kscaldef

I opened a 2007 with a synthetic cork a couple nights ago. It was great. I can't say if they hold up well for decades, but I've encountered no problems with them in the <10 year time scale.

"Having a space to work that you can ignore people is key to getting work done. Constantly being interrupted by people you live with or other people will kill your productivity."

"We wrote the first scoring algorithm at Goalee based on the red-green light. Within a couple of weeks we made our first algorithmic change, and made several quick fix releases to update the scoring methods in the following weeks. By the end of the month, a whole section of our testing suite was almost completely worthless. In a world where cash is king, I wouldn’t mind having those dollars back."

What I don't understand about comments like this is that a whole section of your code, both runtime / deliverable code and test code had become worthless. But, you only seem to view the discarded test code as wasted effort. Either the tests have value or they don't. And, if you write tests, and then discard the code they test, you'll likely also discard the tests. But, that doesn't change whether or not the tests had value, nor whether the new tests that you'll write for the new code have value.

You're arguing against a strawman. The article states that no one is suggesting that students not learn Standard American English. The point it is making is that it is more useful in teaching SAE to recognize that some students arrive at school speaking a different dialect rather than with an incorrect understanding of SAE, and that acknowledging that explicitly is more productive than telling them never to speak their home language.

While parents do, of course, have a huge impact on their children, I think it's overly simplistic to lay the ultimate responsibility at their feet. As raganwald points out (in the other direction), when there are feedback loops at play, the system can re-enforce other traits than you might hope for. Parents with no education in nutrition or no real supermarkets in their neighborhood can't be expected to feed their children well. A father in prison will have highly limited influence on his children. A teenage girl with limited access to contraceptives or abortion (or sex education) may end up a mother well before she's financially, emotionally, or intellectually prepared to perform that job well. Low-income, blue-collar communities may have perverse incentives to tie their children to their existing social and economic status, and resent and resist "modern society" in it's various guises.

Which is to say, I don't think you can approach this from a purely reductionist viewpoint. Yes, a given institution is limited to a degree by its inputs, but it's also the case that each component has the potential to make improvements, even if marginal.

Since we're talking about belief rather than what we can prove, I think it's extremely plausible for the causation in question to go the other way. Given the choice, would you rather date / marry someone who was happy and healthy or someone who was depressed and drinks too much?

Are you attempting to make an argument of the form: A is correlated with B, and A causes C, therefore A causes B?

I'm sorry, but that seems to be about earnings, not about happiness or drinking habits. Am I missing something? (It also says that women experience a penalty, whereas the original article asserts positive correlations for both men and women.)

> as someone who got married at 21, I can honestly say it's the decision I'm most happy about in my life so far.

One might hope that statement was true no matter what age you got married at.

Because unhappy people aren't fun to be around, so people don't choose to marry them? Or because depressed people are negative about their relationships, just like anything else, so don't see them as worth pursuing? It's really not hard to conjecture mechanisms for a correlation.

"Unmarried twenty-somethings are more likely to be depressed, drink excessively, and report lower levels of satisfaction than their married counterparts"

Let's all say it together: Correlation is not causation.

I don't think the law can be submitted as scientific evidence. (One generally hopes the law is informed by scientific evidence, but even that isn't a given.)

Fundamentally, my point was that there's no scientific basis I can imagine for the idea of free-will, in humans or anywhere else. There's simply no physical law that enables it. (It is, of course, an immensely useful fiction, but that's not my point, which was rather that the entire question of "how to behave rationally" seems to rest on an irrational basis.)

> 1. You as a human have the ability to control your reaction to anything.

Do you actually have any support for that statement, other than as an article of faith? I am honestly not aware of any scientific evidence for it.

It is somewhat difficult to divine the precise intent of the author of the article, or of the submitter of the article to HN; but I think it's important to acknowledge that some people are going to use this article to criticize and dismiss anyone who "gets offended" as someone who hasn't reached a certain ideal of detachment. Your very statement that you think it's okay to "act offended", as opposed to "getting offended", gets to my point of the subjective nature of the issue.

This article very early makes the statement that "while getting offended by something sometimes feels good and can help you assert moral superiority, in most cases it doesn't help you figure out what the world looks like." Implicit in this statement is that "figur[ing] out what the world looks like" -- and then accepting that status quo -- is, or ought to be, the goal of all people.

However, assuming one has an understanding of the status quo, and a desire to change it, "getting offended" can be a useful, and rational, response. (I include the quotes because there is an amount of subjectivity in what various people label as "getting offended".) In particular, such responses can serve to educate other people about behaviors which perpetuate the aspects of the status quo which the expresser desires to change.

So, while this article presents itself as a highly rational and neutral argument, embedded within it is actually a deeply conservative point of view.