I wrote, with the help of ChatGPT-4, a Christian adaptation of the Dao De Jing called "The Dove & the Dao": http://doveandthedao.com. I consulted many translations and commentaries and tried to find where Christianity and Daoism harmonized. Where I couldn't, I adapted it to Christian theology. It was an obsessive endeavor that broke my eyesight due to eyestrain (editing on a smartphone is not recommended) but it's one I was finally able to strike off the bucket list.
I had eight Bitcoin when they were worth about $400. I'd check the price every day and read the speculations on the subreddits. It became a bit nerve-wracking for me thinking that BTC could potentially plunge in price to nothing, so I sold at $400. About six months later the price went moon. Oh well.
Promote as you build is the way to go (if you can). I'm posting my book online, article by article. That way you get real-time feedback as to what works at what doesn't.
I do think there are pitfalls to this though. There's a tendency to want to smooth over problems and mistakes and amplify successes, which also makes the story you are telling pretty boring and artificial.
Basically: Let me tell you a story of the time we tried to play golf. We went to the US Open and signed up with our fantastic team of engineers, it wasn't easy and our team had to work long hours to figure it out as we went but thanks to teamwork we struck hole in one every time. We're fantastic at golf, and the audience cheered for our amazing teamwork and leadership success, and Tiger Woods came forward from the crowd to shake our hands and was was very impressed with what we were doing in such short time.
Like this story had no downs, it's completely flat and omits any problems and greatly exaggerates the successes. It's also like not far off the median linkedin post about a project in progress.
It removes all the things that makes a story compelling. What were the problems? How were they overcome? What were the lessons learned?
The risk to this is that your competitors seize the opportunity to criticise your mistakes as if you're hiding them, even if you wrote about them yourself! As such, one justification for keeping problems secret is that your competitors don't know about them. It's unfortunate, as it stops a lot of good-faith collaboration, where strangers will come and offer support.
I think this is why I find the Cool Continuum (http://continuum.cool/) so satisfying to work on: I get to (briefly) explore artists from various disciplines and discover how they broke through into public consciousness. I'm on number 42 and I've learned a lot already. I have hundreds more to do.
And yes, Vermeer and Bjork are both Level 5 Geniuses according to the Continuum.
Bill Gertz (the Author) is a very divisive figure in US politics, with a long history of anti China bias. His writings are much more polemic screeds and less balanced academic analysis. He sees the US-China situation very much as battle between good and evil (with the Democrats being complicit on the side of evil), has zero nuance and very little sourcing in his books. All of this makes his books rather controversial.
All that being said. None of this is evidence for his books actually being wrong.
Actually I think I read the second sentence as a snarky political jab, when on a closer look it seems to have been a neutral question, or at least that's a plausible interpretation.
"So accurate that it hurts" is the sort of thing that political trolls say, and it probably triggered the pattern matching machine in my head—which sometimes misses things, especially at speed. Sorry!
Honestly though, don't you think that's a valid question - asking for qualitative responses? Notice how the user responded to you, as an authority, I hope you're aware of that power dynamic as well.
I've also thought I'd love to see a Netflix style documentary of "a day in dang's life" to help us get to know you, to humanize you more + would be good marketing for HN and YCombinator. You're often very poetic in your responses, I think a documentary focused on you could be quite good.
Well written article, I learned a lot. I wasn't a huge fan of how little they espoused the actual positive side of the site, what continues to bring me and many of you back. The flaming and dramatic views of some are noise to me, the great insight and lively polite debate is what I see.
Dang, should there be a single meta-thread - monthly or quarterly -- where you hold a grand durbar and folks can vent their grievances, and you get some feedback from different segments?
If we were to have a seperate thread, then folks should absolutely not post these things in regular threads, thus leaving them cleaner and with a better tone.
they are free to reference this incident on the grievance thread. There, different downvote rules should apply of course.
There might be others who feel the same way, and therefore might upvote it. So, this way, you can get a sense of how many/deeply feel about a particular issue, and then address it suitably.
Once this particular case is addressed, then we create a link of sorts, and the next month someone brings this up, we just point to it.
I am thinking - maybe once a quarter -- to start with, and vary frequency as needed.
I understand the appeal, but users wouldn't abide by such a restriction on normal threads. The more one tried to force it, the more energy one would provoke to get around it or overcome it.
It would be a lost cause because it goes against human nature. People feel what they feel when they feel it; you can't stop them from expressing it, and trying to stop them would only multiply it.
How appropriate, people being told to shut up on a post about people being made to shut up.
Dammit dang, downvote abuse is a real issue.
The very fact that people keep bringing this up should clue you in. Once or twice, okay maybe it's the complainer's perception that's wrong, but again and again, for over a year? Then your damn system has a problem.
The least you could do to address it is not let downvotes instantly affect a comment's visibility. Fucking delay it for a few hours to allow everyone at least a chance to be seen.
Why is that so painfully hard for you to do? Did you lose the source code or can't find another Malbolge maintainer to take over?
This is not a one year problem. And it will stay that way because, as you know, HN is a corporation. Not a public forum.
Maintaining these rules allow dang@co to maintain the position of control over what happen in HN. The corollary is that changing them will dilute their control. They found a local maximum of discourse level and they keep it that way.
The justification that the discourse on HN is maintained at a high level by not talking about the rules is at least condescending to the participants.
It doesn't matter to them if they lose you on these grounds since talking about the rules appears only on extremes which are shallow in a normal distribution. They will lose the few participants that care enough about that while maintaining those in the middle. (Of course, cutting of the extremes will grow newer ones in the empty space but I digress...).
What happens with time is that people adjust their discourse to the middle ground making it void of any new or interesting information. Thus, HN becomes an echo chamber of mainstream ideas and people will leave when they got bored enough of the same thing. We're already there and @dang is more vocal now because he knows it.
I only partly agree with your view. It might be so, but there is a genuine reason behind not discussing the rules: they're always off-topic. For people like me who come to HN to read an interesting discussion about tech issues, anything mentioning downvoting is almost automatically useless in the sense that it doesn't bring any new information, it's not interesting, it doesn't affect me in any way.
Yes, if I were in charge of HN I would solve certain issues differently, and so would you, but it's a private forum run by someone else, so we have to obey in order to participate, whether we like it or not. The very fact that we're even having this discussion now means we prefer this place to any other in this moment. So you can't say these rules don't work.
> The very fact that we're even having this discussion now means we prefer this place to any other in this moment. So you can't say these rules don't work.
Oh fucking boy, no. What even is that logic
We have a bunch of tabs open on a bunch of other social sites and forums. We don’t prefer HN to any other place, we just think something about it sucks badly enough to express our disdain of it.
I've never heard of NearlyFreeSpeech championing a cause or making a stand for anything or anyone. I assume their brand name refers to price, not political/constitutional stance.
In 2021, western democracy will continue to be attacked from within and from the outside. Especially with the US in pandemonium, Putin and the CCP will no doubt exploit the opportunity.
Then there is the thought-policing of big tech and social media. 2021 is definitely shaping up to be a crucial year, a time when people need to wake up, get informed and defend freedom while they still have it.
The timing of this article is interesting. I've been putting off going to the dentist to have my back molar pulled. I've had this toothache since December but the pain has intensified the past week or so. It's a constant low-level pain that spreads to my front teeth and vamps up as I try to sleep.
I'm wondering if I should "tough it out" and suffer through the pain until the molar completely dies and crumbles away? The process has already started and the tooth is a jagged mess. Will the pain then stop or will my mouth become infected?
I work at a homeless shelter and they suffer through toothaches, often without medication of any kind. At least I can take ibuprofen when the pain gets too much.
Is suffering the dentist of the homeless?
Update: Thanks for the comments, they are helpful. I will make a dentist appointment in the morning.
That is not what happens. At least not the only thing that happens. You risk infection that can climb into the nervous system in your face, the pain you have now could not compare. The consequences of damage to the nerves can be life long.
I've let a tooth die and fall out without getting infected, but most definitely wouldn't do it again. Dentist is so safer, faster and more comfortable!
Don't be like me. My wisdom teeth pushed my teeth totally out of alignment. The headaches have been unbearable at times. I've had infections come and go.
It's been 15 years. I could have spent $3k 15 years ago to enjoy the following 15 years a lot more. What the hell was I thinking?
Well, I was thinking sort of like you are now. If you can afford to fix it, it's worth every penny.
I didi not know this. Thanks. As a person who grew up in India I never went to a dentist. After coming to USA I visited a dentist for cleaning because the insurance offered it for free. The dentist could not believe that it my first visit to any denstist in 27 years.
Contrary to popular opinion: our ancestors survived just fine without dentists for a very long time. Yes, you risk dying, but it's less likely than you think -- your body is pretty good at fixing itself. Wisdom tooth extraction and braces and whatever new money-extraction-technique-du-jour will come out tomorrow is probably not necessary.
Anecdote: when I was a kid, I used to visit a dentist who would always "find" 5-6 cavities every year. After a few years my parents took me for a second opinion elsewhere, and it turned out those cavities weren't really there. Ever since then, I've somewhat distrusted dentists... When I was in my early teens, I was told I needed braces. I declined, and two decades later, my teeth look straight and are fine. In my late teens I was told I needed my wisdom teeth extracted... I declined, and same as before, my teeth are fine now almost 20 years later.
My personal stance now is: avoid processed sugar (for teeth and health in general), brush your teeth, and go to the dentist if something hurts and don't go away within a few weeks. Otherwise dentistry is pretty scammy as a whole.
Our ancestors with good teeth ate zero sugar, zero processed starch. This is so difficult in modern society as to be essentially impossible.
Sadly yes, dentistry has extremely poor, or rather non existant oversight. The answer however is to extremely carefully select your dentist, and get second opinions. Not to ignore dentistry.
Ignore it, no, but the industry has "fads" which are very questionable. Effectively every single dentist will insist you need to come in for "cleaning" every 6mo-1yr... yet there are plenty of people like me (either by choice, or lack of dental insurance or whatnot) who haven't been to the dentist in a decade or two and don't have any issues.
