HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

bees_buzz

31 karma · joined December 6, 2021

submissionscomments
bees_buzz··on Learning to code is still worthwhile
I'm not anymore, but I used to be a research mathematician. I absolutely cannot remember how to do long division, though I was certainly competent at it at one point. I'm also terrible at mental arithmetic these days.

These things were still indispensable on my path to being a mathematician though, they just ceased to be relevant as abstraction increased.

bees_buzz··on First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good
> Why are no of the other people in the meeting using a Vision?

Check out Marques Brownlee's video on this - they probably _were_, it renders your face using the internal cameras in real time and displays that.

bees_buzz··on Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
Devs ruining your fun I'm afraid https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/s7i4xu/1151_added...
bees_buzz··on How they filmed The Last of Us arcade scene
The creators talk about this in the companion podcast - the idea was that literature/media from these games still exists (which we can see as Ellie has the poster), and the only way you found out about fatalities anyway was via gaming publications/urban legends. Just like in the real world, nobody really learned these combos by trial and error.
bees_buzz··on Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction
I had the pleasure of being taught mathematics by the creator of Inform, Graham Nelson, at Oxford (and Oxford class sizes are _small_, 2-5 students). He’s a super interesting guy - created Inform, teaches pure mathematics at the highest level, but seems to most enjoy writing poetry.
bees_buzz··on Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?
If you go looking for elixir stuff it’s there, and it seems like its usage in industry is expanding at a steady pace. IMO this is because it’s a reasonably approachable language designed to solve a common difficult problem (high concurrency, fault tolerance at scale)
bees_buzz··on How to think about task estimation
I agree with this. It irritates me hugely when we estimate tasks by complexity and then use our estimations to determine which tasks we can accomplish in a sprint.
bees_buzz··on I'm quitting my PhD
There are a few ways.

Maybe a research group wants to investigate a connection to another discipline.

Maybe the research group comes across a talented student and sees the potential for a research grant (how this works depends on the country).

Maybe the student has the means to self-fund and so the university happily collects a pay-cheque.

I fell into the first category - I did my PhD in a quantum information group despite my background being in mathematical logic. I was accepted because I knew a lot about different formal logic systems, and they wanted to study connections between those and the formalism they were using for quantum information.

bees_buzz··on Whitehead and Russell’s Principia rewritten in Coq
> he never mentioned Principia Mathematica again.

???

This paper contains a nice summary of Gödel's interactions with Russell. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

Gödel's future work on constructible hierarchies and the dialectica interpretation were directly inspired by Principia Mathematica. I agree that characterizing Gödel's view on Principia as a "step backwards" is overly simplistic, but he certainly mentions and takes inspiration form the work throughout his career.

> as he was mainly criticizing the syntax

If you mean to say that Gödel's criticisms of Principia were just about syntax - that is also incorrect. Gödel had substantial complaints about the truthfulness of the axiom of reducibility that (IIRC) Russell himself thought posed a valid attack on the system in Principia.