Hacker News: teorema

New comment by teorema in "One Einstein Is Worth a Legion of PhD Drones"

teorema — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:12:28 +0000

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher

New comment by teorema in "One Einstein Is Worth a Legion of PhD Drones"

teorema — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:08:47 +0000

The problem isn't who we praise, it's who we don't praise.

Maybe we live in a different world today but my sense is scientific innovation happens in a very different way from the genius model.

Sometime long ago I came across an article arguing that we've replaced the concept of a saint with a genius, as the worldview shifted from religion to science. It was very compelling.

Increasingly I feel like there's only collective recognition. If you're too far ahead of the curve or behind it's all the same. Being at the curve just means you're recognizing everything at the same time as everyone else.

New comment by teorema in "The Spiral Staircase Myth (2020)"

teorema — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 11:02:27 +0000

I wonder if you just asked 1000 people to draw a spiral without any other context, would there be some handedness/chirality to the drawings? My guess is there would be.

https://briankoberlein.com/blog/gripping-hand/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27852139/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/658702.pdf

New comment by teorema in "The Spiral Staircase Myth (2020)"

teorema — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 10:58:19 +0000

Yeah the author seems to be approaching their overall argument by first establishing that there's no primary source evidence from the time of castle building that the defense theory is true. He seems to be trying to establish that the argument for it is modern and therefore just as good or bad as any other.

I wish he would delve into things more but it seems reasonable to me to first establish where the defense theory first came from.

New comment by teorema in "Mysteries the Standard Model can’t explain"

teorema — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 22:37:25 +0000

New comment by teorema in "The DOI System"

teorema — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 09:58:34 +0000

re: mutability you just have the standard be that the document being linked to is a sort of wrapper to the actual one. My guess is this is really what's going on with doi anyway.

But you're correct that the mutability issue is sort of a tricky one.

There's this from IPFS about mutability:

https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/file-systems/#mutable-file-sys...

New comment by teorema in "The DOI System"

teorema — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 09:51:17 +0000

Journals, even prominent ones, change names for all sorts of reasons. It doesn't happen often but it does happen. The meaningfulness issue can cut both ways.

I think the real problem is the centralized vs federated vs distributed nature of it. IPFS is a good example of how that could have looked; not sure if it could be moved into that space somehow (I'm sure it could in theory, but in practice?)

New comment by teorema in "I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old"

teorema — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 20:46:04 +0000

tbh I'm not dyslexic and realized the spaces make it really difficult to know what the filename actually is. If you just take the second example, how would you know if the file was "this is my config.txt" versus "config.txt"?

Aside from parsing errors it just seems to lend itself to ambiguity.

New comment by teorema in "Hertz orders 100k Teslas"

teorema — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 11:10:49 +0000

Yeah I sometimes think the rhetoric doesn't map onto reality:

https://www.auto123.com/en/news/best-selling-electric-cars-w...

https://www.torquenews.com/1083/these-evs-declined-sales-ame...

Tesla clearly deserves a lot of credit but I think the EV space is a lot more fluid than some Tesla proponents would have you believe.

As EV adoption increases into more markets, buyers are going to be more price conscious, and plenty of makers (most of the big companies?) already have a foot in this space. Add missteps with safety or reliability in the long term (see: defrauding the Dutch government and the public about safety) and I think things might change quickly. Tesla isn't going anywhere but the idea that Tesla is the future EV market seems dishonest, naive, or both.

New comment by teorema in "Harvesting ‘true cinnamon’: The story of the Ceylon spice"

teorema — Sun, 24 Oct 2021 02:20:29 +0000

quinine, chicle, eucalyptus...

New comment by teorema in "The ‘lying flat’ movement standing in the way of China’s innovation drive"

teorema — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 01:22:45 +0000

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-12-04/-Involution-The-anxiet...

New comment by teorema in "Vienna museums open adult-only OnlyFans account to display nudes"

teorema — Sat, 16 Oct 2021 14:41:03 +0000

I can remember when a lot of widespread network platforms were niche. Twitter and post Twitter started this VC instant popularity expectation.

I don't mean to advocate for Mastodon or anything else in particular, but these things sometimes have a way of being niche until they're not.

I also think part of the parent's argument was that in encountering obstacles like this, groups of nonprofit institutions such as art museums could leverage their position to promote decentralized systems, rather than simply throw up their hands and go with a sensationalized move.

Then again we are here discussing it. But then again if they banded together to post on some decentralized platform we'd probably be talking too.

New comment by teorema in "The Home Depot Teams Up with Walmart to Expand Same-Day and Next-Day Delivery"

teorema — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 11:14:25 +0000

Actually I'm shocked to read this because I have the opposite reaction. To each their own — you make a good point about the accuracy of their inventory information — but to me the Home Depot website is on of the worst websites I have ever used.

It's unbelievably slow for me, a perfect example of bad JavaScript. Product menus appear at the worst possible moment, inexplicably spreading across the page after I've looked for them and given up. It's impossible to bulk edit lists you've bookmarked. I could go on and on.

It's like someone took this beautiful inventory database and layered this textbook example of bad but typical modern web design on top.

New comment by teorema in "How Columbus Day Fell Victim to Its Own Success"

teorema — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 10:31:01 +0000

Interesting, informative article that raises some good points.

I've always been leery of holidays that celebrate, even if superficially, single individuals. If anything, this shows the danger of doing so. I'd prefer formally recognized holidays be something attached to an idea or value, or something that arises from grassroots origins over a long period of time. So, for example, Thanksgiving or Juneteenth, but not MLK day, Presidents' Day, or Columbus day.

FWIW, I like the idea of eliminating Columbus Day (or another day) and replacing it with an election day holiday. Seems more functionally appropriate, and to place value on something actually critical.

New comment by teorema in "Ask HN: If you could change the UI of any software. Which would you change?"

teorema — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 10:07:35 +0000

OSX, to make the instances and windows of a given program that are running more immediately and passively visible. It's too easy to lose track of open windows in the background on OSX (yes I know you can swipe to see them, but that is something you have to do distinctly of other interactions with programs. This is something Windows and KDE gets right.

Also, the ribbon bar on desktop MS Office is inconsistent, with some things accessible via tabs/ribbons, and some not. in a ribbon UI, everything should be accessible through the same interface.

New comment by teorema in "Why so many of us are casual spider-murderers"

teorema — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 13:08:59 +0000

I generally leave them be or take them outside. House centipedes are a different matter. Those are usually eliminated on sight.

I do have as a general rule that anything univited into the house I can do with as I want as a boundary issue. So sometimes things end up getting exterminated. But spiders don't really damage anything so I don't harm them.

Jumping spiders I actually like for some reason and am kinda happy to see them.

New comment by teorema in "Diet soda may prompt food cravings, especially in women and people with obesity"

teorema — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 05:12:16 +0000

I should edit this by saying I was confused: sucralose does seem to affect gut microflora, but only trehalose, as far as I know, has been linked to C diff.

Still think it's worth keeping track of artificial sweeteners as they're not all the same in their effects

New comment by teorema in "Diet soda may prompt food cravings, especially in women and people with obesity"

teorema — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 05:12:03 +0000

I should edit this by saying I was confused: sucralose does seem to affect gut microflora, but only trehalose, as far as I know, has been linked to C diff.

Still think it's worth keeping track of artificial sweeteners as they're not all the same in their effects.

New comment by teorema in "Diet soda may prompt food cravings, especially in women and people with obesity"

teorema — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 21:10:24 +0000

FWIW, sucralose has also been linked to C diff infection.

It's worth maybe pointing out that this study was based on sucralose, just because it seems this sweetener is worth tracking separately in general. I don't really consume things with artificial sweeteners but sucralose is starting to become a concern of mine (eg for my daughter).

New comment by teorema in "Complex Systems: A Physicist's Viewpoint (G. Parisi)"

teorema — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 10:52:04 +0000

I think (I would have to reread it more carefully) is Parisi's argument is that probabilistic models can sometimes be necessary even with deterministic systems that are well-characterized because the systems are extremely sensitive to information that might be difficult to obtained (i.e., measure).

I think compression/algorithmic complexity frameworks are relevant in that they imply in complex systems deterministic-like prediction with very narrow posteriors will require larger and larger computational resources. Ie the concentration of the predictive posterior depends on the computational resources available.