solvable assuming the management of the team understands these problems occur and is on the same page as the people implementing the software. If that isn't the case and the management isn't going to listen to the devs, I think that is one of the few situations where it is time to just find a new job. Possibly this is more common than not and I have been lucky enough to only experience one manager who was this stubborn and ignorant.
Yeah, fair enough. I work in a position where the deadlines for what we are building are mostly self imposed (we of course want to be competitive with other businesses that do what we do, so there is some sense of urgency, but it is not going to significantly impact the business if we late by a mont or two on something). While we do have deadlines, they are somewhat flexible as long as you can give a really good reason why you can't meet it.
I think the only thing you can do in this situation is to express frustration with whoever was involved in determining the 3 month deadline. You can only tell them that it is not enough time and that they should involve some technical people when making decisions like that. If they don't like what you have to say or the whole strategy of the company is actually based on doing things cheap and fast, then maybe it is time to move to a new company that has an environment which is more aligned with your values.
Not necessarily. At least in my experience, most people want to improve their coding skills and if you build a good relationship with your coworkers and have a track record of putting out good work, then you'll be in a position to offer up suggestions on how everyone can improve.
It really drives me nuts that we have all of these innovative and brilliant solutions for treating a number of supposedly preventable diseases, yet the field of nutrition can't even agree on how we can avoid delaying onset or preventing some of these diseases in the first place. The only thing we know for sure is don't smoke cigarettes.
Maybe I've worked with bad code for too long, but my opinion is, being the one person who understands some clusterfuck of poorly designed and hard to read code is job security and improving it can be satisfying. Reducing coupling, making a codebase more readable, rewriting code to make it more unit testable, or making a given piece of code run faster I find to be satisfying and educational. You learn from direct experience a myriad of ways in which not to do things and exactly why not to do them, and you can use this information going forward when you write your next feature.
Have you ever been depressed or burnt out? Cause I have suffered from both. I will agree that alcohol and most drugs are likely going to make your problems worse or at the very least, keep you at whatever level of happiness you're currently at. I would say psychedelics and antidepressants fall outside of these categories. Many people take antidepressants for a short period of time and then go off of them. Similarly, psychedelics could potentially be a single trip and you're cured type scenario. The benefit of psychedelics as I understand them (though I have never done them personally) is that they allow you to gain a completely new perspective. With this new experience, you can begin to see the world in a more positive light after the experience is done, instead of having a dark cloud hanging over you at all times. It has more to do with kicking your mind out of a loop, as opposed to escaping reality.
If you haven't read it already, you should totally read "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan. The book more or less agrees with your point (though I don't think the science has necessarily come to a solid conclusion on which mental disorders psychedelics are going to help relieve. I think alcoholism had a fairly high response rate, though). I believe the book "Capture" by David Kessler also covers the phenomena of how minds can end up "stuck" in some mode, so to speak, though I have yet to read that one.
Perhaps I have misunderstood what front running is, but I have always thought it is really only applicable when you have an obligation to your clients to give them good execution. You can't front run a market, just your clients. An HFT has no clients on behalf of which they are executing trades, they are just trading for their own account.
I too suffered from insomnia regularly for most of my life (for at least 25+ years that I can remember) and just have managed to figure it out this past year. The major things for me have been light therapy in the morning, carefully watching my diet (certain foods cause mild digestive problems but this seems to really mess with my sleep), meditation and trying to control inflammation (again, partly through being very careful with my diet, partly by taking supplements and taking ibuprofin on rare occasion). The difference has been absolutely phenomenal. Your entire life changes for the better once you can sleep properly on a consistent basis. Glad to hear you have found something that is working for you.
From my understanding on this topic, the problem has more to do with insulin sensitivity. It has been measured that insulin sensitivity is worse the day after a poor night's sleep and insulin resistance can help drive fat accumulation, all other things being equal.
This statement is actually what stood out the most to me because I disagree with it. But, I actually disagree with you that people at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid don't need meaning. If anything, these people need meaning in their lives far more than the people at the top of the pyramid - otherwise, how does one justify all the suffering they must go through on a day to day basis. If you're struggling to make ends meet, having some meaning in your life such as children to raise and feed will make the struggle feel justified. You're not just working those long hours for low pay so you can go home and eat, sleep and repeat, you're doing it for your family and hopefully your children will have a better future as a result of your hard work.
Programmers make stupid assumptions all the time... usually because they are focused on some other more difficult problem and they assume some other problem like this is easy and they don't have to think much abt it, so they don't.
Really? While I personally don't need to work with phone numbers for my job, I found this list to be incredibly interesting. For many, this type of knowledge is often attained by making incorrect assumptions in your code/system design and having them proven wrong over time. Having a list like this which lays it all out for you in one shot is amazing.
Haha yeah, absolutely. I've limited my social media use to HN only for a while now (mainly because I feel it is one of the few sites left where you can just have a civil discussion without things getting too political) and I feel I'm significantly happier and more productive now than I was a few years ago. Of course many other things have changed in that timeframe, but I don't really ever see myself using Facebook or other popular social media again. Quitting all that is quite liberating.
Probably a lot of people just get lured in by social media, video games, Netflix, etc and then spend far more time on these things than they would actually like. I doubt many people are consciously prioritizing their web surfing or video game time, but it just turns out that way since these things are designed to be habit forming.
Personally, I've found my problem is more "feeling like I don't have time" rather than actually not having time. You can always find things to do to fill each moment, but at least for me, the majority of those things are neither necessary (such as writing this post) nor am I doing them as efficiently as possible. I find through regularly reviewing how I'm spending my time, I'm always finding things to cut out that are a waste of my time or finding ways to be more efficient so that I can focus on the things that are actually important to me. Possibly I am just more distractible than average so I have to keep pulling myself back in to focus, but I don't think so.
I don't disagree with you. I just wanted to give the first poster I responded to some credit. There needs to be a balance between quantity and quality of life. For some, they will enjoy drinking and smoking. Personally, I think meditation and mindfulness is a better path. But quality of life matters a lot.
Edit: I also didn't mean to imply that I think the key to a long life is simply not worrying. The key to a long life is definitely a combination of genetics and how well you take care of yourself. But part of taking care of yourself is worrying less.
Not sure why you're downvoted. There is a guy by the name of Peter Attia who has spent a lot of time studying centenarians and his conclusion has basically been, these people won the genetic lottery for longevity. He of course thinks those of us who aren't so lucky with genes can achieve similar results through diet and exercise. Very interesting stuff.
It has to do how we define the word "drugs" culturally, not the reality of whether or not a substance is both addictive and toxic. Alcohol and vaping are culturally accepted drugs that everyone likes to use, so people don't like to think of them as being in the same category as the "bad drugs", which only addicts use.
Also, most people can regularly use alcohol and tobacco without it consuming their life, so I think this is an important factor. The same cannot be said for heroin or crack.
Edit: I'd also like to add that I know a number of people in my generation (millenial) who would consider themselves soft drug users. This would mean marijuana and maybe some hallucinogens occasionally. In Canada at least, regular usage of marijuana is very much normalized amongst my generation. It's not really considered any worse than drinking and I think you'll see over time that marijuana culturally is defined outside of the "bad drugs" category.