HN user

paddleon

133 karma
Posts0
Comments55
View on HN
No posts found.

Hey, I hear you. And I'm sad. Because I'd like to say that the right way is to:

build infrastructure that promotes safe driving, and

train drivers to show respect for other people on the road

However, those are both non-starters in the US. So your answer, which comes down to "at least self-driving is better than those damn people" might be the one that actually works.

Odd that the debate here is all around what is in "the news", vs what is in the other tv shows people are watching.

The amount of violence in the stories we watch is astounding; I wonder if that doesn't influence peoples perceptions much more than the news does.

try counting how many times in the last week you saw a gun being drawn (on TV/Netflix/hulu).

I don’t think it’s any more true or insightful in the modern era

hmm, based on what evidence?

Or, if you prefer, based on what appeal to authority? Did you actually quote that authority properly or did you just wing it? Can you properly quote many authorities?

If you don't have good answers to those, then perhaps you have just proved the your opponents point?

Maybe there is a reason people need more compute in their key fob than what our parents/grandparents needed to pilot their ship to the moon?

maybe they are concerned by the widespread adoption of the attitude you are taking-- make a very strong accusation, then when it was pointed out that the accusation might be off base, continue to attack.

This constant demonization of everyone who disagrees with you, makes me wonder if 28 Days wasn't more true than we thought, we are all turning into rage zombies.

p-e-w, I'm reacting to much more than your comments. Maybe you aren't totally infected yet, who knows. Maybe you heal.

I am reacting to the pandemic, of which you were demonstrating symptoms.

“We’ve created something so dangerous that we couldn’t possibly live with the moral burden of knowing that the wrong people (which are never us, of course) might get their hands on it, so with a heavy heart, we decided that we cannot just publish it.”

Or, how about, "If we release this as is, then some people will intentionally mis-use it and create a lot of bad press for us. Then our project will get shut down and we lose our jobs"

Be careful assuming it is a power trip when it might be a fear trip.

I've never been as unimpressed by society as I have been in the last 5 years or so.

What I also noticed it did better: it doesn't reduce me to data engineering anymore. It understands that I aspire to learn everything and anything I can get my hands on. It's my mode of living and Claude understands that.

I'm really glad you are getting some personal growth out of these tools, but I hesitate to give Claude as much credit as you do. And I'm really cautious about saying Claude "understands" because that word has many meanings and it isn't clear which ones apply hear.

What I'm hearing is that you use it like a kind of rubber-duck debugger. Except this is a special rubber duck because it can replay/rephrase what you said.

the redcoats didn't wear colorful coats and form nice big lines because they were stupid. They beat Napolean using similar tactics. And they didn't lose to the US because of these tactics.

Maybe you should reflect on why people who have lead others in combat have decided that there should be rules to war before you declare that rules of war are a bad idea.

um. My uncle died of polio, and I was a medical researcher (phd) for a while.

Polio can cause paralysis just fine on its own, it doesn't need DDT or paraquat to help it.

And you are also right that widespread spraying of DDT lead to all kind of problems (killed all the birds, for one, leading to "Silent Spring"), which one reason it was banned.

another reason is the mosquitos developed resistance.

comparing artificial to real neural networks

I had a sad day in college when I thought I'd build my own ANN using C++.

First thing I did was create a "Neuron" class, to mimic the idea of a human neuron.

Second thing I did was realize that ANNs are actually just Weiner filters with a sigmoid on top. The base unit is not a "neuron".

Why Startups Die 7 months ago

Congrats on your good fortune, and agree with your diagnosis.

Does it work the other way? If the company isn't growing, do you close it? When/how do you decide this? What if the growth is just around the corner if you just solve this just one more thing?

Size of Life 7 months ago

as a former virologist, I love the thought that LLMs are the virus of reasoning :)

Not really understanding the negativity here.

In the last year or so HN seems to have attracted a lot of people (plus some bots) who seem to have been socialized on Reddit.

I don't know if these people are ignorant of what a good discussion forum can be (because they've never experienced one) or just don't care, but I do wish we could see more reflection on the second-order impacts of posting, and a move away from the reflexive negativity that mimics the outer face of good criticism while totally missing the thought and expertise good criticism requires.

Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US.

you mean the purchase deed isn't registered anyplace?

or you mean that the mortgage company didn't do a credit/background check on the buyer before granting the mortgage? Which includes some level of providing a state-backed identity card?

Or do you mean it's easy to buy a house for cash without hassle in the US? Just a suitcase of $100 bills? I'm assuming you've tried this recently?? (and the house cost more than 150K?

also, this is what chat-style interfaces encourage. Anything where the "enter" key sends the message instead of creating a paragraph block is just hell.

I'm prompting Gemini, and I write:

I have the following code, can you help me analyze it? <press return>

<expect to paste the code into my chat window>

but Gemnini is already generating output, usually saying "I'm waiting for you to enter the code"

You know, we created the US government as an expression of the fundamental rights of man, with the idea that the government would provide for the common welfare and preserve these rights.

In rebellion against a king who seemed to want to exploit us and felt that his being king made him the source of the rights we had.

Maybe we need to re-think the relationship with corporations the same way? Re-structure so that they serve the common good?

The Penicillin Myth 8 months ago

in scientific writing, you need to take

100 articles at 6 pages each

and condense them to 1 article of 6 pages

And add how your method/insight moves the conversation forward, along with describing your method/insight.

The reason why scientific writing can be hard to read from the outside is the 100:1 compression. Decompression of that can require some knowledge of the field.

Also, some people are just bad at writing.

The Penicillin Myth 8 months ago

You can tell the difference between

93 heads, 107 tails and

93 tails, 107 heads

but not between

100 heads, 100 tails and

100 tails, 100 heads.

So while those are two results (93/107 and 107/93), they really only count as two separate outcomes if you pre-specify that the first number is heads.

If instead you consider symmetries, where there are 2 ways to get 93/107 and only one wall to get 100/100, then you have more likelihood for the 93/107 outcome because you have two ways to get it.