10 ms·

Feynman Algorithm (2014)

149 points by LaFolle 9y ago

dom0 9y ago
> 7 requests, 691 KB, 19 s ?!? What is going on there?
- throwanem 9y ago
  They redid their UI last year to be more Web 2.0, which would've still been a mistake, if a less grave one, had it been competently executed. I wonder if it's still serving a complete list of article names to every visitor? If so, that all by itself is probably a big chunk of that 691K. If not, God knows what they're doing now - I don't have a console on my phone, and won't switch to my desktop just to dissect the latest mistakes of rampant NIH as applied to the modern web.
  - dom0 9y ago
    The long request goes to "http://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/FeynmanAlgorithm" http://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/FeynmanAlgorithm" which seems to be just the articles' text. But there's also a names.txt which is ~640K (260K gzip'd). Hm.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      Yup, that's the one. Hooboy.
  - gavinpc 9y ago
    Et tu, c2?
- AndrewOMartin 9y ago
  I got 37 requests, 1,956.14 KB, 150.93 s. Do I win something?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    10 non-transferable Internet points. Special quest worth 1000 Internet points! Turn c2 wiki into an Electron app, so that we also have to download a separate browser to view it!
jwilk 9y ago
Archived copy, which can be read without JS enabled: https://archive.fo/I403G https://archive.fo/I403G
- pasbesoin 9y ago
  Which appears to block me for using a VPN service. I looked for it on wayback.org, which now requires Javascript, itself, just to use its interface. And the one archived result is just a page-load spinner. Looked for it in Google Cache. Spinner. I guess it's time to go back to books and print.
  - jwilk 9y ago
    Here's a plain text version: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/0f377b79eb4bae5e3f2161ff569dce8d/raw/b34b398ea6148276c6897f26b108259625dde40f/gistfile1.txt https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/0f377b79eb4bae5...
    - pasbesoin 9y ago
      Thank you. And pardon the partially rhetorical nature of my initial response. I... "grump" a bit, that way, every so often, as I hate to see the "open" web become -- from my perspective -- less and less so. (All the more so for what is essentially static content.) P.S. I don't consider Javascript-delivered content as libre as other, as the client has to trust that the scripting won't compromise them.
throwanem 9y ago
Feynman was a fascinating person, and remains well able to reward further interest - his autobiographical works being a fine place to start. Generally I'd also try to recommend a work by someone with a less favorable but still well founded perspective, for comparison. But I have yet to encounter anyone who takes such a view of Feynman. Perhaps the closest is the article [1] on his time at Thinking Machines, whence comes this matchless quote: > Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." [1] http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...
- willvarfar 9y ago
  Was Feynman sexist? A quick googling finds nothing.
  - foldr 9y ago
    It actually turns up a lot of article about Feynman and sexism. E.g. this one: http://mathematigal.com/home/2014/7/14/feynman-is-not-my-hero http://mathematigal.com/home/2014/7/14/feynman-is-not-my-her...
    - Asooka 9y ago
      That's rather unfortunate. If I may propose an alternative treatment of Feynman though: simply forget that he was sexist and instead claim he was very progressive and helped female colleaguea all the time. People already want to be like Feynman, so if we simply turn Feynman's historical image into what we want people to be like we would accomplish more than by telling people that their heroes are evil.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
mitsoz 9y ago
This is as useful as * Write down the problem. * ??? * Profit
- lukaslalinsky 9y ago
  The way software development is mostly done these days, it's about writing the solution as the first and only step. It helps being reminded that clearly stating what the problem is and then taking a bit of time thinking about it is important.
- bitexploder 9y ago
  Not if you were Richard Feynman. That is sort of the point of the article. Can or should more people be able to do this? Amusingly, Rob Pike claims some of the best programming advice he ever got was from Ken Thompson. The advice amounted to: when you are stuck, stop, think hard, and then fix the problem. This advice could be seen as amusing rhetoric to stop and think more often.
  - rothron 9y ago
    A variation I've heard is "Don't just do something. Stand there!"
    - bitmage 9y ago
      This is something we try to instill in our new ops people. If you don't understand what's going on, don't do anything. There's nothing to be gained by quickly applying the wrong solution.
  - lloeki 9y ago
    Today more than ever I witness people, professionals even, that just keep on hopefully poking and prodding back and forth in some grandiose effort to maybe just somehow break things back up into working order, which makes me very sad because all that is required is to step back, relax, and just genuinely look at things with your mind. In that situation I'm always reminded of Feynman's "He fixes radios by thinking!", and that, if anything, we should teach people how to think instead of shovelling massive amounts of pre-baked recipes into their head. > And all the time, on the way to his house, he's saying things like, "Do you know anything about radios? How do you know about radios-you're just a little boy!" > I start walking back and forth, thinking, and I realize that one way it can happen is that [so and so...] > So the guy says, "What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but you're only walking back and forth!" > I say, "I'm thinking!" Then I said to myself, "All right, take the tubes out, and reverse the order [because so and so...] > So I changed the tubes around, stepped to the front of the radio, turned the thing on, and it's as quiet as a lamb: it waits until it heats up, and then plays perfectly-no noise. > He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was, saying, "He fixes radios by thinking!" > The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radio - a little boy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it-he never thought that was possible.
golergka 9y ago
Oh no. What used to be the best designed website in the whole internet is now, too, a slow mess that doesn't work in javascript, uses several trackers and loads half a megabyte to display few screens of text. Who the hell thought that slapping some annotations on top is worth this price to pay? Why not add stories to it, too?
- BackwardSpy 9y ago
  It won't even load for me, I just get an infinite spinner gif. Tried turning my browser extensions off, still no luck.
  - cpressland 9y ago
    Ditto...
synthmeat 9y ago
I honestly do not wish to bash on the implementer, but it's an absolute disgrace what they did to c2.com. It feels like an April Fool's joke.
- rcarmo 9y ago
  The archived copy linked to elsewhere on this thread loads and renders _much_ faster than c2, which ironically requires me to disable my ad blocker to actually load.
- zeveb 9y ago
  The only good thing is that the database is available via web calls. The bad thing is that the code to render the text is insane (take a look: https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/blob/master/static/index.html https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/blob/master/sta...). Even the goal of the 'remodel' (really, more of a demolition) is crazy: 'The original wiki rewritten as a single page application.' That's like saying, 'roast beef, now with added concrete and carpet!' I just don't get how someone can think the change is a good idea.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - chriswarbo 9y ago
    I hate JS single-page apps, but as far as c2 goes, I think the idea is to eventually make it distributed. To make that work requires two parts: - Some way for the page to communicate with other instances (e.g. bittorrent, or whatever, implemented in JS) - Some way to display the results (i.e. a JS renderer) The easiest part is the JS renderer, so it makes sense to implement that first. With a JS renderer, the server side rendering can be thrown away. Now that it's a single page using JS calls to fetch data, it's a much easier target to make distributed: "just" switch out where those calls get their data from. I'm glad such experiments are going on, and don't mind putting up with this awkward in-between phase in the mean time.
    - 9y ago
scandinavegan 9y ago
There's a quote under "Skill theory" on that page from Feynman: > "Right. I don't believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math, and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it's no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, 'What one fool can do, another can.' What we've been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn't studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There's a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it deep and profound." -- Feynman, Omni 1979 The "what one fool can do" quote from a calculus book is probably from Calculus Made Easy that was posted on HN a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14161876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14161876 In Calculus Made Easy, the exact quote is "What one fool can do, another can. -- (Ancient Simian Proverb)".
- chii 9y ago
  I dont know if the book you had was correct, but in one of his interviews, Feynmen had mentioned he used a book called 'calculus for the practical man' (https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Practical-Man-J-Thompson/dp/1406756725 https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Practical-Man-J-Thompson/dp/...) i think.
  - justin66 9y ago
    https://books.google.com/books?id=BrhBAAAAYAAJ&dq=calculus%20made%20easy&pg=PR11#v=onepage&q=what%20one%20fool&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=BrhBAAAAYAAJ&dq=calculus%2...
  - 52-6F-62 9y ago
    Thanks to both of you for these. I was looking for resources like this! To wit: hardcover & softcover copies of both are rather expensive (at least in Canada). If they're in any good shape they run ~$50 to ~$80. Kindle has them both for $6 and change.
  - JadeNB 9y ago
    > Feynmen What an interesting world we would live in if there really were a plural of Feynman. :-)
mack73 9y ago
>I had a calculus book once that said, 'What one fool can do, another can.' A link to a pdf file of a copy of an old calculus book from early nineteen-hundreds showed up on HN a week or so ago. I read the first couple of pages. That quote is likely referencing that particular book. I have lost the link now. Anyone remember? Edit: sry, that was weak Googleing from my part. Here it is: http://djm.cc/library/Calculus_Made_Easy_Thompson.pdf http://djm.cc/library/Calculus_Made_Easy_Thompson.pdf
- ralfd 9y ago
  "Calculus made easy". Just search for it.
  - mack73 9y ago
    Yeah that's the one, thx.
swiley 9y ago
This site used to be one of my favorite examples of content over presentation. What happened?
- Iv 9y ago
  Youngsters.
  - wolfgang42 9y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by 'youngsters'--c2.com (and the associated wiki) are still maintained by Ward Cunningham, and the effort to rewrite the wiki[1] is hosted under his GitHub account and appears to have been his decision. It appears to have been motivated by a desire to "federate" the wiki, though I'm unclear on what exactly this vision entails. [1]: https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aban 9y ago
Whenever the Feynman Algorithm comes up, I'm tempted to share "Stop Treading Water: Learning to Learn" [0] by Edward Kmett. It's a great talk and I highly recommend it if you haven't watched it (or frankly, if you already have :). [0]: https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-learning-to-learn-by-edward-kmett-1750 https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-le...
- rustacean 9y ago
  Thank you
  - aban 9y ago
    You're welcome :)
thriftwy 9y ago
My algorithm is usually along the lines of: * Think of a problem * Think real hard * Write down a solution * Write down the problem
abecedarius 9y ago
There's an oral-history interview of Feynman where the interviewer brings up his notebooks, saying something like "where you recorded your results" -- Feynman interrupts like "no, it's where I worked them out". He's emphatic about it after being questioned again. The "Feynman algorithm" is an OK joke, and gets at something real, but I think it smacks a little too much of putting words in the guy's mouth. It has a flavor of mystification that goes against the spirit of a lot that he said in his lectures. There was a lecture explicitly on problem-solving methods in the "Tips on Physics" volume.
apo 9y ago
The algorithm might not be a trite as it seems at first. In particular, I find the first step to be extremely valuable: Write down the problem. Part of my bag of problem-solving tricks is to start by writing a question for StackOverflow. The point is not to post the question for someone else to answer, but for me to frame the problem in such a way that it can be written about clearly enough for someone else to understand it. I find that about 50% of the time I have the answer to my own question before even hitting the post button.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  My algorithm went like this: 1) Write down the problem. 2) Try several established strategies to solve it. 3) Get stuck, resign self to failing out of school 4) Go to sleep 5) Write out the answer over breakfast
ddingus 9y ago
I want to share a look at this from a bit different perspective. As a kid, I would fix, trade and sell older radios and TV's for money and other things. I fell in love with vacuum tube era things. They are beautiful and it's all human scale. You can see the parts. Back then, I didn't have much. Our family was in poverty a lot of the time. Reasons. That's not a big deal, and in fact, was of great benefit to me personally. It kind of forced exploring the world and meaning to get something out of it. I needed it! Anyway, I had a couple of old ratty texts from the 50's era that explained the theory of operation. And I had various toys and projects that showed parts of that theory to me. A crystal radio, for example. I must have reread that text 50 times. At first, I understood very little. Being young, much of the higher level stuff would blow right by. But the general concepts were there. So, imagine being faced with the radio. You don't have much, no fancy test gear, etc... I submit Feynman didn't fix the radio. It's still broken in a sense. But, what he did do was make that radio, imperfect or broken, damaged, as it was, perform as needed. He moved the problem out of the way. This is important. The radio is a system. It's designed to do a task, and it's parts are designed to perform to a specification or other. Each radio is kind of unique too. Whatever flaws it has gets compensated for. Problem: Noise in the radio audio Think real hard: Here, one can start to analyze the radio, take the theory of operation and identify where noise might be coming from. This means one has sufficient understanding to solve the problem in the first place. The heavy lift is realizing it! But, say one does not possess that level of understanding. I didn't back then. Not until many years later, lots of fixes under my belt, and some kind souls giving me test gear. So then, as a system, what's still possible? Fixing the radio may not be an option due to lack of components, understanding, tools. Move the radio Swap the tubes Modify antenna Change power source Change adjustable things in the radio Remove something from the radio Etc... For each of these things one CAN do, which of them may resolve noise? In this way, the problem shifts from, "fixing it", which implies the radio is brought from a flawed state to an acceptable one. (just less and more minor flaws really) That is what Feynman did. A poor component at one stage of the radio may perform another task just fine. Swapping the tubes does that. For many years, I would get this gear from people. And it was a lot of, "look at the problem", "think real hard", "execute solution." And a bunch of that boiled down to what I could do, not so much what should be done, or needed to be done. And a lot of that was successful. Try stuff, observe, try more stuff, observe. After a time, which stuff to try boiled down to a potent set of things. More successes. I would get an older TV, for example. Maybe it had a red tint, or the picture bloomed. One could make adjustments in the set to re-balance the picture, or improve focus, limit overall brightness, and any number of things to bring that particular system into a functioning order sufficient to perform the task required of it. Still broken, in the technical sense. New components would very likely improve it, but a removal of one, or replacement with similar one, even removing one, tweaks to the unit, all could combine to make it perform. In my following of Feynman, I find a consistent theme where he was very good at understanding basic understanding. The calculus book he refers to contained some general solutions he found could solve a very broad set of problems. Rather than explore all the solution sets and struggle to apply them, he would take a very useful one and max it out, applying it everywhere. Where it would not work, or was impractical, he would seek another one. I see this as a very important aspect of this awesome problem solving ability he demonstrated. Collecting things like this, as well as taking problems from various angles: What can be done, and could it help? What has been done before? What should be done. Combine things done before. Guess at possible new things to be done. etc... seems to be major contributors to this skill. Feynman often mentioned puzzles. When you combine a "gauntlet" of puzzles and Feynman's natural ability to recognize fundamental understanding with time and a zeal to solve, his remarks about "not being a genius" have some real merit! Now, he was, and that's not really a matter of serious debate. But, the method, to him, is more about doing the work to be lucid. Solve, solve, solve, refine tools, collect new ones, solve, solve, solve... The difference here, between Feynman, and us ordinary mortals, is the breadth and depth of that lucidity. Those skills I learned in my early youth still apply today. I can't tell you how many times I've arrived at simple ways to "fix" something, just based on what could be done, and inferences on what must be true. It's theory of operation, coupled with broad experience and that "gauntlet" of puzzles run with "the tools" Each of us can do this. Some of us can do it extremely well in a given domain too. I feel Feynman never did appreciate his skill and lucidity about reality itself, the world, it's parts. Few of us have that. But, the Feynman way of looking at things, solving problems, collecting tools to solve them with, being observant, and inference: What is possible? What can we do? What must be true? Etc... Is something everyone can cultivate to varying degrees, depending on our affinity for a given domain, personal attributes, and resources. I know this is a zen like argument, but he didn't actually fix that radio. He made a broken one, or flawed one perform better. And in that last bit is an important realization: We state the problem. Fine. But, we need to also state the goal too. Given a goal, the problem may be too limiting. A solution may appear out of reach, or not be seen due to a problem statement constraining things, or masking things. Work backward from the goal and sometimes one can factor the original problem statement away. And in the doing of that, arrive at a solution that gets it done, or renders the problem a non problem. And I'll add Feynman did the work. A lot of it, and he credits that to a lot of his insights. Solving a bazillion puzzles will turn anyone into a much better solution finder, and he's right about that. Do the work. Seek the puzzles, and keep at them. Over time, one gets an internal sort of understanding that is more broadly applicable.
mtempleton 9y ago
Feynman was a particularly interesting, intelligent, but also a very moral person. He said in an interview in his older years, while tearing up: 'I know the difference between right and wrong.' Of science, my favorite bit from him is that 'in science, it does not matter what your last name is, how brilliant you are, how beautiful your theory is, all that matters is if it experimentally agrees with nature. That's all that science is'[1] After devoting his time to science, he indulged in sex, drugs and art, and in the meantime had a great deal good to say about not just nature, but about morality as well. My type of person. 1-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY
stcredzero 9y ago
There are people who solve a problem the same way that you do, just much much faster. Apparently, Murray Gell-Mann was one such person. I had a professor like that. He was constantly blurting out your next thought just as you were on the verge of forming the words. Gell-Mann did this so often, that his grad students once played a trick on him by meeting up and thinking out a new series of conclusions ahead of time, just so they could blurt out the next conclusion just as Gell-Mann was about to speak it.
kazinator 9y ago
Occurs in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14190069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14190069

149 points by LaFolle 9y ago

dom0 9y ago

> 7 requests, 691 KB, 19 s ?!? What is going on there?

throwanem 9y ago
They redid their UI last year to be more Web 2.0, which would've still been a mistake, if a less grave one, had it been competently executed. I wonder if it's still serving a complete list of article names to every visitor? If so, that all by itself is probably a big chunk of that 691K. If not, God knows what they're doing now - I don't have a console on my phone, and won't switch to my desktop just to dissect the latest mistakes of rampant NIH as applied to the modern web.
- dom0 9y ago
  The long request goes to "http://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/FeynmanAlgorithm" http://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/FeynmanAlgorithm" which seems to be just the articles' text. But there's also a names.txt which is ~640K (260K gzip'd). Hm.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    Yup, that's the one. Hooboy.
- gavinpc 9y ago
  Et tu, c2?
AndrewOMartin 9y ago
I got 37 requests, 1,956.14 KB, 150.93 s. Do I win something?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  10 non-transferable Internet points. Special quest worth 1000 Internet points! Turn c2 wiki into an Electron app, so that we also have to download a separate browser to view it!

jwilk 9y ago

Archived copy, which can be read without JS enabled: https://archive.fo/I403G https://archive.fo/I403G

pasbesoin 9y ago
Which appears to block me for using a VPN service. I looked for it on wayback.org, which now requires Javascript, itself, just to use its interface. And the one archived result is just a page-load spinner. Looked for it in Google Cache. Spinner. I guess it's time to go back to books and print.
- jwilk 9y ago
  Here's a plain text version: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/0f377b79eb4bae5e3f2161ff569dce8d/raw/b34b398ea6148276c6897f26b108259625dde40f/gistfile1.txt https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/0f377b79eb4bae5...
  - pasbesoin 9y ago
    Thank you. And pardon the partially rhetorical nature of my initial response. I... "grump" a bit, that way, every so often, as I hate to see the "open" web become -- from my perspective -- less and less so. (All the more so for what is essentially static content.) P.S. I don't consider Javascript-delivered content as libre as other, as the client has to trust that the scripting won't compromise them.

throwanem 9y ago

Feynman was a fascinating person, and remains well able to reward further interest - his autobiographical works being a fine place to start. Generally I'd also try to recommend a work by someone with a less favorable but still well founded perspective, for comparison. But I have yet to encounter anyone who takes such a view of Feynman. Perhaps the closest is the article [1] on his time at Thinking Machines, whence comes this matchless quote: > Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." [1] http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

willvarfar 9y ago
Was Feynman sexist? A quick googling finds nothing.
- foldr 9y ago
  It actually turns up a lot of article about Feynman and sexism. E.g. this one: http://mathematigal.com/home/2014/7/14/feynman-is-not-my-hero http://mathematigal.com/home/2014/7/14/feynman-is-not-my-her...
  - Asooka 9y ago
    That's rather unfortunate. If I may propose an alternative treatment of Feynman though: simply forget that he was sexist and instead claim he was very progressive and helped female colleaguea all the time. People already want to be like Feynman, so if we simply turn Feynman's historical image into what we want people to be like we would accomplish more than by telling people that their heroes are evil.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago

mitsoz 9y ago

This is as useful as * Write down the problem. * ??? * Profit

lukaslalinsky 9y ago
The way software development is mostly done these days, it's about writing the solution as the first and only step. It helps being reminded that clearly stating what the problem is and then taking a bit of time thinking about it is important.
bitexploder 9y ago
Not if you were Richard Feynman. That is sort of the point of the article. Can or should more people be able to do this? Amusingly, Rob Pike claims some of the best programming advice he ever got was from Ken Thompson. The advice amounted to: when you are stuck, stop, think hard, and then fix the problem. This advice could be seen as amusing rhetoric to stop and think more often.
- rothron 9y ago
  A variation I've heard is "Don't just do something. Stand there!"
  - bitmage 9y ago
    This is something we try to instill in our new ops people. If you don't understand what's going on, don't do anything. There's nothing to be gained by quickly applying the wrong solution.
- lloeki 9y ago
  Today more than ever I witness people, professionals even, that just keep on hopefully poking and prodding back and forth in some grandiose effort to maybe just somehow break things back up into working order, which makes me very sad because all that is required is to step back, relax, and just genuinely look at things with your mind. In that situation I'm always reminded of Feynman's "He fixes radios by thinking!", and that, if anything, we should teach people how to think instead of shovelling massive amounts of pre-baked recipes into their head. > And all the time, on the way to his house, he's saying things like, "Do you know anything about radios? How do you know about radios-you're just a little boy!" > I start walking back and forth, thinking, and I realize that one way it can happen is that [so and so...] > So the guy says, "What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but you're only walking back and forth!" > I say, "I'm thinking!" Then I said to myself, "All right, take the tubes out, and reverse the order [because so and so...] > So I changed the tubes around, stepped to the front of the radio, turned the thing on, and it's as quiet as a lamb: it waits until it heats up, and then plays perfectly-no noise. > He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was, saying, "He fixes radios by thinking!" > The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radio - a little boy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it-he never thought that was possible.

golergka 9y ago

Oh no. What used to be the best designed website in the whole internet is now, too, a slow mess that doesn't work in javascript, uses several trackers and loads half a megabyte to display few screens of text. Who the hell thought that slapping some annotations on top is worth this price to pay? Why not add stories to it, too?

BackwardSpy 9y ago
It won't even load for me, I just get an infinite spinner gif. Tried turning my browser extensions off, still no luck.
- cpressland 9y ago
  Ditto...

synthmeat 9y ago

I honestly do not wish to bash on the implementer, but it's an absolute disgrace what they did to c2.com. It feels like an April Fool's joke.

rcarmo 9y ago
The archived copy linked to elsewhere on this thread loads and renders _much_ faster than c2, which ironically requires me to disable my ad blocker to actually load.
zeveb 9y ago
The only good thing is that the database is available via web calls. The bad thing is that the code to render the text is insane (take a look: https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/blob/master/static/index.html https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/blob/master/sta...). Even the goal of the 'remodel' (really, more of a demolition) is crazy: 'The original wiki rewritten as a single page application.' That's like saying, 'roast beef, now with added concrete and carpet!' I just don't get how someone can think the change is a good idea.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- chriswarbo 9y ago
  I hate JS single-page apps, but as far as c2 goes, I think the idea is to eventually make it distributed. To make that work requires two parts: - Some way for the page to communicate with other instances (e.g. bittorrent, or whatever, implemented in JS) - Some way to display the results (i.e. a JS renderer) The easiest part is the JS renderer, so it makes sense to implement that first. With a JS renderer, the server side rendering can be thrown away. Now that it's a single page using JS calls to fetch data, it's a much easier target to make distributed: "just" switch out where those calls get their data from. I'm glad such experiments are going on, and don't mind putting up with this awkward in-between phase in the mean time.
  - 9y ago

scandinavegan 9y ago

There's a quote under "Skill theory" on that page from Feynman: > "Right. I don't believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math, and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it's no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, 'What one fool can do, another can.' What we've been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn't studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There's a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it deep and profound." -- Feynman, Omni 1979 The "what one fool can do" quote from a calculus book is probably from Calculus Made Easy that was posted on HN a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14161876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14161876 In Calculus Made Easy, the exact quote is "What one fool can do, another can. -- (Ancient Simian Proverb)".

chii 9y ago
I dont know if the book you had was correct, but in one of his interviews, Feynmen had mentioned he used a book called 'calculus for the practical man' (https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Practical-Man-J-Thompson/dp/1406756725 https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Practical-Man-J-Thompson/dp/...) i think.
- justin66 9y ago
  https://books.google.com/books?id=BrhBAAAAYAAJ&dq=calculus%20made%20easy&pg=PR11#v=onepage&q=what%20one%20fool&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=BrhBAAAAYAAJ&dq=calculus%2...
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  Thanks to both of you for these. I was looking for resources like this! To wit: hardcover & softcover copies of both are rather expensive (at least in Canada). If they're in any good shape they run ~$50 to ~$80. Kindle has them both for $6 and change.
- JadeNB 9y ago
  > Feynmen What an interesting world we would live in if there really were a plural of Feynman. :-)

mack73 9y ago

>I had a calculus book once that said, 'What one fool can do, another can.' A link to a pdf file of a copy of an old calculus book from early nineteen-hundreds showed up on HN a week or so ago. I read the first couple of pages. That quote is likely referencing that particular book. I have lost the link now. Anyone remember? Edit: sry, that was weak Googleing from my part. Here it is: http://djm.cc/library/Calculus_Made_Easy_Thompson.pdf http://djm.cc/library/Calculus_Made_Easy_Thompson.pdf

ralfd 9y ago
"Calculus made easy". Just search for it.
- mack73 9y ago
  Yeah that's the one, thx.

swiley 9y ago

This site used to be one of my favorite examples of content over presentation. What happened?

Iv 9y ago
Youngsters.
- wolfgang42 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by 'youngsters'--c2.com (and the associated wiki) are still maintained by Ward Cunningham, and the effort to rewrite the wiki[1] is hosted under his GitHub account and appears to have been his decision. It appears to have been motivated by a desire to "federate" the wiki, though I'm unclear on what exactly this vision entails. [1]: https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

aban 9y ago

Whenever the Feynman Algorithm comes up, I'm tempted to share "Stop Treading Water: Learning to Learn" [0] by Edward Kmett. It's a great talk and I highly recommend it if you haven't watched it (or frankly, if you already have :). [0]: https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-learning-to-learn-by-edward-kmett-1750 https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-le...

rustacean 9y ago
Thank you
- aban 9y ago
  You're welcome :)

thriftwy 9y ago

My algorithm is usually along the lines of: * Think of a problem * Think real hard * Write down a solution * Write down the problem

abecedarius 9y ago

There's an oral-history interview of Feynman where the interviewer brings up his notebooks, saying something like "where you recorded your results" -- Feynman interrupts like "no, it's where I worked them out". He's emphatic about it after being questioned again. The "Feynman algorithm" is an OK joke, and gets at something real, but I think it smacks a little too much of putting words in the guy's mouth. It has a flavor of mystification that goes against the spirit of a lot that he said in his lectures. There was a lecture explicitly on problem-solving methods in the "Tips on Physics" volume.

apo 9y ago

The algorithm might not be a trite as it seems at first. In particular, I find the first step to be extremely valuable: Write down the problem. Part of my bag of problem-solving tricks is to start by writing a question for StackOverflow. The point is not to post the question for someone else to answer, but for me to frame the problem in such a way that it can be written about clearly enough for someone else to understand it. I find that about 50% of the time I have the answer to my own question before even hitting the post button.

stcredzero 9y ago
My algorithm went like this: 1) Write down the problem. 2) Try several established strategies to solve it. 3) Get stuck, resign self to failing out of school 4) Go to sleep 5) Write out the answer over breakfast

ddingus 9y ago

I want to share a look at this from a bit different perspective. As a kid, I would fix, trade and sell older radios and TV's for money and other things. I fell in love with vacuum tube era things. They are beautiful and it's all human scale. You can see the parts. Back then, I didn't have much. Our family was in poverty a lot of the time. Reasons. That's not a big deal, and in fact, was of great benefit to me personally. It kind of forced exploring the world and meaning to get something out of it. I needed it! Anyway, I had a couple of old ratty texts from the 50's era that explained the theory of operation. And I had various toys and projects that showed parts of that theory to me. A crystal radio, for example. I must have reread that text 50 times. At first, I understood very little. Being young, much of the higher level stuff would blow right by. But the general concepts were there. So, imagine being faced with the radio. You don't have much, no fancy test gear, etc... I submit Feynman didn't fix the radio. It's still broken in a sense. But, what he did do was make that radio, imperfect or broken, damaged, as it was, perform as needed. He moved the problem out of the way. This is important. The radio is a system. It's designed to do a task, and it's parts are designed to perform to a specification or other. Each radio is kind of unique too. Whatever flaws it has gets compensated for. Problem: Noise in the radio audio Think real hard: Here, one can start to analyze the radio, take the theory of operation and identify where noise might be coming from. This means one has sufficient understanding to solve the problem in the first place. The heavy lift is realizing it! But, say one does not possess that level of understanding. I didn't back then. Not until many years later, lots of fixes under my belt, and some kind souls giving me test gear. So then, as a system, what's still possible? Fixing the radio may not be an option due to lack of components, understanding, tools. Move the radio Swap the tubes Modify antenna Change power source Change adjustable things in the radio Remove something from the radio Etc... For each of these things one CAN do, which of them may resolve noise? In this way, the problem shifts from, "fixing it", which implies the radio is brought from a flawed state to an acceptable one. (just less and more minor flaws really) That is what Feynman did. A poor component at one stage of the radio may perform another task just fine. Swapping the tubes does that. For many years, I would get this gear from people. And it was a lot of, "look at the problem", "think real hard", "execute solution." And a bunch of that boiled down to what I could do, not so much what should be done, or needed to be done. And a lot of that was successful. Try stuff, observe, try more stuff, observe. After a time, which stuff to try boiled down to a potent set of things. More successes. I would get an older TV, for example. Maybe it had a red tint, or the picture bloomed. One could make adjustments in the set to re-balance the picture, or improve focus, limit overall brightness, and any number of things to bring that particular system into a functioning order sufficient to perform the task required of it. Still broken, in the technical sense. New components would very likely improve it, but a removal of one, or replacement with similar one, even removing one, tweaks to the unit, all could combine to make it perform. In my following of Feynman, I find a consistent theme where he was very good at understanding basic understanding. The calculus book he refers to contained some general solutions he found could solve a very broad set of problems. Rather than explore all the solution sets and struggle to apply them, he would take a very useful one and max it out, applying it everywhere. Where it would not work, or was impractical, he would seek another one. I see this as a very important aspect of this awesome problem solving ability he demonstrated. Collecting things like this, as well as taking problems from various angles: What can be done, and could it help? What has been done before? What should be done. Combine things done before. Guess at possible new things to be done. etc... seems to be major contributors to this skill. Feynman often mentioned puzzles. When you combine a "gauntlet" of puzzles and Feynman's natural ability to recognize fundamental understanding with time and a zeal to solve, his remarks about "not being a genius" have some real merit! Now, he was, and that's not really a matter of serious debate. But, the method, to him, is more about doing the work to be lucid. Solve, solve, solve, refine tools, collect new ones, solve, solve, solve... The difference here, between Feynman, and us ordinary mortals, is the breadth and depth of that lucidity. Those skills I learned in my early youth still apply today. I can't tell you how many times I've arrived at simple ways to "fix" something, just based on what could be done, and inferences on what must be true. It's theory of operation, coupled with broad experience and that "gauntlet" of puzzles run with "the tools" Each of us can do this. Some of us can do it extremely well in a given domain too. I feel Feynman never did appreciate his skill and lucidity about reality itself, the world, it's parts. Few of us have that. But, the Feynman way of looking at things, solving problems, collecting tools to solve them with, being observant, and inference: What is possible? What can we do? What must be true? Etc... Is something everyone can cultivate to varying degrees, depending on our affinity for a given domain, personal attributes, and resources. I know this is a zen like argument, but he didn't actually fix that radio. He made a broken one, or flawed one perform better. And in that last bit is an important realization: We state the problem. Fine. But, we need to also state the goal too. Given a goal, the problem may be too limiting. A solution may appear out of reach, or not be seen due to a problem statement constraining things, or masking things. Work backward from the goal and sometimes one can factor the original problem statement away. And in the doing of that, arrive at a solution that gets it done, or renders the problem a non problem. And I'll add Feynman did the work. A lot of it, and he credits that to a lot of his insights. Solving a bazillion puzzles will turn anyone into a much better solution finder, and he's right about that. Do the work. Seek the puzzles, and keep at them. Over time, one gets an internal sort of understanding that is more broadly applicable.

mtempleton 9y ago

Feynman was a particularly interesting, intelligent, but also a very moral person. He said in an interview in his older years, while tearing up: 'I know the difference between right and wrong.' Of science, my favorite bit from him is that 'in science, it does not matter what your last name is, how brilliant you are, how beautiful your theory is, all that matters is if it experimentally agrees with nature. That's all that science is'[1] After devoting his time to science, he indulged in sex, drugs and art, and in the meantime had a great deal good to say about not just nature, but about morality as well. My type of person. 1-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY

stcredzero 9y ago

There are people who solve a problem the same way that you do, just much much faster. Apparently, Murray Gell-Mann was one such person. I had a professor like that. He was constantly blurting out your next thought just as you were on the verge of forming the words. Gell-Mann did this so often, that his grad students once played a trick on him by meeting up and thinking out a new series of conclusions ahead of time, just so they could blurt out the next conclusion just as Gell-Mann was about to speak it.

kazinator 9y ago

Occurs in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14190069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14190069