Jimmy

15 ms·

91.
by Jimmy 11y ago
If you look at the URL for that article, you'll see it's filed under the "humor" folder. Other articles on the site are legitimate.
92.
by Jimmy 11y ago
Before I clicked on the comments, I had a suspicion that this article wouldn't resonate with the HN crowd. It's very much an example of "humanities" thinking.
93.
by Jimmy 11y ago
"Polygamy will further the deterioration of society!" "Polygamy has a history of abuse!" And where have we heard precisely these arguments before? People are great.
94.
by Jimmy 11y ago
I'll go ahead and enthusiastically agree as well, but with no throwaway, to get the ball rolling! I don't think I'm important enough for anyone to care what I say on HN though...
95.
by Jimmy 11y ago
>People love being emotionally numbed That's not what alcohol does. If anything, it's an emotion amplifier. It does usually put me on the happy end of the spectrum, but I don't consider that to be "numbing".
96.
by Jimmy 11y ago
By most accounts, the majority of mathematics papers and textbooks feature "informal" proofs, as opposed to "formal" proofs. Rather than work in a clearly-defined formal system where every inference step is justified by
97.
by Jimmy 11y ago
People fall victim to this fallacy in their own thinking all the time. They want to get good at doing X, but task Y is a lot easier and success at Y is mildly correlated with success at X, so they start practicing Y instead of X. It's
98.
by Jimmy 11y ago
Having a traditional job is such a terrible experience. At the very least, it's terrible if you're not 100% in love with whatever company project you're working on. I think there are some personality types that are suited to
99.
by Jimmy 11y ago
Oh, I thought this was going to be a "do you feel like you're missing out on life?" post. No, I don't feel like I'm missing out on what you're talking about. But there's probably a party in your neighborho
100.
by Jimmy 11y ago
>For example, English way of writing is terrible for expressing sounds. Japanese or the korean ways are much better Or Spanish by the way. Just wanted to point out that the style of syllabary that Japanese uses wouldn't be practical
101.
by Jimmy 11y ago
> That hypothetical language wouldn't be more abstract so much as vague and context-dependent which isn't the same thing. Well, the hypothetical language has one word, so it wouldn't be able to express much of anything (be
102.
by Jimmy 11y ago
>Chinese is so outdated and obsolete in so many ways. This is really interesting. Could you expand on this? Do you find it to be something with the vocabulary, the grammar? What about the writing system? I've always wondered how
103.
by Jimmy 11y ago
>At this firm, people believed that success indeed required ideal-worker-like devotion. The word "success" seems like a misnomer here. Success is not possible under these conditions. Killing yourself for transient business proj
104.
by Jimmy 11y ago
>It makes your feeling seem universal It universalizes the feeling of the writer, not the reader. Much like religion or the Effective Altruism movement, the rise of homogenized communication (image macros, rage comics, the "that mom
105.
by Jimmy 11y ago
An associate professor at a relatively prestigious university that I worked under had essentially become a manager. His days were dominated by answering calls and emails, writing grants, and going to meetings, with all of the actual scienti
106.
by Jimmy 11y ago
What exactly would submitting to the corporate BS get you? A promotion, the recognition of your current batch of co-workers? Are you really the kind of person who cares about such things? Do you need more money, are you afraid you might
107.
by Jimmy 11y ago
Would you be able to quote a passage from the book where Joyce claims that that's his view? It's been a long time since I read Portrait of the Artist , but I don't recall that being in the book, nor does it sound like somet
108.
by Jimmy 11y ago
>He highlighted enough of my superfluous fluff that I finally got writing and how one must write as little as possible. Right, because Joyce, Pynchon, and Nabokov would have benefited from being told to write "as little as possibl
109.
by Jimmy 11y ago
Why should it indicate difficulty and not easiness? A similar feat would be completely beyond me in math. Even though I minored in math as an undergrad, I have almost no understanding of the questions and arguments being discussed in the p
110.
by Jimmy 11y ago
My intuition is that this happens more in philosophy than other fields. I, an amateur, have thought of multiple questions and arguments which I later come to find have already been explored in the literature. I've seen students in unde
111.
by Jimmy 12y ago
Why isn't there a row for "figuring out how large, poorly-documented legacy systems work"? That's what most of my daily development tasks consist of, anyway.
112.
by Jimmy 12y ago
How do we get around the issue of funding though? A lot of innovative projects come out of universities because governments give them money without expecting an immediate return on investment. How can we create a non-academia system that
113.
by Jimmy 12y ago
It's fine. I was being overly-pedantic. :)
114.
by Jimmy 12y ago
>But by "getting the idea" I mean the intent. I'm suspicious of the intent. That's why I want a more formal criteria.
115.
by Jimmy 12y ago
>If it is valid, on-topic criticism, it isn't gratuitous negativity. We'll need some assurance that invalid criticism can also fall under the category of "not gratuitously negative" as well. Otherwise, we've ju
116.
by Jimmy 12y ago
>That is gratuitously negative because you are not contributing anything to the conversation except your opinion. That doesn't explain at all why something would be "gratuitously negative". I can contribute my opinion that
117.
by Jimmy 12y ago
Your thesis seems to be "If (if you don't do X, then you starve to death), then X is slavery", but I don't think that's true. Think of small hunter-gatherer groups that lived before the advent of agriculture. If the
118.
by Jimmy 12y ago
What countries do a better job of fostering creativity and critical thinking? Every culture has its sacred cows. The idea of an environment that's fully tolerant and welcoming towards any and all dissent is, as far as I can tell, a m
119.
by Jimmy 12y ago
>I wish that when GC encountered a cycle it would just tell the programmer that they now have a leak, maybe even suggest where it could be fixed with one of those neat little IDE quick fixes, and continue chugging along. Are you saying t
120.
by Jimmy 12y ago
This really resonates with me. On the one hand, you have the desire for greatness and importance, and on the other, the sobering realization that unless you do something completely absurd - inventing free energy, for instance, or getting us

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