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Imagine an artificial intelligence (surgery robot) making this decision.


There is no need to let robot take such decision. Robot are useful when there is a lot of fast decisions to take.


I would never want to become a business partner with someone who is smoking cigarettes. Why? For me it indicates a lack of intelligence, not being good at dealing with stress and bad long-term thinking. When smoking cigarettes you are paying twice - first when spending money in order to ruin your health, and many years later when you are spending money on health-care in order to fix your ruined health. The Greeks have understood this.

Also, when you are getting closer to an emergency situation than we are normally today, you will also start caring more about your health automatically. That's what evolution has taught us, it is natural behavior. Modern luxury has let us care less about our bodies than we should.


Do you feel the same way about having a business partner that drinks alcohol or is overweight?


> that drinks alcohol

I haven't really thought about whether I would be a business partner with someone, but in this case quantity certainly matters. When people say smoker, it is implied someone who smokes often and constantly throughout the day - 24/7. The equivalent drinker would be an alcoholic, not just someone who has a beer on Friday.


1) "social smoking" is a thing just like social drinking

2) alcoholism has much worse direct consequences than heavy smoking


I used to smoke, and it was around 4 a day. Hardly all day, but I was still considered a smoker.


In a judgment free way - my dad's long-term business partner was overweight. Died super young, in his mid-60s. It was heartbreaking for everyone involved, and I would not wish it upon anyone. Please take good care of yourself.


That's a good question. Interestingly not! For one part I think that drinking (modest) amounts of alcohol is not as bad for your health as smoking. I would avoid people who love binge-drinking though, for the same reasons as above. Also it is much harder to find non-alcoholics than people who don't smoke, I would think.

Being overweight is a different card, because it's a symptom, not an action that is chosen voluntarily. There can be many reasons for being overweight... maybe genes, some kind of illness etc.. I can't judge based on something I don't exactly know. But then again ... when I see someone eating lots of fast-food, chips and drinking Cola ... I would probably hesitate to ask him to become my business partner.


This is all seemingly a very superficial and judgmental process you've described for selecting a business partner. I'd probably want to know more about their work experience and skills - not so much their taste in cola or cigarettes.


You would miss out on guys like warren buffet with that kind of reasoning.


I find your arguments a bit shallow. I know extraordinary people who like to smoke. How can you say a smoker has a "lack of intelligence" and what makes you think people smoke from stress? I smoke from 16 to 35 and I never did it because of stress (yes I smoked when stressed too) - for me it was that calmness it gave. I could concentrate more than I can now as a non-smoker - I could go deeper and stay there for bigger amounts of time.


Quite a lot of these arguments against smoking are silly. In moderation, smoking is fine and studies have shown that it increases cognitive ability and lowers stress. Some of the best engineer's I've ever known in my career smoked cigarettes. I don't personally smoke them, but I used to. I use nasal snuff and smoke a pipe now, which is significantly different than cigarettes. However; the social stigma against cigarettes is crazy. It doesn't bother me as long as I'm not trapped in a room with no ventilation with a cig smoker. Sugar is probably worse for you than cigarettes, but like anything it should be moderated. Cigarettes are specifically engineered to get you hooked.


Some smokers are self medicating for mental health issues:

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/diseases/depressio...

Before you say that is also justification for rejecting them, be aware that some folks on HN are vocal about the need to destigmatize mental health issues generally and plenty of very successful people have mental health issues.


[flagged]


If they are self medicating for something, their performance may be worse if they quit. The optimal answer is to resolve it without drugs of any sort. But that optimal answer is really hard to achieve and is not considered a realistic expectation in many cases.

Do you drink coffee? Coca Cola products? Tea?

All of those can also medicate for an unrecognized health issue.

Do you exercise regularly? Eat spicy food? Live a spartan life?

Again, every last one of those can be an effective means to manage health problems.

Not managing them is worse. Being judgy about a particular means of management strikes me as close-minded and ill informed.

There is no clear cut difference between lifestyle choices and health management. Lifestyle and diet play a very large role in health outcomes. And that role is not as simple as "Don't do X and you will be healthier."


Good luck finding a business partner, then! In my experience you don’t often run into worthwhile potential business partners, and you‘ve just excluded 20% of them on a whim!


That's a bad habit you have there, I bet you thinking extends to more than just people who smoke, I would distance myself from people with this line of thinking when looking for a business partner.


Could someone explain to me how Golang would compare to Rust for this purpose? I'm a Golang newbie and I always wondered if it would be possible to write an OS in it (+ some assembly).


Golang isn't generally suited to real time or near real time systems (like operating systems) because of its garbage collector. It will pause (not for very long) whenever it likes to tidy up and that can cause problems when interacting with hardware where timings are potentially critical.


Thanks, makes sense!


As humans we are evolved to have more compassion the more similar a being is to us, and less compassion the more different it is from ourselves. Human ethics is often selfish (pun not intended) in the sense that it is based on what feels bad for US when doing it. In my opinion, there is nothing objectively "good" or "bad", there is only harmony or disharmony in nature.

Pain indicates critical disharmony with the ideal state of any being. Same applies to plants! Do you think plants feel pain? They certainly do, but "pain" means something entirely different for them. What about planet earth and its ozone levels?

The real question we have to ask ourselves is, how much are we responsible for increasing the harmony in the world around us, vs. focusing on our own expansion in terms of technology, luxury and total population.


This is awesome, thanks =)


Yeah how are they solving the tor outproxy problem? You are essentially letting another user use your IP to access websites, which holds a lot of room for abuse.


Hi, I am gladful that I stumbled across this question. I am not going to tell you a sorry.

The essence of my answer first: You can heal yourself. The body follows the mind. First there is reality in your head, and then in the physical world.

Second, read the book by Dr. Joe Dispenza, called "You are the placebo". If you have a bit of patience, read the two earlier books mentioned there ("Evolve your brain" and "Breaking the habit of being yourself").

I have read a lot of books, covering spiritualist topics, healing, taoism, traditional chinese medicine, ritualist magic and psychology as an overall topic. The essence is, that what we call the rules of physics and medicine today are short-sighted and often plain damaging. One example for this is the belief that you can't change certain things.

Denying your own possibilities when they exist is a self-fulfilling prophecy, you cannot disprove it if you don't really believe in it. Doctors telling you that you have a serious illness (or just in the risk of becoming ill) are doing serious damage to you if you believe them, because your mind is making it real.

Illnesses are an expression of something going wrong, which means you have to fix it by changing how you live, what you do, and essentially, who you are. I have had some minor illnesses such as cavities and hay fever, both of which I fixed using meditation and visualization.

The books I mentioned show a practical way for us people today who essentially believe science to be "true". It builds upon that belief, and I can really recommend it if you don't have time wrapping your mind around ancient chinese belief systems.

The reason I was not going to tell you a sorry is that I don't feel sorry for you, I feel hope and I feel gratitude - there is a reality (which implies it is real and exists right now) in which you are 100% healthy, and giving your experiences of becoming healthy out to the rest of the world. It is possible, and it is your choice. I am not wishing you luck, because luck is not what you'll need. I wish you will be able to grow yourself from being a victim, to having your live in your own hands. I wish you'll be able to take action, and make decisions, and for the entire time, enjoy your process wherever it leads you.

One last word, you will be free of injuries or problems if you find yourself being free of them, it is the moment when it makes "click" in your brain, and that is the moment when reality changes. For me it was the moment when I discovered that I had no cavities, and that they are healing, and that my doctor was wrong. And in the same moment, my doctor became wrong because reality had changed. That is how it works.


Linux does not have lost its way. It has truly followed its way, and that's what you got. It was always clear (at least for me and many other people), that if you don't design a system but put it together step by step, you will end up with a mess.

I have always been on the NetBSD side, and it's bright over here. Even FreeBSD suffers from similar problems as Linux, trying to get new features fast. That's just how software development works (or does not), you have to follow proper design to get something for the future.

Linux will always be stuck in past design decisions, and in order to stay compatible, things will need be become more and more complex, until they break.


The whole point of systemd was/is to design a coherent system that integrates all the core parts. It's also what caused all the problems for OP, unlike the "step by step" approach that was working fine for him.



What new features is FreeBSD trying to get fast?


Nice article! One of the authors points was that people are not effected in their daily life through privacy problems (or at least that's what I read between the lines during that "dead bodies" metaphor).

So here's my idea: I'll place a warning in my email signature, that people should take care what they write to me because my email account is spied on and everything is recorded.

There are two points in this; first, it is quite accurate to reality, my (and everyone else's) email IS scanned for suspicious content for example. Second, it will shift the focus of people writing their text to this fact, that they are being monitored. This in turn should raise their awareness of the problem and put some effect on their life that they can easily perceive.


Interesting suggestion. I hope you will share your experiences with it.


For me, the language of a project has a large impact on whether I would consider contributing to it or not. When I dislike the language, I'll usually not want to be involved with the project, but just watch it growing. Thus, it makes a project more interesting for me if the language is nice.


I know. That’s kind of true for all of us. But yet I believe this is not that important. Specially not important enough to put the language like a badge of honor beside the project’s name or description in the title, like how these “written in Go”s are.

If a projects seems interesting enough for someone, it’s more than easy to see what language is it written in. BTW, that’s how things work: you don’t decide to contribute to a project because it’s written in your favorite language. You first have to like the project itself, and if it happens to be in a language you’re comfortable with, you may contribute to it.


Your last sentence while intuitively seems true, simply isn't. There are plenty reasons some one might contribute to a project, the language could be the only reason, and that would be completely reasonable.

Example: You might not be interested in writing a text editor, but you've seen this and the lime project, both written in Go, you don't care for writing a text editor, but you might figure you could spend some time to this guy fix an issue in your free time.

Is the above a little far-fetched? Maybe, is it unrealistic? Not really.


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