The Key to Higher Quality is Higher Quantity - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-business-of-living/why-quantity-should-be-your-priority-3bc2b16fe3f5#.71nkro3k4 <comment><USER2> This kind of advice is a double-edged sword. It does point you in the right direction but when you meditate shortly on the meaning of the words "quality" and "quantity" I think you're likely to conclude that the thesis "The Key to Higher Quality is Higher Quantity" can imply almost anything.

For a long time I've been an opponent to this mantra and in a way I still am. This is because in my opinion a lot of people define "higher quantity" wrongly. Learning flash cards mindlessly all day will hardly help you become more fluent in a foreign language; preparing loads of meals or even the same meal very often doesn't help you become a chef if you aren't fully concentrated on what you're doing.

Lately I am of the opinion that you have to practice with a zen attitude, like it is described in "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind". And because of that I think the author of this article also gets it wrong when he says:

      As Ira Glass so famously put it, the best way to refine your craft is to create a huge volume of work. Not to create the most perfect piece you can, but to create many pieces of work.

I guess what Mr. Glass hints at is that you shouldn't become paralyzed by being caught up in thoughts. That is: It is useless to think "Oh this needs to be perfect" or "Oh this needn't be perfect because some clever guy said so" because in that instance you've already lost concentration and you are not really stretching your skills. You certainly have to TRY your best every time. In other words: Strive for perfection but don't get distracted by having dualistic thoughts about your practice.

<comment><USER3> Practicing is not the same thing as doing something many times _. Refinement requires identifying failure and the causes of that failure.

Fail fast is a great mantra, but the fast part requires understanding that you have failed and using that failure to understand how to succeed.

_ People don't get great at chess by playing lots of chess, they get good by studying and learning techniques often with advice from a teacher.

<comment><USER4> And yet the quantity-over-quality potters were not making any effort to identify the failure and the causes of that failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A wise lesson once given to me by a person I can't recall:

 _If you 're going to "practice" guitar, then actually concentrate on what you're doing - don't just have one in your hands and fumble around with it while you're watching TV - focus and you will improve._

...which blends with another maxim I picked up:

 _There are some guitarists who can truthfully say they 've played for 40 years - and it sounds impressive until you find out they've only played the same 9 chords the entire time._

So I can appreciate what the article is kind of pointing out in a lot of words - "Practice makes better" \- it's a perfectly reasonable message to put forward. The examples are okay overall. There's a lesson in there about the ceramics class, but it seems like a setup from the beginning - a lot of varibles in the outcome depending on the professor, right? I mean, just letting the non-quantity group sit there and drool or goof off isn't maximizing the actual concept of reaching for perfection.

Oh, and I listened to a 60 minute long tape of Kanye from that prolific period. The end results are really cookie-cutter. He basically found a sample of music that somebody else wrote & recorded, stretched/looped it, added a hip-hop sounding MPC kit line under it, and called it done. It's a strong example of mechanical repetition to hone the tools of a trade (production/sound engineering). Personally I view it as the antithesis of writing original material, but like I said, personal opinion.

<comment><USER6> I should add too, that as someone who has personally played guitar for 30+ years, "the same 9 chords" is a good route to extraordinary musical depth. Music isn't just technique - it's expressiveness. Knowing more chords won't necessarily make you a better musician, or even a good one.

My own technique hasn't improved significantly in ages, but I'm a better musician year after year. Why? Because I become more profound. I have better things to say with the technique I have.

<comment><USER7> This is pretty similar to how Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath has described how he tried for a while to play real fast like a lot of the younger guys and focused instead on playing what does do well with better understanding and execution than those with less experience but more technical skill could manage.

Similarly for us engineers, a real "10xer" is not just someone that ships fast, you must ship something that is efficient with time and resources. This can be done with luck but is more often done after lots of experience and mistakes are made.

Hence, the lesson from W. Edwards Deming about how experience teaches nothing without a framework or theory of concepts and knowledge is applicable very much at the individual level as well as organizational. You can practice the same punch 1000 times but if you do not really experiment a little, never measure your punch effectiveness, or try to understand why your punches are not getting any better even though you are stronger, you will lose against someone that has carefully analyzed 1000 punches they've thrown and practiced with that knowledge to shape their efforts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Eventually you run into limits, that's when the real work begins. It took me 3-4 months to work up to where I could do cardio 3 times a day for an hour a pop. I use a hybrid cardio machine called the Arc trainer at Planet Fitness.

I did that routine exactly once before my right calf muscle developed strain. I've played this game before a dozen times with a dozen different activities. Every time I wind up losing focus and that's why I have a dozen of them and not three of them.

So rather than drop cardio entirely, I'm backing off to three or so sessions a week and cutting down the length to a half-hour to 45 minutes depending on how I feel. I'll pick the frequency back up as my muscles heal.

You really do have to get obsessive over little details to be able to do this. I have a fairly strict routine that I follow every single time I go out to the gym. One time my iPhone decided to start updating against my wishes just as I was about to get on the machine.

After some choice swear words, I packed it up and went back home. It wasn't worth sitting at the gym waiting for music and trying to work out without music wasn't going to give me a good workout. Focusing on quantity allows you to skip sessions knowing another one is coming.

<comment><USER9> I'd disagree that giving up on that workout was a good idea. I'm heavily involved in the powerlifting community, and there's a well-known phenomenon where people try and talk themselves into taking an extra rest day or two before "leg day" because leg day is so important that they absolutely have to feel 100% when they do it...problem is they do this every week, so instead of doing 100 leg workouts a year at 95%, they end up doing 70 leg workouts at 100%. And trust me, that's not a good trade-off.

The thing to realize is your mind is just trying to trick you into getting out of something, because leg day is hard.

<comment><USER8> Cardio isn't powerlifting. Every single workout is more or less the same. I worked out three times a day on cardio because the balls of my feet would get irritated after about 45 minutes, so I couldn't just do 3 hours in one sitting. The calculus changes when you're doing 14-21 workouts a week.

I _want_ to do more cardio. Even now, I wish I could get on the machine. I've come to need it just like my morning coffee. I have to keep myself away from it so I don't get injured.

It will take me probably another year before my body adjusts to the massive amounts of cardio I want to do.

<comment><USER10> If every single workout is the same, where is the progress?

(Or are you just talking about which exercises you do?)

<comment><USER8> I talk more about it in the comment below, but the latter is correct. Everything around the workout can be heavily refined because I do the same exercise every time. I vary time, intensity, range of motion, and sometimes even the basic approach I take towards performing the exercise, but my gym sessions have revolved around my arc trainer session for a few months now.

Eventually I will find an exercise to add onto my routine, I've experimented with kettlebells, but haven't yet committed to them. My ideal setup would be a home-built power rack so I can do basic compound lifts. For various reasons I've not taken on that project yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Producing many of the same crap won't increase quality. Producing one crap, testing it, and improving it will. This is almost definitional.

The state of "many things" is irrelevant, it's the process that links those things together that makes the difference.

The ability to learn from the results of the first crap is crucial. There are too many examples of processes that result in the same crap over and over even though the process is iterative.

The "quantity vs. quality" reasoning is sort of a red herring here, the real discussion is about how to maximize learning while minimizing investment and baseless assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER12> Quantity, as someone once said, has a quality all of its own. That said, practice doesn't always make perfect; it forms habits. It's easy to form bad habits, and reflective practice, mindfulness, etc, are only partial solutions to that problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is absolutely true. Stephen King said that if you want to be a writer then write a lot. 2,000 words a day.

When I was in 6th grade, I used to shoot free throws every night for hours. Just for fun. We had a track and field day at the end of the year and I beat out two guys for first place in the free throw competition who went on to play basketball on our high school team.

I beat them at something that they cared about a great deal and I didn't care about at all, simply by inadvertently practicing a lot.

<comment><USER14> > I beat them at something that they cared about a great deal and I didn't > care about at all, simply by inadvertently practicing a lot.

While some may argue that shooting free throws every day for hours counts as 'caring', I would argue that it was your emotional detachment from the results/outcome that made you really good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love this concept, and think the premise is absolutely true.

As others have pointed out, practicing and just churning out quantity often develops habits and bad practices.

One way of combatting that seems to be switching up your routine and deliberately avoiding these habits. This article explains a little more on that: [http://www.iflscience.com/brain/researchers-uncover- method-l...](http://www.iflscience.com/brain/researchers-uncover-method-learn- new-skills-twice-fast)

But I think it's apparent all over. People who are able to produce a large quantity of new ideas/methods/etc. almost automatically are of higher quality.

Take the Beatles for example. The produced a huge amount of music in their relatively short recording history.

But they didn't just follow the same patterns, they experimented and look where they got. Writers can be the same, and athletes, and why not developers too?

</comment><comment><USER16> makes me wonder if the reason why it is a lot harder to pick things up when one is older is primarily the lack of large blocks of available time as opposed to the brain being less "plastic" or adaptable as one sometimes reads.

When you read famous musicians' bios, for example, there always seems to be something along the lines of "I practiced 8 hours a day every day", hence lots of quantity over several years, but this is of course next to impossible to do in adulthood with all the demands on our time.

<comment><USER17> I manage to practice 6-8 hours a day and I work full time. Just leaves me with absolutely no time for anything else once chores are taken care of. Can't wait to buy a tiny remote cottage so I can practice full time with minimal bills.

<comment><USER18> What do you practice?

<comment><USER17> Theory and history, then technical training (scales, chords, arpeggios, ear training, sight reading, and etudes), then my repertoire which currently consists of Bach's BWV 903, LVB's op. 13, Brahms op. 118 no. 1 & op. 118 no. 2, Gershwin's three preludes, Berg's Sonata op. 1, and Webern's Variations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not a writer or web designer. Have no opinion on that aspect. For IT and QA, this is terrible advice. You shouldn't just try random stuff over and over. Instead, you should first look for people who get the job done on a regular basis. Look for what principles or techniques they used to do that. Start there. Observe in your own work or field reports what problems people run into with what solutions were tried. Reuse what worked, experiment with what didn't in new contexts, and so on.

Essentially, get a good start using what's already been done then use creativity and scientific method to quickly become better. Publish lessons you learned from solving problems with certain goals and constraints. Contribute back to this overall process of learning.

Alternatively, people can try the author's advice and re-create the modern web experience from HTML, JavaScript, C, and assembler via trial-and-error, exploratory programming. I'll pass. ;)

</comment><comment><USER20> I (sort of) adopted this philosophy in December of last year. Instead of toiling away on a single project for months on end, attempting to perfect every last inch of it. I've decided that I'm going to release a project every month, for a year. Get all my ideas out there, and just see what happens. I've gained way more experience switching gears between projects, than I would have sitting, staring at the same code day in and day out. The third project launched yesterday, and starting the fourth this weekend!

</comment><comment><USER21> Almost 20y earlier Eric S. Raymond wrote that famous line in his essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar': "Release early, release often". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often)

</comment><comment><USER22> Analogy: The larger your training set, the better your neural net. Of course, having a good quality training set is important as well. But with enough data, even not-so-great-data at huge quantities helps generate a well-performing neural net.

</comment><comment><USER23> As in Greasing the Groove, GTG</comment>


I'm sorry, HN. I built an open-source coding platform but I need help - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/the-domecode <comment><AUTHOR> To all the readers who have already read about my platform on HN, I apologize for constantly posting the same thing. It might come off as rude and indecent and I can assure you that those are not my intentions.

I'm in highschool right now and over the past ~8 weeks, I made an open source coding platform called DomeCode. "DomeCode is an open source platform to help you advance your coding journey with pre-existing resources to learn programming concepts ( in Python as of now ), take notes, plan tasks, practice coding problems in 6 different languages including, Python, Go, Java, C++, C or Rust. You can also discuss interesting stuff on the forum, meet other developers and most all even get to listen to music conveniently without ever leaving this open source platform to navigate to paid platforms." This is what the description on my platform's landing page suggests and for the most part, that explains it well.

However, the issue is that it's kind of hard to acquire users, all the users I have gotten till now ( 237 in all ) are through Reddit and a few through HN and organic searches but I don't see a fast user growth. I launched the platform on 5th August ( the alpha version ) and I'm very much against the idea of advertising so I haven't tried that yet. On top of that, I want DomeCode to be a profitable startup. So far, I haven't received any donations/sponsorships. If you could help me with that, I'd be more than grateful to you. And if there's any contributor who likes open-source, I'd love for you to contribute at [https://github.com/the- domecode/](https://github.com/the-domecode/)

I really don't want to cause any chaos or disturb you with spam on HN but I don't seem to have any other option it seems. You can contact me at email@example.com with any proposal you might have or if you wanna mentor a highschooler like me who's into programming. And ofc, feedback is more than appreciated.

<comment><USER2> Stop trying to pour gas on something with no flame. Compose individual, truly personal emails to each of the users who have signed up so far. Ask them what they were expecting to get, what they got, and what software-related problems they have. Open your heart to them - explain that you're committed to trying to understand and improve their daily work and would love 5 minutes of their time to chat.

This will take at least a month, maybe two or three. Don't submit anything else to HN or elsewhere until you've heard from them and adapted your site.

Start here: [https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6g-how-to-talk-to- users](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6g-how-to-talk-to-users), [https://www.ycombinator.com/library/66-biggest-mistakes- firs...](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/66-biggest-mistakes-first-time- founders-make). Watch the other intro videos that basically boil down to: ask your users to tell your their problems, rather than forcing your solution on them. Everything else - money, user growth - comes after your product is thrilling 5, then 10, then 20 people. Go ask your users what would thrill them, then go thrill 5 of your existing users.</comment></comment>


Road Unpricing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@daedalus3000/road-unpricing-6539c2a34691 <comment><USER2> "On the freeway, rewarding drivers 1 cent for every minute that they kept their speed at 50 mph resulted in a traffic planner's dream: a smooth flow of vehicles all traveling at the optimal speed for maximum road utilization."

I'd happily lose that "reward" to drive faster. If you want to keep everyone driving at a certain speed for extended periods of time, there is only one way that really works - average speed cameras as implemented in the UK. There are long stretches of the motorway(50 miles long for example) where you have a camera at the entry point and at every exit point - the camera reads your licence plate when entering and when leaving, calculating your average speed based on time.

For the entire length of the limited zone people do drive at the limit, because everyone knows that there is absolutely no escape from the fine. At a regular speed camera or police checkpoint you can slow down momentarily only to accelerate again. There's no escaping average speed cameras.

<comment><USER3> I used to spend a huge amount of my commute frustrated, tailing someone in the left lane, trying to pass. One day, it really "clicked" that the behavior was totally unproductive. However, I didn't want to just passively accept the traffic status quo. Instead, I opted for what I call my "slow drive":

1\. Always drive in the right lane;

2\. Always make sure the car ahead is slowly pulling away;

3\. Always make sure there is space on my left for someone to pass me on the left.

The 3rd rule is the hardest, and I will admit to some dickish behavior to stop other drivers from pacing me "on the left", or (worse) in my blind spot--- mostly by very tightly hugging the center line, or by turning on my blinker and slowly moving into the left lane.

As a practical nuts-and-bolts, I'm averaging about 5mph less than I used to, but a wash on total commute times---I'm usually at the front of lights, and jackrabbit to clear the intersection.

My favorite part is seeing _dozens_ of cars passing on the left at high speed, while (on one occasion) more than a dozen cars were very slowly plodding behind me.

I'm certain there were angry people trying to turn right but, considering I'm going as much as 15mph below the posted limit, a little forethought would have them passing me---it is this very thoughtlessness that I'm targeting.

There also a lot of rural one lane highways out where I'm at. For these, I go the posted limit; if I'm being tailed I pull over & yield the right of way.

My commute, while still irritating and long, is much more pleasant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In general, most roads shouldn't have a price for most drivers, and rewards for maintaining a particular speed sounds stupid.

However, we'd get big improvements to our urban/suburban city planning if we had (a) much less street parking, most of it metered; (b) looser or no parking requirements for houses and businesses written into the zoning laws, with mixed-use zoning allowing both smaller parking-free residential units and for- profit parking structures to pick up the slack from the reduction in free and required parking; (c) lower speed limits on urban streets encouraged by better street designs and enforced more strictly by traffic cops; (d) tolls on most highways; (e) much higher gas taxes to offset health and environmental costs of driving, and a removal of various automobile subsidies; (f) tolls for large vehicles like trucks which cause most road damage and cost the most in road maintenance, proportional to the amount of road wear they cause, which increases something like mass per wheel to the fourth power (a semi-trailer truck causes something like 1000x the road wear of a passenger car).

<comment><USER5> I agree on everything else but (a).

Street parking actually makes streets better. It slows down traffic by reducing the available width (everybody keeps a safe margin to parked cars) and by causing disruptions (motorists entering or exiting a parking spot). Street parking also makes pedestrians feel safer as the barrier of parked cars insulate them from the moving traffic. A street with lots of parked cars generally also feels safer because human activity can be expected from time to time, unlike on a completely cleared street where there is only traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> FYI Daedalus was a column by David E. H. Jones in New Scientist by a fictional inventor, containing all sorts of fun, odd, and satirical ideas: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._H._Jones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._H._Jones)

<comment><USER7> Some of these columns were collected in book form.

The Inventions of Daedalus: [http://www.amazon.com/Inventions-Daedalus- Compendium-Plausib...](http://www.amazon.com/Inventions-Daedalus-Compendium- Plausible-Schemes/dp/0716714132)

The Further Inventions of Daedalus: [http://www.amazon.com/Further-Inventions- Daedalus-Compendium...](http://www.amazon.com/Further-Inventions-Daedalus- Compendium-Plausible/dp/0198504691)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds interesting. Alas, the last sentence has triggered a Cobra Effect alert. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)

<comment><USER9> Yeah. The last sentence made me thing the whole bit was satire, and now I'm just confused.

<comment><USER10> Spoilers [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._H._Jones](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._H._Jones)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think Daedalus (writing in the 1970s/80s) didn't anticipate that we'd spend our time working for free to gain HN karma, Facebook likes and so on. No need to pay out cents at all, just ring the little bell!

<comment><USER12> The only way that would work is if your bell rang in other people's cars.

A big part of those gamification systems is a competitive/social aspect, so you can win against your friends and boast about your e-points.

So, add a scoreboard for the best drivers on that mile of road, add some points, do a "best of the day", there are tons of options there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Where does the money come from? Not just for the payouts, but to setup and maintain the program?

Seems like there would be some major privacy concerns also.

Pretty sure it's satire, though.</comment>


North Korea fires on South Korea – live coverage - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/nov/23/north-korea-fires-south-korea

<comment><USER2> This is coverage from an event last November. While interesting, I'm not sure how it's relevant. Can you provide some context?</comment>


GroupOn's Andrew Mason, Marketing to Acquire Everyone  - <AUTHOR> http://www.simplerna.com/2011/08/groupon-marketing-to-acquire-everyone.html

<comment><USER2> No mention of annoying customers with emails. The notion of marketing as pestering needs revision.</comment>


Startup feedback. What is your biggest pain in hiring as a candidate? - <AUTHOR> http://www.careerswitch.me/?campaign=fitbit

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

We are building a platform 'where you can privately connect with employers in order to create a pipeline of best opportunities for your future job search'

We are looking for some feedback on following:

1] Is the concept useful, what would you like to see this evolve into? 2] Does the messaging on landing page makes sense? Any suggestions? 3] Any Other feedback :)

Thanks for helping out !</comment>


A True Story - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Story <comment><USER2> Lucian also wrote the earliest known version of _The Sorcerer 's Apprentice_, which I view as the ur-example of an "AI rebellion" storyline. A programmer is harmed by their creation not because it goes against their orders but because it follows their orders to a much greater extent than they were anticipating.

<comment><USER3> This is bogus. Abhimanyu's story in Mahabharatha and Sanjiva's story from Buddhist Jataka tales both predate Lucian and are both Sorcerer's Apprentice type tales.

<comment><USER4> Interesting, could you post one of them? The version from Lucian is as follows:

"Whenever we came to an inn, he used to take up the bar of the door, or a broom, or perhaps a pestle, dress it up in clothes, and utter a certain incantation; whereupon the thing would begin to walk about, so that every one took it for a man. It would go off and draw water, buy and cook provisions, and make itself generally useful. When we had no further occasion for its services, there was another incantation, after which the broom was a broom once more, or the pestle a pestle. I could never get him to teach me this incantation, though it was not for want of trying; open as he was about everything else, he guarded this one secret jealously. At last one day I hid in a dark corner, and overheard the magic syllables; they were three in number. The Egyptian gave the pestle its instructions, and then went off to the market. Well, next day he was again busy in the market: so I took the pestle, dressed it, pronounced the three syllables exactly as he had done, and ordered it to become a water-carrier. It brought me the pitcher full; and then I said: Stop: be water-carrier no longer, but pestle as heretofore. But the thing would take no notice of me: it went on drawing water the whole time, until at last the house was full of it. This was awkward: if Pancrates came back, he would be angry, I thought (and so indeed it turned out). I took an axe, and cut the pestle in two. The result was that both halves took pitchers and fetched water; I had two water-carriers instead of one. This was still going on, when Pancrates appeared. He saw how things stood, and turned the water-carriers back into wood; and then he withdrew himself from me, and went away, whither I knew not."

<comment><USER5> Not the OP, but I was curious so I read a bit about Abhimanyu and Sañjīva.

Abhimanyu was a warrior in the Mahabharata who, while still in his mother's womb, heard Arjuna tell the secret of how to break into the powerful circular battle formation known as the Chakravyūha. His mother, and with her, Abhimanyu in her womb, fell asleep before hearing how to break out of the formation. Once an adult, Abhimanyu entered the Chakravyūha of his enemies, the Kauravas, and killed many of their soldiers. But, not knowing how to exit the formation, became trapped inside and was eventually weakened and killed by the combined might of his enemies' heroes.

The Sañjīva-Jātaka is a story-within-a-story. The main story tells of King Ajātasattu who followed Devadatta, the enemy of the Buddhas and how he paid for it. The story-within, tells of a young brahmin, named Sañjīva, pupil of the Bodhisattva, who taught him a spell to raise the dead. Wishing to impress his peers, Sañjīva cast the spell on a dead tiger. But, not knowing the counter-spell, he could not control the tiger, who bit him in the neck and killed him, then fell dead by his side. The story-within is meant to teach how an evil person cannot be a true ally and will soon turn against you:

      Befriend a villain, aid him in his need,
      And, like that tiger which Sañjīva raised
      To life, he straight devours you for your pains.

There are obvious parallels between the two stories and the Sorcerer's Apprentice tale (modern and ancient). However, Abhimanyu's story is also significantly different, in that the Chakravyūha is not his own creation that he lost control over.

If we take Abhimanyu's story as similar to the Sorcerer's Apprentice story, and accept that the theme is one of knowing how to initiate a process, but not how to stop it, then we may also heed the story of Phaethon, the son of Helios, the sun god, who asked to drive his father's chariot (i.e. the sun) but couldn't control it and was killed by Zeus to stop him wreaking havok to the Earth. This is a story from Greek mythology and therefore much older than the story of Sañjīva and at least as old as the Mahabharata.

Therefore, as a stereotypical Greek, I will claim the oldest telling of the story of The Boy Who Lost Control for the legend of Phaethon.

__________

Refs:

Abhimanyu's article on wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhimanyu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhimanyu)

Chakravyūha article on wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padmavyuha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padmavyuha)

The Sañjīva-Jātaka:

[http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/j1/j1153.htm](http://www.sacred- texts.com/bud/j1/j1153.htm)

Phaethon's article on wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaethon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaethon)

<comment><USER6> Phaeton is a credible origin for starting-something-you-can't-stop stories but I think Sorcerer's Apprentice has a further facet, where the process that you start is autonomous to some degree and causes problems by doing exactly what you told it. (In the case of the undead tiger it was being more of a live tiger than Sañjīva expected.)

<comment><USER5> Hey, I don't disagree completely, but it's hard to decide how to answer this kind of question. In short, we are trying to figure out a way to identify a class of stories, based on a single example and on the observation that it has some common elements with other stories we happen to know. The difficulty is in the fact that there are many such "common elements" we might decide to focus on, or ignore, and each set thereof can substantially change the stories we identify as "similar to" our single example, the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

So, for instance, we could broaden the description to include any story of losing control over one's, or someone else's creation- therefore "covering" stories as diverse as the legend of Icarus, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and of course the stories of Sañjīva, Phaethon and Abhimanyu. We might focus on the moral dimension of the story, which draws more stark parallels to the story of Sañjīva but also King Midas. We might choose to stay as close as possible to the them of "magical automation" in which case, we 'll only include stories like the original tale in Lucian's work, the Sorcerer's Apprentice many versions, and the story of the Golem of Prague, all of which include something like the Paperclip Optimiser AGI. And so on.

I guess now I make it sound like navel-gazing, but this is actually a legitimate problem with very real applications. For example imagine trying to organise the stories I list above, plus who knows how many others, in appropriate categories _automatically_ based on their _narrative_ characteristics. It's probably impossible to do that sort of thing with current NLP techniques, or at least to do it in a way that would satisfy a majority of human classifiers. Not to mention, the problem of choosing what part of a _story_ (as opposed to what portions of _text_) to attend to when categorising a document is also not something we can currently solve convincingly.

So it's an ill-defined, hard, classification problem. Perfect subject for a machine learning paper :)

<comment><USER6> Interesting take on the topic, thanks! I think part of the problem is trying to categories stories on some kind of taxonomy rather than seeing them as bundles of attributes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The most fascinating thing for me is that at that time, he was able to conceptualize that people could walk on the moon, and that it was big enough to have a war on the ground. I'm not sure why, but something in me makes me think that I never would have imagined something like that back then. Quite the imagination.

Of course, he seemed to also think that you could walk on the sun, but can't blame him for extending the logic and not knowing that the sun's composition wasn't great for walking.

<comment><USER8> Democritus, who lived many centuries before Lucian, reasoned his way to discovering the concept of atoms, and that the world must be built up from a finite set of small indivisible particles. I find that even more fascinating...

<comment><USER9> It is indeed. But even more so for me is that then Epicurus, starting from this, deducted a whole ethic that is essentially modern. If you haven't read it yet, I think you would appreciate an account of the whole story, of how it was supressed by the church for centuries and eventually triumphed: "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" [https://www.amazon.com/Swerve-How-World- Became-Modern/dp/039...](https://www.amazon.com/Swerve-How-World-Became- Modern/dp/039..).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of a quote from the late Ursula K. Le Guin:

> I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and > therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The novelist produces statements that are blatantly untrue, knowing that they are untrue. The reader also knows that none of the stuff they're reading is true, yet is able to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story while it lasts. The story might be full of lies, but the enjoyment is true. The message contained in the novel might also be true, as is the person you become after having read many a classic. So it seems that a well-written falsehood can sometimes convey truth better than raw truth itself.

<comment><USER11> _Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth._

Nice. It is akin to my favorite movie line: _I 'm too truthful to be good._

<comment><USER12> My personal line is "Truthful 50% of the time. Lying 50% of the time. Exaggerating 50% of the time."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 'The book ends abruptly with Lucian stating that their future adventures will be described in the upcoming sequels, a promise which a disappointed scholiast described as "the biggest lie of all"'

"Wait! Where are you going?!? Coming soon! Don't miss, History of the World Part II!"

</comment><comment><USER14> I have read almost all his books as a kid, because I had found them very cheap (10c each) in Athens, Greece where I live. The most impressive is the "style" of the author which was VERY modern.

<comment><USER15> I thought ancient greek was rather different from modern? Or were they translations?

<comment><USER14> There was an evolution in the language. Homer is harder to read than Plato and Plato is harder to read than the New Testament.

By the time the New Testament was written 50-100 AD the language was quite close to todays form, so you can easily understand it, although it would be harder to talk like this.

Lucian lived about 100 years after this, so the language was easy to read. Moreover his use of the language made it even more easy, because he despised those authors that were trying to appear "serious".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/luc/true/index.htm](http://www.sacred- texts.com/cla/luc/true/index.htm) here is a translation of the story, will be reading it...

<comment><USER17> > [...] if he looks into the looking-glass he sees every city and every > country just as if he were standing over it. When I tried it I saw my family > and my whole native land, but I cannot go further and say for certain > whether they also saw me.

Google maps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember thinking of Luciano (we read him in Latin in high school back in Italy) when Fargo by The Coen Brothers came out. We're all just remixing since centuries!

</comment><comment><USER19> "They find sinners being punished, the worst of them being the ones who had written books with lies and fantasies, including Herodotus and Ctesias.[25][24]"

We the fiction writers are condemned to the deepest layer of hell... man. Pa always said nonfiction was the answer.

</comment><comment><USER20> I love the thing at the end about the sequels. This guy sounded pretty clever.

</comment><comment><USER21> See also The Golden Ass[1], the only Latin novel to survive in its entirety.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ass)

</comment><comment><USER22> I will definitely give this a read based on all the comments here. Studying Latin in high school, one thing I found fascinating how the same stuff the Romans and Greeks dealt with thousands of years ago is very similar to the same things we deal with now.

</comment><comment><USER23> This brings back memories.. A page from "A true story" was the ancient greek translation in the 1990 national graduation exams in Italy. Unusual stuff, completely different from the usual suspects (Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristotle)

</comment><comment><USER24> It would be a bit funny if somebody wrote the Wikipedia article in the same style as the novel (parody, sarcasm, and a complete lie).</comment>


Ask PG: What's your take on the Yahoo! situation? - <AUTHOR> Given the recent events, and that you sold Viaweb to Yahoo!, I'm curious to find out what you think of the whole Yahoo! situation. Carl Icahn has recently engaged in a proxy fight. Or is at least flirting with one. Should it have accepted Microsoft's offer? <comment><USER2> I think if Jerry and Filo had a chance to run the company for a while, they could probably surprise people. They're probably as smart as Larry and Sergey, but they've never had a chance to run Yahoo the way they'd like. If they had, it would have more of a hacker culture, and Google wouldn't be trampling them so badly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you stay in touch with them, and/or with Yahoo in general?

<comment><USER2> Not really. And that was 10 years ago. Most of the people I know at Yahoo now started after I left.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ask PG: What should I have for lunch?

PG seems to have become a gnomic magic 8 ball of sorts. I can only hope for his sake that he's built Eliza-like behavior into HN such that his responses to all "Ask PG" questions are fully automated.

<comment><USER2> A glass of prune juice or a nice marshmallow salad.

<comment><USER4> When we were going to say hi to you on the pre-Startup School dinner, we were joking that we should corner you and ask ALL the questions we have, existential or otherwise ("why am I here", "what is the meaning of life", "what is the best color" etc) :-)

<comment><USER2> we invited you; it's a mistaken metaphor; ff6600

<comment><USER5> That's always been my favorite color. I feel so validated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The long term consequence of "exit strategy" at work here. Yahoo "exited" way too soon, and the founders never really had any chance to shape the company. CEO Koogle assembled Yahoo (one of the smaller parts being ViaWeb) and Semel tried to remake it in a Hollywood direction.

Contrast this to Amazon, and later Google, where the founder(s) have had very strong influence on the culture. Another company where the founder exited too soon (voluntarily) is Ebay, and Ebay has no soul whatsoever, and they are doing everything they can to lose their natural monopoly.

</comment><comment><USER7> Slightly offtopic: this thread showed up as dead earlier today. Was it resurrected?

<comment><USER8> You must be new here. Links on the site fall off the stack eventually--but when you reload the page, new ones are made. It's a "feature" of the architecture pg used to build the site (continuations based).

So, if you sit idle on any of the comment pages for more than a few minutes it becomes unavailable. You have to start over on the main page and dig your way back down. I imagine this is not a fundamental flaw of a continuations-based design, since Seaside seems to cope with it OK (I guess?)...merely something that pg, or someone else, has not added the code to handle yet.

<comment><USER7> No, no. I mean the title of the article ended with "[dead]".

<comment><USER8> I must be new here. I've never seen that happen.

<comment><USER7> Go to your profile, and change 'showdead' to 'yes'.

<comment><USER8> It sounds confusing. I think I'll leave it alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Only two things would've caused them to spurn Microsoft—excessive self-worth or hubris—both of which are bad.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure that I agree here.

Despite the public statements to the contrary, I suspect that Yang's motivations are not about the short-term financial plan, but about the long- term survival of the company and of their culture.

Microsoft is a massive organization, and has had several problems integrating smaller players into it's corporate structure. My suspicion is that a number of higher-level Yahoo members are convinced that if the Microsoft were to go through, they'd lose the ability to continue to decide their own fates. Look at the AOL-TW merger for an example of the clashes that can arise when trying to combine two massive companies with dissimilar cultures.

Yahoo employees may additionally be concerned, given that their potential suitor has quite a history of purchasing, or nearly purchasing companies, and not fully utilizing them.

In immediate dollar terms, no, turning the deal down doesn't make sense.. But in a long-term view of "where do we want Yahoo to be in 5 years", it makes all the sense in the world.

The problem for the Board is that the stockholders are more interested in the former, than the later, so Yahoo is trying to contort to justify using a framing they don't agree with.

<comment><USER11> Once the shareholders have sold the company off to Microsoft, if Yahoo falls apart, that's Microsoft's problem. It wouldn't hurt the people who had already sold Yahoo, so it's not a scenario that Yahoo's board should be considering.

(One caveat: the Microsoft offer is part cash, part stock. Since part of what Yahoo shareholders will receive is stock in the combined entity, I suppose that predicting a meltdown a year down the road means you're saying the offer is worth less than the current calculated value)</comment></comment></comment>


Freakonomics: Shaming Your Way to Weight Loss - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/shaming-your-way-to-weight-loss/

<comment><USER2> I've got an easier solution than the one proposed : just don't buy any rubbish food in the first place. If you want to snack at the office, bring in a container of fruit.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with the information overload? - <AUTHOR> Some weeks ago I was feeling overwhelmed so I started an information diet. I feel much better now. After some thought I've decided to limit my news intake to:
HACKER NEWS - top 10 articles of the day and javascript related articles:
http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/
https://www.hnwatcher.com/
TWITTER - once a day, no tweeting and following only 10 accounts.
FACEBOOK and MAIL - once a day.
SKYPE - just by appointment.
How do you deal with the problem of information overload? <comment><USER2> Being busy is a personal choice unless you are working several jobs to put yourself though college (or in a comparable situation).

"Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues." - Sogyal Rinpoche.

I suggest reading this [https://t.co/qH9s5Pay0Z](https://t.co/qH9s5Pay0Z) (medium blog post on being busy with tech).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not rocket science. To deal with information overload, you reduce your number of inputs.</comment>


3D Projector Blurs Line Between Reality and Fantasy - <AUTHOR> http://live.wsj.com/video/3-d-projector-blurs-lines-between-fantasy-reality/13956AE9-235E-4BB1-9CFF-0D17C4154A5F.html#!13956AE9-235E-4BB1-9CFF-0D17C4154A5F

<comment><AUTHOR> The researchers page is here: [http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/PicoArray/](http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/PicoArray/)</comment>


"I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do" - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/silicon-valley-arrogance-i-can-tell-you-which-startups-will-succeed-without-even-knowing-what-89aa8ea35d23#.kizcm7fi2 <comment><USER2> I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt that there was some intended hyperbole and suggest the author was a little silly to put her words under a microscope. I'm also going to put it in the context that success may not mean getting funded, or exiting, but learning and perhaps making it to your next job or startup.

In a world where we focus on headlines and the exception rather than the rule it a good lesson to learn. Primarily, hard work and commitment make all of the difference. Maybe you will succeed without them - the exception. However, understanding and valuing them will give you a lifetime of returns.</comment>


What do the wealthiest know that others don't? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2016/07/15/what_do_the_wealthiest_people_know_that_others_don_t.html <comment><USER2> I think this article is short-sighted and poorly written. Its most grievous offense to me is lumping all non-rich people together.

The 22-year old out of college who needs a place to sleep doesn't need to save up for a mattress that will last them 10 years... they need a place to sleep. Especially when (unlike the article) you stop to consider other factors besides money. With "disposable" furniture/goods, you almost never need to take it with you when you move, as a 22-year old does frequently. This is an extreme example, but if the difference between a couch you'd want to keep and a couch you'd leave is $200 and the cost of the move is $200... it's actually a wash.

The middle aged parent taking care of multiple children with a poorly paid job isn't saving up for a nice couch. They're watching their family couch slowly disintegrate and they're getting years beyond what the author of this article might consider "useful".

I love the tech community for all it has given me, but the political and socioeconomic views of so many of its inhabitants ([redacted] in particular) who were born on third and told they hit a triple give me the creeps. Poor people aren't poor because they're stupid. They're poor because they don't have a lot of money, and the root causes of that can be as varied as anyone's individual life. Articles like this suggest that 500 words and a subscription to Slate can stand in the way of each and every one of those root causes.

The only valuable thing from this article is to avoid debt, beyond that there's not much of substance here..

<comment><USER3> Undoubtedly there are a lot of people in unfavourable circumstances who simply cannot afford to save and blaming them on stupidity is pure arrogance.

The real "stupidity" which causes so many people to remain poor is depicted with that BMW guy in the article. It is about trying to maintain a lifestyle that is beyond your means.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. This article should have been retitled "What do those who keep their wealth know that those who lose their wealth don't?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seriously? Life insurance is a great way to pass down wealth?? Depending on your situation, your life insurance will barely pay for the funeral. What, do you think everyone can afford million dollar policies for 'a few measly dollars a month'? Sorry to dissapoint, but teaching people to wait for their family to die is a horrible way to 'pass on wealth'.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the rest was fairly coherent, but that one threw me as well. Life insurance tends to fall into the same category as most optional 'insurances' for me - you end up paying out considerably more then you get back.

That said, for those with children, I can understand the purchase. Overall it's very circumstantial.

<comment><USER6> That is what insurance is for, the unforeseen instances in your life. You may pay out what appears to be a significant sum, but what if something happens to you? Life insurance should be something people think about.

1\. Student loans: There was a story floating around of how a family co-signed on loans for a child and then were on the hook for said child when they passed away.

2\. Family: If you have a kid, get life insurance. You should have the ability to leave the living with a sum of money to ease the burden of your absence. This means the loss of income and life adjusting to a one-parent family, not meaning that there is a pile of money to blow.

Do not say it is not affordable, grab a term policy that gets you to 65 and then be comfortable knowing that you have one less thing to think about.

For those who claim it is too expensive, a million dollar , 30 year term- policy for non-smokers is as follows:

\</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

| Age | Sex | Monthly Cost |

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

| 25 | Male | $55 |

| 35 | Male | $66 |

| 45 | Male | $160 |

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

| 25 | Female | $45 |

| 35 | Female | $55 |

| 45 | Female | $120 |

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

I am using this as a public service announcement, get life insurance.

<comment><USER4> I totally agree and I have a life insurance policy through my work, plus an additional one I pay for. Not 1m dollar policy, but decent and cheap (i'm a smoker). However, my qualm with the article is that it talks about this as passing down wealth.

I dont consider life insurance 'wealth'. Its a safety net that nobody should look forward to, but unfortunately a lot of people do. My wife has a wealthy grandmother and every one of her children are all drooling at the moment she passes away. I can't stand all the end of life bickering that goes on and the way I read this article sounds like it would perpetuate that more.

From seeing how rabid her family gets about money, I would rather be poor than deal with all the greed involved with such large policies. I believe that a policy large enough to pay off the deceased's debt and leave some extra money to help support the family is fine, but way overshooting for too large of a policy is asking for trouble. Backstabbing, lawsuits, etc.

Sorry for the rant. I just regularly hear my wife talk about all the selfishness her aunts and uncles display constantly and I cant stand it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What an atrocious answer. Does this guy think "the 90%" are just poor and irresponsible?

All of these answers assume the 90% is ignorant, short-sighted, and bad with both money and math.

Newsflash: The 90% includes the entire middle class, and not everyone who is poor is such because they are bad with money.

<comment><USER8> Actually, this guy gives a very well-written common-sense guide to getting rich. There are a lot of people in the middle class who live paycheck to paycheck because they manage their income poorly.

<comment><USER2> I'd love some citations there..

<comment><USER9> [http://www.npr.org/2016/04/24/475432149/could-you-come-up- wi...](http://www.npr.org/2016/04/24/475432149/could-you-come-up-with-400-if- disaster-struck)

<comment><USER2> This is a citation for the claim "people in the United States are poor".

What I want a citation for is:

> There are a lot of people in the middle class who live paycheck to paycheck > because they manage their income poorly.

What I want is definitive proof that, as claimed, _most_ poor people in this country are poor because they manage their money poorly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Those people who got a 'great deal' on Ikea furniture or faux leather couches will be buying another one sooner than the person who bought quality goods"

But what will you sit on while you save?

<comment><USER10> Moreover, a really nice couch will probably run you north of $2000. We have dogs, three kids six and under, things get messy. A cheap pleather couch from Big Lots is $350 (and is plenty comfortable). I'd rather buy a handful of those over the next 15 years and just throw them out when they're destroyed than a nice $2000-$3000 couch.

(Note: I haven't read the article yet, I'm planning on doing so, and I generally agree with buying nicer well made things, BIFL, but sometimes it's easier/cheaper to buy something you know will be ruined and you won't care as much).

<comment><USER3> Financially responsible people are far more likely to keep and maintain their stuff in good condition over long periods of time. That is a huge (and often overlooked) aspect of saving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Move to where the money is.

Befriend those who are already wealthy. Emulate them.

Befriend people who are on the fast track and believe in loyalty. Be very useful to them. Help them rise.

Invest at least 25% of your income.

Get out more. Talk to more people. Increase your opportunities to get lucky.

Eliminate toxic people in your life (you can help them later if you want).

And, don't burn bridges.

Edit: forgot one - dump bad investments (and places, people, etc.) quickly

<comment><USER2> > Move to where the money is.

Oops I was born in a small poor suburb outside of Pittsburgh and barely make enough each week to feed myself and pay rent, where am I getting money to move?

> Befriend those who are already wealthy. Emulate them.

> Befriend people who are on the fast track and believe in loyalty. Be very > useful to them. Help them rise.

This entirely depends on living in an area "wealthy" people would live. In my hypothetical poor suburb the richest guy is the guy who owns the only bar within a drive.

> Invest at least 25% of your income.

I make $1200 a month post-tax. In any given month:

\- $500 rent

\- $50 car insurance

\- $200 food

\- $80 enjoyment ($20/week)

\- $75 utilities

That leaves me with $295 for everything that's a non-essential in my life. This is a flat tire. This is a doctor's appointment. This is medication. This is Christmas gifts. This is a leaking roof. This is a broken stove. This is money that I need to be liquid every month, you suggest I invest all of it? I probably wind up spending this money just to get by, it's less than $75/wk for expenses outside of a pretty barren lifestyle.

> Get out more. Talk to more people. Increase your opportunities to get lucky.

Again, this is entirely dependent on there being people of value in my immediate vicinity.

> Eliminate toxic people in your life (you can help them later if you want).

> And, don't burn bridges.

Believe it or not, these are the _only_ valid points you've made to apply to my hypothetical life... And this is for a single person who makes 15000

<comment><USER12> Hypothetical lives often are for very conservative people who make up reasons why nothing will help. Moving for a poor single person can be as simple as hitchhiking or, for $90 more, taking a Greyhound somewhere.

And 'wealthy' is relative. There's always somebody better off. And you can contact people all over the world these days, with something called the Interweb.

<comment><USER2> I'm really not trying to say people below the poverty line can't function or move cities, what I'm saying is a lot of people can't do a lot for financial reasons and it's unhelpful advice to suggest things like the parent. A lot of people in this country are in financial situations they didn't put themselves in that keep them there implicitly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A life insurance?

I'd rather say don't trust anyone with your money other than yourself. The insurance (like anyone investing your money) will take a nice chunk of everything it earns and if something is left (a big if in times of zero or negative interest rates) you might get it.

</comment><comment><USER14> "life insurance is hands-down the easiest and lowest-impact way to pass wealth on to the next generation. . . . If you're retired, your adult children should be paying the bill for you."

Can anyone explain the math and/or logic behind this to me?

<comment><USER8> Because, at that point, life insurance is basically your children's inheritance. Everything beyond what goes to paying burial costs and remaining debt is your adult children's inheritance. If you don't believe in transferring large inheritances to adult children, then there is no point in paying for life insurance beyond funeral costs.

What the author didn't explain is that life insurance is a way to avoid inheritance tax. Depending on circumstances, it's cheaper to pay an absurd amount of money for an insurance policy, because the payout to the beneficiaries is taxed differently than a straight-forward inheritance, and thus might, after taxes, result in a better payout.

<comment><USER14> I understand the idea of avoiding inheritance tax, but that has become less of an issue with a $5.45M estate tax exemption. Leaving that aside, my question is why would my kids pay for my life insurance as an investment.

Assume they have paid of their debts, maxed out their 401k and Roth IRA contributions and they have extra money to invest for retirement. If they put it in the stock market they will pay income taxes and any dividends they receive, which they don't have to pay any taxes on life insurance so I see that. But it still seems to me that life insurance is a bet on when I die and if they are not dependent on my income I don't see why they would want to take that bet.

I am 57 and I can get a 20 year term-life insurance for $5k/year with a payout of $250k. If I outlive the policy that is $100k in sunk costs and the next term life policy will be even more expensive.

Whole life makes even less sense at my age. The only way this makes sense to me is that if you had a whole life policy that you started wen your kids were younger and now you are retired and can't afford the payments do you cash it out? Well, if I cash it out then maybe I end up spending it or the nursing home gets it, but if my kids take over the payments then they get the benefit (unless the nursing home still takes it.)

This still assume I bought whole-life 20 years ago which everyone at the time told me was a sucker's bet so I'm still not sure that this makes any sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This should be: What can the wealthiest afford to do that keeps them wealthy?

</comment><comment><USER16> "Answer by Ron Rule, CEO of As Seen on TV"

Where's "how to scam low-income folks out of their money with cheap useless crap" on the list?

This is someone whose business model is literally marketing shitty, unnecessary products to low-income folks via infomercial advising purchase of "quality goods".

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if Slate has an arrangement with Quora... and if I posted an answer that they wanted to republish, could I insist on just rewriting it into a different piece so it was more like I was published on Slate? Why wouldn't they do that with all of these Quora "articles?"

</comment><comment><USER18> Society has a limited amount of resources and manpower. Your capital is your share of society's resources and manpower. The capital can either be used on yourself or to build new products and services. Some people are better than others at building products and services people want. The free market attempts to redistribute capital to the people who are better at building products and services people want.

Most people use their money for themselves. They use the money to pay for food, clothing, and cars. If they get a pay raise, they use the additional money to pay for better food, better clothing, and better cars. They don't see the money as capital to build products and services people want.

</comment><comment><USER19> Generally, they know other wealthy people who can get them better opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER20> First rule my parents ever taught me is that quality only hurts once.

<comment><USER16> Quality hurts every time your kids spill their chocolate milk on the $2k sofa. :-p

<comment><USER20> Don't put your children on $2000 sofas. Also, don't have kids :)

<comment><USER16> As a parent, I'm well aware "don't have kids" is a good way to get rich, at least money-wise. Holy hell, summer camp is expensive!

<comment><USER20> I grew up going to a free summer camp, it was the sixty acres of woods behind my house :)

<comment><USER21> I was about to say the same thing. My summer camp was everywhere between the highway and the river.

<comment><USER16> Try that today and CPS will show up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> not to click on link bait?</comment>


Show HN: Supercharge Your Customer Feedback - <AUTHOR> http://fullscope.io/

<comment><USER2> Correct me if i'm wrong. Are you running Google Plus feedback as a service? because it is like Google Plus feedback

[0] [https://www.google.com/tools/feedback/intl/en/images/preview...](https://www.google.com/tools/feedback/intl/en/images/preview.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty much the idea, with a few extra add-ons like console logs and plugging into existing customer support channels.

I've found this type of feedback tool to be really helpful in reducing the amount of back and forward when handling suggestions or problems in web apps. Hopefully it'll, at the very least, make the "What browser are you using" reply go away.

<comment><USER2> Ohh i see! That's good idea :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice widget, congrats on launching! I'd love to see it in action without signing up though, so you might want to consider adding a giant "demo" button somewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, thanks for the feedback :)</comment></comment>


Forth Haikus - <AUTHOR> http://forthsalon.appspot.com/

<comment><USER2> Okay, what am I doing wrong? I have FF4, but the site says I need Firefox with support for <canvas> and Javascript. I thought FF4 had that?</comment>


The Value of Time - <AUTHOR> http://jackg.org/the-value-of-time

<comment><USER2> While most of the comments here are talking about the fact that this is the posters "discovery" of opportunity cost, there's another point to be made here. There are several reasons why, as a startup founder, getting that $660 laptop instead of the $700 one benefits your company other than the $40 that stays in your bank account.

Frugality breeds more frugality: if you set an example, others will follow and compound the financial savings. Frugality can result in camaraderie, since you are all in the rickety boat together eating ramen. Frugality can prevent resentment and walls going up between employees and decision makers, since even the CEO has to cut back on everyday luxuries and lives the same way employees do. Frugality can express your values by giving you an opportunity to "splurge": if you spring for a $500 chair for all the engineers but never fly first class yourself, it shows that you understand how important a good working environment is compared to other things that are perceived to be frivolous. Frugality can serve as a reminder of risk: if you're surrounded by luxuries you can forget you are actually a startup fighting to stay alive. Frugality can maintain a good relationship with investors even when the going gets tough, since it shows you're trying your best to avoid blowing their investment. Frugality can motivate employees and reward them for success, since you'll only add perks when the company can afford them, and when you do, the team made it happen not the VCs. The list goes on.

<comment><USER3> Slightly off-topic: I had ramen a few times in Japan, and while truly delicious, it's massively expensive and rather exotic. Why is ramen a synonym for "cheap" in the US (apparently)? Or does it mean just "instant noodles" over there?

<comment><USER4> The US of A has a greater capacity to produce grains needed to produce the noodles, and can deliver them to market without having to put them on a boat. Japan has less arable land, so less grain producing land, and (probably) has to import more (which requires boats).

<comment><USER5> > The US of A has a greater capacity to produce grains needed to produce the > noodles

And more importantly, a greater capacity to subsdize production of said grains.

Edit: Did this comment really get greyed out? The mechanism for that is still kind of mysterious to me. Let me clarify, I don't mean the US has more money, just a dumber system of farm subsidies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the concept of opportunity cost[1], and along with time preference and marginal utility, it is one of the foundations of praxeological thought. Understanding OC changes your entire perspective on the world, makes you realize why rich people don't recycle as much, why first class flights exist, and why people with higher salaries are more likely to have chauffeurs (so they can not waste time on the act of driving, when the economic output they would produce in that time pays for the driver, the car, the fuel, and still leaves profit).

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost>

<comment><USER7> Opportunity cost is an important idea to keep in mind.

However, there are some other factors which are also important. For one, money _now_ is worth more than money _later_. It's easiest to imagine future earnings discounted based on how far in the future they are; I think traditionally they are discounted exponentially.

Another is that time worked is not necessarily linearly proportional to productivity. Perhaps for the most menial of assembly line work this is true, but for creative endeavors like programming it isn't. In fact, working _more_ can make you _less_ productive in an absolute sense!

You also have to keep your risk tolerance in mind. That is, a 1% chance of earning $1000 is _not_ the same as a 10% chance of earning $100.

And, of course, opportunity cost also applies to all sorts of resources like money (especially in some liquid form) as well as time. This is something to keep in mind if you plan on investing money in something illiquid.

In short: opportunity cost is important, but so are a bunch of other things.

<comment><USER8> This can actually be captured with the simple recognition that opportunity cost is not entirely monetary, but rather it's about _value_. "Money now" has more value than "money later". This is described using a <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_function>

> It's easiest to imagine future earnings discounted based on how far in the > future they are; I think traditionally they are discounted exponentially.

It's called <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_discounting>

<comment><USER9> > It's called <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_discounting>

For larger amounts of money, it is also important to consider the time value of money: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's very easy to use a framework like this trick yourself into spending more money on luxuries, though, because productivity fluctuates wildly and isn't really easy to account for on an hour-by-hour basis. Will you _really_ be providing that extra $50 in value if you take the cab instead of the subway? Often, I think the honest answer is "no". People often do think "my time is too valuable to take the subway", but I suspect that may boil down to status more than actual value in many cases (something closer to "I'm too _important_ to take the subway").

It all gets quite fuzzy, at least if you're working on a salaried basis rather than billing hours. My own experiences are that the opportunity-cost ROI often doesn't materialize, because spending the extra $X to save Y minutes of time does not really result in me getting more done that day, since productivity bottlenecks tend to be things other than the number of minutes in the day. Plus, you can get a lot of thinking and planning done on the subway. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Now the fun part is that your time has different value to different people.

For instance for yourself, your time may be worth what you are being paid. Suppose that you get $120k/year. You work 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year, so you're being paid $60/hour. So if money for something comes out of you, $60/hour is a cap on what you're willing to pay - and actually it is less than that because you have little direct ability to change how much you're being paid.

Now let's look at that same employee from the point of view of the employer. If you've got an employee, after benefits, office space, training, etc, on average you're paying 2x salary for that person. (This figure varies by organization, but 2x is a typical figure.) That person works for you 50 weeks per year, 5 days/week, 6 hours per day. (Why 6 hours? Well they are present for 8, but take lunch, do personal emails, etc. So they only really work for perhaps 6 of those hours.) Do the math - that employee is costing $160/hour.

$60 vs $160 for the same person is pretty bad, but it does not end here. In order for it to make sense to hire an employee, you want that employee to be earning you more than they cost. So $160/hour is a floor for the value you hope they are providing - hopefully that figure is more like $200/hour or more.

The moral is that an employee's time is worth massively more for an employer than an employee. And therefore a wise employer should be willing to pay several times more than the employee to make improvements in how efficiently that time gets used.

(That said, there is a breed of employee who, faced with an employer who is willing to be generous, will try to figure out how much they can ask for. There is a balance to be found...)

</comment><comment><USER12> I find it frustrating that many tech people (sorry for being general, but I see it a lot on this site and other communities) have a general sense of disdain for MBA/BBA-educated individuals, and then write multi-paragraph blog posts about opportunity cost, which is a 101 concept in any economics or business curriculum.

I'm not trying to derisive of Jack -- it's a good post -- but this is not some grand insight. This is why educational and personal diversity is a good thing: reinventing the wheel doesn't just apply to code, it applies to business.

<comment><USER13> I've never heard of people having disdain for the particular knowledge or economic "science" (to use that term loosely) of MBAs. The problem people have with such folk is the way it is applied (too often blindly).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is an excellent thought process, and it's good to know about opportunity cost.

Once you do, internalize it, and pack it away so it can never see the light.

As soon as you start treating _people_ as the equivalent of the monetary value of their time, you're lost. You've gone too far.

This way of thinking is powerful and dark. Please—use in moderation.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. I know a company that made the mistake of putting an MBA type in charge of advertising, and therefore in charge of their affiliate program. She pushed always trying to figure out how much an affiliate was worth, before deciding if their stupid questions were worth the time that it took to answer them.

She made two fundamental mistakes. The first is that the time it takes to figure out up front whether someone is worth her time leads to a bad interaction surprisingly often (so even the "worthwhile" ones get a worse experience than otherwise). The second is that she valued an affiliate at the profit on the business they brought in minus the amount they got paid, completely missing the fact that having them out there linking to you improves SEO, which helps bring additional free traffic.

The result of her being penny-wise and pound-foolish, and that company's rapid growth trajectory turned flat and stagnated.

<comment><USER15> FYI,if you're being penny wise and pound foolish then you're not doing a very good job of calculating opportunity cost.

And it also sounds like the "MBA type" wasn't doing a very good job of calculating value added, which is a separate problem from opportunity cost.

<comment><USER11> That would be my main point.

There are a lot of hidden sources of value which are hard to quantify when it comes to anything like customer service. Therefore the errors that she was making are likely to be systemic in anyone who is trying to be economically efficient.

<comment><USER16> And even more likely to be systemic in anyone who is not trying to measure the world. Science works.

<comment><USER11> Actually not. People who do not try to measure what is going on make an entirely different set of systemic errors.

Which set of errors matters more depends on what you're doing. For anything resembling quality customer service, measuring tends to lead to the worse errors. But a CFO who does not reflexively try to measure stuff would be a disaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> At institutional scales, this sort of thinking can add up to things of real significance. For example: I'm a transport planner specialising in Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) systems[1]. 5 years ago, a certain large corporation took a very serious interest in building a campus-wide PRT system, funding extensive feasibility and engineering studies to that effect. The primary rationale for the system was value of time. When these high-value employees spend a significant amount of time hunting for places to park or moving around the campus on its internal shuttlebus system, that represents a substantial loss of value-creation. Thus a $360 million PRT system which saved each employee an average of five minutes per day would pay for itself in just a few years. The business case had other legs to stand on as well, but that was by far the most impressive item on the balance sheet.

Unfortunately, before the scheme could come to fruition, there followed a series of unfortunate events -- including but by no means limited to the collapse of the world economy -- which convinced said corporation that an even more appealing way to optimise their employees' value creation was to cancel all capital expenditures and sack a few thousand people. And the rest is history.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit>

</comment><comment><USER18> Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine, talked a bit about this when he interviewed[1] for Mixergy:

 _Yeah. I'm a big fan of, I think Don Mershaw[SP] was the first person that told me this, but he said a founder needs to value his time at $1000/hour ..._

Which he justifies:

 _So, what if you had a consulting customer that said, "I'll pay you $200/hour but there's only a one fifths chance that I'll actually pay you." Now, what hourly rate would you quote? Now you'd quote more like $1000/hour, because you probably won't get paid, but if you do you need to be paid disproportionately high to account for the fact that you took on the risk. That's exactly what's happening in a start up, and that's exactly why it needs to be $1000/hour._

[1] <http://mixergy.com/jason-cohen-wpengine-interview-2/>

<comment><USER19> But that doesn't make sense - in the consulting example you would still value your time at $200/hour, you'd just be at a $1000/hour wage.

That fits with startups, where you value your time at x, and are looking for at 5x exit when then thing sells. You're still valuing your time at x.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think that OP raises a good point in this post, but I'm skeptical of whether his strategy is really applicable in the real world. Yes, there are obviously some cases where it may make sense to do the more expensive option in order to save time, but can this strategy really be used as an overarching decision making mechanism? I think not, primarily because of the fluctuations in productivity/necessity of productivity that happen from minute to minute, hour to hour.

As OP says, he "use[s the] expected values throughout this post,"—I don't think average/expected value is really an accurate way to make decisions about _non-averaged_ decisions. Primarily, if you always choose the more expensive thing to save time, justifying because your average value makes it worth it, you will inevitably end up "saving" time that is useless; therefore, you'll end up—on average—spending more money than the value you create.

Does anyone else feel this way/think I'm crazy for thinking this?

<comment><USER21> Let's take the salesman example. A salesman isn't literally making $150/hour. As a hypothetical the value might be $0 in hour 0, $450 in hour 1 and $0 in hour 2 for an average of $150/hour. Much of sales work is this way, their is preparation time, and sales time. There may be prospecting, etc. So even though they may not make the money during that hour, if you are burning their motivation to prep or prospect you are burning their ability to get through hour 0 and into hour 1.

Part of the reason to use an average is that it gives you a very simple, but generally applicable metric. There are always exceptions and the rate may change frequently or slowly. Those are nitpicks though. The general point is that your time should be valued against the best use of your time. For instance the hotel example only makes sense if the alternative to walking to the convention is working or more time networking to generate revenue. If the alternative is sitting in your hotel room longer watching TV then $160/hour is not the replacement rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me of the movie In Time[1]. The movie itself isn't particularly amazing, but I definitely resonated with it's underlying themes around the value of both time and money, and how they are inextricably linked.

It's a hard idea to communicate across to your average layperson though, that their half hour of diligently shopping around for the best deal actually cost them more than they saved. It's all conjecture though until you're actually using your time to earn money, or you are being paid for your time. But even if you aren't directly making money from your time, you can argue that the time spent will still offset/reduce the amount of time you do earn money from.

There are definitely limits on this type of thinking, and how seriously you should take it.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time>

<comment><USER16> I also appreciated the concept of _In Time_, even though the plot was awful. I wouldn't hedge by saying there are limits to this type of thinking. Everyone should take it very seriously. Time is money in a very real sense.

Speaking of which, I should get back to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There is more to life than optimizing everything based on cost. That walk from the more distant hotel is healthy for you, and you get to enjoy the scenery. Sometimes it's good to think of time as having monetary value because it gives you perspective, but also sometimes it's good to forget it and actually enjoy life.

<comment><USER14> Ironically, it can often turn out that the latter is, in fact, more optimal.

Sometimes stochasticity makes better decisions than we possibly can. Do not limit yourself to logic alone—it describes such a very small subset of human possibility.

<comment><USER9> This. I faced an interesting paradox a few years ago when I first learned about opportunity cost. I found myself explicitly analyzing every trivial decisions in terms of opportunity cost and eventually realized that constantly thinking about opportunity cost was costing me opportunities. In other words, the opportunity cost of caring about opportunity cost is most often not worth it.

<comment><USER14> Yes! This is most of what I take from the ideas of Zen: that trying too hard at something ruins the final result.

How I describe this to the gaming generation is through a common shared experience. Remember that one time you spent 3 hours trying to beat that one level in that one game, then finally got frustrated and gave up, only to return the next day and beat it on your first try in 3 minutes? Zen.

The paradox makes no sense logically, yet it exists.

Moral: don't get in your own way—stop thinking too much about why and how and just do!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> You probably shouldn't spend your day calculating trade-offs for every purchase you make. Theoretical value added is still just theoretical value, but cash outflows come from finite cash.

The best values and leverage are found high repetition or high scale activities. For example, everyone has to commute to work every day. Considering moving the office closer to a train station/highway/bus terminal so that each of your employees shaves off 15min of commute time is a highly leverage-able decision.

<comment><USER25> No, you shouldn't, but you can still calculate _more_. For example, do one calculation up front about 'should I in general take the subway or a taxi?' and then follow your answer for the next couple years; for maybe a few minutes of work, you save money-time for perhaps thousands of days to come.

In general, the best space-time tradeoff will never be 'all time' or 'all space'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think this is taking the value of time concept way too far. So if an employee spends 15 minutes in the toilet he's pulling down the company's future value? Feeling entitled to favors from others (whose time is 'less valuable') is just a peek into where this line of thought heads.

Anyway, I'm not wasting my time discussing this [$640 blog post].

<comment><USER27> > _So if an employee spends 15 minutes in the toilet he's pulling down the > company's future value?_

Yes, he is. The way to realise that is to ask what would happen if everyone in the company did that, and did it not for 15 minutes but for 8 hours a day.

Sure, 15 minutes may not make a huge difference - but it's like saying "chucking a penny into the rubbish isn't losing me money", it may not be losing you enough to be worth caring about, but technically yes it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This kind of mental framework is very key for analytic decision making. At a decision crossroads, having this sort of thought process has often helped me make the right choices. That being said, if I'm not careful, this kind of non- stop analysis of my productivity makes me pretty stressed out. Yes, I value my time a lot - but I've also had to learn to let go sometimes and let life happen. The more I continue to ruminate on thoughts like, "Am I creating $100 worth of value right now?", the more my ability to relax deteriorates. I don't want to be in constant productivity maximization mode.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's a meaningful literature about this sort of thing in transport economics: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_time>

</comment><comment><USER30> A good start down the path - but you have to make the next conceptual leap after thinking about time as a countdown resource. That leap is thinking about whether you can use time to create more time, what sort of trade-offs you can pull in through support of medical research to ensure that you have a higher expectation value of living for a greater number of healthy years.

You can indeed put time and resources in to that goal in this day and age, and a related question is what you losing in the trade-off by not doing any of that. e.g.:

<http://www.sens.org>

<http://www.neworgan.org>

<http://www.mfoundation.org>

<http://www.lifestarinstitute.org>

[http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.scienceag...](http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.scienceagainstaging.org)

<http://www.bg-rf.org.uk>

etc.

</comment><comment><USER31> Related XKCD: <http://xkcd.com/951/>

</comment><comment><USER32> _> Once you start thinking like this, your day becomes full of these tradeoffs. Today I had to buy computer for a new employee [5]. I went to Amazon, my go-to online store, and immediately found what I was looking for listed at $700. Based on previous experience, I know that Amazon isn't usually the cheapest option for laptops; I estimated that if I spent another fifteen minutes diligently searching the web, the expected value of the best price I'd find would be $660. At that moment I was estimated my rate of value creation at over $160/hr, so I bought the Amazon computer and moved on to the next item on my to-do list._

I wonder if Amazon does this when they price items like computers?

</comment><comment><USER33> Welcome to the next level. Its one of those things like comparative advantage [1] that you need to internalize so that decisions you make take them into account. It goes along with understanding that 'money' when you give out equity for it, costs 10x what it does if you earn it.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage></comment>


It's a Man's World, and It Always Will Be   - <AUTHOR> http://ideas.time.com/2013/12/16/its-a-mans-world-and-it-always-will-be/#ixzz2nv4fvTfg <comment><USER2> In spite of how it begins, this article can be read as yet another criticism of men, albeit an underhanded one. Two key points the author makes betray this:

"Yes, there has been a gradual transition from an industrial to a service- sector economy in which women, who generally prefer a safe, clean, quiet work environment thrive."

"After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall."

To summarize, she argues that women are better adapted to the modern white- collar workplace while men, thanks to their brute strength, are better adapted to lower status blue-collar jobs, and nothing short of an apocalypse will put men back on top. There's certainly no rancor against men evident in this fact- based argument!

This end to the article is especially unfortunate because there should be some real concern about how men are portrayed in modern media. In children's movies, boys have become brutish, bullying antagonists to the protagonist princess more often than not. In comedies, the most common formula pairs a strong, competent, beautiful woman with a bumbling, slob of a man-child who will inevitably woo the lass with sweet intent more than anything else. Arguably, this probably reflects the fantasies of the bumbling, slovenly, men- children running Hollywood more than a deliberate campaign against the competent male, but the effect is the same. Action flicks glorify blue-collar men. The cerebral, hero scientists of decades past are long gone. Heck, even Indiana Jones is grossly over-educated by modern action hero standards!

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: Men built the modern society, women should be grateful. Men are doing all the dangerous work in the world, women should be grateful. When society collapses, the classic male figure will be necessary once again.

That's it. I guess the author does not think that women would be "pouring concrete, laying bricks" even if their lives depended on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not like the feminist groups are fighting to make sure 50% of all pouring concrete jobs is done by women. It's not like feminist fight to make sure that in 50% of divorce cases children go to fathers. This isn't helping feminist image at all. Another special interest group that fights for special treatment. This much about equality.

<comment><USER4> > t's not like feminist fight to make sure that in 50% of divorce cases > children go to fathers

But they do!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From Jezebel: "Camille Paglia has been trolling since before trolling was A Thing. She's the OG of barfing up archaic assertions about women, men, and feminism, justifying them with sweeping, unverified statements, and dressing them up with $2 words, and calling it new. Her latest, "It's A Man's World, And It Always Will Be" is so absurd that it doesn't merit a response; it merits an edit." Http://jezebel.com/camille-paglia-please-see-me-after- class-1484324950

<comment><USER6> Jezebel: using ad hominem since before ad hominem was A Thing.

<comment><USER5> A line-by-line dissection of a writer's pposition is not an ad hominem attack. Slamming Jezebel for some supposed disposition for ad hominem is itself, ironically, an ad hominem attack.

<comment><USER6> I have no business arguing with you on the topic, but I'm just wondering: is it really so that accusing someone's argument in ad hominem is ad hominem? Or have you just used "tu quoque"?

<comment><USER7> AH is defined by the context. When someone's character is central to their argument then a comment on that character isn't a fallacy.

That the person's who wrote the article above thinks that the author of the other piece is flawed, isn't central to the majority of their argument. Thus using that the person who wrote the article thinks that way, as a reason to dismiss the entirety of their piece, probably qualifies as AH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) > to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of > themselves as women.

You know, if you feel your femininity is defined in terms of the men in your life, that's your business. And I can understand how if you felt that way you might feel that other women weren't _really_ women.

But if that's your definition, then I don't want to be your sort of woman. Waving your hands in the air and saying things like 'centered and profound' just makes you sound like you don't have an argument.

<comment><USER8> If you read it in context, following the debate question "are men obsolete", followed by her paragraph where she says feminists have been tearing men down, then in context what you quote is not a woman defining herself in terms of a man W=f(M) so much as what is the relationship of the women and the man cothreads? Producer and Consumer? Master / Slaves?

I think Paglia is suggesting a co-equal but different Producer / Consumer relationship is better but what we are getting is perhaps closer to Master / Slaves, a relationship that distorts each individual thread.

<comment><USER7> If Paglia is just saying that we should have a co-equal producer/consumer relationship, in what sense does the man serve as 'a model to be embraced or rejected'?

And how would that even be an equal relationship? In more agrarian societies it might make a certain degree of sense. But in a modern world, less so. If you go that route it looks very much like she's defining femininity in terms of the traditional idea that women should stay at home to raise children. (And if you don't, you're a lesbian, apparently.)

But if so, the argument she goes on to build around that - men made the world and continue to have a great deal of influence in many areas (ignoring the major contributions of women to many areas of modern life) has to be questioned for relevance. It answers the prompt, to a degree, 'Are men obsolete?' Or at least one interpretation of it. But seems to have little to do with any discussion as to why we might want to be kept women or address many of the horrifying inequalities that arise from being so.

<comment><USER8> What she said:

 _Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without_ __strong ___men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women._

Emphasis added:

Definition of model:

1\. a three-dimensional representation of a person or thing or of a proposed structure, typically on a smaller scale than the original. "a model of St. Paul's Cathedral"

2\. a system or thing used as an example to follow or imitate.

I believe she is referring to the first usage of model and emphasizing how she needs a _strong_ men. That is she wants a well defined instance of class men so that instances of men and instances of women can have well defined interoperable and efficient interfaces. Without such well defined interfaces, instances of women are not sure what instances of men respond to or what inputs they accept and not sure what their output is. Reflection is not implemented.

You believe she is saying class men is putative parent class of class women which can smash patriarchy by choosing a different protype.

I don't believe that is what she is saying.</comment></comment></comment></comment>