treya
treya on Hacker News
First and foremost - suspend any disbelief about whether you can solve it. This is hugely important. If it has a solution and you are going to be able to solve it, then it needs your full undivided attention and focus and motivation in order to make the best progress. The possibility that it doesn't have a solution and/or you aren't able to find one is the pathological case - you should only be concerned about the successful strategy and not be spending time on the pathological one. Secondly, be aware that difficult problems which haven't already been solved are unsolved for a reason. Be willing to be patient and dedicated to a long term investment of energy and time on your part to work on it
I think this is mostly just correlation, and the more direct tie is in the economic demographic. River drainage basins generally go like this - the affluent demographic live on the upstream side of the city, the poor demographic live on the downstream side that's dirty and polluted after passing through the municipal area
It's probably a good idea to use an RO filter regardless. It's a very straightforward way to reduce toxins directly entering your body. Virtually everything is now contaminated with environmental toxins, and we're effectively being bombarded. You can't avoid them but you can take steps to minimize your exposure/reduce your risk
This is a good database of water quality:
https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/
Looking for a very specific set of things or type of resume is a huge oversight. Very few people are going to know what you're looking for, and anyone competent doesn't value their time so little to micropolish their resume for exactly your company. If you're not scanning every resume to read between the lines of how the applicant has devised their resume to try to digest what skills and experience and personality they actually have, then you're basically overlooking a significant percentage of those who apply
A corollary to this is if the company you're applying to isn't competent enough to figure out if you're right for the job, you probably don't want to work for them anyway
Repeated sessions of deep concentration in a particular subject or problem over a prolonged period clearly creates neural growth. I've tackled several extremely complex projects in my life, and in each case I found that I became increasingly proficient at working on them as time progressed. I started to realize epiphanies typically aren't that you suddenly discovered something, but are that your cognitive ability ultimately progressed to the point where you can fully understand something. By the way, in each of these periods I was regularly napping because of the mental fatigue. I have a sense that a lot of the neural growth happened during those naps.
> No, autism is not related whatsoever to the lack of empathy!
Also mentioned below, but https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/broken-mirrors-a-... would suggest exactly that it is related (or better, lack of empathy and autism are concomitant). You do have to consider the role of mirror neurons in empathy to make the connection.
That's funny to me, because I can't think of anything he's done, or said, that would indicate he's smart
10,000 hours may be a vague rule of thumb, but it says nothing about what is going on, and it's not just a matter of practicing. Learning, knowledge, wisdom, etc. all come from neural growth over time - your brain responds to thinking/concentrating/practicing by growing in the areas of the brain that were used, and this growth accumulates over time. Even in much older people the brain is plastic and is producing new neurons in addition to growing existing synapses, albeit at a gradually slowing pace. A corollary to this is, don't expect to understand things immediately - keep working at new concepts and skills. If you persevere, over time you will understand them and become proficient.
It's important to note that "practice" can't be something like, for example, simply taking tennis lessons - you must be challenged and struggle for it to have an impact. I would also include desire as being essential - it must be something you truly want to do, not something you just go through the motions for. Also consider that your physical health, regular exercise, diet and quality of sleep are intimately tied to cognitive growth.
Have soft job offer in Canada and a general timeline to move if we decide to go. My wife would retire. Job is remote so can live anywhere in Canada
1) Think hard about things that you have to work at in order to understand
2) Engage in exercise that regularly includes anaerobic intensity
3) Sleep well and deeply
Learning is brain growth that occurs as a result of thinking, largely during rest and sleep following the activity. Exercise will increase the amount of growth that occurs (mentally and physically), and good cardiovascular health is effectively the same thing as good brain health
And, maybe obviously, practice the brain teasers and interview questions. They are a skill that is not the same thing as being mentally sharp
He annoys me a lot, too. His positions on human health, and human progress, are fundamentally flawed. The article talks about a common analytical mistake in many of his arguments. But in virtually everything I (try to) read by him, I find so many that I just give up.
This is a ridiculous and fundamentally flawed proposition. The obvious omissions and lack of consideration of other factors threatening the planet belies this author's bias/naivete/stupidity/other motivations.
First, the demand for energy is only a small fraction of numerous ways the planet is being compromised - irrevocably. Satisfying all energy demands worldwide cleanly will not "save the planet".
Second, carbon-free is completely different than being clean energy. The byproducts (generally leaking radioactive waste) are significant, highly toxic, and long-lasting. While the emissions of fossil fuels is considered, other cleaner alternatives are not.
Third, the demand for energy is, for the most part, contrived. We are sold on the ideas of the need for one car for each person, the need for cars to travel in the first place, whole house heating and cooling, electrical solutions to simple manual tasks, etc ad infinitum. We could massively reduce energy needs by using low-power and no-power solutions.
Not quite sure what the motivation of this article is here, because the author (likely intentionally) dodges calling out that he's making a distinction between the pure definition of extinct meaning no more individuals of a species being left, and the more colloquial term referring to massive die-offs. Just because total extinction of a species may asymptotically take centuries doesn't mean there isn't catastrophic loss of life in the meantime. So it seems, at best, he's being disingenuous.
And for someone who should be intimately familiar with the subject, to call climate change "the most serious problem" we're facing, this to me suggests he either doesn't know what he's talking about, or he has other motivations here, or he's just an idiot.
Widespread pollution of our groundwater, rainwater, oceans and air - in many places now at toxic levels, collapse of ecosystems, massive habitat loss and destruction, global depletion of resources, all will affect us to a greater degree and sooner than climate change (to be fair, climate change will exacerbate these other factors).
And on top of everything else, he's completely ignoring that the pace of many of these trends are accelerating.
The fact that there is a tremendous diversity of life forms now, after the planet having clearly suffered past extinction events, is just plain obvious and makes much of what he says here about adaptation and evolution not very interesting.
I've run across a number of not just anecdotal accounts of long longevity, good health and lack of disease in a number of different indigenous cultures. I get the uncomfortable feeling that we are persistently and myopically comparing ourselves to in terms of health and longevity (and happiness/satisfaction for that matter) to what has been essentially a pathological state of human existence in the newer civilizations of the last couple thousand years. And still in modern times the diseases of civilization are raging as hard as ever.
For a good example, read the description of the Crow Indians in the last appendix of Journal of A Trapper:
https://books.google.com/books?id=49HTAAAAMAAJ&printsec=fron...
Bought a car with free SiriusXM subscription. I listened to a few stations a number of times - pretty good selection, but really didn't use it much. After the trial period, started getting calls from them. I (regretfully) accepted a discounted rate to extend my trial, but I had refused to accept any subscription that auto-renews. (Only later would I find out the salesperson outright lied to me that they were offering me a one-time subscription). The extended period eventually expired, and they billed me for another subscription at a higher rate. Since I never ultimately listened to anything, I never realized it was still active. By the time that one expired, that particular card had been closed, and they started mailing me past due notices. Which is when I discovered they'd continued billing me. I was irate and called their customer service at least a dozen times, every time getting a different runaround. On most of those calls, the runaround was to transfer me to a menu system that went nowhere. I fired off a letter to them, then just gave up, refusing to pay. The past due notices eventually ended up at a collection agency, and I had a couple interactions with them until I discovered the magic word "fraud". I sent the collector a letter explaining how Sirius had charged me for something I never asked for, which is fraud. It literally took years, but finally I got Sirius off my back. I am definitely uninstalling the several instances of Pandora we have.
The "right" startup - one that is bootstrapped, has a successful product idea, a good founder, competent employees, and equity - is almost always a better choice than the big firm. That's because you'll get to wear all hats, learn on the fly, learn to do everything and anything to make the product successful, and with luck get a big chunk of change in a few years.
That said, companies like this are few and far between. Especially now, apparently with most startup companies opting in early for venture capital or angel investor funding, which dilutes both your opportunity for equity and say in the company. And honestly, there are a lot of dumb ideas out there. Also, if you're relatively new to the industry, you probably don't have the ability to recognize the right startup opportunity.
In most cases, it's better to start off at a big company and learn the ropes, and when you think you've done that, take your time watching for the startup opportunity, and then make that move. In the long run, though, no one really is going to look out for you. With these two steps under your belt, you'll have the background to be your own founder one day.
Apart from that one comment, the remainder of this article - the vast majority of it - was a well presented argument about why the original post was flawed. That comment was obviously just an aside
We clearly think in ways that aren't available to the conscious parts of the mind, read most any Oliver Sachs or VS Ramachandran book for clear evidence of that. But what part this plays in specific problem solving isn't clear.
And this article dismisses unconscious thought but doesn't offer a good explanation for what is happening. For instance, what actually happens when you figure something out? And while what actually happens is undoubtedly related to flashes of inspiration or seeing an optical illusion in a new way, these things are only part of the story. A story that isn't told by most conventional models of learning or understanding.
But with careful observation, you can find clues for a simple explanation of epiphanies, solving problems in your sleep, and acquiring greater understanding over time. And that explanation is that the mind grows during rest/sleep in response to cognitive effort, most significantly during a period starting at least 24 hours afterwards and maybe peaking 36-48 hours later. That time frame here is from my own observations, the actual numbers aren't important to the explanation here. But it seems probable that learning and understanding is the result of “brain growth” that occurs as a result of thinking about something, and that this growth is specific to what you've been thinking about, and is cumulative. Your brain is not consciously thinking during this, and likely not unconsciously thinking about it either, but instead is just growing in a specific area. The result of the growth is that you are better able to perceive and grasp ideas that you couldn't previously.
We already know that memories are “consolidated” during sleep. Likely this consolidation is just some kind of structural or neural growth in the brain. Other parts of the brain are unlikely to be much different. The flashes of inspiration can be sudden understandings of a simple problem, but understanding deeper concepts or ideas requires brain growth in the area. I'd guess the flashes of inspiration type of understanding is analogous to short term memories, whereas deeper understanding and learning is the result of accumulated brain growth. When that brain growth becomes sufficient to grasp a concept, the sudden understanding (or epiphany) moment doesn't necessarily come with a realization that your brain is different and only has just then been able to grasp or figure out a problem.
Also, my intuition tells me that maybe we don't actually know anything at all, and we really only “figure out” everything. In other words, our brain is just a very good JIT (just-in-time) prediction engine. And when we think we know something, it's actually just the case that we predict or model it in real time at the moment we begin thinking. And memories are reformed every time we try to recall them, by neural structures that recreate the same pattern over and over when it's asked for.
This also explains things like prodigies, who typically spent many formative hours immersed in something over a long period to develop their abilities, and even acquired savant syndrome that can occur after head trauma (which does occur until after the brain has healed in response to the trauma).
I'd agree part of the problem is the widespread "buy the most house for the lowest price" phenomenon, which infects many other aspects of our society beyond shopping for homes, but far and away the primary problem here has little to do with architectural issues. The problem is with builders who are trying to maximize their profit - the key being build the biggest house possible on a lot of a given size (or per FAR restrictions). And the same group of builders who go this route tend to have little awareness or real concern for aesthetics - to them architecture is better when you have many rooms, higher foyers, more complicated floor plans and roof planes, and a larger number of different types of building/cladding materials. The appeal of these things has slowly creeped into the general public because tract house builders have adopted lesser versions of this crap for decades.
Messi is doing several things in the referenced video. First, he's staying wide (almost to the touchline) which is drawing the 2 defenders towards him. This increases the open space for attack, but more importantly it betters the overall ratio of attackers to defenders in the active part of the field. He's also intentionally walking. Running, and more so sprinting, causes opposing players to be more aware of you. Walking suggests you aren't actively participating. When the defenders turn their attention to the play, he slowly moves in behind them - this puts him in a more dangerous position (this isn't a great clip to demonstrate this because he ends up having to back up to receive the cross.) Notice also he's positioning himself so he's not substantially closer to one defender than the other - you don't really see the effect of it here - but that will tend to cause both players to cover him. If he can pull two defenders instead of one to cover him, he really doesn't need to do anything else to increase the odds for his team. But space-making isn't the real genius of Messi. His ability and willingness to take on several (or more) players at once, aside from the obvious advantage when he scores in such situations, will draw opposing players to him, opening up the rest of his team for through-passes into dangerous positions where defenders have been pulled out of place.