willurd

Grant (the 3Blue1Brown guy) has an uncanny ability to explain difficult concepts and the fundamental intuition behind them. In many of his videos, he explains topics from the perspective of a person inventing that topic (such as in his first Calculus video [1]). I can't recommend his videos enough.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUvTyaaNkzM&list=PLZHQObOWTQ...

The author of this article either didn't actually read 12 Rules for Life or already made up their mind before going in.

> Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say.

The irony of this is that the author himself has nothing of real value to say. (See, I said it so it must be true)

Way to ignore the article completely and dismiss an entire class of people in one sentence. Bravo.

I wouldn't even go this far. An amateur can have tons of experience, and even be an expert in their field. It's true, many people use the word "amateur" to mean unskilled, beginner, etc, but in actuality it's simply someone who engages in some activity for something other than payment. ("Amateur" means "lover of" in Old French, apparently.)

An amateur isn't really someone who knows nothing about a particular subject. On the contrary, every amateur by definition knows at least something about their subject matter. An amateur is simply someone who engages that subject in a non-paid capacity, for personal enjoyment or some other reason. Indeed, amateurs can be, and many are, subject matter experts.

> an excess of analytical thought, particularly when applied to "what if" scenarios.

> This leaves me usually exceptionally well prepared for most situations life throws at me, through my incessant internal roleplaying, however also results in me "experiencing" many negative situations and outcomes, in order to understand how to either mitigate against them or to deal with them when they arise - and the emotions that come with them.

I do this ALL the time. I tried explaining it to my family once...they looked at me as if I just told them I'm a schizophrenic. I'm not having a conversation with myself and I don't believe these scenarios are real. I'm role playing because it helps me predict lots of possible scenarios and how people might react in those situations, which then lets me make more informed decisions about how to handle situations such as those and finds me less frequently being caught off guard.

Why they didn't understand this, I do not know. I'm glad at least someone does.

Thanks for the feedback! If you have any ideas about how you would change the syntax, I'd love to hear them.

And that overloading helper function is cool :)

> Books aren't like software where you can release often and iterate.

That's not true at all. Check out https://leanpub.com/, Manning's MEAPs, The Pragmatic Programmers' Beta books, Apress' Alpha books, Oreilly's Early Release books, etc, etc. Of course these are all digital (mostly PDFs), but they are still very much books.

I don't agree with you. Therefore you lack the mental wherewithal to understand my point of view. I mean just look at all these connections I make between unrelated things. I also have all these cool statistics I made up to prove (not really) my point, so obviously you're wrong.

In all seriousness, though, maybe the programming you've done has been a slog. I'm sure I speak for quite a few programmers here on HN in kindly asking you to not call us all stupid for liking something you don't.

If any law would make suicide illegal, or any government would exert any control over you should you fail, then it stands to reason that those people making those laws, and those people in those governments, own your body.

It's a toy, that looks like a gun, and shoots plastic balls filled with air that afaik wont break skin. Toy gun is not only not weak, it's accurate.

Until things change, this is arguably the most important US issue we are facing right now, and is thus always relevant. So no, there are not too many NSA stories on HN.

Please redirect your shock toward the US government.

And by the way, at the time of writing 27 of the top 30 articles don't mention Snowden in the comments, so...

No problem at all :) Glad I could help you out.

Maybe that's where the confusion was. I was talking about browser development. Thanks.

Does whoever downvoted me care to explain why or offer another opinion?

Not that this invalidates what you said, but NPM and Grunt (and just enough Node.js to use them) are required learning for JavaScript developers nowadays IMO.

I think I can explain how to get started with require.js pretty quickly. I've attempted to do so with a short gist: https://gist.github.com/willurd/6054834 (much shorter than the OP and a higher code/text ratio).

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there aren't people out to get you.

I was actually going to suggest $1099. Can I pay that instead?

Invited. Thanks!

I've come to accept that HN is the place I go to satisfy my "intellectual curiosity" and more focused lists are where I go to get my learn on. For example, for JavaScript stuff:

* http://reddit.com/r/javascript (yeah it's on reddit, but it's a great resource)

* http://javascriptweekly.com/ ( https://twitter.com/JavaScriptDaily )

* http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/tag/javascript/

* http://dailyjs.com/

* http://javascriptshow.com/ (been a while since the last episode)

* http://javascriptjabber.com/ (I haven't listened to any episodes yet, but I plan on it soon)

I'd like one! william.bowers@gmail.com

How many tigers have you repelled? Which species? I'm particularly worried about bengal tigers in my apartment complex. Can it handle those?

I agree, as I stated above in another comment. When asked whether the burden of proof is on them, I replied: "It is. That doesn't mean we have to marginalize people who have theories, even if they don't have any evidence to back them up. My approach is to entertain all possibilities until they are proven to me to be false. In that way I attempt to avoid tunnel vision."

It is. That doesn't mean we have to marginalize people who have theories, even if they don't have any evidence to back them up. My approach is to entertain all possibilities until they are proven to me to be false. In that way I attempt to avoid tunnel vision.

This is the first I'm hearing of it, and I imagine the first a lot of other people are hearing of it. Two things:

1. Just because it's old news, doesn't mean it isn't news for a lot of people.

2. My point still stands: some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true (do a search for "conspiracy theories that were proven true"), so wholesale calling conspiracy theorists nut jobs, or saying they are "tinfoil hat" wearers is unbelievably shortsighted.

Has it? Examples? (I'm not saying it hasn't; I don't know)

I don't deny that some people do actually have paranoid delusions. But there's a big difference between a paranoid delusion and a (conspiracy) theory. The point I'm trying to make is that in light of recent conspiracies, we have to cut the conspiracy theorists some slack.

Ugh. In light of recent events you can't seriously be using the phrase "tinfoil hat" in good conscience.

As to whether you're right or not, I don't know. But please figure out a less lazy way of getting your point across. The whole "tinfoil hat" argument is a fallacy used to marginalize people and shut them up without actually providing any evidence. And if you have evidence, then you don't need it.

Well, I never said static languages suck :) I really like static typing actually, and have seriously thought about using TypeScript or Dart. I've also got years of professional experience with C++ and AS3 and I love them both. I think Java is a fantastic language. And Objective-C...is growing on me ;)

What I did say was that I can be just as productive in those languages as I am in JavaScript, if not more so. It remains to be seen whether I can gain more productivity with TypeScript or Dart.