Viewing profile — igf

Building in an interrupt "Hey, pay attention to the real world now" feature would seem important. On the other hand, it'd still be awkward when you had to climb over someone to go …

If my lottery tickets had anything like the rate of return of YC's, then buying more would be an extremely sound investment strategy.

I'd also like to see estimates from the 1990s of how much sea level rise we can expect by 2016. I seem to remember reading a book back in the day that said New York City would be c…

Why? They don't have anything to destroy anyway.

Well, it's too damn crowded on this planet.

Even out there, it's a pretty rare use case. If you're somewhere so remote that you can't get there with any kind of land vehicle, then... what are you even doing there, that you n…

There's no good solution to running a large organisation. Instead of complaining that large organisations are badly run, we should instead marvel that they run at all.

Unfortunately the indispensible employee generally isn't the one getting fed hard technical problems, he's the one responsible for maintaining the complex, mission-critical thingy …

>The degree to which pre-modern Britain included people of African origin within its population continues to be a topic of considerable interest Why? Also, aren't all people of Afr…

Given the ongoing mess that was the onlineification of the 2016 census, I don't think anyone (the people or the government) would have any interest in this. The Australian election…

Well, I stick all that under the heading of eugenics anyway. I don't care how it's achieved, but we need better people.

The answer is eugenics. Good luck getting anyone to take that seriously though.

>Many people come to realize their mediocrity after spending enough time under the sun. Accepting this realization and learning to be happy with it takes time -- especially at the …

>I think you're mistaking someone who's happy but ignorant of their mediocrity, and someone who's aware of their own mediocrity Not really, I don't think people are unaware of thei…

The vast majority of people on the planet are mediocre, and many people seem happy about it; or rather, if they're unhappy then they're unhappy about other things rather than their…

Restricted to the publically-available data from one particular and rather odd site, but probably not crazy. At first it seems counterintuitive, shouldn't it be roughly 50% gaining…

Which still has nothing to do with value, which is why I value more highly a Stradivarius violin than the pile of ashes which you could obtain by burning a Stradivarius violin.

> Even crazier, the physical size of your font can influence peoples’ understanding and feelings about it. Now, I wonder if I can make this work the other way around. If I'm making…

I don't know if game theory is the branch of mathematics that can help you out here. Game theory usually rests on matters of "If I do X then my opponent(s) will do Y", but in this …

> What's the argument that this is gambling? I suppose because you pay a small amount of money and you may or may not get something valuable out, which makes it effectively gamblin…

I don't know whether they're typically introduced with malign intent, or with good intentions that inevitably go bad, but I don't really think it matters much -- open vacation poli…

Okay, fine, but why am I in here experiencing it?

>I would be willing to code in a not-so-beautiful language for a summer Career advice: don't be a primadonna. Even actual literal primadonnas don't start out as primadonnas.

> The "trap" that is the Labor Theory of Value may not be the most profitable but maybe it's the most ethical The labour theory of value doesn't even logically hang together in any…

This is why you should never rely on any government to take care of you in retirement. Save for your own damn retirement and retire on your own damn schedule.