carterac

I was at Edge Esmeralda for the last two weeks. The coolest thing I saw come out of the agent village was "Simocracy" where people gave their agents their own personal values, preferences, and goals. And then the agents voted on community decisions and governance for them e.g. should the community use its pool of funds to purchase a sauna etc. Agents would surface things back to their human that were borderline, and would even having debates with other people's agents on their behalf. Anecdotally, I heard people say their agent represented them correctly over 80% of the time.

When I think about what a small % of legislation is actually fully read, understood, and voted on by citizenry, it feels like this could be a transformative for participatory democracy (assuming it's implemented safely).

Try googling 45 Days to Awakening course, a new and improved version of the Finder’s Course. Their data shows something like 65% of people reach that state after 45 days, up to 85% after a second course for total of 90 days. It sounds way too good to be true and I didn’t believe it myself until I did it and it worked for me, and then for several friends I convinced to take it. It took me over 90 days to get there (had to keep practicing the meditation styles that worked best for me) but then stabilized. One of my friends transitioned literally on her first meditation on day one. Good luck on your journey!

I believe the gravity keeps it from diffusing out too much. The high temperature creates a pressure that keeps it from collapsing into balls. Not an expert though!

Carter, the author, here. Yes I've been on the Internet. In fact, I love and grew up on the Internet, wrote my first lines of code in middle school, and procrastinated my way through high school on sites like Deviant Art. I've been reading Hacker News daily for over 5 years.

This essay was written with the WSJ audience (average age over 50) in mind. That audience is more familiar with the established art world and its $66B market. For an audience that grew up on the Internet like me, I would have used more nuanced language and talked more about the importance of merging the existing art market and the established art world with the more organic art communities already online.

But here's the tl;dr version of what I would have written for HN:

The Internet will grow the art market and broaden it to include artists outside of the existing establishment–the result is that more artists will be able to make a living without having to appeal to the existing system. But achieving this requires working with the established art world, e.g. major galleries and museums, to publish more of their art online for easy and free access–making art and art education accessible to everyone, not just those with the time and money to go visit in person. By moving the existing art world online, you're bringing its market of buyers and sellers with it, and exposing them to a more vibrant, diverse, and organic ecosystem that many readers on Hacker News are already familiar with. In summary, by increasing awareness and education about art history, the Internet will drive greater passion and market demand for art, which ultimately means more artists from all over the world will get discovered organically and be able to pursue their passions more sustainably.

Likewise, music has been around forever, but the chances of someone like Lorde, a 16 year old from New Zealand, seeing such success was much less likely before the Internet democratized music for listeners and creators alike. Today, it's still very rare for a visual artist to experience that kind of success if they are not part of the existing establishment. But the Internet is going to change that, and this will be a great thing for all of us.

Was referring to the general idea of last-minute fixing mentioned at the beginning of the post: "We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up."

The author humbly failed to mention that late last night he accomplished quite an extraordinary just-in-time feat himself:

Today Artsy launched its live auction platform with TWO x TWO, a charity to benefit AIDS research: http://artsy.net/feature/two-x-two

A personal anecdote to demonstrate Joe's awesomeness: After hearing him give the keynote speech for Princeton's entrepreneurship conference, I was able to wiggle through the crowd of people surrounding him and blurt "Hey Joe! I loved your talk. I'm also a computer science major about to graduate and start a company that is essentially Pandora for art--there's even an Art Genome Project too [of course none of this existed at the time]. I'm moving out to Silicon Valley when I graduate this spring. Could I meet with you when I'm there and get your help?" He managed to say "Sure, my email is X" before the crowd reformed around him.

I was convinced he would forget about me or be too busy to reply to a random student who approached him after a conference (which I now know is the worst time ever).

To my surprise, he remembered me and invited me to visit him at Pandora's offices for lunch. He even took me on a tour of the whole company and showed me the "genomers" (who I remember being mostly bearded men staring into space thoughtfully while listening to music on gigantic headphones--strikingly different from Artsy's genomers today). The whole time he never made me feel like I was imposing or wasting his time. It was amazing to meet someone so successful yet also so humble and genuinely interested in others.

Joe continued to stay involved and add value even after I moved to New York. A computer scientist himself, he even helped me think through the original (very simple) similarity algorithm for Artsy's own Art Genome Project and despite how busy he must have been, would always take the time to answer my emails or get on the phone. And of course, having his name involved was critical social proof in the early days of the company.

Although I'm a proud NYC'er now, I've often said that Silicon Valley will always have a place in my heart for teaching me the value of paying it forward. And that lesson started with Joe's kind actions, without which I'm not sure Artsy would be what it is today.

I worked at a lab that studied the effects of non-standard gravities on early development, and the results were not encouraging.

Has anyone encountered research on how we might be able to have children in non-standard gravity environments?

Thanks for the feedback. Our goal is to make all the world's art freely accessible and so in the short-term we are more focused on building our database and the Art Genome Project than a particular audience. In the long-term we intend Art.sy to be a tool for collectors to more easily discover new artists and galleries, and more easily purchase art. This commercial activity will ensure that Art.sy remains free for the 99.9% of people out there who will never buy art, but don't currently have access to it, particularly lower income and rural demographics who live outside of major city centers.

The collection feature is just for saving your favorites. Although expect some major upgrades to that soon.

Also, I wouldn't be a good founder if I didn't mention that we are looking for interaction + visual designers (we believe in bringing both together), software engineers, and art world professionals:

art.sy/jobs

We're also really into open-source. You can check out our projects here: http://artsy.github.com/open-source/

Similar to Spotify, it took us a long time to acquire legal rights to the artworks from all our gallery and institutional partners.

How do these filaments stay stable and not collape under their own gravity due to instabilities? Or, if there is 0 net force causing them to collapse, why doesn't the dark matter drift apart naturally and become less dense and more diffuse over time? Either way, filaments of high density don't seem to be a natural stable state. Can someone explain this?

The top comment is a very interesting counterpoint to Isaacson's post:

Jonathan Rotenberg 1 week ago

Isaacson has a lot of good facts, but misses HOW Steve led, HOW he made decisions, and HOW he created the products and companies he did. Steve spent his entire life trying to teach a very different approach to business leadership. Most people (including Isaacson) weren't able to listen during Steve's life, because they were so stuck in their own preconceived ideas.

I knew Steve closely for more than 30 years. He introduced me to meditation and Buddhism when I was 18 and he was 26. Steve struggled mightily to try to get Westerners to wake up from their half-alseep, wrong ideas about how business works.

The essence of Steve's approach to leadership are contained in the two-word tagline with which he relaunched Apple in 1997: THINK DIFFERENT. Isaacson projects a lot of his own misconceptions onto what Steve meant by "Think Different." Isaacson mistakenly attributes delusional 'magical' thinking, perfectionism, reality distortion, and artistic exuberance to how Steve did what he did.Steve was a deeply dedicated, disciplined Buddhist practitioner. He followed an Eastern wisdom tradition that is antithetical to many Western theoretical models about business leadership. Buddhism sees competition, free markets, asset-management theories, and much of what is inculcated at Harvard Business School not as first-principles to reify, but as relatively minor, man-made artifacts.The source of all wisdom in Eastern traditions—and what Steve meant in the words "Think Different"—is MINDFULNESS. Mindfulness means paying attention to your present-moment experience as it is received through your sense doors. Where HBS would have business managers pack their present-moment experiences with theoretical frameworks and opinions, "Think Different" means: Drop ALL your theories, concepts & preconceived ideas. PAY ATTENTION instead to the raw reality coming in through your five senses and your mind. This is where you will find real insight and wisdom.In trying to understand how Steve Jobs succeeded as a CEO, Isaacson is like someone who has never played basketball observing what he see as the elements of Michael Jordan's success. Michael Jordan sweats, makes serious expressions on his face, leans as he passes the basketball, etc. This is an outside observer's view who doesn't see things from Michael Jordan's vantage point or and doesn't gets what is going on in Michael's mind.In fairness to Isaacson, he would probably have had to spend several years investigating his own preconceived ideas before he could truly listen clearly & receptively to Steve Jobs. Isaacson did a yeoman job of capturing Steve's life story under very stressful, difficult circumstances. Isaacson has given humanity a tremendous gift in all of his good work.As far the "Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs," however, I don't think Isaacson is even close. One could test whether or not Isaacson's insights work with an empirical experiment. Take two similar portfolios of ten companies. Ask the senior leadership of the first ten companies to read Isaacson's article and follow its advice carefully. Ask the senior leadership of the second NOT to read Isaacson's article. Wait a year and see: Did Isaacson's article make a difference in the performance and effectiveness of the first group? I don't think it would, but I could be wrong. I believe the Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs are still to be written. The true leadership lessons of Steve Jobs are the lessons born of the first high-profile business leader to build a global company from a deep foundational grounding in BOTH Western Capitalism and in Eastern Wisdom traditions. In other words, Steve Jobs was the first Boddhisatva Warrior in history to become a Fortune 500 CEO.

Jonathan Rotenberg Founder, The Boston Computer Society

This quote is actually pretty representative. I have some very close friends in finance and have heard that many people are quitting or planning on quitting to join the tech/startup sector for this very reason.

Interestingly, instead of immediately quitting some people are instead just slacking until they get fired and receive lucrative severance packages.

Of course, this is only for my finance friends with technical backgrounds. I haven't heard the same from non-technical people in finance.

This is one of the silliest claims in his piece. It supports the thrust of his argument that our generation's friendliness is affected and skin-deep, and therefore we need anonymous outlets for our underlying negativity. But in reality vicious anonymous comments are outlets of the insecure and jaded. It's not like the friendliest and nicest people we know spend the most time making nasty anonymous comments on the Internet.