Goal: Money
So I moved to Austin for an adventure with three or four half-plans for making money which all fell through, plus unexpected expenses hit me hard. A few months ago I read the writing on the wall and set about finding a Real Job. Interviewed at a local startup; they didn't want me. Went to some programmer meet-ups, gave a couple talks, stuck around afterwards to ask who was hiring. Found a great company that way, so starting this month I'm living in L.A., working for a funded startup in a skyscraper.
My buddy and I continue to grow our e-commerce ...
I left my family, my job, and my girlfriend to move across the country, to Austin, to explore the world, to work for myself, and to become a Complete Social Creature, aka a Normal Person, aka an Adult.
Progress. Being so far from home has freed me to act like who I want to be, rather than who people expect me to be. This is coming at the same time that social interactions are making much more sense than they did when I was younger. I understand what I have to offer and what others have to offer me, and how to frame our interactions like that. Dating is easi...
I'm coming around on the stronger version of the Efficient Market Hypothesis that says, "you can't buy and sell equities in a way that beats the market in the long run. Just invest in an index fund, pay low fees, and don't try to pick stocks." I'm not sure I believe this any more, for a few reasons.
One is that I lived with a guy who traded professionally and we had a series of conversations where he explained about stocks to me, specifically why information-efficient prices don't automatically imply an unbeatable market.
Another is that the outsid...
$3,000.00
My goals are money, power, and romance. Some good news on all three, finally!
Money. I'm bankrolling my buddy in a high stakes poker game. He's highly skilled but rather risk-averse, so we negotiated the following deal: I provide his buy-ins, he gives me 40% of his winnings and keeps the rest. It's been a great year so far, netting me about a year's worth of living expenses for basically zero time investment. As an unexpected side effect, by talking over hands and general strategic concepts with him, I've absorbed some of his poker skills, which I've tested...
Some great resources on poker AI: University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group. Papp 1998 in particular goes into detail about what makes it difficult, briefly: multiple opponents, imperfect knowledge, risk management, agent modeling, deception, and dealing with unreliable information. To these I would add the distinction between optimal and maximal play:
In chess AI, it never really matters what you expect your opponent to do like it does in poker. In chess, you just always try to move the board into the most favorable possible state. A win is a win...
Agreed about reading random source code files. I popped open the first .py file I found on the django project and got this:
which I would say is a little esoteric for even the most precocious non-programmers.
But I also agree that investigating one's programming aptitude is a great low-investment high-reward endeavor. It does seem to be the case that many people just "get it". This thread offers some great suggestions on how to check: Checking for the Programming Gear.
I was on the subway the other day and Sovereign Bank had bought up all the ad spots advertising in big print "MONEY MARKET ACCOUNT. 0.6% APY. $100,000 MINIMUM." The interest rate offered on a smaller deposit is presumably less than that, and yet the bank thought this deal would be appealing enough to advertise. This makes a year of "emergency fund" holdings in a money market account approximately worth the change in the couch. I don't see how that's enough of a difference from a checking account to worry about.
New England guy here. I was surprised when I read OrphanWilde's comment yesterday; I went out last night and observed. These are the rules most of us follow:
Always negotiate on salary, i.e. ask for more than their initial offer. Patrick McKenzie explains why.
Have you ever tried writing software? Like they say: "a programmer is a machine that turns coffee into money," or something like that.
I'll give it a shot.
In poker you want to put more money in the pot with strong hands, and less money with weaker ones. However, your hand is secret information, and raising too much "polarizes your range," giving your opponents the opportunity to outplay you. Finally, hands aren't guaranteed -- good hands can lose, and bad hands can win. So you need to bet big, but not too big, with your good hands.
So my buddy and I sit down at the table, and I get dealt a few strong hands in a row, but I raise too big with them -- I'm overconfident -- so I win a...
I don't know anything about programming Macs, but here are some thoughts for anyone who wants to try this:
Dating. Progress from June, February, December, October.
A year into my experiment, I'm glad to finally report some success: I asked a girl out and she said yes and we had a very nice time together ending in my first real sexual intimacy. I tried to see her again, and she was enthusiastic about the prospect for a week or so, but things cooled after that. I think she moved on.
For a long time before this I had to seriously consider some scary hypotheses about myself, many along the lines of "you are so X that you'll never Y." I've updated all of tho...
The article you linked talks a little bit about modeling admissions officers. One nonobvious thing to consider:
There's a very good chance that the only person who will ever read your college essay is 25 years old.
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/05/how_to_write_a_college_applica.html
Some unsolicited advice: private universities are way overpriced right now, and 17- & 18-year-olds are regularly encouraged to take on massive nondischargable debt in a way that many consider exploitive. Stanford's tuition broke $40K this year...have a plan, is all.
What you're saying rings true, and a lot of people agree with you, but is it actually right? Is it testable? I can think of plenty of counterexamples, by people who look like they know they're doing. But I can't think of anyone whom I just want to grab and yell at: "you'd be so effective if you'd just shut up about the signaling already!"
Don't sell your reflexes short. Our brains were executing complicated plans for millions of generations before acquiring explicit reasoning, i.e. language. Lately I've been leaning towards the Elephant and Rider model of decision-making, or drawing from this pithy tweet by Stephen Kaas. In your case, I think, your elephant wants to surf the web, and it has a lot more brainpower than your goal-setting rider who wants to finish the paper.
In a practical sense, I think this means you want to put yourself in situations where success is the default, expected res...
The Twitter devs vetoed that idea back in 2009 -- too much spam potential. Here's my 5-minute effort anyway:
http://www.wmorgan.net/lw_twitter.html
I don't have a Twitter account so the page isn't tested, but it looks like it works -- give it a second to load, though.
Edit: The following JavaScript will turn all Twitter links on this page into follow links. Couldn't figure out how to make a bookmarklet in markdown:
jQuery('a[href*="twitter.com"]')
.addClass("twitter-follow-button");
jQuery(document.createElement("script"))
.Because someone downvoted it. If I had to guess why they did it, it'd probably be some combination of these:
Mathematically literate like grad students, or quants? I'd expect to hear that justification much more from the former group than the latter. It doesn't hold water, right?
You're explaining expected value and it's absolutely true. It's the law that tells you what decision to make.
If there's an intuitive explanation, I haven't found it yet. All I know is that there's a reliable cluster of people who
For what it's worth, I think you make great points in your comment and I agree with all of them :-D
I'm reminded of what Joe McNally said about tradeoffs between goals and principles:
If someone won’t listen to what you have to say because you’re not wearing a tie, then put on a tie, ’cause what you have to say is more important than not wearing a tie.
There's a difference between behavior that's obviously harmful and seriously harmful. Status games are silly and rude and promote bad epistemology, I agree, but they're everywhere, I doubt I'm really hurtin...
I've never seen a compiling AI, let alone an interrupted one, even in fiction, so your example isn't very available to me. I can imagine conditions that would make it OK or not OK to cancel the compilation process.
This is most interesting to me:
From these examples, I think "will become a person" is only significant for objects which were people in the past
I know we're talking about intuitions, but this is one description that can't jump from the map into the territory. We know that the past is completely screened off by the present, so our de...
You are right; retracted.
Consider this set:
A sleeping man. A cryonics patient. A nonverbal 3-year-old. A drunk, passed out.
I think these are all people, they're pretty close to babies, and we shouldn't kill any of them.
The reason they all feel like babies to me, from the perspective of "are they people?", is that they're in a condition where we can see a reasonable path for turning them into something that is unquestionably a person.
EDIT: That doesn't mean we have to pay any cost to follow that path -- the value we assign to a person's life can be high but must be finite...
Alright, I'll PM you something this month; we can see if you get anything out of it.
The goal is to date successfully. The subgoal is to get one date. Despite meeting a lot of single women, flirting with them, and getting some phone numbers, none of them have been willing to actually go out, or they've made plans and then cancelled. The working theory is that I'm way less attractive than I think. So I'm debugging my appearance and behavior.
Clothes. My process was this: go online, read about fashion, put clothes on, stare at mirror. "According to this, none of my shirts actually fit!" Go to the store, try shirts on, "and none...
Upvoted for a very granular description of what you're up to and how it's going.
You have to know exactly what you want, and you have to know exactly how to get it.
Eben Moglen, on how to change the world
I notice you have a STEM degree. Since the job market is in your favor, I'll assume you will find multiple employers interested in hiring you. Learn about salary negotiation now, before you go into an interview. If you're as clueless as I was when I got my first job, then you can pick up thousands of dollars for a few hours of research.
Recommended reading: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
I've been trying to adhere to it for a year or so. My main point of departure is that I drink a lot of diet soda and beer. My results:
The pleonastic cat was intentional (I like the expressiveness), but I didn't know that about pipes. Very cool!
Agreed about debugging. Dijkstra said something like, "Debugging is the process of taking bugs out; therefore programming is the process of putting them in." Or consider the revelation of Maurice Wilkes:
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
One of the biggest misconceptions I n...
This is an awesomely clear explanation of the thought process. I can see how "willingness to take on an enemy" or "willingness to speak for everyone" may be deciding factors in who boos and who doesn't. It also explains why booing only happens in large crowds (at sufficiently small events, everybody is in the same group). Cheers!
Thanks for the reply, and upvoted. Now there are three things I don't understand ;-). It rings true in the sense that people can be reliably expected to behave that way. But I still cannot empathize, and if I have the same mental machinery as the booers, then I ought to be able to.
Fun to boo. This one feels right and yet so foreign. Shouldn't sympathy for the target of criticism kill the fun? Like you imagine doing something hurtful, then you picture the other person, hurt. Then you imagine what it would be like to be that person, and, jeez, I wouldn't w
For many people, alcohol raises talkativeness and lowers inhibition, so you're more likely to say things you normally wouldn't (in vino veritas). Sharing private things is a friendship-builder (HPMOR 7), but it can also be embarrassing. Drinking is a pre-commitment to build friendship through potentially embarrassing interactions, and when you abstain, you're saying, "I'll hear your secrets, but keep mine, thank you very much," which is a suspicious and untrustworthy kind of stance.
To the extent the above is true, it's too bad, because
Why do people boo performers? Example: I was at Geek Bowl 2012, which was this huge team trivia event in an auditorium, and toward the end of the night they invited participants to come on-stage and dance in teams for 45 seconds per team. Only 4 of the 200 teams volunteered, and while they danced, the crowd noisily jeered them. Now, the dancing wasn't great, but...
I'm guilty of booing sometimes, and to me the thought process seems to be:
1) The bad performance makes me feel bad.
2) The crowd is similar to me, and is my in-group in the situation.
3) Therefore, the bad performance is making everyone else in the crowd feel bad.
4) I empathise with the crowd more than the performers, since the crowd is a constant in-group I can identify with through the entire event, while the performers are fleeting and on average neutral.
5) Therefore to signal my anger on behalf of the crowd's suffering, I boo at the bad performer, who has slid from neutral to Enemy.
It's fun to boo. Expressing public displeasure with someone in a totally safe and one-sided fashion Is something people love to do: See forums.
Doing the same thing as the crowd around you is very thrilling. If some people start booing other people are likely to join in.
People actually DO get angry at performers. People tend to have strong senses of entitlement in these kind of situations and if they're disappointed they will be upset. Not everyone is crass enough to boo but surely you've felt ripped off in the past by a performance that was worse than what you expected?
Not particularly referring to your experience, but instead drawing from a few dozen rock festivals I've been to in the past decade.
You gain nothing from booing them, except possibly you signal...what? Being loud and opinionated? Being in a position of judgement and therefore high-status?
This is the main reason, for what I saw. Booing an act puts you on a higher level than the people who like it, and have therefore bad taste. In addition, it could also signal the membership to a different fan group.
...Even assuming there's a signaling explanation, I can
It turns out not to matter. Consider a formalism G', identical to Godel numbering, but that reverses the sign, such that G(N) is true iff G'(N) is false. In the first N numbers in G+G', there are an equal number of truths and falsehoods.
For every formalism that makes it easy to encode true statements, there's an isomorphic one that does the same for false statements, and vice versa. This is why the set of statements of a given complexity can never be unbalanced.
More immediate goals have been put on hold while I pursue a project of opportunity. Work has sent me to the Philippines, where I've been for the past three weeks, to help the US Army build schools. Since I want to, one day, live and work in southeast Asia for an extended period of time, this has been a great chance to gather information cheaply.
Lots of firsts for me: first time outside the US, dealing with a language barrier, working in a military environment (I used to wonder how I'd have fit in if I'd joined the service, and WOW the culture does not suit...
Dating: The girl from my previous post cancelled on me 30 minutes before we were going to meet. Then the next week she invited me out to lunch and cancelled again, an hour out. So I guess she didn't actually like me.
Then I went on a blind date with FOAF and that went OK. I took her out again but there was just no romantic chemistry, so it was a couple of nice times but that was the end of that.
I've been trying to get better at reading the subtext of social interactions to tell when someone is interested. I noticed that a single friend had been getting touc...
I noticed throughout your post you said "turns out she didn't like me" twice, as if this was a simple boolean value that you have to find out the value of.
The truth is that attraction is pretty malleable and it's totally possible that your friend had romantic interest in you which disappeared while having dinner with her, or that the potential date that cancelled on you twice was turned off through non-physical interactions (texts, phonecalls).
Your 3 step action plan sounds solid though. The fundamentals of pick up artistry will also help a ton.
This is the generated code segment:
aphelion=aphelion+aphelion;
aphelion=aphelion+aphelion;
guess=12;
aphelion=aphelion>>guess;
Those four lines together amount to a shift 10 bits to the right, i.e., division by 1024.
I think you understand what's going in the code. The point of my refactoring was to make something that was human-readable: something that I could describe in English. And the English for those four lines of code is "divide by 1024." That's what those four lines do.
Very interesting demonstration. Thanks for sharing this; it was fun to read through! I think I have a pretty good idea of how it works.
As a professional programmer:
That code it generated...is really, really shitty. It's unreadable, and for that reason, a human cannot look at the generated code and figure out "what's going on," i.e. Kepler's laws. Insofar as it works, it's much more reminiscent of 0x5f3759df, but that algorithm was optimizing for speed, not correctness or elegance.
I'm not surprised that the algorithm does worse on the control grou...
The generated code is bizarre. I refactored it as well as I could, and it still doesn't make much sense:
aphelion = (aphelion + perihelion) >> 10;
aphelion = aphelion - (aphelion / 12);
guess = ( ( (aphelion | 12) * (int)sqrt(aphelion) ) ^ 12 ) / 12;
"To get the orbit time in days from the aphelion and perihelion in Kkm, first sum them and divide by 1024. Then from that, subtract one twelfth. Then, to the value, perform a bitwise OR with 0x0C, multiply by the square root, and bit-XOR 0x0C again. Finally, divide by 12, and that will give you the number of days."
The three problems with the code are that the variable names are all lies, there's a bunch of redundant rescaling which isn't consolidated because it's done in integer math when it should be floating point, and there are a couple bits of overfitting (bitwise operators) that don't belong. If you convert to SSA and wipe out the misleading names, you get:
a1 = perihelion+aphelion Real
a2 = a1+a1 Rescaling
a3 = a2+a2 Rescaling
g1 = 12 Rescaling
a4 = a3>>g1 Rescaling
t1 = a4/g1 I buy my utilons from SIAI. $4531, about 10% of my net in 2011. I give for the main reasons you always hear: massive payoff, impending doom, trust in the management.
I buy my fuzzies from the following sources, around 1% of my 2011 net:
LW uses that domain to serve jQuery and Prototype. This is a recommended practice. The voting and posting code both rely on these libraries.
It sounds like what we want is failover: "if the user can't get jQuery from Google, then give it to them from LessWrong." Here is how to do it.
CDN failover is a best practice in general because it keeps the site working if Google ever goes down.
My plan is just to read IRS 1040 Schedule A and the instructions for it. The tax code itself isn't too horrible either, from what I've seen, but this is coming from a guy that reads computer programs for fun and profit.
Yeah, lock up that $531 for SI.
Here we are. We buy and sell Magic cards.
Attn Magic: the Gathering players
If you want to buy something, send me a PM and I'll send you a coupon code for a LW discount.
If you have MTG cards you want to sell, I want to talk to you. Our buy prices are competitive and we will buy most everything. Drop me a line with what you've got and I'll get back to you quick with an itemized spreadsheet breakdown.