Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
[Meta] I'd love the read the book with all the stories mentioned in the comments.
Comment · 4 years ago
At the moment yes.
Comment · 4 years ago
Thanks! Yep, I also played Blaston a while and really liked it. We basically replaced shooting with a gun with punching in order to make it even more intense.

In addition we also want to build out the social part and create a community of Space Punchers that work out together and motivate each other to stick to a regular schedule. I find it really fascinating how immersive VR can be and really make you think that you are in the same place with your friends. If we can translate this energy into forming a healthy habit of working out regularly with a community than we are on a good path.

Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
I think there are two sides to a service like that: on the one hand it provides more transparency to the individual customer (good), on the other hand, any external or internal malicious actor now has a very convenient tool to gain access to lot of very personal information about a single individual (bad). It was probably not even possible without a tool like that, not even for jeff bezos.
Comment · 4 years ago
I disagree with your conclusion that the odds remain 2/3 even if the host doesn’t know where the prize is. If that were the case, it would mean that if the same scenario is repeated many many times, then in 2/3 of the cases you would still pick the door with the prize with the same strategy. But what about the instances where the host picks the door with prize before you even get a chance to pick the other door? These cases happen with a probability of 2/3 * 1/2 = 1/3. Therefore, you only get to choose in 2/3 of the cases and in 1/2 of those cases you have already picked the correct door the first time.
Comment · 4 years ago
And it doesn’t even have to be conscious decisions either. In my case: I was working for two clients as a freelancer but mid projects it clicked with an exchange student who was about to head back to her home country in two weeks. But it really clicked, such that I neglected my ongoing projects in a really unprofessional manner. I didn’t want to, because I really needed the money, however I just slowly stopped working on the projects so I can spend as much time as possible with this exchange student. And when I wasn’t with her, I was losing sleep thinking of her, even writing songs for her - a prototype courting behavior. Needless to say, my unprofessional behavior came back to bite me years later when I was interviewing and the potential employer was checking references including my former clients. Was that all healthy middle ground? I don’t know. I just know that 10 years later, 5 of those married, and now with two children, I don’t really care :). I'm just as happy as one can be.
Comment · 4 years ago
> The viewers who watched [Gangnam Style] earned nothing, even though many of them contributed and were critical to the video's ultimate success.

The author is wrong here, even though it rings true. Early viewers who shared a popular video before it was popular earn the reputation of knowing the next cool thing before everyone else does. They gain “I liked this band before it was cool -tokens”. That’s worth something among peers. If we start to pay out monetary value in addition to that, than we would actually overpay the early viewers. Market forces will eventually rebalance the equation such that early viewers will neglect the reputation part and just start sharing as many videos as possible regardless whether the personally think that those videos are the next cool thing.

Comment · 5 years ago
I think you misinterpreted my comment (probably my bad, Im not an English native). What I meant is: It is important to make sure that the profits of stocks sold need to be taxed properly, and only the after tax amount that’s left over can be spend on, some may say frivolous, space adventures. Especially when it is often reported that billionaires dont pay hardly any taxes, since their wealth grew „only in equity“. But then suddenly they find themselves on a pretty expensive space vacation.
Comment · 5 years ago
Lot of people in this thread are arguing that wealthy people can spend money on what ever they want. I think it’s important to distinguish whether the money they spend on personal joy rides has been taxed as private income or written off as business expense. Does anyone have information on whether Bezos‘ investments into Blue Origin has been taxed previously as personal income when he presumably liquidated Amazon stock?
Comment · 6 years ago
The disconnect in this conversation between employer and employee happens for these reasons: In reality companies had to pay a premium in order to demand that an employee lives in certain geographic area so that they show up every day in a certain office building. Depending on the location of the building, the premium can be very high.

Now comes the pandemic which forces - or should I say “allows” - companies to try out the remote model in unison without the risk of being the first mover.

It turns out that it works good enough. But then a company must be questioning why it should continue paying the location premium to employees if it doesn’t see any benefit in it anymore. Adjusting existing salaries downwards, even though the employees didn’t make any changes in their commitment, is socially unacceptable.

Now companies hope that if an employee decides to take advantage of the new freedoms they have an open for this conversation where they try to cut the location premium based on COL arguments, which they know is not the real reason.

If it would be up to companies alone, they would have already reduced all our salaries and if we wouldn’t have liked that, they would have said.. well just move to a lower COL area, we don’t mind

Comment · 9 years ago
Yep,I second that. I'm getting redirected to google.
Comment · 10 years ago
I think this line of jokes has some potential, but I
Comment · 11 years ago
Given a set of tasks T, that have to be done, and the tasks are interdependent.

Sort T by difficulty to complete. Complete one task after the other starting with the hardest.

This approach goes against the often spread advice that you should start with the easiest tasks, which are probably fast to complete, in order to get quickly a feeling of accomplishment which keeps you motivated. I think this approach is wrong and here is why:

IMO our brains always weigh risk multiplied with investment against reward, and as long as the reward outweighs (risk * investment), we are motivated: Risk meaning here, that you invest time and effort but eventually you miss the deadline and are not paid the full reward. The more time we let pass, without completing anything, then the risk of not getting the rewards becomes bigger and eventually it is not worth our effort anymore, and our brain finds more rewarding things to do (procrastinates). So why should we start with the hard tasks first?

Because, given that we start with the easy ones first, we reduce the available time to complete the hard tasks, and by the time that we start with the hard ones, the risk of failing becomes too big in order to be still motivated. In contrary, when we start with the hard ones, of course it takes longer to finish them, and the time left for the easy ones is less, but our brain can easily estimate the risk of easy tasks, and it will find that it's quite possible to get the final rewards, because we already finished the hard ones.

The realisation changed my life. I completed my CS master studies within 15 months.

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