Hacker News: myWindoonn

New comment by myWindoonn in "Infinity Category Theory Offers a Bird’s-Eye View of Mathematics"

myWindoonn — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 15:03:32 +0000

We should teach the bulk of Lawvere theories only once. Students should get to know groups and rings as two flavors of a similar construction, and also be introduced to the mysterious fact that some objects, like fields, don't fit into the Lawvere-theory paradigm.

New comment by myWindoonn in "Why Are So Many Young Men Giving Up on College?"

myWindoonn — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 15:22:35 +0000

From WP: "Critical race theory (CRT) is a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of US civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to critically examine the intersection of race and U.S. law and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice." It's legal theory, dumbass.

New comment by myWindoonn in "Why Are So Many Young Men Giving Up on College?"

myWindoonn — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 15:19:13 +0000

"White" is meaningless, isn't it? At best it's a judgement about skin pigmentation.

New comment by myWindoonn in "Science as Attire"

myWindoonn — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 03:19:17 +0000

The sequences use terms like "intelligence", "smarter", and "cognition", purely to place themselves in what they conceive to be the scientific genre of philosophy.

New comment by myWindoonn in "Elizabeth Holmes’s Last Pitch"

myWindoonn — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 14:08:51 +0000

A company without investors is a bootstrapped small business. Investors without a company are venture capitalists. Without investors, a company never becomes a startup, never has front-page articles in newspapers and magazines, never gets invited onto cable news for interviews, never hires expensive talent, never buys sports cars for its executives, never spends millions of dollars on advertising, etc.

Without investors, Holmes never would have mattered. The investments are what enabled her to commit the fraud.

New comment by myWindoonn in "Solarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It's About the End of Capitalism"

myWindoonn — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 14:05:04 +0000

No. The reason why insulin is expensive is because the USA has a free market for pharmaceuticals and allows manufacturers to set high prices. The reason why there are hundreds of thousands of homeless is because the USA has a free market for housing and allows homeowners to set high prices.

New comment by myWindoonn in "Functional programming is not popular because it is weird (2016)"

myWindoonn — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 14:02:28 +0000

Python and Scheme are the two classic examples of non-declarative functional languages; they are both instructing low-level VMs to mutate machine state, but also both have functional-programming tools and first-class functions. The Scheme (set!) form is a great example of imperative mutation within a functional paradigm.

New comment by myWindoonn in "One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia"

myWindoonn — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 14:00:07 +0000

I wonder why HN doesn't have anything to say about this. The closest we can get is to have a pseudonymous account offer a half-hearted congratulations. Surely HN appreciates efforts to undo Nazism and historical revisionism?

New comment by myWindoonn in "Functional programming is not popular because it is weird (2016)"

myWindoonn — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 18:48:33 +0000

Ah, to be reminded of high school, where one could be not popular simply because they are weird.

I think that they've confused functional and declarative?

New comment by myWindoonn in "The Hard Problem of Consciousness Has an Easy Part We Can Solve"

myWindoonn — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 14:36:05 +0000

I wish that philosophers had to take science classes. It is completely unimpressive to announce a theory for consciousness without having experimentally tested it, and Nautilus should not have run such a self-congratulatory article without experimental evidence.

New comment by myWindoonn in "NFT(s) are just money laundering"

myWindoonn — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 13:55:26 +0000

Sure. A large amount of expensive art is sold in order to facilitate money laundering, and NFTs are expensive art.

New comment by myWindoonn in "If-then-else had to be invented"

myWindoonn — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 13:53:06 +0000

I like this recent history, but it's worth remembering that we invented this sort of statement millennia ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu

New comment by myWindoonn in "One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia"

myWindoonn — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 16:03:59 +0000

As a former editor, I wish I had her gumption.

New comment by myWindoonn in "Elizabeth Holmes’s Last Pitch"

myWindoonn — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 16:06:51 +0000

Theranos was obviously impossible because the amount of blood drawn was too small. Just like with homeopathy, there simply aren't enough atoms to make everything work. Despite the physical obstacles, they were able to raise enough money to start disrupting phlebotomists and other health-care professionals, cashing in on their fraudulent claims.

If the most qualified capitalists cannot tell whether a CEO is fraudulent, then it seems that we should alter the CEO appointment system somehow. In particular, I hear stories of automated decision-making algorithms being prototyped to replace executive officers; members of the board/cabinet each submit a machine-readable proposal, and the algorithm chooses one. Would Theranos have been successful in their fraud if they had not had Sunny and Holmes at the helm?

New comment by myWindoonn in "Solarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It's About the End of Capitalism"

myWindoonn — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 15:25:57 +0000

Is a scarcity of top-level research doctors the reason why insulin is expensive in the USA but not other rich democracies? Similarly, is a scarcity of luxury mansions the reasons why the USA has hundreds of thousands of homeless but not other rich democracies?

New comment by myWindoonn in "Solarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It's About the End of Capitalism"

myWindoonn — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 14:45:42 +0000

It is only your perception that coops are somehow being held back. Cooperatives have succeeded in every industry. The vast majority of industry requires Free Software, a cooperative system. I went to the store yesterday and bought milk, eggs, and flour from worker-owned dairies and mills, to say nothing of the weekly farmers' market.

I grew up shopping at a Bi-Mart. Some folks have entire careers at Mondragon. Worker cooperatives are incredibly successful; we should really be asking why traditional corporations get so many subsidies and tax benefits.

New comment by myWindoonn in "Solarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It's About the End of Capitalism"

myWindoonn — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 14:41:03 +0000

I usually pick three specific markets -- food, housing, and healthcare -- and I want to double-check: You believe that we have scarcities of these things? We certainly have artificial scarcities, but those seem like they were created by humans in order to control humans.

New comment by myWindoonn in "Electrons May Well Be Conscious"

myWindoonn — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 14:10:25 +0000

Your comment was the only useful one in this entire discussion. It is shameful that folks here claim to be scientific and yet cannot read a single WP article.

New comment by myWindoonn in "Electrons May Well Be Conscious"

myWindoonn — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 21:33:24 +0000

I use https://hckrnews.com/ to browse HN. I can easily see flagged and dead articles.

New comment by myWindoonn in "Contra Scott Alexander on Literally Everything"

myWindoonn — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 21:32:28 +0000

Folks interested in this line of thought can also check out https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/ and https://old.reddit.com/r/techtakes/