pavas

12 ms·

61.
by pavas 6y ago
> it seems likely that "relevant" knowledge is not infinite. Does it? At the very least, the relationships between prime numbers "seems likely" to be infinite, and that's only taking into account patterns in a co
62.
by pavas 6y ago
You're describing memes.
63.
by pavas 6y ago
> The $500k number in the post that he links to seems way off Assuming 30% tax rate that's 150k gross compensation/year over 5 years. That's pretty average compensation for big tech companies for fresh grads[1]. That also
64.
by pavas 6y ago
There's stress everywhere, agreed. In my experience, holding all else equal the amount of stress you have is correlated with the cost of screwing something up or of not delivering on time. Holding all else equal, that is also correlate
65.
by pavas 6y ago
I work for a FAANG company. The interviews were quite stressful, and my goal for every question was to push through and at the very least make some progress instead of giving up. I don't make use of any of the algorithmic skills I was
66.
by pavas 6y ago
The features may have limited scope but if they have an entire team dedicated to them they usually deal with large enough scale that it's worth it. When you're dealing with distributed systems at large scale you can no longer have
67.
by pavas 7y ago
I think a good lower bound for the number of COVID19-related deaths in the USA without proper measures is somewhere in the millions, not hundreds of thousands. And that includes a very large blow to our medical system. This is one of those
68.
by pavas 7y ago
Beating this thing requires sacrifice and it seems very few people are willing to voluntarily do it. There is no reason to despair or panic or be anxious if you are following the proper precautions to prevent its spread. I think there is ju
69.
by pavas 7y ago
Oh I wasn't trying to imply that. I was responding to "What's the next step after those?" with some of the paths I've gone down. I've put somewhat of a moratorium on philosophy as of late because I don't h
70.
by pavas 7y ago
Your starting point is taken up by Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy. The more modern expansion of these ideas can be found in Phenomenology by people like Husserl or Heidegger. There are a lot of contemporary philosophers de
71.
by pavas 7y ago
In the end the money for UBI comes from taxes one way or another. Even if every dollar is taxed the same amount, not everyone makes the same amount of dollars.
72.
by pavas 7y ago
This is assuming that we don't take quick and drastic action. Which is where we were as a country less than a week ago, and it didn't seem inevitable at the time that we were going to take this as seriously as we should be. These
73.
by pavas 7y ago
Do you feel like this same attitude applies to something like Ebola? If someone were to walk around with Ebola, sneezing and coughing on everything, would you still be of the opinion that they should have the right to do so? Does this stanc
74.
by pavas 7y ago
Because you aren't everyone else. There are lots of people that would be hit very hard and require intense hospitalization or face death if they were to get COVID-19. Furthermore, this would put a strain on medical resources if the num
75.
by pavas 7y ago
You might be severely underestimating the impact that a bad living situation can have on a persons confidence, motivation, and mental energy to approach tasks. The most important thing they can do is ANYTHING that gets them into a stable li
76.
by pavas 7y ago
Besides, this issue has been solved for many years now. Auto-completion in modern IDEs has gotten really good.
77.
by pavas 7y ago
If you're talking about a small, quickly-written, one-off piece of code, then I think truncated variable names are OK. If the code is anything that anyone else (including future you) will have to read, or a part of a larger system, the
78.
by pavas 7y ago
>I think if this is mania, it’s controlled mania in a way? That sounds like hypomania. If you're relatively smart it's like a superpower, but most medical professionals do not believe its something you can control. I know nothi
79.
by pavas 7y ago
This sounds like mania. Be careful.
80.
by pavas 7y ago
I think you're actually missing his point, which is not so much a matter of perspective but rather a direct application of Goodheart's Law. When you are trying to incentivize by proxy (e.g. promote good ideas by rewarding vocal an
81.
by pavas 7y ago
The extra calculation doesn't change the theoretical asymptotic time complexity because O((k+1)f(n)) = O((k)f(n)) = O(f(n)). In a real computer most of the calculation time will be spent dealing with cache misses and reading from memor
82.
by pavas 7y ago
I'm talking about experience as in "what it is like to be something"[1] which is different than learning or memory. [1] This is the most well known paper on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_
83.
by pavas 7y ago
There are two broad categories of comments that you've conflated together into an "irrational" label. The first is grounded in mystical woo-woo, and the second is grounded in philosophy of science (meta-science) and philosoph
84.
by pavas 7y ago
This article is talking about the question of consciousness as "experience" itself, not necessarily as the state of having some sort of intelligent subject (the "I"). You're very likely right that the functional cha
85.
by pavas 7y ago
More fundamental than thinking is experience itself. Regardless of whether there is a "you" or if it's some amalgamation of state that is loosely bounded together and "fooled" into thinking it is a unity, something
86.
by pavas 7y ago
So how do _you_ make any sort of judgments based off of what people say? What information do you use to judge whether their statements are accurate? Or do you always start with the assumption that everything everyone says is suspect? What s
87.
by pavas 7y ago
You can't get around the problem of manipulation if your trustworthiness metric for content will be the same for all people, as it is on reddit, hacker news, or Amazon for example. Having moderators just concentrates the issue into a s
88.
by pavas 7y ago
The reason I mentioned that the trust metric should be transitive and distributed is so that it prevents gaming as much as possible. You wouldn't want to have a trusted central authority (for everyone) because that could always be corr
89.
by pavas 7y ago
I've been thinking that the only way to get around the bad-actor (or paid agent) problem when dealing with online networks is to have some sort of distributed trust mechanism. I feel like manually curated information is the way to go,
90.
by pavas 7y ago
This comes down to the concept of 'proof'. How do you know that the code you wrote does what you think it does? You construct some sort of proof in your mind, but for any non-trivial code you have to follow certain operational rul

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