jplasmeier

That's not the same question though. I've answered those questions for myself, but I couldn't tell you what consciousness is or isn't, because that requires language, and language cannot suffice to communicate our personal experiences.

I actually wrote a paper comparing how Tractatus and Godel’s incompleteness theorems approach the concept of self-reference. (I believe it was the final for Philosophy of Mathematics with the brilliant Colin McLarty.)

I don’t have it hosted anywhere but iirc the tl;dr is that they’re more or less independently reaching different conclusions as the two models are fundamentally incompatible.

I found this piece revolting. The author feigns a conscience so that you too, conscientious engineer, can stomach working for the modern day equivalent of big tobacco. To be clear I don’t have a problem with anyone who works at Meta, but I do have a problem with taking the moral high ground in doing so. Admit it’s the wrong thing to do but too fun/lucrative to pass up, your life and that of the people around you will benefit.

The whole article is written like an ad. I wouldn’t take any of it at face value.

What makes you think YC companies have any different standards than the rest of the corporate world? If anything startups are deliberately held to a lower standard on the justification of “disruption”. YC is a way to make people money first and foremost. Don’t be shocked.

This comment itself kind of falls into that, isn't it? :p

"More readable code almost always means less efficient code."

Can you give examples? I'm not sold that the "low hanging fruit" of readability improvement (empty lines to break up "paragraphs", breaking up unintelligible one-liners into several lines, etc.) degrades performance. My intuition is that the compiler/interpreter ends up producing almost identical runtime code and therefore similar performance.

Unless you mean more along the lines of expressivity (i.e Python and Ruby can get a lot done with fewer statements compared to C), but to me this effect is in a different category than readability.

As a personal anecdote, I was a vegetarian for ~3 years from late in high school to junior year of college. It was definitely a valuable experience that afforded me much perspective into my diet, the diets of others, and food in general.

When I started eating meat again it was under a vague condition to eat "good" meat, that is, either cooked fresh by my mother, or from a higher-end restaurant. This eroded a bit and after a year or so I was back to eating meat relatively unabashedly again.

A few days ago I spent my entire Saturday vomiting bile from food poisoning ($CMG is the top suspect), and now I'm back to my post-vegetarianism habits of being careful about the meat I consume. I'm aware of probability and statistics, so this is somewhat irrational in that sense, but I suppose my point is that I'm grateful for the experience I had of being vegetarian and I think everyone should try it for as long as they can.

EDIT: Oh, perhaps the most shocking part of the experience was how few people knew what the difference between being pescetarian, vegetarian, and vegan is, as well as dealing with all manner of assholes who couldn't fathom why anyone would do such a thing to themselves.

EDIT2: As for health, it bears mentioning that I knew a couple people who are/were vegetarians and had much worse diets than many non-vegetarians. Naively substituting a chicken breast for a block of cheese is _not_ healthy!

EDIT3: I made a point of almost never asking my friends to pick somewhere more vegetarian friendly. Almost anywhere, I could deal with. Notable exceptions were seafood restaurants and anywhere in the South of the USA. There's only so many onion rings one can stand!

Does anyone have data on the departure of executives at other companies, past or present? Of course the reaction is that this is something like an exodus, but I would love to see data on exec-churn at similarly sized companies for comparison's sake.

But he's making the world more "open and connected!" (by bringing internet to third world countries and restricting them to his website...)

Of course. For example, many of the questions for technical interviews involve knowing which data structure to use in a given setting, and applying it to find a solution.

The interviewee is more than welcome to study data structures and interview questions about data structures. A poor student will just memorize questions and answers by rote without really understanding the data structure in question. The good student will actually learn and understand data structures in the context of the solution.

One would hope that interviewers are able to ask follow-up questions about the solution which distinguish between the two.

EDIT: During the best tech interview I have done, I had no idea how to solve the question asked (that is, I had not studied its solution despite this being a relatively common question). I was able to ask articulate questions and invoked understanding of data structures as I went along. Memorizing solutions is a game of luck, and not recommendable.

Facial unlocking programs have this problem too. Just search for "facial unlock racism" and there's pages of results from various sources and years.

Software is subject to the same effects institutions of racism, sexism, etc. and is a good example of just how pervasive these institutions are.