thedevil

I learned to accept that I feel bad sometimes and it made me happier.

But I went farther than that.

I also learned to accept that my ideas and behaviors are inconsistent and it helped me better understand the world and myself.

And finally, I learned to accept that I sometimes do bad things (and desire to do even more bad things) and it made me a better person.

(Disclaimer: my experiments have n=1, no control group and subjective measurements chosen in hindsight.)

Or (4) Two things that are good and just can conflict sometimes and cause challenges.

I'm an American and I used to say that I'm antiwar but what I really meant is that I'm anti-iraq-war, anti-Afghanistan-war, etc.

I do think there are wars we should fight. We just haven't had any of those in my lifetime.

Thank you for your awesome response. It probably would have taken me hours of googling and reading to find these exact posts. A mere upvote is not enough of a thank you for such a quality reply.

In my state, there's a (fast) road that turns down under a bridge. From a distance, it kind of looks like I'm going to crash into the bridge.

Even though I know the road wouldn't drive directly into the bridge, I slow down a little and look carefully to make sure I'm actually not going to crash into the bridge.

When my perception doesn't fit my internal model, I gather more data (look at different parts of the bridge and what other cars are doing), or transform the data (ie turn my head slightly and look at the bridge and road from different angles)

Edit: Likewise, when someone's tone doesn't match their words, I gather more data (look at their body language).

Have any researchers experimented with neural nets to do the same? I haven't noticed any posts here about that.

It was a cloudy day, near sunset, low humidity, the car was slightly cooler than outside, and we were acclimated to higher temperatures.

75 was not only safe, it was comfortable.

It actually is a misdemeanor in my state to leave a child unattended in a car if it's in public and there's risk of "hyperthermia, hypothermia, or dehydration."

I looked it up after a stranger hung out at my car to nag me for leaving my son (who refused to leave the car) for five minutes in a locked car in a safe neighborhood in 75f weather.

tldr: Google founders have more voting rights than Apple executives. In case you didn't know, this impacts corporate behavior, especially dividends.

I thought this would be about the way each interacted with customers, which is far more interesting.

Note that GDP is only a proxy for value to society. It's based on what's measurable, not on what's valuable.

Prisons and wars increase GDP but make us worse off. Likewise, many free apps (e.g. Google Maps) significantly improve our lives but don't significantly impact GDP.

This matters because the approach used to measure externalities may undervalue software engineers and teachers and overvalue defense contractors and lobbyists.

Edit: This is really important for software. Software has low marginal cost so the market price (and therefore measured GDP) trends towards 0 but the (mostly unmeasured) consumer surplus is huge.

Another Edit: Note that externalities for defense contractors and lobbyists actually weren't measured here and probably couldn't be reliably measured with this technique due to international differences, but they made great examples for my explanation.

I'm going to go against the crowd and say that Uber survives as a business for now. They may scale back expansion and they might raise prices. They may even get acquired at a lower valuation. But I bet they'll still be operating.

I think their burn rate is almost surely the result of subsidizing expanding markets. I can't imagine established markets being anything but ludicrously profitable.

Disclaimer: I don't necessarily like Uber, I've never even used them and I know almost nothing about their (former) CEO outside of headlines.

That's way too many emojis for the purpose of quickly conveying high level information.

It's not that politics don't matter, it's that political discussions are not just useless - they're harmful.

Political discussions almost always become emotional, rather than intellectual, discussions. They work on the wrong part of the brain.

Virtually everyone takes absurd positions and then viciously attacks their fellow human beings who take a different absurd position.

So every day on HN I see articles explaining 1) why Elon Musk and Tesla are great, 2) why Kalanik is evil and Uber is going to fail, and 3) why Trump is evil and stupid.

This article comes very close to all three (only briefly mentioning Trump).

Now, I dislike Trump and Elon is my hero (don't know much about Kalanik), but clearly there's a very serious groupthink problem going on here on HN.

All three of these men are mere mortals and only have 24 hrs/day. They can't commit great crimes or great heroic acts every single day. Yet, these articles hit the top of the feed every day and seeing these articles every day is going to cause your brain to outweigh these articles, seriously distorting your perception of reality.

I suspect this is why some were so surprised by the election result. I actually bet my money on Trump even though I dislike him (he's a slimy jerk, but he's not stupid). And while many here are 100% sure Uber is going to flop, I'd be tempted to put money on Uber. Their business model looks insanely good to me (if self-driving cars or government actions don't wipe them out).

Unfortunately, this reality distortion isn't a problem restricted to HN.

As a sincere question, why did people downvote this comment?

I thought he was funny and I think lighthearted humor has value to it. It didn't seem snarky to me, did it to someone else?

Did it seem off-topic? It's a joke rather than useful information, but I'd argue that it is on-topic per the rules: "Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

Am I missing something?

It's interesting to note that China and India were the global economic juggernauts until only very recently:

(first google result to demonstrate the point) https://infogr.am/Share-of-world-GDP-throughout-history

In my early 20s, I used to meet girls at a country swing dancing place. I was really nerdy and this gave me a chance to practice interacting with women and I got quite a few dates off of it.

Some of my fellow nerds tried to do the same thing but they made this big mistake: they'd think just because the girl danced with them, they could try for a phone number. It would make the girls really uncomfortable. Other people would see that, and it made it harder to get another girl to dance with.

I took a different strategy: I danced with any girl, made them smile (I was good at dancing with beginners and I recycled the same few jokes over and over), and then move on. Sometimes the girl would show interest and that's when I'd go for a phone number.

And if the girl wasn't interested (vast majority of the time), they'd still tell their friends how fun I am, or other people would see the whole interaction and I'd quickly feel like a rockstar.

> what it is that ostensibly makes RT so different from other media networks

1) Different kinds of propaganda. Fox, CNN, MSNBC are businesses that reflect the biases of audience, owners, employees, etc. RT bias is support of the Kremlin.

2) Different levels of commitment. Fox, MSNBC, CNN are businesses pursuing their own interest. Their purpose is making money. RT was set up purely for propaganda. It's purpose is spreading propaganda. The "alternative news" is merely a method to deliver the propaganda.

Fox opposed Trump but then flipped to suit their interest. RT will never oppose Putin.

If Putin decided he wanted to genocide Jews (a totally unrealistic example just to illustrate the point), RT would come up with a reason why it's unavoidable, justified, and the US's fault anyway. If Trump came up with the same idea, even Fox news would probably oppose it.

I thought it probably auto-updated in Linux (Mint) as it seems to on the rest of my devices. But I looked at my version, and checked Wikipedia and saw it was from a year ago.

Laziness. Although your comment will probably guilt me into finally doing an update.

So, I think I owe you a "thanks"?

Not everyone knows basic UI principles and definitely not everyone has the skill of applying (and noticing) them. I derive a little educational value out of it.

Although, if I'm honest, my main motivation in reading it is confirmation bias / validating some of my own complaints.

Also: The new UI freezes up a lot.

And when I try to log in from my linux laptop, it tells me I need a more modern browser (because my Chrome is a single year out of date?).

But it's correct in telling me to use a different browser: LinkedIn (and only LinkedIn) crashes constantly otherwise.

Shh.... don't give them ideas.

I always knew that lying to oneself is a good planned strategy for lying.

But never thought that our natural tendency to deceive ourselves might have the ultimate purpose of helping us deceive others.

This is why I love hacker news. I get a different perspective every day that (whether it's right or wrong) forces me to re-consider my mental models of the world.

> but we made it that way ON PURPOSE

Aside from everything else, why would you make animated squiggly lines on purpose? It's extremely irritating because it causes motion in my peripheral vision. I can't see how it adds value.

As an HOA board member, I approve of this comment.

My personal experience is consistent with your second point.

But I'd be careful about making conclusions from the suicide/antidepressant statistics. It's shown to be highly correlated to altitude. I've included a couple links from google search to demonstrate the point.

That being said, the Mormon/LDS church does cause some psychological hardships for certain groups such as LGBT and ex-mormons... at least in my anecdotal experience.

suicide rate map: http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2015/03/higher-suicide-rates-o...

altitude map: http://weather.unisys.com/usgs/

Comcast ripped me off much more than that. My HOA signed a (incredible bad) deal with Comcast to provide basic channels (the ones nobody wants) for $35/unit* * for 3 years. Then, Comcast's rep allegedly* forged the contract to last 8 years instead of 3.

The stupid manager lost the emails, Comcast insisted on the (allegedly* forged) 8-year contract and so the HOA paid it until the manager found the original signed contract (years later) and compared it to the forged version. Then Comcast still pressured the board on the 8-year until we hired a lawyer.

I estimate that this alleged* fraud was worth $378,000.

* It was never proven in court but the evidence is pretty strong. The forged pages have inconsistent numbering, scanner marks, wording, and date format.

* * It was actually a rate that increases over years. $35 was last year's rate.

I'm not under any NDA so I'm exposing it but making sure all my details and wording are correct so I don't get sued. Please forgive the edits.

I'm not sure that achieving a solution is the same as avoiding a problem. And it's not clear to me which has happened.

I'm from Utah. I moved to Seattle, then San Francisco. When I had a kid, I moved back to Utah.

One thing I noticed is that Utah is almost all middle class. Some have more money, some have less, but most of them are middle class.

It's relatively easy to go from poor to rich if you're really middle class. I mean that if your parents are well educated but a high school teacher and a stay-at-home-mom in a middle class neighborhood, you're​ poor but you can become a medical doctor almost as easily as a rich kid.

It's not so easy to become a doctor if you're raised by your high school drop out grandma because your mom's working and your dad's missing and the adults around you are unemployed, going to prison, or working at fast food restaurants. If you can lift up people in situations like that, I'd be much more impressed.

I think the Mormon welfare system is very impressive (and I do recommend that progressives take a look at it) and Utah government is vastly better than California's. But I think the lack of a real lower and upper class would make mobility look artificially better.