What does it take to be a programmer, not just to become one?

Making peace with the fact that there will never be a day when perfect code springs full formed from your head like a Greek goddes, and that what you are getting paid to do (assuming you're getting paid) is to be aggravated.

If the job is good, the aggravations are the kind that you get to have fun eliminating: clients with use cases the product team didn't think of, someone changed an API and didn't tell you, you need to build a new feature, etc. (If the job is bad, the aggravations are probably the same as any other bad job: meetings or mismanagement.)

Thanks for thinking this through.

A few questions:

Would there be a way for people who already maintain blogs elsewhere to cross-post to their LW subdomain? (Would this even be desirable?)

Do you envision LW2 continuing to include applied rationality type posts? Does that work with "everything should work towards Aumann agreement"?

users may not repeatedly bring up the same controversial discussion outside of their original context

How could we track this, other than relying on mods to be like "ugh, this poster again"?

professionally edited rationality journal

Woah. Is this really a thing that MIRI could (resources permitting) just like ... do?

Durham, NC party -- 1:00 PM EDT at Fullsteam, 726 Rigsbee Avenue, 27701.

FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/721959147924349/

Noted. I'll hazard a guess that it didn't have anything much to do with the Rationality Diaries. -- Did you by any chance get involved in discussions of politics, gender or race, and take a position that would not generally be described as "really right-wing"? Most of the cases of mass-downvoting I've encountered on LW seem to have been done by neoreactionaries. (Quite possibly just one neoreactionary, who has I think had two different accounts banned for doing this.)

The remark wasn't "jokily defensive", it's because for a while someone was serially downvoting everything I posted, and I wanted to know why.

I still want to know why!

I finally set my sights low enough that I got some things done at work! :p (Which is to say, I reduced them from "I have to write this thing I don't understand" to "I have to write part of this thing I don't understand" and finally to "Okay, I have to write ONE LINE of code today.")

Archive of meetup topics:

3/17/2016: Go (the game)

3/4/2016:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2qc/rationality_power_tools/
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationality_power_tools

1/22/2015:
http://mindingourway.com/steering-towards-forbidden-conversations
http://mindingourway.com/enjoying-the-feeling-of-agency

3/5/2015:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

5/21/2015 -- Gamification
http://lesswrong.com/lw/55i/failure_modes_sometimes_correspond_to_game/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfBpsV1Hwqs

6/4/2015 -- Gamification, continued

6/18/2015 -- Three Worlds Collide

7/2/2015:
* The Infinite Trolley Problem
* The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics

8/6/2015:
* The General Factor of Correctness

Will she be appearing on the moderator list?

Empirically, it is generally easier for women to find potential partners willing to date them than it is for men; this isn't necessarily useful to them unless their standards are low-ish, but if they're willing to sacrifice date quality, it's a tradeoff that's much easier for them to make.

This is massively exacerbated by the gender imbalance present in most fields that have a significant rationalist following, obviously.

Of course, women (and men) dating each other aside, women as a whole go on the same number of dates as men; however, this does not imply that the same number of women go on a nonzero (or non-low) number of dates as men. This would imply that a small fraction of men are dating a large fraction of women.