Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
Jun8 · 2012-05-12
· Original
thread
I think that in certain situations the moral question of doing or not performing an act is either a weak function of the entities we interact or is not a function of them at all. I think this is one of those cases: I would give a small amount of money (e.g. a quarter) to anyone who has to ask for it for whatever reason. I find Stallman's attitude to be condescending to extreme, i.e. "you lied to me", how can you judge that person?
A similar ethical question: Should we eat animals? Some people object to this citing the misery, pain, etc. that the animals have to endure. But suppose we create a certain pig/chicken/sheep clone that is incapable of thinking (or, as in http://www.amazon.com/The-Pig-That-Wants-Eaten/dp/0452287448, actually wants to be eaten): Would your attitude on this matter change? I think it should not.
The way I treat entities with less power than me (homeless people, animals) wholly depends on me and not inputs from them.
* Three pieces of (mundane, well-known) advice: build stuff, write, and network. These support each other.
* Your profile is very interesting: philosophy & CS, languages, etc. Write about these things, what can the CS crowd learn from a philosopher and vice versa? Write a blog post with your thoughts on each of the ethics challenges (there are 100) in The Ping That Wants to Be Eaten (https://www.amazon.com/Pig-That-Wants-Eaten-Experiments/dp/0...)
* Do weird stuff! Randomly pick two departments in your university’s directory and think about an idea that combines them, eg Classics and Biology or Entomology and Math. This is where really interesting stuff comes from. Or you’ll end up with ridiculous ideas, great for a blog post.
* Fire up Eventbrite (or some similar) and go to local events if interest. Better yet, reach out to organizers to speak at events, they’re always looking for people. You never know who you’re going to meet.
* Allocate some alone time in nature
* Obvious, but: Create value for people and give away for free. This can range from a 2 sentence summary of an interesting concept and a quote (who were the Cynics) posted on LinkedIn to a small tool (my current needs: a Mac native tool that takes detects slide changes on Zoom/Teams meeting, takes screenshots and creates a lot out of them; a super simple web tool to edit images to put on tshirts).
* Cold emails are hard.
* rentr homepage is underwhelming there are a few typos, you should comments from people who use it (probably no one at the moment), these sort of N^2 ideas almost always run into bootstrapping problems, unless you can have a community, eg a large building, use it.
Hope that helps.