Hacker News: rfergie

New comment by rfergie in "Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT"

rfergie — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 03:03:51 +0000

For most taxes you expect higher earners to pay more but this is not the case with student loans because high earners pay of their loans quickly whereas lower earners end up paying far more in interest.

An actual graduate tax would be far less regressive than the current system

New comment by rfergie in "Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road"

rfergie — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 22:21:09 +0000

> so either none of the current competitors are doping or all of them are

The drafting effect in cycling means that a clean cyclist can finish very closely behind a doped cyclist

New comment by rfergie in "Show HN: Excel to Python Compiler"

rfergie — Thu, 23 May 2024 20:02:28 +0000

https://pypi.org/project/formulas/ might help with this without needing the OpenAI part

New comment by rfergie in "Introducing Superalignment"

rfergie — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 22:41:03 +0000

> It seems like ClosedAI wants their system to follow the desires of some people and not others, but without describing which ones or why

If the problem is "unaligned AI will destroy humanity" then I'd take a system aligned with the desires of some people but not others over the unaligned alternative

New comment by rfergie in "Ask HN: Is the rate of progress in AI exponential?"

rfergie — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 20:11:48 +0000

> What might be seen as exponential progress could actually be the accumulation of a few tremendous leaps

This is what exponential progress is as long as the leaps continue happening

New comment by rfergie in "The Axiom of Infinity (2018)"

rfergie — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 23:09:44 +0000

Thank you for the link to the paper; very interesting!

New comment by rfergie in "The Axiom of Infinity (2018)"

rfergie — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:43:09 +0000

One construction of the natural numbers that I've seen is

1. There exists an element 0 that is a natural number

2. For every natural number there is a "sucessor" that is also a natural number. (i.e. if n is a natural number then n+1 is a natural number)

This construction means there can't be an upper bound N because then step 2 couldn't be applied to N.

Maybe there are other constructions that could workaround this? I'm guessing not because you'd still struggle to define the usual rules of addition for all numbers in a bounded set

New comment by rfergie in "Ask HN: How to Deal with Being Unlikeable"

rfergie — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 16:29:36 +0000

I think that at a networking event 1-2 minute conversations are normal so this isn't a sign you are doing something wrong

New comment by rfergie in "Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill"

rfergie — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 14:48:16 +0000

Don't you just end up on a "meaning treadmill" instead?

New comment by rfergie in "Ask HN: Employee wants stock; what do I do?"

rfergie — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 09:33:31 +0000

> There’s a huge difference between being there from day one vs day 2,555. Between being a founder and an employee who joined later on

This is true but there is also a huge difference between 97% and 3%

New comment by rfergie in "A run across Mexico"

rfergie — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 13:08:59 +0000

Just saying "36000 die" by itself doesn't tell me very much about how dangerous it is - expressing that as a percentage gives much more information I think.

As another person points out 0.03% is 3 times the risk of dying in traffic which, before looking at the numbers, I would have guessed to be the most dangerous aspect of a trip like this.

You seem to think I am being trite and using a "dry presentation" of statistics to minimise the risks of being murdered by a cartel but I actually find this presentation brings the (large) risk of it home to me much more clearly than with a contextless number like 36,000.

E.g. for the UK the numbers are 0.001% murders and 0.003% for traffic

New comment by rfergie in "A run across Mexico"

rfergie — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 08:24:30 +0000

36000 Mexicans is 0.03%

For more context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the risk of death by traffic in Mexico as 0.01%

New comment by rfergie in "Why Executives Like the Office (2021)"

rfergie — Tue, 10 May 2022 15:24:30 +0000

> some of them talk about their gorgeous cars for the sake of talking about their cars

> My coffee machine is all mine (Gaggia Babila)

New comment by rfergie in "Ask HN: Is there any way to detect websites that are SEO-optimized on Google?"

rfergie — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 11:50:10 +0000

Do a search and the websites that rank at the top are the optimised ones

New comment by rfergie in "Ask HN: How to gracefully handle competitor mudslinging"

rfergie — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 08:45:41 +0000

    so I took out a few Google Ads on companies in the same space

This is considered an aggressive move. My guess is their CEO thinks he is responding in kind

New comment by rfergie in "Ask HN: What is the worst part of bootstrapping your side project?"

rfergie — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 10:09:08 +0000

The long slow SAAS ramp of death

New comment by rfergie in "Slow Ways – a network of walking routes connecting Great Britain"

rfergie — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 09:56:34 +0000

I am very surprised by this.

I suppose somewhere like Ben Nevis maybe 90% of the people you meet won't have a map and it is possible that places like this will represent a large proportion of the total people you meet when doing a round. So maybe it does make sense that you frequently encounter people without a map doing Munros just because most of the people you encounter are on Munros like Ben Nevis

But the restriction to "non-obvious" Munros doesn't match with my experience

New comment by rfergie in "St. Matthew Island is said to be the most remote place in Alaska"

rfergie — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 20:11:35 +0000

Ridiculous!

It would take longer to get to the moon and back if you walked there. There is no place on Earth that you couldn't get to quicker if your budget was the same

New comment by rfergie in "What Gödel theorems don't say"

rfergie — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 08:28:12 +0000

It has been a long time since I've studied this; can you link me to something more about the reals being consistent and complete? Or write a quick explanation in a comment?

I thought there were undecidable propositions in the reals (e.g. cardinality)

New comment by rfergie in "On Marketing Haskell"

rfergie — Sat, 30 May 2020 18:21:47 +0000

I took his point to be that things like "feels readable" and "feels fast" and to do with feelings rather than actual quantifiable things that could reasonably be compared between languages.

So it isn't that those things aren't important; just that they are subjective