patkai

8 ms·

31.
by patkai 7y ago
Gell-Mann is one of my favorite scientist, partly because he conforms to my idea of what a scientist is, ie. diverse interests (linguistics, systems science), fun communicator (just check YouTube), very slightly eccentric (Yann LeCun's
32.
by patkai 7y ago
I just read von Neumann's biography recently. He wanted to call the ENIAC the MANIAC - because of its unreliability - but his colleagues refused.
33.
by patkai 7y ago
"No one is coercing anyone else" - in a way they are. As a software developer I don't think I have the choice not to use one of the big clouds. Protonmail and DDG I do use, but I can't use Hetzner instead of AWS or GCE i
34.
by patkai 7y ago
Meaning just how awesome email and Excel are!
35.
by patkai 8y ago
Isn't Belém to Manaus the trip Jules Verne described in 800 miles on the Amazon? I wanted to take that trip since I was 10.
36.
by patkai 8y ago
Rich Hickey brought joy and aesthetics back to software development.
37.
by patkai 8y ago
Just to put this in perspective: Apple has about 30 times more cash unused than this German investment in AI. Plus this R&D budget is only "potentially" impactful.
38.
by patkai 8y ago
That is funny! I thought about it the other way around: if I _have to_ put a tie on for a meeting - or conform in other ways - than how valuable am I as a consultant? I see a simile in visual design as well, e.g. Craigslist could be that wh
39.
by patkai 8y ago
I've seen this problem on Kindle books with equations, is that a related problem?
40.
by patkai 8y ago
Read yesterday's list as well! I have always been following YC batches and to me it seemed this Day-1 was excellent.
41.
by patkai 8y ago
Ten years late, but hopefully not too late. In 2007 I worked in a project that promised a distributed IoT platform. Unfortunately I don't remember what it was called.
42.
by patkai 8y ago
Not sure what to think of this yet, but it is refreshing to have an interesting new angle on the brain. This guy reminds me of Marvin Minsky, who once said "I bet the human brain is a kludge."
43.
by patkai 8y ago
Yes, there are. The Basecamp founders wrote books about it, Rework and Remote. The reason you don't hear more about them is that heroic work is more glamorous to discuss. It is worth following https://twitter.com/dhh
44.
by patkai 8y ago
This is data, not even a model, and interpretation is hard. You may see the decline - of e.g. PHP - as an opportunity or a threat. Anecdote: in Finland there is one person providing APL training. Guess how much insurance companies pay him ;
45.
by patkai 8y ago
Good one! Let me try another angle: the greatest trick is to cover up the simple fact that the redistribution of wealth is arbitrary. We could agree that the owners of German Shepherd dogs do not pay VAT on Thursdays if they have a green ha
46.
by patkai 8y ago
Sorry to nitpick but that "smack dab in the middle of nowhere" is 40 miles from Paris :) Anyway, it is very surprising that freelancing and remote work are taking off so slowly. At the company where I do remote freelance work I th
47.
by patkai 8y ago
Some say that journalists pick photos that support their message. (Have you ever seen a favourable photo of Trump in an opponent paper or vice versa?)
48.
by patkai 8y ago
Could we somehow estimate how much electricity unnecessary design - mostly meaning unnecessary js running on pages - costs the planet? I guess it was done already...
49.
by patkai 8y ago
Jeez, how painful to think that she has to explain her role regularly just because she is a woman. My wife and I are both software developers, and recently moved from Helsinki to Berlin, with two kids. If you could see the faces when we tel
50.
by patkai 8y ago
I love to write SQL queries and even use them extensively in my code. However, almost everyone I talk to resists this, and warns me that "one day you will regret..." It gives me an uneasy feeling that I actually might, though it h
51.
by patkai 8y ago
Poverty is like drowning.
52.
by patkai 8y ago
From a moral point of view there is. My point is that from the point of view of science the same self-correction should work in both cases, so the bigger story to "somebody lied" is that "in case of this attractive lie the se
53.
by patkai 8y ago
Could we think about this experiment as a meta-experiment? Zimbardo experimenting on the research community and the public how long we keep something like alive just because it is an attractive story? (I am not defending him!)
54.
by patkai 8y ago
You are right, it is not OK to deliberately lie. What I meant is it's OK from the point of view of science and science will correct these kind of "lies" in the same way it corrects erroneous measurements, documentation errors
55.
by patkai 8y ago
The narrative of the original experiment may be a "lie", but in what way is a Medium article the "truth"? It would be very important to educate and remind ourselves about how science actually works. It does not work with
56.
by patkai 8y ago
Just wondering if it's time to start to decouple the client and the server. I did that with mail and use a native client only, and hosting a git repo on DO or similar should not be too big of an issue either.
57.
by patkai 8y ago
"a billionaire is an example of market failure" This is at least funny, but might have a lot of truth in it as well. I formulated something similar about the marching almost-monopolies like Apple and Facebook: they are a gigantic
58.
by patkai 8y ago
Not expecting mind blowing insight, just insight. Data turned into knowledge and models, showing relationships and significance. Gathering data is an intermediate step in this process. But true, it is a nice dump of data!
59.
by patkai 8y ago
I'm also skeptical of reports where one seems to need 294 slides to identify a trend. But drowning viewers in data and having no conclusions at the end is all the data I need.
60.
by patkai 8y ago
Zuckerberg is a very rational and collected person, so if he didn't make friends then he didn't want to make friends. It also implies the actual significance of the EU.

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