libraryofbabel

38 ms·

481.
by libraryofbabel 7y ago
One of the most interesting things about Gödel's Incompleteness theorem must surely be how _little_ effect it has had on the day to day practice of mathematical research. It's one of the most profound mathematical results in the l
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by libraryofbabel 7y ago
There is some overlap, but they complement each other. This one (Database Internals) has much more of a technical deep dive on storage engines, especially B-tree implementation details. If I was mentoring someone learning this stuff, I&#x27
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by libraryofbabel 7y ago
I'm currently teaching a class on databases to 10 junior engineers at a medium size org (~130 engineers). It's a huge amount of work but wonderfully fun and rewarding. The class is an even mix of CS grads and engineers from nontra
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by libraryofbabel 7y ago
This is an active area of interest in History of Science scholarship these days, which is steadily dismantling a lot of myths about how long peer review has existed and where it came from. It is in fact linked to the need to bring in funds
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by libraryofbabel 7y ago
> Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong? In which the authors conveniently ignore the existence of a number of disciplines, lik
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by libraryofbabel 7y ago
They did, and the tip is now out of date. A latter-day Bezos would drive a U-haul down the I-5 to IKEA Renton and buy a bunch of 2 meter Linnmon desk tops for $47.99 each. Don't buy a door. Just buy the mass-produced commodity fiberboa
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by libraryofbabel 7y ago
It's a good analogy, although I feel compelled to point out that Beethoven never heard Beethoven's Ninth either, since he was profoundly deaf when he wrote it.
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by libraryofbabel 8y ago
I asked this question to a class of smart 18-19 yo college students a few years ago. Almost everyone thought it was done with some kind of wireless transmission (e.g. "by satellite"). The idea that it was physical cables lying in
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by libraryofbabel 8y ago
The deeper point here - what the article is actually about but which has now been obscured by Musk's spectacular Twitter meltdown - is one about different kinds of technical culture. Silicon Valley culture has transformed our world, bu
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by libraryofbabel 8y ago
It looks like it's now been unflagged. It's worth noting that the article is quite moderate in tone (praises Musk for his offer to help etc.), and is mainly asking bigger questions about the Silicon Valley mentality of rushing to
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What Elon Musk Should Learn from the Thailand Cave Rescue(nytimes.com)
127 points by libraryofbabel 8y ago|67 comments
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by libraryofbabel 9y ago
Nice piece of journalism. Maintenance isn't sexy. It doesn't make for catchy political campaign promises. It's dirty, it's hard, it never ends, and you've succeed best when no one notices. But we live in a world ful
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by libraryofbabel 9y ago
It's true. But I do get the sense that at least the Hacker News community is more curious about and open to philosophy and the humanities than the tech world on average, and certainly more so than other online tech communities that I e
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Maintenance often matters more than innovation (2016)(aeon.co)
121 points by libraryofbabel 9y ago|17 comments
495.
by libraryofbabel 9y ago
It's nice to see Kuhn get a shout out; just occasionally I wish that the HN community at large was as well-informed on philosophy (and history) of science as we apparently are on all manner of technical topics. In fact one of the thing
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by libraryofbabel 9y ago
As I read it, the point of the dog story is really to suggest that there are probably limits to understanding at every level of intelligence. Sure, humans have a lot of cool tools for thinking about the world that dogs don't have (anal
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by libraryofbabel 9y ago
I've always liked the dog analogy ever since I came across it in Stephen Weinberg's book Dreams of a Final Theory : "...it may be that humans are simply not intelligent enough to discover or to understand the final theory. I