trominos

There's a more generic term for what you're experiencing, which is "lack of motivation." On some level you don't care much about what you're doing; if you did, I guarantee you wouldn't be paralyzed. When you're motivated, things tend to fall into place.

That's not an indictment of you. Contrary to popular belief, motivation doesn't much come from within. For almost everybody, long-term motivation is about other people: your friends, your community, and the world at large. You'll be motivated to do something when these groups of people push you to.

And the mechanism for that push is almost always the same: status. In the long term, human beings find it very easy to do things that increase their status, and very difficult to do anything else (except for things that are inherently more pleasurable than difficult — but that generally doesn't include studying CS theory).

This is really hard on college students, because even though good grades will increase your status after college, they rarely do much for your status in college. If you're good, professors might care, but the collective student body won't.

The solution is to find people who really care about your performance in your field of study — maybe a professor's lab, maybe a group of high achievers, maybe (ideally) a club with an external goal (e.g. autonomous vehicle club) — and make those people central to your life by spending a lot of time with them. If you do, it'll become natural for you to work hard at your field. Although still, you'll only be driven to do things that directly increase your status in your group.

And of course, this solution can be hard to implement; spending lots of time with a new group of people takes its own motivation. It gets a lot easier after college, though. After college you get a job, and wherever you work, everybody will care about how you perform.

Thanks for the explanation. One thing that's confusing me: if the company gets a Series A round, convertible debt is worse than the equity you would've gotten because you've essentially chosen to invest as a VC rather than an angel (which means you're investing, in all likelihood, at a higher valuation). This isn't true if the valuation cap is sufficiently small, but then why not just get equity out the door?

If the company goes bust convertible debt is worth nothing, like equity.

Where's the upside? Convertible debt seems like a strictly worse investment than stock.

This is like saying that the entire universe can be simulated by using a fundamental theory of physics as source code.

It's (to some extent) true, and potentially interesting philosophically -- but completely meaningless from an engineering perspective.

The flaw in the argument for switching comes in its second line:

"1. I denote by A the amount in my selected envelope.

2. The probability that A is the smaller amount is 1/2, and that it is the larger amount is also 1/2."

If we're gonna be taking expected values we need to assume that the monetary amounts in the two envelopes are generated from a probability distribution on the nonnegative reals. Then the probability distribution for the amount of money in the smaller envelope is going to be some kind of curve (call it S), and obviously the probability distribution for the amount of money in the bigger envelope is going to be the same curve only "stretched out" and "squashed" by a factor of two (we'll call it B).

Now if you say "my envelope contains exactly A dollars," you can tell what the probability is that your envelope is the smaller envelope by comparing the relative heights of the two curves at the value A; let's denote these heights by S(A) and B(A). It is certainly possible that the two heights are the same, in which case it's fifty-fifty that you have the bigger or smaller envelope, the rest of the logic holds, and you should indeed switch, getting an expected return of 5/4 * A.

But it is obviously impossible that in general the two heights are the same for any given A, because then the two probability distributions are the same -- and that can't be true, because B is a squashed, stretched-out version of S, and for a variety of fairly obvious reasons you can't squash and stretch out a finite curve on the positive reals and get the same curve (unless that curve is 0 everywhere). And so we can't conclude that in general you should switch, which is good because if you're not allowed to look at the money before you switch it obviously doesn't matter whether you do or not (unless the people running the game are messing with you).

Taking your hands off of home row to get out of insert is also easily soluble -- you can map literally any key combo to esc. I use command-i (on a Mac), which is effortless to type and feels nicely symmetric to using i for insert.

This is a bad idea. Even if we accept that no individual can reasonably spend more than $200 million non-charitably (which is false), super-rich people tend to care deeply about money for its own sake -- I say this from limited but real personal experience -- and the accumulation of money tends to be a major factor in their motivation to continue to produce and to invest. If you impose a $200 million wealth cap, you are going to substantially reduce the wealth production of some of the most productive members of society and dramatically curb certain kinds of investment.

What do you get in return? Essentially the government receives a bunch of claim checks for wealth (remember that "money" itself has almost no intrinsic value; what we're after, from a macroeconomic viewpoint, is a maximal sustainable production of wealth). Your proposal amounts to reducing overall wealth production in exchange for increasing the government's buying power by a comparatively small amount. Forget ethical arguments against it; except in very extreme economic circumstances, it's absurd from a practical standpoint.

This is a popular argument in support of mind-enhancing drugs in the "real world," and it's completely wrong. You could make almost exactly the same argument in favor of nootropics in schools: "anything that allows the sum-total of human learning to increase at a faster rate is good."

That's just not true in either case. If the widespread use of a substance accelerates human work (or learning) by 10% (whatever that means) but halves life expectancy, it almost certainly isn't good. That's obviously pathological but my intention here is only to show that your argument is bad, not your conclusion.

Moreover, you seem to believe that, outside of schoool, people would only take nootropics if the net benefit to humanity outweighs the net detriment; the real world, after all, isn't a competition. The problem is that it often feels a lot like one. If I'm competing with a coworker of roughly equal skill for a promotion and a nootropic is available to both of us that will increase job performance by 5% but noticeably decrease quality of life -- again, this is pathological -- we're put in a prisoner's dilemma: both of us would much prefer that neither of us take the drug if the alternative is that we both take the drug, but both of us have a strong incentive to take the drug no matter what the other one does.

There's no getting around the fact that allowing nootropics in the real world at least has the potential to instigate exactly the same sort of prisoner's-dilemma-esque mental arms race that allowing nootropics in schools generates. Some of the side effects of that arms race might be good, sure, but some of them might be very bad. This issue isn't anywhere near as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be.

Meditation is learned skill in a way that "running" in your example doesn't seem to be. Ten days of practice is more than just "ten more days of meditation in my life"; it's a hundred hours of improvement. A more reasonable comparison would be to say that a meditation retreat is like going off and doing math for ten days straight. (I've actually done the latter, and it's shocking how much you can learn and improve in a week and a half if you completely dedicate yourself to something. Total immersion really is very very powerful.)

But... HN has nuanced discussions pretty frequently. Right now the top comments in this thread primarily serve to point out the blinkered view taken by the article. HNers love proving people wrong like nothing else, and until that stops being true I don't think this site will really succumb to groupthink. (I admit that groupthink seems like it's become much more common recently -- and, like you? I've particularly noticed it regarding IP/DRM -- but I still generally see the "minority opinion" surfacing when it's actually reasonable.)

All that said, I do think that HNers are way too quick to upvote comments that happen to support their previously-held beliefs even when those comments are extraordinarily lacking in nuance (see: the score on your post). But I don't think that's ever gonna change.

I'd be careful about messing with points on comments (and with karma more generally).

You might enjoy imagining a forum where smart people anonymously engage in civilized discussion without need for the kind of lowbrow pleasure-center-stimulation that the current karma system provides, but I doubt such a thing could exist; if it did, it would probably be much less exciting than HN. Smart people who enjoy good discussion are still people, and most of what people do is seek out easy rewards.

You've built something almost impossible here: a place where it's very rewarding to say interesting things and very unrewarding, generally, to say uninteresting things. Don't look this gift horse too directly in the mouth. If you kill the point display on comments I think you'll kill a lot of the content on this site.

Not to mention that, though it's easy to make fun of people who get too sucked in to internet arguments, there's frankly nothing wrong with people going out of their way to correct other people and that kind of behavior is pretty fundamental to crowd conversations like HN. It's probably annoying that jacquesm's popular approval forced you to respond to him, but I (and others) enjoyed reading your comment; I think you'd be hard-pressed to show that you writing it was a net loss activity.

This is great but (unfortunately) it's not quite right. The author seems to have forgotten the difference between a program without specified inputs -- which can't be said to "halt" or "not halt", because it might halt on some inputs and loop on others -- and a program with specified inputs, which always either halts or loops.

Thus at one point the poem asks whether Q halts without specifying an input to Q. This question is meaningless.

The correct proof is given by BrandonM in a thread somewhere on this page. Check it out. (scott_s restates the incorrect proof above BrandonM, for comparison.)

Even assuming that this "screwed factor" is something meaningful, you miscalculated it. I think you're trying to find (percentage increase in work over normal hours/percentage increase in pay over normal pay).

If your pay is just a percentage of a company's profits, the amount of equity you hold has no impact on this number. If you working 50% more hours generates 10% more profits (or whatever) for the company, you get 10% more pay for 50% more work, so the screwed factor is 5.

Again, this is assuming that the screwed factor is meaningful in the context of a startup, and it isn't. First of all, the different possible outcomes for an early employee of a small startup can mostly be boiled down to two, maybe three: the startup IPOs and you get rich, it gets sold and you get well-compensated, it fails and you get nothing. Treating your income as a very smooth function of the hours you work is misguided in this kind of scenario.

Second, contributing to a culture of working really hard on the startup (by working overtime) might be more important than the work you actually do in your overtime. Startup employees don't work in a vacuum.

The terminology is secondary; the important point is that it seems like smart people are unpopular, but it's not clear whether that's true and if it is true it's not clear why.