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bchjamon Understanding is a poor substitute for convexity (2012)

If someone knowingly uses bad data, aren't the claims supported by it false?

bchjamon Understanding is a poor substitute for convexity (2012)

> No experiment could ever possibly hurt scientific knowledge

what about one with a falsified result?

fwiw I think convexity and understanding are relatively orthogonal, but how could one employ the former without the latter? However the author's position seems to be more that gaming systems works better than exploring their contexts. Sometimes you might make more money in less time, but the money is all you'll get out of it. In practice, maybe understanding and convex payoff functions are both useful at different scales.

bchjamon What is your least popular but deeply held opinion on personal productivity?

Productivity is a poor metric for actually improving your quality of life, solving hard problems, or doing much of anything other than running in circles at speed.

bchjamon Huawei Reveals the Real Trade War with China

The history of reserve currencies suggests a ~100 year arc of dominance, and the US is at the end of that line.

https://azizonomics.com/2012/01/04/a-history-of-reserve-curr...

bchjamon Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Real

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brouwer%E2%80%93Hilbert_contro...

Brouwer's career suffered as a consequence of his disagreements with Hilbert.

EDIT (with links to the political aspect): Letters written more about the politics of publishing than the math itself are referenced in a book called "The War of the Frogs and the Mice" (PDF) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.224... (see bottom of pg 9 as displayed for the letter Brouwer wrote to Hilbert's wife)

bchjamon Ask HN: Is neuroscience-inspired machine learning the next big thing?

I've come to think of machine learning as an engineering approach for building more scalable statistical systems. Computational neuroscience seems like it does more math modeling for understanding of brain function, but still might use machine learning methods as part of its research.

Also, good is subjective, and we don't have wetware in our engineering toolchain anyway. Loosely coupled metaphors seem to be popular and effective due to ambiguities like this.

bchjamon Show HN: Remote jobs for people with disabilities

How does this cater to the disabled more than any other remote job site? If it does, there should be a little blurb about it

bchjamon The Secret to Ant Efficiency Is Idleness

reminds me of a recent article about how Messi walks more than other players https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/messi-walks-better-than...

bchjamon First Impressions of the Rust Programming Language

Figma's Rust in production post was pretty good https://blog.figma.com/rust-in-production-at-figma-e10a0ec31...

bchjamon Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

Meaning is a process of its own creation, not a measuring stick. Often when people speak of meaning as though it were quantitative, they usually are referring to how much they help other people. Meaning is also interactive, it rarely happens in total isolation. If everyone around is constantly conflating meaning with monetary success, it's easy to feel confused and despair. Don't blame money, but rather look for bits of beauty in life and share them with people you care for. At least that's what seems to work for me

bchjamon Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle (2012) [video]

Alex Warth of HARC has a new Dynamicland-inspired repo called roomdb https://github.com/alexwarth/roomdb

bchjamon Ask HN: If you had a month of free time, what would you do?

Perhaps a more interesting question would be how your interests & goals change after a month of downtime?

bchjamon Ask HN: How and where can I publish my research on AI as a college dropout?

https://distill.pub/journal/

bchjamon Manifold Garden (Escheresque Puzzle Game) Teaser

There's a great GDC talk about level design for this game by its creator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed2zmmcEryw

bchjamon Ask HN: How does one overcome the need for instant gratification?

iterate more, starting simple has its merits

meditate

bchjamon Working from home may hurt your career

working from home entails a personal responsibility for effectively scheduling your time. having a separate space from "normal" household activities can really help staying focused and avoiding overwork / burnout.

over time, the worst part of working from home is lack of eye contact. engaging with others outside of home can help, but there's still an awkward quality to getting to know people without seeing their reactions

bchjamon California’s wildflower bloom can be seen on satellite imagery

I went on a local trail run in LA this week and was surprised by how many thick patches of wildflower there were. Swarmed with bees, snakes crossing the trail under my foot. Best spring in some time

bchjamon Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's Mindstorms

You might enjoy reading Papert's "Gears of my childhood" for a better perspective on his attitude towards learning as a process of discovery

http://www.papert.org/articles/GearsOfMyChildhood.html

bchjamon Ask HN: How do you get notified about newest research papers in your field?

not exactly the same thing, but http://www.gitxiv.com/ is pretty cool for pairing papers with source

bchjamon Seymour Papert has died

I don't think constructivism and embodied cognition are too far afield, they both have an emphasis on environmental interaction. That sort of intertwingedness goes along with the general thrust of Dreyfus' argument

(+ here's a link to Dreyfus' essay Why Heideggerian AI failed http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf)

bchjamon Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations

London is in Europe but Berlin in Germany? seems pretty ironic given recent news

bchjamon Rats free each other from cages (2011)

"smart" is often interpreted as a measure of skills with symbol systems, rather than any general capacity to cultivate understanding. it wasn't that long ago that this sort of reactionary logic was used to justify enslaving large populations of humans. bias borne from the relative locality of individual existence is hardly a solved problem for humanity. In future I'd hope for greater understanding and less disgust

bchjamon Why now is the best time to study quantum computing (2014)

Heisenbugs, what will become of you?

in all seriousness though, I heard someone talk about their qc research a year or so ago and it was fascinating but I imagine debugging such systems could be quite the challenge

bchjamon When Dungeons and Dragons Set Off a Moral Panic

as a kid in the late 80s, the news convinced my grandma that DnD was training me to be a satanist w/ suicidal pacts around the characters and all

bchjamon Why Is Vertical Rhythm an Important Typography Practice?

nice!

Logic & Design also has a wonderful chapter on rhythm in visual design

http://www.amazon.com/Logic-Design-Revised-Science-Mathemati...

bchjamon Meta2 AR Goggles, preorder at 949$

suggesting that single letter logos are maybe a bad idea

bchjamon You hear a voice in your head when you're reading, right?

Speed reading techniques often try to break written word streams down into visual chunks and let the wetware do the rest. Unsurprisingly, results vary widely. Ironically though, this sounds a bit like a very high level description of segmentation as in computer vision

bchjamon Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

oh the irony, Win98 was the MS "internet as desktop" release. Least favorite OS ever

Awesome project though!

bchjamon Fellowship V2

How would this work for people considering non-profits?