xamuel

66 ms·

691.
by xamuel 8y ago
That should be done as well, the flashcards are just a supplement. I find there's often a weird transition where if I'm just reading docs as if it were pleasure reading, I'll be nodding my head, "yeah, that makes sense&q
692.
by xamuel 8y ago
Have you seen how the usual mathematician/physicist programs? They "google as they go", looking up everything, copy-pasting from stackoverflow, etc.
693.
by xamuel 8y ago
Back then, I pretty much made cards for everything possible. One trick is I found it's best to design the cards so you can say the answer fast. You don't want to waste time verbalizing long asnwers. So my cards end up looking like
694.
by xamuel 8y ago
I credit Anki with allowing me to successfully leap from ivory-tower academic to professional software engineer. I recognized right away that most academics would scoff at lowly "plebian" tasks like "actually learning the det
695.
by xamuel 8y ago
You're right of course. Nevertheless there's a difference between saying "the simulating computer probably uses error-correcting codes or something" (speculation) vs. saying "an experiment suggests (same thing)&quot
696.
by xamuel 8y ago
Compare König's lemma [1] ("every infinite tree contains a vertex of infinite degree or an infinite simple path"), often considered the first example of infinite graph theory. It wasn't articulated until 1927, almost hal
697.
by xamuel 8y ago
Yes, I saw him live last year, he was great :) But it would be daft to think his recent works come anywhere near the importance of what he did in the sixties
698.
by xamuel 8y ago
Darwin actually articulates a much-more-precise law (which serves as a cornerstone of his whole book). I've argued in my papers that the KDL is in fact an infinite-graph-theoretical statement (remarkable because infinite graph theory w
699.
by xamuel 8y ago
From that article: >Imagine Keynes was really a highlander and was still alive and at the height of his intellectual powers. Who would it be more beneficial to read, the 1936 Keynes or the 2010 Keynes? The "at the height of his inte
700.
by xamuel 8y ago
"A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read." --Mark Twain It's amazing how much low-hanging fruit there is in classics. When I read Darwin's "Origin of Species", I found that
701.
by xamuel 8y ago
One example of something you'd always like to verify is, "this code does not have undefined behavior". This could be the key to obtaining C speed without C's lack of safety. In fact, in some possibly-formalizable sense,
702.
by xamuel 8y ago
On the philosophical side, I recently published a paper which could potentially lead to a whole new genre: making actual scientific (=falsifiable) progress on the previously-ineffable question, "Do we live in a simulation?" "
703.
by xamuel 8y ago
Kolmogorov Complexity is not a single explicitly-defined function: it depends on your model of computation. For large strings, this doesn't matter very much, because if you have a program of length n in one Turing complete programming
704.
by xamuel 8y ago
Something else Google Maps does: it calls religious buildings "businesses" (if no-one has claimed them, then you'll see a "Claim this business" link when you click on them). This is a huge libel against those religi
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by xamuel 8y ago
We encourage emotional response when it's the "right" response, and discourage it when it's the "wrong" response. For example, buying Apple products is "right", while voting for Brexit is "wrong&
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by xamuel 8y ago
I understood you as saying that we should choose to "rise above" emotional persuasion. You have good intentions but your advice is bad: our susceptibility to emotional persuasion is not something we can consciously remove, no more
707.
by xamuel 8y ago
darkerside pointed out a great rational benefit of trusting emotional people [1]. What would be the benefit of trusting better-looking people? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17668937
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by xamuel 8y ago
Think of it like this. Two men both have a condition where if they see flashing red lights, they go into a psychotic rage. One man chooses to ignore the condition because going into a psychotic rage is bad, therefore he should pretend that
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by xamuel 8y ago
Brilliant, you win the thread. Your post is like a koan. Also consider that young children are almost purely emotional. It would make sense that we should be hard-wired to trust, and build trust with, our children.
710.
by xamuel 8y ago
This "be yourself" line of speaking is garbage. It makes the speaker sound wise while doing nothing to help the person who is desperate for a romantic partner. About as useful as telling a depressive person to cheer up. Imagine we
711.
by xamuel 8y ago
I didn't read it as "we should trust people based on looks", but more as "we DO trust people based on looks" (I assume the "empirical evidence" refers to evidence of this being hardwired into us, not to ev
712.
by xamuel 8y ago
>you need to resolve that ambiguity Better yet would be to preserve the original ambiguity. Especially important for fine literature where sometimes the ambiguity is the whole point.
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by xamuel 8y ago
So what would the above code actually look like, in your world? >you don't have to write these checks every single time But in real-world applications, the way you react to errors would differ from function to function. Some functio
714.
by xamuel 8y ago
Could you elaborate? As a C guy, I'm interested what you think would be simpler than that simple code you posted. Structurally, what you just posted (minus the details about what "socket" and "listen" mean) could be
715.
by xamuel 8y ago
That's important for casual readers, but less important for historical reconstruction purpose. Consider that reseachers used a micro-CT scan followed by volume cartography analysis to locate the ink within the thoroughly burnt-to-a-cri
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by xamuel 8y ago
Part of the problem, I think, is these days there are more people who want to write than there are people who want to read. So it's an endless battle to draw attention to your own writings. "Look at me! Look over here!" Unles
717.
by xamuel 8y ago
Statistically, these "mother wrongly arrested" stories are about as rare as genuine child abductions. Avoiding parenthood because of them is as irrational as reporting a woman for leaving her child in the car for five minutes. (No
718.
by xamuel 8y ago
As a male scientist with a family, I wouldn't mind if someone wrote news articles about my work and mentioned I'm "a loving father of two" or whatever. Just as long as it doesn't dominate the whole article and distr
719.
by xamuel 8y ago
That's a very good point, thanks. But just in this thread, I see many other arguments to invalidate the vote: * Arguments that economics make Remain "right" (assuming economic considerations overrule votes; if economists prov
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by xamuel 8y ago
My sinking feeling comes from seeing democracy dying, replaced by "right answers" declared from on high. Suppose the UK held a referendum about whether RSA encryption should be legal. The voters narrowly vote to keep it legal. Sud

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