Viewing profile — pfkurtz

We have 2 options for dangerous things: 1) Regulate. 2) Criminalize. If lots of people do it, (1) is better, even though it normalizes the danger, because we get seat belts and pha…

Isn't the suggestion that if there were not police/criminals as an interface to getting high, there would be a) the ability to know whether the drug one is purchasing contains a Fe…

It's because Iran is currently undergoing a large rebellion that might topple their human rights abusing government, and those other countries aren't.

If I were mostly mobile I would buy one of those 2-way screen extenders that attaches to the back of the laptop and gives you 3 monitors, and/or a large vertical touchscreen to use…

Very disappointed by this. I've got mounted vertical monitors surrounding an extra wide curved monitor on a desk that has 3 distinct surfaces at different heights and a hidden shel…

There's a wide range of symptom-clusters called "depression" and other mental health issues that pair nicely with feeling terrible. If it's not that bad, and/or if you have suffici…

LSD: Multiple times I did it with others and profoundly deepened my relationship with those individuals. Another time I did it by myself and saw the face of evil and I've never bee…

Frege is all over analaytic philosophy, as I experienced it as an undergraduate in a top department. Many of the most important papers and books (Dummett, Kripke, Evans, etc) in ph…

That he took a walk everyday is somewhat informative, given how much of his philosophy is centered on normativity, but I prefer the anecdote about how he was a billiards hustler as…

To unite our points, I might be thinking of something like: the immensity of sensory and cognitive data that pass through (sub)consciousness during the learning task are sifted and…

That's sometimes true but I think my point still stands. When I'm studying a foreign language, I learn some words and they stick, but I'm exposed to a bunch more that I don't remem…

Learning is as much forgetting as remembering. When I study something, I go for awhile, but eventually it becomes difficult, confusing, hard to see the forest for the trees. Partic…

Really, I have little piles everywhere around the house I tend to park for any length of time; I've never been able to do flashcards since my mom made me do them a ton when I was l…

I'm studying Programming Rust (O'Reilly, 2nd edition one year old, 800+pp) and I think it's fantastic. I am a better programmer for it. 4.6 stars wtih 200+ reviews on Amazon, for w…

Leaving technical books in the bathroom is a crucial hack for lifelong adult learning.

The people who are unwelcoming on HN and the people who post interesting/challenging responses... do not seem to overlap.

Those are not places I suggested leaving books, because I'm not stupid. I suggested: by the toilet. So you can learn something every time you poop. Then there's these other things …

There's an obvious example in programming: one might read a lot about machine learning, without becoming a practitioner. Without actually doing some work, one's opinions about buil…

What the heck are you even talking about? I gotta say, Hacker News is probably one of the least welcoming communities on the internet.

Not even close.

If you triple majored in 3 technical subjects, I submit that your aim was not what I am talking about. I am talking about how you fit in learning the real knowledge of our collecti…

Lol. Read my first line. I'm a software engineer posting on Hacker news. I know how to learn a skill. This is something else, that you can have, if you read lots of books and learn…

A lot of people here are going to talk negatives and prioritization and purpose, but I personally also want to be practically omniscient, and you should strive for it too. You need…

Thank you for this recommendation, I'm on a DynamoDB contract job and... really learning to think hard about key structure and designing for efficient querying, rather than efficie…