xamuel

63 ms·

601.
by xamuel 8y ago
Here's one example. In Darwin's "Origin of Species", a key principle which Darwin talks about at great length is the so-called Knight-Darwin Law, the observation that even in apparently asexual species, sexual reproducti
602.
by xamuel 8y ago
The paper mentions how Erdos accomplished so much while knowing relatively little machinery. This is, I think, a more general paradox of mathematical research, not limited to Erdos: it's a mis-conception that to do important original m
603.
by xamuel 8y ago
Unless your shop literally hires every warm body that walks in the door, you're still seeing things through survivor bias lenses. Even those inept kids are better than what you'd get if you opened the floodgates.
604.
by xamuel 8y ago
Most people wouldn't be able to cut it in software dev, whether they did the 3 month bootcamp or even if they managed to pass a 4-year university program. 99% of the time, Little Jimmy's 4th grade English teacher would have a snow
605.
by xamuel 8y ago
If it were done universally, then you'd have the exact same zero-sum parent game: parents would continue to pester the $1m/yr rockstar teacher about why their kid got an A- instead of an A.
606.
by xamuel 8y ago
The answer is "No".
607.
by xamuel 8y ago
No sane person thinks murder is good, rather people differ in what they consider to be murder. Soldiers killing enemy soldiers in combat during a war is not really murder, who cares what some judge 3000 miles away says. Btw when you say &qu
608.
by xamuel 8y ago
I always interpreted virtue signalling not as implying insincerity, but rather implying the main reason they're broadcasting the belief is to put a spotlight on themselves. If there was a murder in the news and you immediately went on
609.
by xamuel 8y ago
You can always draw a line through the points, but it isn't always a good approximation. If the points are inherently bunched around a line, then a line through them will approximate them well. If they're a big random cloud, then
610.
by xamuel 8y ago
ML is a souped-up version of "draw a line through these points". We can get really efficient at drawing lines through points, but it's not like we'll suddenly realize some deeper fundamental theory about it!
611.
by xamuel 8y ago
He's a pop philosopher and a genius at cultivating followership, but he doesn't really have productive ideas (at least not ideas whose results you couldn't explain in 5 minutes to a 12 year old, to borrow Chomsky's langu
612.
by xamuel 8y ago
Zizek isn't a philosopher, he's an entertainer disguised as a philosopher. His entire schtick is: take something common sense, declare the opposite is true, and do so in a profound-sounding way with lots of eccentric gesturing and
613.
by xamuel 8y ago
>Lessig’s paradigmatic example of a hybrid is Red Hat, Inc. Well, so much for that! Which I guess just further proves the article's point.
614.
by xamuel 8y ago
>many who learn one first Everyone learns imperative first. "Wake up!" or "Eat your vegetables!" are imperative. No-one says to their kids, "map(vegetables, eat)"
615.
by xamuel 8y ago
Call me a philistine, but you could mix high-proof liquor into whatever beverage you want. There's no reason why the active ingredient and the flavoring need to be correlated.
616.
by xamuel 8y ago
I guess I'm a dork, but I'll never understand beer branding. The active ingredient is alcohol, a drug that induces various desirable effects. You wouldn't pay extra for artisanal aspirin or tylenol, so why alcohol? Reminds me
617.
by xamuel 8y ago
If a church is too large and non-denominational, it ends up being a YMCA with sermons. In other words, there's no more church there, just vague platitutes and networking. Jesus himself said: "Do not assume that I have come to brin
618.
by xamuel 8y ago
In that article, the author claims that a human brain cannot create something more intelligent than itself, and argues by saying that over several billion years of evolution, no human brain has ever done so, thus it must not be possible. Th
619.
by xamuel 8y ago
>pre-prints on their websites People don't realize how inadequate this is long-term. Hundreds of years from now when scholars look back at the early 21st century, it's going to look like the dark ages.
620.
by xamuel 8y ago
From that article: >Twenty-six years later, I still don't understand Berkeley. I have a nice edition of his collected works. Will I ever read it? Seems unlikely. This is like buying a book about React, putting it on your shelf, not
621.
by xamuel 8y ago
I was expecting a rant about job ad filler. "Join a world-class team of architects, we are changing the world and ushering in the age of Aquarius with our revolutionary CAAS (CRUD-As-A-Service) model, endorsed by Mark Zuckerburg's
622.
by xamuel 8y ago
Because memory management is an area where C++ over-simplifies and assumes one size fits all. In the C++ worldview, memory allocation is a black box, and no two apps would ever have any desire to use different memory allocation strategies.
623.
by xamuel 8y ago
9 times out of 10, the person applying 3rd normal form doesn't know what they're doing and ends up over-engineering the hell out of a project and making things much worse.
624.
by xamuel 8y ago
It's fun to create paradoxical faces by alternating between increasing two contradictory vectors. For example, alternating between +bald, +wavyhair, +bald, +wavyhair, ... eventually seems to produce unsettling faces where it's har
625.
by xamuel 8y ago
If the original experiment was large enough [1], you could almost always find some C such that "drug A doesn't work for condition B but 90% [2] of individuals with condition C showed significant improvement". In fact, you cou
626.
by xamuel 8y ago
>more interested in proving their superiority over others than in actually getting stuff done. I've noticed this happens a LOT in all kinds of meetings. I myself am guilty of it, so now I try to think before I speak, "if I rais
627.
by xamuel 8y ago
Mega-churches remind me of this warning from Jesus: "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to
628.
by xamuel 8y ago
Zizek is good at uttering profound-sounding things, but there's no substance. Anyone who has raised young children knows there's a high chance they'll call your bluff.
629.
by xamuel 8y ago
"The Metamorphosis" is the usual short story appetizer (often assigned in high school). "The Trial" is typically the introductory novel, though if you want to be a rebel you could start with "Amerika" instead.
630.
by xamuel 8y ago
>no additonal depth I disagree. It has many different layers of meaning. Besides the plain reading on the face of it, you can also read it in the context of Kafka's own relationship with his father. Or you can read it through the Ch

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