nonce42

Some random thoughts on the US movie situation:

For teens, it sort of makes sense in a way to restrict portrayals of sex more than violence. The average teen isn't going to decide to murder someone after watching a movie, but very possibly could decide to have sex.

It seems like movies have a monopoly on socially acceptable portrayals of nudity. Nobody raises an eyebrow if you go to a mainstream movie with a nude scene. And actresses can show breasts in movies, but would cause a scandal if a nipple showed happened in real life.

Once I started thinking about how much violence is shown in movies, I realized that it really is a crazy level. Just count the murders in a typical action movie and compare to real life. (Interestingly, rapes are portrayed very very rarely in movies.) I'm not suggesting censorship of violent movies, but doesn't it seem like maybe there's a bit too much?

"... on sites like RentBoy, which was busted and shut down in 2015 by Homeland Security for facilitating prostitution." - am I the only one who finds this a bizarre role for Homeland Security?

P.S. This sure feels like a PR piece: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

PS2: The article has lots of ads for luxury goods while describing women using prostitution to buy these products: "She became a sugar baby in order to buy luxury goods." I can't figure out if that is terrible ad placement or genius ad placement. And there's a strange circularity where the article creates demand for luxury goods (and sex), while simultaneously providing a solution for how to obtain the luxury goods (and sex).

I've had a 4-day work week (working 80%) for a while and it's great. If your circumstances allow you to do this (and I recognize that most people can't), I strongly recommend it. I've been able to do a lot more on side projects (like blog posts). It also gives me much better "work-life balance" and more time to spend with my family - I know it's a cliche, but kids will be gone before you know it so spend time with them while you can.

A few disadvantages: First, I only get paid 80% as much. Second, it took a fair bit of effort at work to set this up at work; management was supportive, but they'd rather I worked 100% and it took multiple levels of approval. Third, this basically puts me off the career fast track. Fourth, from a social/cultural point of view, people don't really understand working 80% and I find it's easier not telling people about it (thus the throwaway).

I've been doing a 4-day work week (working 80%) and it's great. If you're in a circumstance that allows you to do this (and I recognize that most people aren't), I strongly recommend it. It gives me much more time to spend with my family - I know it's a cliche, but kids will be gone before you know it so spend time with them while you can. The 4-day work week also gives me much more time (nonlinearly more) to spend on side projects.

A few disadvantages: First, I only get paid 80% as much. Second, it took a fair bit of effort at work to set this up; management was supportive, but they'd rather I worked 100% and it took multiple levels of approval. Third, this basically puts me off the career fast track. Fourth, from a social/cultural point of view, people don't really understand working 80% and I find it's better not telling people about it (thus the throwaway). Finally, I feel sort of a personal pressure to make the most of the extra day - I no longer have an excuse for not accomplishing more. E.g. why am I on HN when I could be writing a book :-)

Yes, a shorter work week definitely helps. I'm currently working 80% of full time, which gives me so much more time to work on interesting (but inherently unprofitable) side projects. I highly recommend working 80%, but I recognize that financial and social factors make it difficult in general.

$8M. This is based on personal experience - that's the number where it started to feel different.

  Whatever happens, we have got
  The Maxim gun, and they have not.
  -- Hilaire Belloc

A basic assumption with drones is they are great because the US has them, but that's not always going to be the case. What worries me is what will happen when drones become widespread. Sooner or later someone will make the AK-47 of drones, and there will be millions of lethal drones around. I don't know what that will do for warfare, but it can't be good. World War I showed the difficulty of adapting to widespread machine guns, and the adjustment to widespread drones could be just as bad.

The article omits a huge factor: In American culture, you are not allowed to say you are smarter than someone else, and nerds typically violate this rule. Thought experiment: turn to your officemate and explain why you are smarter than they are - it's not going to go well. Saying that you're richer, thinner, or more athletic is also arrogant, but I think putting down someone's intelligence is especially cutting.

I saved myself a lot of trouble in high school by never explicitly saying I was smart (even though it was obvious). If someone started shoving me and saying "You think you're smarter than everyone else", I'd say something like "No, not really. I just do well in school", and they would happily go on their way. (I'm sure this wouldn't work for everyone, and I don't mean to generalize too much. Also, this was my actual view, not just something I said.)

I hypothesize based on this and other articles that Paul Graham went out of his way to make sure people knew how smart he was, which would explain why he ended up at the "D" table. This seems more likely than the article's hypothesis that nerds spend all their time on being smart and just didn't have time to be popular. (Seriously, look at athletes who are practicing at 6am - they are the ones who are spending all their time on their craft.)

Going the opposite direction, I'm working 80% (32 hour weeks) by choice and it's awesome. I have so much more time for other interests and family and it's much less stressful. Of course I only get paid 80%, but that works for me.

I'm doing this at a major computer company and my management is supportive. Nonetheless, it took months of discussion and needed to get approved by the VP. And it's probably hurting my "career path".

Culturally, I find people don't understand working less than 100%. You have Friday off? Is that vacation? Is that a partial layoff? (I'm male, and in the US for context.)

Overall, it would be nice if working less than 40 hours were an option for more people.

Yes, a lot of people don't understand that.

To make it concrete: Do you skip screening of the young pregnant Irish woman? I hope not. That was Anne-Marie Murphy, whose boyfriend put Semtex and a timer in her bag. [1]

Do you skip screening of the attractive blonde woman? Sorry, that was hijacker Leila Khaled with a blonde wig and hidden grenades. [2]

(These are both very interesting stories and I recommend reading the links below.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_affair

[2] http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2001-09-28/news/0109280226_...

Is there some movie that's source of the cliche of needing to defuse a bomb by cutting the wire with the right color? This is so common a cliche that it must have come from somewhere.

And while I'm asking random questions, where did the cliche of the anarchist with the spherical black bomb with a fuse coming out the top come from? This icon was used for system errors on the original Mac, but it must be way older than that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(symbol)

Her claim that "“don’t ask for permission” is a dangerously rapey lesson to teach young men" is rather bizarre, given that the expression is attributed to Grace Hopper (specifically "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper) It's extra ironic that Kate Losse complains that the work of women in computer science is ignored and erased, while not recognizing the contribution of Admiral Hopper.

I didn't expect so much controversy here, I just wanted to get a feel for the order of magnitude. I went with 2000 pounds for the car weight, which is the weight of a 1976 Honda Accord - 1976 because of a search error on my part. 4000 pounds is the average new car or light truck, so that number is a bit high because of the trucks. In any case, the energy dumped into this experiment is like a big car crash concentrated into a tiny capsule.

Anyone who has used a treadmill at the gym will recognize that it's a lot of work to burn off 400 calories. Not enough to get a car up to 140 MPH because the body isn't 100% efficient.

To put these numbers in context, 8000 joules is about 2 kilocalories (or about half an M&M candy). It's about $0.0003 of wall electricity. It's about the energy in an AA battery. It's the energy from exploding 2 grams of TNT.

1.7 megajoules is about 400 kilocalories, or a king size Kit Kat bar. This is the energy of a car going 140 miles per hour. This is about 7 cents of AC power.

It's worth reading the criminal complaint and indictment (https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-auernheimer) to get some background. In particular: the discussions of using the email addresses for a phishing scheme, using them for spam, shorting AT&T stock and profiting off the data release, setting up WiFi routers so they can blame it on a third party, discussing how this was a federal crime, and how to spin themselves as a legitimate security organization. These things make it really hard to view weev as a genuine security researcher who was prosecuted for no good reason.

"...marvel at the poor decisions of the poor" - I've always wondered if rich marvel at the bad decisions of the middle class in the same way. And what they see as the big mistakes keeping them from being rich. E.g. the problem with the middle class is they just don't understand the importance of entrepreneurship / capital gains / ???

Looking at the Bay Area in this map, I noticed a very dense African-American region near Dublin CA that looked out of place. I investigated what it was and was shocked to discover it was the Santa Rita Jail. The map really made it clear how racially skewed the jail population is.

I find it strange that the US has laws that many people break and the law is only enforced sporadically. Some examples in California are speeding, missing front license plate, age of consent laws, use tax on out-of-state/internet purchases, and illegal immigration. Having a bunch of laws that people break with impunity has a "broken window" effect, leading to less respect for the law overall. (Whether or not these laws are just is an orthogonal issue, which I won't get in to.)

Regarding speeding, I don't see how the current system can hold up under technological advances. There are a dozen trivial ways to tell if someone is speeding, from the toll booth data of the original article to cell phone GPS to computer vision to road sensors to smart cars. It doesn't make sense for the police to perform inefficient, dangerous traffic stops when all this data is available, but the system would collapse if everyone received 10 traffic tickets a day.

The people who claim that $X million in Silicon Valley is still just middle class are annoying, but it's true. I have $8 million and it honestly changes very little. I'm living a middle class life, working a middle class programming job, my friends are middle class, I buy middle class stuff, and I have no special power or respect. I'm not sure how to convince you that this isn't just verbal gymnastics, but real.

There are a few advantages. One difference is I don't worry about how I'm going to pay for e.g. a $1000 car repair (but it's still painful). I'm also more likely to hire someone for maintenance or gardening. Also, I theoretically could quit my job and live off my investments, but that's unlikely to happen.

Of course this is partially a linguistic argument. If you define upper class as the top income quintile, for instance, than I'm upper class, but that's meaningless.

I do wonder if I'm doing things wrong, and there's some secret for admission to the upper class. Maybe I should start flying first class, buy a Ferrari, stop shopping at Target, and hang out with rich people. (Although I think that would just make me nouveau riche, not upper class.)

(My motivation in this comment is that these HN threads tend to be entirely speculation, and the semi-rich never comment, so I hope to provide a useful perspective.)

About $10-100 a month through Amazon Associates on a moderately popular blog (usually the lower amount). And $12,000 a month from a small Bay Area office building.

The important thing to remember is that AGI (which the article discusses) and how much money you "make" are not very correlated once you make above, say, 200K a year. A key reason is unrealized capital gains - I guarantee you that if a billionaire makes $77 million, most of that isn't going to appear as AGI. In a sense, realizing capital gains means something went wrong, not to mention income which is very wrong. Other factors that keep money out of AGI include tax-exempt bonds, business expenses, and capital loss harvesting. (And these are just some of the legal ways.)

Please, when you read an article discussing AGI, keep in mind that it is a semi-random number. Unfortunately since it's the number available, it's what gets used.

This discussion seems to be mostly theoretical, so as someone who actually has $7 million, I'll provide my experience. In summary, not life-changing - my life is pretty much like the average engineer. I'm not spending like a rock star - your car, computer, stereo, clothes, etc are probably better than mine. (Although my house is a bit larger than average for Silicon Valley: 5br/3ba in an unfashionable city.) It's not enough money to feel even slightly important or rich in Silicon Valley. I don't feel like the "money problem" is solved; I plan to keep working for the foreseeable future.

I suppose I could move to somewhere like Kansas and retire, and live an upper-middle class life, but I don't see the point in that. (The "official" recommended spending rate of 4% would yield a high but not enormous income. Expecting 6-8% income is crazy talk.) The obvious HN answer is to start a company, but a) I'd be bad at it, b) I wouldn't enjoy it, c) I'd probably end up losing a pile of money, d) large opportunity cost, and e) health care.

Trying to summarize: the people who say a few million doesn't go far in Silicon Valley are right. It eliminates various problems (and I do sympathize with those with financial difficulties), but otherwise hasn't changed much for me. (Or maybe I'm just using it wrong.)

The Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens is very interesting; it describes an actual case where one of the people in a lifeboat was killed and eaten by the others, who would have otherwise all died. They claimed it was a "custom of the sea" that you could draw lots and kill one victim in such circumstances, but the court decided in a highly controversial case that necessity is no defence against a charge of murder.

An amusing article about the trolley problem is "Brain Teaser" (http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/harper%27s.htm) which satirizes these ethics problems by adding an absurd number of conditions such as a busload of orphans, transplant patients about to die, a brain in a vat, and the inventor of the pop-top can.

My impression (from very brief study of Mandarin) is that Mandarin has a lot more homonyms than most languages, e.g. lǐ has a ton of meanings: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/l%C7%90 It also seems to me that a lot of Mandarin phonemes are much closer together than most languages, e.g. ch and q are both a similar "ch" sound (likewise sh and x). Or maybe these sounds just seem similar to me because of my English upbringing?

Do linguists have a way to quantitatively measure how close together the sounds and words are in a language? Some sort of Shannon entropy measure, maybe? Or a way to measure how spread out words are in "phonetic space". I couldn't find anything, but I'd like to know if there's a way to measure these things objectively.

Thanks kscaldef and detst for your replies. I do think a lot about moving out of Silicon Valley especially since the state of California is in such a financial mess. Theoretically, I could quit my job now, but it wouldn't make much financial sense, and I enjoy where I'm working.

My experience with $5M is in fact firsthand, and it feels a lot closer to "middle class" than to "rich". Maybe it's because I live a non-extravagant lifestyle and I just need to buy myself a Ferrari :-) But seriously, what I'd like is to find out from people who actually know, if there's a financial level at which life changes qualitatively. E.g. is there a level at which it makes sense to stop working and spend your time managing your charitable foundation and hanging out at TED and Davos?

One thing I genuinely want to know is how much money it takes to be "rich" in Silicon Valley. In my experience, $5M yields a slightly better but still basically middle-class life. I suspect a lot of people are underestimating how much they need to reach the FU level.