Hacker News: orthoganol

New comment by orthoganol in "Why It’s So Hard to Actually Work in Shared Offices"

orthoganol — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:21:36 +0000

Will be buried, but fantastic "fear and loathing in WeWork" kind of article. Loved it.

WeWork basically parodies itself.

New comment by orthoganol in "Is Art Created by AI Really Art?"

orthoganol — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 04:37:20 +0000

I think "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" basically applies here. Short answer is: no; it's devoid of any aura.

New comment by orthoganol in "Pigeons and Love"

orthoganol — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 23:31:53 +0000

I read for a full 5 minutes and the author had not said anything substantive, just their own thoughts about pigeon love based on some pigeons he saw in his backyard once. Ok.

New comment by orthoganol in "Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens"

orthoganol — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 18:26:53 +0000

> I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing

You're reading too much into Sam's quote. This is almost certainly because East Asia has zero PC culture (homogenous populations; nothing in history), so he doesn't feel those particular pressures there that he's reacting against here. That's all.

New comment by orthoganol in "Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley"

orthoganol — Sat, 16 Dec 2017 04:01:17 +0000

I think fact that you get fired if you bring up biology at your company's brown bag on diversity (a la Damore), means, just maybe, that you can't actually say some of those things.

New comment by orthoganol in "E Pur Si Muove"

orthoganol — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 18:16:21 +0000

You know Sam, if you stopped censoring controversial positions or posts from hacker news I might take you seriously.

Coming from someone who is now almost automatically moved to the bottom of threads or the ridiculous "See More" section you all implemented, who as a result just doesn't post much anymore.

New comment by orthoganol in "Sugar industry withheld possible evidence of cancer link 50 years ago"

orthoganol — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 19:58:11 +0000

The effects of vehicular pollution? If sitting in your garage with a running car kills you, obviously being surrounded by traffic all day in the cities we live in must be absolutely terrible for you.

New comment by orthoganol in "Slack is offline"

orthoganol — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 23:53:59 +0000

How is there nothing on the front page of HN, slack being out for almost an hour now?

Given timeframe and upvotes, how is this not the top of HN?

New comment by orthoganol in "Study shows the top 0.01% of Scandinavian households underpaid taxes by 30%"

orthoganol — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 23:36:21 +0000

What an absurd straw man position. I open my statement with "those who should get rich". What do you think?

New comment by orthoganol in "Q&A: Douglas Hofstadter on why AI is far from intelligent"

orthoganol — Sat, 21 Oct 2017 22:55:31 +0000

You're still extremely optimistic about the 'intelligence' of state of art data driven approaches, even if they aren't general intelligence. I'm not sure where that optimism is coming from.

The chess example... "They were wrong about AI never beating grand masters, they're going to be wrong about X". Well, if you make the board bigger, there won't be an AI system that can beat a human.

Play Dota 2, but introduce a random variable that can't be known beforehand by anyone, like things in the real world, and the AI will always be beatable.

Great for specific domains, obviously, but your optimism about doing more advanced stuff, perhaps doesn't seem so grounded.

New comment by orthoganol in "A “negative emissions” plant has opened in Iceland"

orthoganol — Sun, 15 Oct 2017 17:29:57 +0000

Out of curiosity, we would need ~500 of these stations in their current form to offset a typical coal power plant (7.5 thousand tons co2/ year, a claim from Climework's about video, v. 3.5 million tons co2 / year), or about 5-6 million stations to offset global co2 yearly emission (40-45 billion tons co2/ year).

New comment by orthoganol in "Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee"

orthoganol — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 16:42:34 +0000

What about the world of contracting? You can also be someone who has flexibility on where/ when they work and for who, and it's probably a more viable 'path' in tech than in any other industry.

Since the vast majority of founders fail, having significant financial cushions from your family or years working prior is probably the top pre-requisite if 'founder' is your path.

New comment by orthoganol in "Simulacra and Simulation"

orthoganol — Sun, 24 Sep 2017 20:53:46 +0000

I'll throw a line to Zizek. In his serious works, he does set out a systematic ontology of reality. I don't fully understand it, if there is even something to fully understand, but along the way he without doubt makes you think, and gives relatively accessible interpretations of a ton of other thinkers.

He's not a major philosopher like Kant, but he is much more than a charlatan or provocateur.

To his credit, I probably wouldn't have picked up his serious work if his antics hadn't first put him on my radar many years ago.

New comment by orthoganol in "Simulacra and Simulation"

orthoganol — Sun, 24 Sep 2017 17:34:37 +0000

I believe everyone should give critical theory a fair shot. But I find the majority of the thinkers to have pretty simple ideas that are heavily dressed up and typically exhausting to get through, with little personal benefit, except perhaps social cachet in certain communities. I personally think you're better off grappling with the dead philosophers who critical theory seems to be predominantly in conversation with, like Kant and Hegel. And then add in Marx and Freud.

If you believe I am off base, I welcome suggestions of thinkers who are an anti-pattern here.

New comment by orthoganol in "Nestlé Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For"

orthoganol — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 13:02:24 +0000

I wouldn't be so sure, within the last year it's now "Hechy Hech mixed with groundwater", you may have seen the pre-emptive advertising on buses when they rolled it out. My feeling is that it is probably worse than it used to be.

New comment by orthoganol in "Someone Made a Fake Equifax Site. Then Equifax Linked to It"

orthoganol — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:42:09 +0000

The HN algorithm seemingly took it off the front page fast, so no problem by me.

New comment by orthoganol in "Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?"

orthoganol — Sun, 03 Sep 2017 05:04:27 +0000

Wow, The Game I had totally forgotten about. Along with the 4 Hour Work Week, those are two books that gave me totally new measuring devices for success and attractiveness when I was in my early 20s. 4HWW redefined 'elite' as young entrepreneurial globe trotters (location freedom), and was probably the main igniter of the digital nomad movement, while The Game redefined attractiveness (for men) as a predominantly behavioral thing - boldness, non neediness, confidence etc. - not a wealth, credentials, or even primarily physical attributes thing (and pretty much ruined going out to bars for half a decade). Agree or disagree, those books really, really impacted thinking for millennials.

New comment by orthoganol in "[dead]"

orthoganol — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 21:22:40 +0000

TL;DR "No, trust me."

Prepared to take the hate too. Answers seem fake under the question about relation with parents, and your voice does not strike me as a 13 year old, in particular seeming too controlling of situation. I don't buy it. I apologize in advance if I'm somehow proven wrong in some verifiable way.

New comment by orthoganol in "Where will artificial general intelligence come from?"

orthoganol — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 21:01:40 +0000

You're going to have to elaborate on complex tasks. I would argue the majority of successful, money generating software based in NLP/ NLU, i.e. the majority of the industry, is "rule based" (used in a general sense to mean non DL). Personal assistants, search, chatbots, etc.

New comment by orthoganol in "Where will artificial general intelligence come from?"

orthoganol — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 20:21:29 +0000

Ok but I am talking about general human intelligence when I say AGI and 'recently emerged', not mollusks. You could easily argue we will find out how higher-order intelligence emerged one day, as some researchers already have models for that if you've read a college anthropology textbook; may not be right, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that it emerged recently due to new structure(s) ('design') coming about in a relatively short time period, so making the claim "Since we don't know how it happened, therefore it must be like X" is flawed.

You know what French Enlightenment thinkers were also against? Making headstrong claims (as an authority) without empirical evidence on your side :)