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logicalmindon What to do After Making a Billion dollars

If you change "money" to "credit" his point makes more sense. People spending credit they've earned, rather than money, is what causes problems.

logicalmindon A New Name for Stack Overflow (with surprise ending)

My interpretation is that he is going to use your comment, like the one he linked to, as motivation to prove you wrong. Maybe your comment will be printed out and put onto the wall of the SE office.

logicalmindon Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

You should really read the book "Ishmael". It explores the end-game of our "way of life" and gives thoughts to alternatives. It doesn't involve an extraordinarily intelligent alien showing us the way, but an alternatively evolved intelligence here on earth.

logicalmindon Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

You should read the book "Ishmael" and see if it changes your view.

http://www.amazon.com/Ishmael-Adventure-Spirit-Daniel-Quinn/...

logicalmindon A reminder for us all: The Hacker News newcomer welcome page.

The problem is that you really don't know who Random J Commenter is. That person could be a more successful and more knowledgeable person who just happens to NOT want to be a celebrity. There are plenty of smart people who simply don't want to play the popularity game. That doesn't make their input any less valuable.

Additionally, in my opinion, you are going to find more success in following tangential ideas from someone successful. You aren't going to duplicate what pg or Joel or any of those guys have done. The real value comes from intelligent people discussing tangents to some idea or theory. And if popularity is disproportionally rewarded to the thought behind the discussion, then the result will be less contribution to the site.

logicalmindon A reminder for us all: The Hacker News newcomer welcome page.

No snarkiness was intended. I was agreeing and expanding your comment. Nothing irks me more than seeing a very insightful discussion between "high profile member" and "regular user" and seeing a drastic difference in the point total of the comments when they are equally interesting. People should upvote content and not commenter.

logicalmindon A reminder for us all: The Hacker News newcomer welcome page.

You could almost make a rule that any comment that had a high profile user's name in (including pg) should get some kind of karma deduction.

Don't get me wrong, some of these comments are very good, but way too many people vote up celebrity instead of content.

logicalmindon Ask HN: Why would you spend your own fortune to get a political office in USA??

It's about power. In this case, "power" means political power. Some people are willing trade a percentage of their wealth to acquire power. Note that in earlier times, power was usually acquired by heredity.

If you want to read a fascinating book on the different kinds of power and how it has been acquired over time, read the book "Power: A New Social Analysis" by Bertrand Russell.

logicalmindon How To Actually Win A Fist Fight

If you want to read a book on how your body will react to conflict situations, I highly recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Violence-Comparison-Martia...

It's not a book about fighting. It's about how your bodies mental and physical senses react to violent situations.

logicalmindon A hell of a time

You may be 100% correct, it's just that it hadn't become real for me. I am in my late 30's and have father-friends in various industries. When I went to school there were a couple of female students in the class here or there. We treated them no different than any other students. There were plenty of embarrassing sexual advances by students, but nothing along the lines of sexual assault. Men and women of the tech community were the smart students.

I've talked to many father-friends who have sons and daughters who go to various high schools and colleges. I've heard stories of sexual assaults and very unfortunate situations. But I could always justify them to myself as inferior disciplines and sad situations.

It's not like I thought this never happened in tech. Just the combination of highly skilled, top company, person in tech and the response of a general community that I highly respect give me pause.

In general, I think I am older than the HN crowd, so I am fine with thinking a bit different.

logicalmindon A hell of a time

Sure, Here was the original top comment I found appalling:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1875900

This right here is called denial. In short "I have a friend, who is like this guy, who was accused of the same thing and he got off." Which in my opinion is denying that the female involved is telling the truth and that this person is completely innocent.

Additionally, this is the second highest post as I type. I don't think I even have to respond. At this time, the comment that makes the same point as me is downvoted to the negative:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1875948

At this point I don't want to continue further defending my point. Downvote me if you like. I find the responses here about 50% disturbing and 50% uplifting. That is no reflection on HN, but on the tech community. Before today I would have gladly recommended to my daughters to follow a tech path. But after tonight I've lost my innocence on that. I've never really thought about these issues from a woman's perspective before tonight. And I've never really been involved in a situation like this. So my responses might be a bit different than the typical younger 20's male responses. And I'm fine with that. Maybe I've just lost my innocence.

logicalmindon A hell of a time

My original post contained the words you quoted. As I scrolled down the page I realized that the posts were less offensive and edited my post. Yet, at this point in time, a number of the top upvoted comments are quite defensive and in denial.

logicalmindon A hell of a time

As the father of two daughters I am somewhat appalled by the responses here. I'm not taking anyone's side, but the responses here are shocking to me. I don't know what to say, but, WOW! Maybe I need to rethink the advice I am giving my daughters.

logicalmindon Eliminating Political Parties

It's really just "appeal to authority", which is a very common logical fallacy used in politics. Everyone has their opinion on the intent of the founding fathers and that is used to sway many political arguments.

logicalmindon John Carmack on government

But the government that delivers this poor ROI has produced John Carmack. Who is to say that some of the "inefficiencies" in the system did not lead to John becoming the person he is today?

The results depends on what is being measured. If you're measuring dollars in vs. dollars out, then that is one thing. But if your measuring the "number of John Carmack's produced" then the government is 100% efficient.

It's not unlike someone climbing Mount Everest and then looking back and saying "Mount Everest is easy to climb". From the perspective of the person who has successfully made the climb, it is easy. But you can't apply that perspective to the vast majority who have not made the climb.

logicalmindon John Carmack on government

Yes, but here is the rub. Once upon a time only the aristocrats could afford to be educated. Then it was deemed by democratic government that education should be afforded to all. The people voted for that, knowing full well that it would cost everyone some of their hard-earned money (taxes).

Generations have gone by and many people take the things that are "common goods" for granted. Unless John Carmack's family is from an aristocratic lineage and his family is wealthy enough to have given him privately funded everything, then he is also "standing on the shoulders of giants" who have paved his way. For him to now become essentially an aristocrat and now say that each people should fend for themselves is difficult to comprehend. At least Newton was humble enough to realize how he got to where he got.

logicalmindon John Carmack on government

Considering he is posting this under his aerospace company, does anyone else wonder where aerospace would be today without government funding? Sure, you could argue that it has been inefficient in terms of pure dollars. But there is more to advancement than simply the money spent.

logicalmindon Investing in each others YC companies

I would assume the intent would be the diversification of risk/reward. Since most startups don't make it to worthwhile profitability you are hedging your bet on other startups.

logicalmindon Google: What We're Driving At

I thought your ideal future was everyone riding bicycles ;)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1699114

logicalmindon Web Developers...HOW?

You will probably want to get independent feedback from others (with nda if necessary) on whether your idea is truly industry changing before you go investing time and resources into building it.

logicalmindon Mathematics for computer science (Fall 2010, MIT)

The symbol N stands for the set of nonnegative integers, namely, 0, 1, 2, 3, . . . (ask your instructor for the complete list).

Ah, math humor ;-)

logicalmindon IE9 team responds to Reddit questions: reddit tl;dr version

Here is the AMA that just started. Seems the reddit base is riled up against them from the start.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_memb...

logicalmindon Dick is a bad manager

As a manager, is your cubicle set so that your monitor is visible to everyone who walks by? Or is this simply policy for your subordinates?

logicalmindon Functional Programming, from Java to Scala, D. Wall

http://www.java-tv.com/2010/06/29/funky-java-objective-scala...

logicalmindon Tell HN: An Observation

To be constructive, if my generalizations are correct, then HN could support some form of tags or categorizations to identify the kind of story being posted. People could focus on the areas that interest them and not see stories that don't appeal to them. This could also be a way to identify "gossip" and track its appeal to parts of the userbase. Just an idea...

logicalmindon Tell HN: An Observation

Forgive my generalization, but I see HN as a handful of groups with some overlap. You have hackers/programmers, business marketing, pure entrepreneurs, and investors/angels. There are people who fall into multiple camps, but stories tend to fall into one of these groups. I think the point you're making is that topics along the lines of hackers/programmers seem to have fallen off in favor of some of the other areas. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Personally, I visit the "new" page as often as the frontpage and find many interesting stories there.

logicalmindon The Genius and Tragedy of Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

To add to that, the post seems very personal to me, which is the part I find most distasteful. Yet, there are many many reams of comments here that are further dissecting patio11 on a personal level. It's like people don't seem to realize that patio11 is either reading these posts or soon will and it feels very much like people are speaking good/bad of him behind his back. A lot of this discussion and commentary will be linked to his real name and his future. For better or worse.

It feels like a room full of amateur psychologists diagnosing a person in public.

logicalmindon The Genius and Tragedy of Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

I find this really disturbing. This is part of the reason I don't use my real name as my username on HN (or anywhere else on the internet for that matter). Maybe I'm just more sensitive to privacy issues.

logicalmindon Ask HN: Are you saving for retirement?

But by the time you're 65 the retirement age will be 75. So if you want the money at 65 you'll have to take it out with penalties.

logicalmindon Trouble with Diaspora

A related question would be, is this their minimally viable product. And how secure does a minimally viable product need to be?