The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own.

Live deliberately.

You are free.

- Anon (Edited)

This insistence on bald self-determination will fail utterly for all but the loneliest, most isolated instances of Nietzschean uebermenschen. The reality is that mankind is a social creature, that we draw on the meaning provided by others, that we look to the molds of others for inspiration, that our definitions of ourselves vary significantly from culture to culture and society or society. But wherever and whoever you are, you won't find the secret to eudaimonia in a philosophical ramble that reads like it was written by the memetic Courage Wolf.

I know many who have tried to "make themselves" and failed. It seems to be a common thing for kids in their early 20s, fresh out of college, to try to do. Many with depression will not be able to summon the will to "imbue" their own meaning. For many, the assertion that the "universe looks on with indifference" is strictly worse than irrelevant. And so on.

And even if you have some unusual strength of willpower such that you can take the OP's advice to heart, trying to re-make yourself all at once, with no idea how to go about it, will be about as productive as banging your head against a wall, and the end result will be nothing but a terrible headache and severe ego depletion.

Indeed, I once tried the Courage Wolf approach to happiness that is advocated above. I found much better results once I decided that I don't know what I want, but by pursuing those things that seem to fulfill me, I can head down the positive path one step at a time.

Many, particularly Greeks such as Aristotle, pondered what makes one happy, free, and virtuous, with much more insight than the OP. But you don't have to read Aristotle. Just use some common sense.

  The reality is that [..] that we draw on the meaning provided by others

  For many, the assertion that the "universe looks on with indifference" is
  strictly worse than irrelevant.

  trying to re-make yourself all at once

The philosophy kashif describes can be considered to be Buddhist, Existentialist, Nihilist and probably many other things, in nature. Your interpretation and rejection of it as Nietzschean nihilism says more about how you view these things than about what kashif's quote means.

Now I'm tempted to write a self-help book called "The Courage Wolf Approach to Happiness"

But -- we also have far more freedom than many people realize. "I can't" usually conceals a confused morass that needs to be dredged out with a vengeance.

The decision might still be "I won't", but if you know why, and have some sense of how to maintain your emotional equilibrium, etc. you're still far, far ahead in the game.

I think the quote resonates with you (and many people!) because it's so easy to be locked into near-immobility by a kind of inarticulated wash of bad feelings about how other people must be judging us, and in fact most of this anxiety is unfounded and misleading.

It's incredibly valuable to take a kind of eyes-open "5 questions" approach to big decisions, to dig out the kind of thing like "so apparently I will do almost anything to avoid being criticized by men who resemble my father". And yeah, break free from the crowds (hint: this tends to actually earn you respect, not harsh judgment), work on improving yourself, etc..

But don't delude yourself into thinking that simply because there's no god, universal meaning, etc., you'll be able to just shake it off if you realize that your choices have earned you the contempt of those you love and respect.

But, hey, your mileage may vary.

No. Every single fucking day I wake up like a goddam bull, ready to charge out and destroy everything in my path. Maybe I'll start a new business, maybe I'll buy a house, maybe I'll get in my car and drive to Texas, I don't fucking know, but I'm going to do something that makes me happy. Sure, I used to be sad and pathetic like you, not sure what I wanted to do with my life, until I realized, there is no "single thing". I want everything. I want thick juicy steaks still dripping blood, I want wide-open blue skies, endless summer, ice cold glacier water out of the skull of my enemy. I want to fuck until I scream, drive up the face of a cliff, ride horses in France, blow 10 grand on peanut butter or maybe just buy the biggest suite in the place and sit around ordering pay-per-view. It's your goddam life you spineless fuck, no one is going to live it for you. You better wake the fuck up now, or you're going to turn around, look at your Chrysler Minivan, your mortgage, your pot-belly and your thinning hair and wonder with crushing regret where it all went, how you got here, and what the fuck do you do now? Goddam, I want to slap you and wake you the fuck up. You want to know what to do? LEAVE THE FUCKING HOUSE and go explore. Fuck a midget. Create a stand-up routine and do open mike night. Yeah, you aren't funny. Get over it. Learn something new. Go out and live. Then again, there is something to be said for a nice nap.

Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/DoesAnybodyElse/comments/cm06w/dae_f...

Yes I know, glass houses and all, but I'm not the one making the braggadocious comment. My real point is not to point and laugh at this guy, but to point out that such things are easily said and not so easily done.

What makes him happy? Not all of these things he's writing about, of course. Though I'll bet he's happy when he writes about it, and gets the impression that people, real people out there, are reading it, getting excited over the energetic prose and maybe getting fired up and/or laughing. That's real.

But to actually try doing some of these things? Well, after half-an-hour riding horses in France, he'd have noticed they're a lot like horses elsewhere, and also be pretty chafed and ready to get off but not sure how to ask that in French. If he bought 10 grand worth of peanut butter, he'd realize two things: someone has to pay the bill, with real money that's generally hard to get, and peanut butter has an expiry date like everything else (and it's sooner than you'd think...), so he just wasted, like, $9970 that he now can't use to pay for overpriced hotel rooms and pay-per-view (if that were enjoyable itself...).

Come to think of it, this is a pretty good capture of the concept of happiness that is pushed by advertising. More, more, and more shit, all at once! -- that's happiness. If a rare, thick steak is nice, then surely a rarer, thicker steak is nicer! If sex is pleasurable, then surely more sex with more people is still more pleasurable! Doing anything that people on TV do must be amazingly fun, because they look so happy (and toned and suntanned and...)!

(Of course it's correct -- I mean, that's why lottery winners are all so happy with life. right?).

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

"I am 18 with 20 years of experience"

Note : Replace that 20 with whatever you want :)

...and by what standard should we judge "well"?

That's a hidden way of arguing there can be no meaning to life without a creator, a feeling that religions the world over have handily exploited.

Meaning can derive from yourself, you can feel good about your own acts within your own reference frame of morality that you have derived from your experience with the world.

There's nothing wrong with that and it is just as satisfying, or even more so than some externally supplied meaning.

Meaning can derive from yourself, you can feel good about your own acts

I can feel good about shooting heroin, but that doesn't mean it's right (or that it's not!). It really ends up sounding like "Do what makes you feel good, and try not to think too much about why it makes you feel good". That's not necessarily bad, but I haven't seen any argument that it is good, other than that it's not necessarily bad.

If what you're looking for is what's most satisfying, I'll agree that introspection and experiment will tell you that. If you're looking for what you ought to do, what's really "meaningful", it's not at all clear to me what can tell you that. Or that anything can, or that it's even a question with an answer. At least if there's no answer, continuing to think about the question can't be wrong. ;)

World of warcraft characters are not self aware, but if they were, my point is exactly that they could aspire to higher meaning than fun for players, by their own standards of morality and what they choose to be fulfilling.

You can feel good about shooting heroin, for a little while, and then you'll realise that it is not all it is cracked (pun intended) up to be. So you will most likely either revise your value system or you'll die of an overdose.

Just doing what makes you feel good is not a very good system of morality, since it obviously allows you to do good to yourself at the expense of others. People that have such tendencies are usually labelled either unable to empathise or psychopaths depending on how far they go in their pursuits.

What you 'ought' to do, is to try to define a set of rules for yourself that start from axiomatic things that any healthy and well thinking person can perceive as 'good'.

It's not a coincidence that most laws tend to start off from basic principles like 'property is ok' and 'killing is not' and work out a whole series of codified laws from there.

For a moral viewpoint on life and a feeling of satisfaction you could very well do the same, on your own almost without external input.

Some people will come up with extremely selfish sets of rules, which is fine as long as they fit within the legal framework and make them feel good, some will do much better than that.

And some will fail, and end up in jail or become ostracised from society.

Whenever you see yourself saying, "you ought to"/"it's good to"/"it's moral to", notice the immediate reason that the statement seems true (assuming it does) is to satisfy some goal. You have a goal of not hurting other people (or, to say it another way, you want not to hurt other people), but while that suffices for directing your thoughts and actions on this level, if you back up a level, you'll see that this goal is in service of another goal. If human goal systems were regular and consistent, there would ultimately be a topmost goal which all this was pointing at. But that doesn't seem to be the case, so we're left shifting about aimlessly, considering only that which we happen to consider (our happiness, the happiness of others, life satisfaction, or whatever) without anything to direct what we ought to be doing.

Making up your own meaning doesn't solve this problem, but only ignores it. It might be that it's unsolvable (I currently think so, at least), but in that case, it can hardly matter that one keeps looking.

If your philosophy is consistent, then the above statement is only true for you, correct?

Then why aren't we allowed to integrate religion into our rules to live by? Are some things "external to the self" allowed, and others disallowed?

(For many, someone else has decided, and quantified it.)

Ethics come from the satisfaction of preferences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_utilitarianism

http://www.writesomething.net/post/1260672/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

That is the most liberating thing I have ever read in my entire life.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398805 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

The title says it all. Self-control is exhaustible. So when you're trying to make changes in your life, keep it to one simple thing at a time. Over time the one thing you decided to change stops being self-control and starts becoming a habit. Once it becomes a habit? Start training something else. You'll rack up positive changes in no time.

I don't have the study in front of me, but I recall the effect was pretty clear.

For example, let's try and factorise f(x) = 2x^3 + 9x^2 + 4x - 15

What happens if we set x = 1? Then f(1) = 2 + 9 + 4 - 15 = 0, so (x-1) must be a factor.

It's much easier to get f(x) = (x - 1)(2x^2 + 11x + 15) = (x - 1)(x + 3)(2x + 5) if you know one of the factors in advance. This was useful at school, at least. Not so much now.

* See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_remainder_theorem

If the co-efficients of the odd powers and the even powers are equal, then (x+1) is a factor.

I'm, ah, coming up blank on this one for now.

Relatedly, buy yourself a puppet and route all email through the puppet.

Did you order a blended drink a few minutes before closing? (that really pisses them off) Also, don't take this the wrong way, but did you tell them about it rudely? I have no way of telling from your post so I am just putting that out there.

tail -10000 somelogfile | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail

Quick one liner to get a fix on who is currently messing with your server in ways that are 'counter-productive', also a nice way to show newcomers to unix how you can string together existing unix commands to create new ones on the fly.

As for start-up advice that would fit in one line:

A practical, bug ridden, bad implementation of something trumps a theoretical, perfect implementation of the same thing.

  grep "some pattern" * -R | cut -d' ' -f1 | 
    xargs sed -i -e 's/some_other_pattern/replacement/g'

It's also not a bad idea to do a quick mysqldump of the database you are working on, just in case.

  #!/bin/sh

  # reform = re-format code to use different indentation
  # Usage:
  #    reform oldIndent newIndent source destination
  #
  # e.g. reform 3 4 fred.py fred1.py
  
  unexpand --tabs=$1 $3 | expand --tabs=$2 >$4

    ... | sort -nr | head

For anything you wish you were doing every day, like working out or practicing violin or working on your startup: Get a big, yearlong calendar and put it on a wall in your bedroom. Every day you complete your task, mark a big, red "X". Eventually, you'll build up a big string of X's and won't want to break it. That incentive will push you more than you think.

Worked much better than the excel spreadsheet I had tried before (the one from the Hacker's diet).

I'm having a decent month: http://calendaraboutnothing.com/~telemachus

Then I hung a small calendar in the bathroom where I cross each day that I brush my teeth, and the "I don't want to break my win streak" feeling is so RIDICULOUSLY compelling that it's been many months now and I brush my teeth almost every day, in fact I didn't miss one day since 1 month and 3 weeks ago.

DON'T underestimate the sheer POWER of "win streaks".

My teeth are almost white now!

From this I'd gathered that tooth discoloration is permanent.

1. Buy a 50gb Dropbox account, put all the folders you care about in there (all your projects, documents, music, etc.). Makes life so much funner when you know you don't have to worry about losing your important documents ever again.

2. Start using a password management tool like Keepass. Makes you rely less on memory, which makes life on a computer less stressful. I wrote an article about this recently with some tips and tricks (http://www.loopycode.com/solving-sign-up-anxiety/).

I've been doing a lot of work on backups -- A few months ago I had a crash of a nearly new harddrive. Nothing could be recovered from it. I did have important stuff (like source code) backed up but it was still unpleasant. My advice: spend a few days working on your backups.

I'm told the symlinks should go in opposite directions, but generally this setup is very clean.

You can create these via drag and drop in Linux (ctrl+shift in Gnome) and OSX (command+option), and via some other trickery in Windows.

http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/SyncOtherFolders

The big problem with keeping projects in there is that each project might have computer-specific configurations. I try to keep those to a minimum, by e.g. using relative directories whenever possible. For the few things that I can't keep completely relative, I rely on environment variables that I set on each computer I work on.

Other than that, I haven't run into any problems working right out of my Dropbox directory. At one point I considered running all my software from Dropbox (using portable versions), but that really did cause a lot of headache (most programs have session-specific configuration which would cause problems on different computers).

Have you run into any other problems with keeping projects inside Dropbox?

Is there any way to change the folder Dropbox? If so, I guess it could be the same as ~.

However, I bet on a mac you could rsync or cron it to keep local and DB together.

That may be obvious to this crowd, but I learned it the hard way!

I competed in the ACM programming competitions in college, so I did lots of practice problems. When I coded up-front, I would first represent the problem description as data structures and solve it from there. This is obviously flawed, since I had no idea whether any of it was useful! Sometimes they weren't, and sometimes I missed obvious tricks and wasted a lot of time. When I first worked out a solution on pencil and paper, I always knew what code needed to be written.

That's likely far from obvious to this crowd (if it has been paying attention). Paul Graham advocates the exact opposite: "exploratory programming", where you start writing the program without even knowing what the problem is, let alone the solution.

I personally agree more with you than with Graham, though.

(Adapted from

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295342

where the first person to reply to this quotation that time reminded me that not everyone on HN takes advantage of this, but where other HN participants got Confucius's point.)

http://chegra.posterous.com/you-only-need-one

http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...

This is also relevant:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/km/motivated_stopping_and_motivated_...

Both articles are an interesting read, and it's sobering when you catch yourself doing the things they describe.

It seldom occurs to us to pick apart the things we already know are true, so our logical and rational strengths become torches with which to defend our held beliefs rather than lights to shine upon them.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

If there is nothing in it for the other person, you're just wasting time, both his and yours. 'Because I want it done!' will only get you a half-hearted effort or worse.

(This might seem obvious, but I find that it is tempting to "just see if I can get it to work" before I read the documentation. I always end up with worse code than when I take the time to read up on the technology. A similar advice is The Pragmatic Programmer's "Don't program by coincidence")

That said, taking an option off of the table simply because you'd have to "break a rule" to do it can be foolish -- just be aware of why the rule exists, and what you're actually risking in breaking it.

I had a client a few weeks ago that had a drive failure. We went to restore from his offsite backup copy and found that some of the files he needed weren't being backed up. A quick review of the backup job would have caught this.

Also, answer this question: If your home burns down, will your backup still work? I like to have one or two hard copies, and one cloud copy of the most important things.

Heres mine :

Look after your mentors. Anyone who takes time to give you guidance, help or advice, go far out of your way to display your appreciation.

If they have children, buy them presents. If they like wine, ask a wine expert for help, and buy them a great bottle of wine.

People so rarely do this that you will absolutely make their day.

I had 2 amazing mentors in high school who supported me in rather extreme ways. After college I had started a company making high end stereo equipment, using a lot of what I had learned from them. 10 years after I graduated high school I had dinner with them and gave them each one of my products, telling them how much they had influenced my life and how thankful I was.

A week later one of them died suddenly. So don't waste time in doing this.

Also, accept that humans are imperfect and no code (whether yours or another's) will be defect-free. Fixing is more important than blaming.

* See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72 for more info and background/variations that improve on accuracy in certain situations.

Or more generally: you can stand out by doing what others are afraid to do.

Keep your heart pure. Do everything without arguing or complaining. Guard your tongue. Speak in private of people only what would be helpful for them to hear in public. Keep your word. Do not criticize people in positions of power. Pray for them. When the moment comes that you meet them, and have a chance to influence them, your voice will be authentic and honest. Your voice is like a violin, played well for many years it can develop an incredible resonance.

Edit: Minor choices may have major impact on your life though random chance. But, most of them don't, and there is no way to know ahead of time (or after the fact) which choice is the right one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(poem)

Personally I've always appreciated it in it's literal interpretation. Maybe this is why I could never truly appreciate poetry.

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." --Albert Einstein

If you go by that interpretation, you have to explain what every other line in the poem is talking about. It's all about how the two roads were completely indistinguishable, and Frost is very explicit that neither was perceptibly more traveled than the other ("the passing there / Had worn them really about the same").

That's why "I took the road less traveled by" is something he'll say "ages and ages" in the future: At the moment, he can't tell any difference between the roads, but in the future he will have built up a mythology to support his arbitrary choice.

I've never heard a good explanation for what the rest of the poem is talking about if his fuzzy memory at the end is meant to be a true recollection.

There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. - C. A. R. Hoare

Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. - Douglas Adams

"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop." - Lewis Carroll

If you're going through hell, keep going. - Winston Churchill

Probably true. Physical discomfort when you're trying to think deeply about anything is a huge detractor -- hence the importance of taking care of your body even if your interests are mostly "mind".

But that said, throw out your TV, don't thoughtlessly collect expensive shit that you then have to worry about fixing/protecting from theft/maintaining, etc..

Luxuries are easily replaced and also hurt the progress of mankind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsh

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372723

I press up to get the second-last command where I used ls, and instead it shows me the second last command used, full stop, outside control-r mode. How does one cycle through ctrl-r results?

Best example is something that happened last year that I don't think I'll ever forget. I was in China (Chengdu to be more specific) with a few friends, working for an IPTV company broadcasting from a big event out there. Everything that could possibly go accidentally wrong did. First our connecting flight in the UK was an hour delayed meaning we had to run to catch the flight to Asia. On arrival in Chengdu three of us were quarantined by the government for swine flu (which we didn't have, and were released an hour later). Having got outside the airport and tasted the smog one of our taxi drivers proceeded to drive a few of us to the wrong hotel on the wrong side of the city (small thing but.. it all adds up). This went on for the few days before the event, including half our team getting really nasty food poisening, and 95% of our video equipement (worth six figures) getting lost by the airline we shipped it with. Anyway, it was all pretty tough with seemingly everything going against us for no reason, but the turning point was the most insignificant thing that happend that trip. A few of us were walking back to the hotel the night before the event was starting, going through a large open space, not many people around, and after a few seconds of discussion about its appropriateness... Iain just shouts "CxxT" at the top of his voice. It broke the tension so easily and from then on we really did find it much easier to look on the bright side...

Humour can help defuse problems so often, that example just happens to be my favourite (from what was probably the most eventful trip I've ever been on).

Course, this is my personal motivational technique.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have three problems, the original problem, the regular expression, and dealing with the annoying developer who isn't that good at simple regular expressions who will repeat this phrase everytime he comes across a regex in any codebase rather than actually figure out how they work.

1. Don’t pick on the weak. It’s immoral. Don’t antagonize the strong without cause, its stupid.

2. Don’t hate women. It’s a waste of time

3. Invest in yourself. Material things come to those that have self actualized.

4. Get in a fistfight, even if you are going to lose.

5. As a former Marine, take it from me. Don’t join the military, unless you want to risk getting your balls blown off to secure other people’s economic or political interests.

6. If something has a direct benefit to an individual or a class of people, and a theoretical, abstract, or amorphous benefit to everybody else, realize that the proponent’s intentions are to benefit the former, not the latter, no matter what bullshit they try to feed you.

7. Don’t be a Republican. They are self-dealing crooks with no sense of honor or patriotism to their fellow citizens. If you must be a Republican, don’t be a “conservative.” They are whining, bitching, complaining, simple-minded self-righteous idiots who think they’re perpetual victims. Listen to talk radio for a while, you’ll see what I mean.

8. Don’t take proffered advice without a critical analysis. 90% of all advice is intended to benefit the proponent, not the recipient. Actually, the number is probably closer to 97%, but I don’t want to come off as cynical.

9. You’ll spend your entire life listening to people tell you how much you owe them. You don’t owe the vast majority of people shit.

10. Don’t undermine your fellow young men. Mentor the young men that come after you. Society recognizes that you have the potential to be the most power force in society. It scares them. Society does not find young men sympathetic. They are afraid of you, both individually and collectively. Law enforcement’s primary purpose is to suppress you.

11. As a young man, you’re on your own. Society divides and conquers. Unlike women who have advocates looking out for them (NOW, Women’s Study Departments, government, non-profit organizations, political advocacy groups) almost no one is looking out for you.

12. Young men provide the genius and muscle by which our society thrives. Look at the Silicone Valley. By in large, it was not old men or women that created the revolution we live. Realize that society steals your contributions, secures it with our intellectual property laws, and then takes credit and the rewards where none is due.

13. Know that few people have your best interests at heart. Your mother does. Your father probably does (if he stuck around). Your siblings are on your side. Everybody else worries about themselves.

14. Don’t be afraid to tell people to “Fuck off” when need be. It is an important skill to acquire. As they say, speak your piece, even if your voice shakes.

15. Acquire empathy, good interpersonal skills, and confidence. Learn to read body language and non-verbal communication. Don’t just concentrate on your vocational or technical skills, or you’ll find your wife fucking somebody else.

16. Keep fit.

17. Don’t speak ill of your wife/girlfriend. Back her up against the world, even if she’s wrong. She should know that you have her back. When she needs your help, give it. She should know that you’ll take her part.

18. Don’t cheat on your wife/girlfriend. If you must cheat, don’t humiliate her. Don’t risk having your transgressions come back to her or her friends. Don’t do it where you live. Don’t do it with people in your social circle. Don’t shit in your own back yard.

19. If your girlfriend doesn’t make you feel good about yourself and bring joy to your life, fire her. That’s what girlfriends are for.

20. Don’t bother with “emotional affairs.” They are just a vehicle for women to flirt and have someone make them feel good about themselves. That’s the part of a relationship they want. For you it is a lot of work and investment in time. If they are having an emotional affair with you, they’re probably fucking someone else.

21. Becoming a woman’s friend and confidant is not going to get you into an intimate relationship. If you haven’t gotten the girl within a reasonably short period of time, chances are you won’t ever get her. She’ll end up confiding to you about the sexual adventures she’s having with someone else.

22. Have and nurture friendships with women.

23. Realize that love is a numbers game. Guys fall in love easily. You’re going to see some girl and feel like you’ll die if you don’t get her. If she rejects you, move on to the next one. It’s her loss.

24. Don’t be an internet troll. Got out and live life. There is not a cadre of beautiful women advertising on Craigslist to have NSA sex with you. Beautiful women don’t need to advertise. The websites that advertise with attractive women’s photos and claims of loneliness are baloney. All they want is your money and your personal information so that they can market to you. The posts on Craigslist by young “women” seeking NSA sex, and asking for a picture are just a bunch of gay troll pic collectors. This is especially true if the post uses common gay lexicon like “hole” as in “fuck my hole” or seeks “masculine” men, or uses the word cock (except in the context of “Don’t send a cock shot.”) There are women on Craigslist. They are easily recognizable by their 2-5 paragraph postings. Most are in their 30's or older.

25. When you become a man in full, know that people will get in your way. People who are attracted to you will somehow manage to step in your path. Gay guys will give you “the look.” Old people will somehow stumble in front of you at the worst time. Don’t get frustrated. Just step aside and go about your business. Know that these are passive aggressive methods to get you to acknowledge their existence.

26. Don’t gay bash. Don’t mentally or physically abuse people because of who they are, or how they present themselves. It’s none of your business to try to intimidate people into conformity.

27. If your gay, admit it to yourself, your parents, your friends and society at large. Be prepared to get harassed. See rule 14. If someone threatens you or assaults you, call the cops. Have them arrested. You have no obligation to self sacrifice because of who you are. As a gay person, you’ll have more social freedom than straight men. Use it to protect yourself. Be prepared to get out of Dodge if your orientation makes your life unbearable. Move to San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, or New Orleans. You’ll find a welcoming community there.

28. Don’t be a poser. Avoid being one of those dudes who puts a surfboard on top of their car, but never surfs, or a dude with a powder coated fixed gear bike and a messenger bag, but was never a messenger. Live the life. Earn your bona fides.

29. Don’t believe the crap about the patriarchy. More women are accepted and attend college. More degrees are awarded to women than men. Women outlive men. More men commit suicide. Men are twice as likely to be victims of violence, including murder. If you consider sexual assaults in prisons, twice as many men are raped as women (society thinks prison rape is funny). The streets are littered with homeless men, sprinkled with a few homeless women. Statically, women are happier than men. The myth that girls are being cheated by are educational system is belied by the fact that schools are bastions of femininity, mostly run by and taught by women. Girls outperform boys in school. It is the boys in school getting fucked over, and prescribed ritalin for being boys. Real wages for men are falling, while real wages for women are rising. Just because someone says something enough times, doesn’t make it true. You have nothing to feel guilty about.

30. Remember, 97% of all advice is worthless. Take what you can use, and trash the rest.

28. Whether you're gay or not, learn to use apostrophes correctly. Ditto for other common spelling and grammatical errors. There are plenty of pedants out there, and if one reads your application and it's full of mistakes, you won't get the job.

I took this 3% as the take away from the entire post :)

A few useful ones in there, but too much crap to wade through.

3% of 30 is just less that 1, so I took part of this one and trashed the rest.

Silicon Valley = Santa Clara Valley

Perhaps fight an equal.

The reasoning for #1 should be obvious. The reasoning for #4 is so the experience makes you grow as a person: you will be much less afraid of other people if you've been in a fight, because you know you can live through it.

Works for everything in life, which is both a blessing and a curse.

When muscles aren't used, they contract. When you sit down a lot, some of the muscles that attach to your spine are probably contracted. This leads to lower backaches and worse.

One of my next best hacks was discovering King Solomon's Proverbs: http://bit.ly/aJpmva

Average minds think alike, great minds think differently.

Likewise with making it good -- everything takes longer than estimated, and so life will likely intervene to stop you working before you even have anything working at all.

Lesson: get it working first (however badly), and evolve it from there.

It will make your mornings so much more enjoyable and give you a precious moment of self-care and contemplation every (other) day.

- Sleep 2 hours extra.

- Find a purpose that means something to you (not success/cool/clever).

Would you explain this, please? Where you means 10ren, or anyone who has an explanation, and this means the quoted sentence.

A question is usually about how to do something to something - ie. the stress is on a verb. It helps to understand what that really means by defining what it is about - ie. the nouns. Defining the nouns is usually pretty straightforward, and often reveals what it is that has made the problem difficult to think about. For me, the nouns are often an input data structure (eg. a grammar + constraints), and an output data structure (eg. another grammar, or a particular function with certain qualities).

I tend towards being anti-functional programming, but I have to admit this is pretty much a declarative, mathematical, functional approach. It even feels functional, in that you end up creating new "variables" for new states (ie. immutable not variable), and although there's an explosion of names, things become very clear to express when you have a convenient and precise name for everything (ie. every noun).

So my gem is this: Stop getting mad or angry about what happens, especially if you can't change it. If someone screams at you, don't waste the energy screaming back, it's done, there's nothing you can do to change it. Just work out what you want to do next to get the best result and do it.

1. Vim / utilize your IDE's keyboard bindings

2. Vimperator for Firefox

3. Vimium for Chrome

4. FreeCommander (or any Norton Commander clone)

5. Activate Gmail keyboard shortcuts

(Edit: added #1 and #5)

Something about it just works.

(Yes, I've got a couple more of these. yes, you can ask for it ;) )

Similarly, Always run SELECT query before running UPDATE/DELETE query, with the same WHERE clause.

What does happiness mean to you? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What do you value most? What are your goals? What should they be? How would you define success?

Cultivate your mind so that you may do the above better.

I think it's a quote from Mark Twain.

Tip: The three hours it took to read How To Win Friends and Influence People taught me more about running a business than 5 years of school and 8 years of employment.

If you're completely stumped, take a break. Go for a walk / bike ride / whatever. The context change can help you see approaches you've overlooked.

Get enough sleep, or you'll be too tired to realize you're not thinking clearly.