Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
Serious question. Are there any alternatives to HN? Been reading HN on and off since 2010 and the decline to this is painfully obvious. Used to learn a lot from reading on here but now only check or post out of habit and lack of a high quality alternative.
Comment · 4 years ago
But, the floor of profits for a company is not denominated in dollars. It is shit you put in your mouth and eat or a useful product like a refrigerator which you can put things which allow you to not die.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is some electricity, and arguably a waste of it.

Comment · 4 years ago
At this point, I think people who can say 1. with a straight face are either intellectually dishonest or just repeat things others say.

The majority of teachers make a median US wage fairly early into their career and plenty make a multiple of it later on, on top of great benefits. Their job is no more challenging than nearly all other professions. “But they have to”… yes, everyone else has shit they have to deal with. The fact that the Waltons, crypto lottery winners, etc. exist is a separate problem that doesn’t mean teachers are underpaid.

Education majors are easier.The sky is blue. If we even remotely believe in a meritocracy (liberals often really don’t when you dig into their beliefs, granted) starting teachers should not make as much as a starting EE major. Nobody in their right mind would or should pursue an engineering career if teaching paid equivalently.

Comment · 4 years ago
Trump tried to ban TikTok (and quite a lot more), but he’s orange and bad, so Biden repealed it. And tariffs are racist, so there’s that. America is not functioning well at this point and nothing indicates it will improve.
Comment · 4 years ago
I’m not going to win any upvotes for saying this but I think it’s worth mentioning that this study is dishonest, blatantly politically-themed, and likely intended to score points within the authors’ circle. In other words, it’s meant to be printed off and used as toilet paper. Seeing papers like this is a frightening reminder, at least for me, about how inefficient and wasteful our society has become, in that we continue to funnel large amounts of resources to professions or groups like this.
Comment · 4 years ago
A million years? Let’s crunch the numbers. I think the intellectual honest would acknowledge ashkhenazi intelligence differences. That took quite a lot less than a million years. And certainly intelligence is being selected for more than ever. We’re just, as a race, starting to experiment with gene modification. Would it really surprise you if minor modifications in intelligence aren’t made? It’s not going to be a million years for a significant leap bud.

As for the other point, it is indeed standing, on air.

Comment · 4 years ago
They absolutely did not say anything about “obvious” discoveries. That is even more ridiculous of a claim. Which major breakthroughs in stem were “obvious”? Or are you speaking from hindsight, where in this brave new world we’re smarter than all previous generations?

They also did not say there are major advances but they are “really hard” (your words), they said there are no major advances left (by comparing them to continents, which we’ve already all discovered). There is no other way to interpret their words, unless you believe there are additional continents on earth to discover. Maybe atlantis?

The OP is not commenting on individual contributors vs large groups but I will comment on that as I disagree. You are describing the current state of physics (and many other stem fields) and the popular consensus about future advancements. While certainly having hundreds of researchers is necessary on many projects, you have no basis to claim an individual will not make a major breakthrough in the distant future. And frankly, as much as they are necessary, giant labs are strongly encouraged by our current culture. Large profits from monetizing research into products, corporate involvement and funding, staggering bloat in universities, fame-chasing, printing off papers like buzzfeed articles, unprecedented levels of organized fraud in academia… very little of the current culture is conducive to modest, brilliant individual contributors in many fields.

You have no idea how the culture will change in science, how much more intelligent and capable people will be than we are in the distant future with natural selection and gene modification, and whether there will be any more breakthroughs by individuals or small groups that will seem “obvious” in hundreds of years. To say otherwise is frankly dogmatic caveman thinking.

Comment · 4 years ago
Literally your post, the top comment on the thread, leads with an unabashed claim that humans have already discovered all of the “major advances” in the sciences. It’s flabbergasting.
Comment · 4 years ago
Regarding replicability, I disagree this is a problem at all. Writing shit code is not going to prevent someone highly capable from replicating your results. If anything, I empathize with researchers writing sloppy code. It’s a creative field and they already have to do enough editing and documentation. Omitting code or fabricating/manipulating evaluation results is what prevents replication.

Frankly, unlike the author, I think there’s too many people in the field. They produce a handful of papers worth reading every year along with thousands upon thousands of models that may or may not slightly improve performance on a specific task and then have no general value beyond that. And I don’t believe this will change much- ml is likely the most monetizable PhD path by a safe margin, so there is too much profit incentive to churn out crap at any cost.

Comment · 4 years ago
Important to note that the audience of this article and Tiktok’s target market are disjoint. Relevant minds need to be swayed.
Comment · 4 years ago
I find this take ridiculous. This is the liberal equivalent of “no systemic racism”. What would you call it when a significant portion of your company believes in woke values and promotes some of these individuals into influential roles where they have power to pressure people? I’m sure their influence on product always rationally optimizes shareholder value and is not influenced by their beliefs.
Comment · 4 years ago
Homotopy type theory probably. Uses in modern theorem prover languages include verification of systems/hardware and formalization of math.
Comment · 4 years ago
If you’re doing a lot of extra hours, not having to commute and getting some peace makes a huge difference in making it sustainable.
Comment · 4 years ago
Modern crypto has to be the most ostentatious display of our generation’s detachment from reality and laze. I pray the big players pumping these like penny stocks on a much grander scale are eventually held accountable. While digital currency and decentralized finances are ideas societies should explore, modern crypto has served no other purpose than to funnel drug money and fund North Korea. I hope a crash becomes a reminder to at least some people that actual “value” involves natural resources being extracted and prepared with a lot of time and ingenuity required by humans, not thin air.

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