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If you find yourself explaining the intricacies of CNN algorithms in your suicide note, consider that you are too "dug into" a bespoke topic. In 2 years, none of these math problems would be his mind at all.

I wonder, are there an infinite number of proofs of the theorem, each more complex than the last? Can I rephrase what they did, make it more convoluted, and call it a new proof?

Whoever wrote this piece is a bad communicator who thinks he's a good communicator, and then goes through life getting confused about why no one understands him.

For example, in the story about the Japanese, he assumes some context from the reader: "What are they building? What is Fujitsu and what is Habitat and why does Japan need their own special version of it?" It's not even clear they're building anything technical, so I wondered, "Why do they need a client and server? And also, didn't you ever think to check their internal technical details before? What did you think would be the result?"

“who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?”

These are good questions and you better have a well-worded answer! In fact, it is easy to answer these if you have prepared for them. Did you just assume that the potential customer would already have familiar with the technicals of your product? If that was the case, they would have bought it from someone else already. Your target demo is the uninformed.

This post claims that the answer to "why white" is because of the beneficial effects it has on the disposition of the writer. But that's hardly a reason to write, that's just a helpful side effect. The reason to write is that you have something to say, and you want others to hear it.

As someone without a lot of math background, the most confusing part of this is k. Is k a number, like 7.45 or whatever? Or something else? Everything else is just normal mathy stuff.

So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too

No. He got that number of followers because he is on Twitter. He would not get the same number of followers on some other social media platoform. Trump had 20 times as many followers on Twitter than he has on Truth Social. And those Truth Social users are less valuable.

Engineers like to think that the engineering is the important part of platforms. It's not. The engineering can be easily replicated. The valuable part of platforms is the users. You buy the platforms to buy the users.

Some of them, like Dolphins, sure seem damned close to our own capabilities with likely fully formed languages ... Because we're definitely trying to communicate with the species we're aware of that we think have language.

This is highly doubtful. Crows don't have language anything like humans. Dolphins are a more likely candidate. I want to believe it, but I can't.

But as for "could"? Shit you can do that at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta

Yes, these are some of the highest paying companies on the planet. Your statement is not a put-down of Jane Street.

anymore than there is a clear winner between tabs and spaces.

But there is a clear winner here. Tabs won, almost all code files use spaces. Of course everyone uses the tab key on their keyboard, and the IDE makes spaces for you; no one is going to manually press space 4 times.

I don't think solar energy is the only type of energy. And if you are at "we are running out of square meters of land to put solar panels on", space might actually be viable at that level of advancement.

Food is not limited by labor, or specifically scarce any more than any other good. In fact it's not obvious to me it will always require labor at all.

Strictly speaking, all goods are scarce if you don't have an infinite number of them. But I think we are lazily saying "scarce" when we mean something like "unavoidably zero sum". The only thing you list which has that is land.

No that's their point. We could provide for everyone but we do not. I disagree with that like you might, but you're missing the point.

Not being able to send things into space is not scarcity.

Strictly speaking, this is false.

Does anybody else have the feeling HN somehow became "programmer news" along the way?

I think it's clear from Paul Graham's essays that he always basically defined "hacking" as just programming. He then created Hacker News.

Then it became "Hacker News" and about "Anything that good hackers would find interesting".

Well, yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

*What to Submit*

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

But somehow I would expect more outlandish topics then all the discussions about corporate software jobs and tools we see.

Well, I don't know, if you're interested in that you can submit such things and upvote them. But I wouldn't necessarily expect founders to post more off the wall stuff.

Is there a smaller communitiy somewhere, where less "normies" with normal jobs hang out and more founders and makers?

Yes, https://lobste.rs/

Who decides what's right for humanity? Someone has to. How about the owners... aka the shareholders.

People will overgeneralize this. The biggest similarity is that they are both personal finance / money related subreddits. The other connections are mostly the human mind making a story. Not everyone on r/poor is poor, not everyone on r/btc owns a lot of bitcoin.

The author seems to be confusing distributed systems with market systems. Cloud services are a market system, but it isn't distributed... it's all in central servers. The technologies that are "simply never going to be able to achieve their goals" are trying to be market systems and distributed systems.

I have most of my money invested with Vanguard, but I will say that they don't actually have the lowest fees in the industry.

This is weaponized verbiage. "My opponents are wrong because I assume they have harmful motivations." Way to dodge the actual point of contention: whether modern art styles are ugly vs classical styles. Most people should not and do not care whether the architecture "attacks progressivism", because beauty itself is the goal.

No, there is no reason to believe that.

The capacity to practice is itself partially innate. Take a person with ADHD - they will naturally have a harder time practicing piano. I myself was unable to practice piano as a child, but for different reasons.

He didn't misrepresent or disagree with the author. He added extra commentary on something the author brought up.

As per gold: I agree with that common objection. If bitcoin is a ponzi, so is gold.

First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.

First, this does not negate the comparison. Bitcoin could also be like that, and therefore not a ponzi. Second, I know a long of gold investors who would disagree with this opinion. Third, the market cap of gold is over 4x bitcoin, indicating that gold has already reached saturation, whereas bitcoin has space to grow.

Second, as a commodity, gold HAS a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry,

This is a point that always gets brought up in discussions of gold. It is wrong and practically dishonest. Gold as jewelry does NOT drive the value of gold, by and large. And even if it DOES, the valuing of gold as jewelry material over any other similar-colored material is itself non-intrinsic/socially constructed. People like to own gold jewelry for the same reason people like to own bitcoin.

So while my students are out on their walks, they might be mind-wandering more than in the classroom, but this is a good thing

To be a bit flippant, isn't this obvious? Who thinks that mind-wandering is a bad thing? Teachers, I guess. How is it possible to be a philosopher without mind-wandering?

In 2014, a new study showed that walking decreased rational and linear thinking and increased divergent thinking and imaginative mind-wandering

The only thing problematic here is the decrease in "rational" thinking. I think in context it means something closer to rigid, concentrated, and well-defined (ie - uninspired).

The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position.

Then they are mislabeled as "minimum requirements." They must be relabeled as "preferred requirements."

And I know many more who sought out his class.

I think you read the blog post in the wrong order. The apology is on line 3.

My main criticism to cryptocurrencies is that they're mostly unbacked.

The fact of a currency being "backed" by something went away in 1933. No currency is "backed".

This makes me think cryptocurrencies are mainly about speculation more than rebelling against governments and central banks.

Yeah, they are about speculation. Whether investing in crypto rather than some other financial asset constitutes "rebelling" is subjective.

I was a bit shocked by this sentence

On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants.

As far as I can tell, it makes two logical errors, 1) that absence of evidence is reason to not take an idea seriously, in a space of known unknowns, & 2) that a possibility can be discredited because dishonest people are pushing it.

On the former point: "evidence = likely" does not necessarily imply "no evidence = unlikely" as you seem to believe (if by evidence you mean like courtroom evidence; we use probabilistic reasoning in the absence of such "evidence" for any one explanation.) we have gathered 0 evidence for many (probably most) true things.

Finally, there's a lack of understanding of how power works in the US. If you could get censored for saying something that the US government knew for months, then yes, you were being silenced, the absence of literal NKVD notwithstanding.

Oh ok, the prisoner's dilemma is about whether you should tell your coworkers your salary.

It's not even the prisoner's dilemma. It's just two actors with different incentives.