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drchewbacca

305 karma · joined April 21, 2019

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drchewbacca··on Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?
Personally I like project based learning. Just try to make something cool, maybe a game, a robot, a hydroponic grow station or whatever and then learn what you need to learn as you go along.

If you gave me a book of inverse kinematics I'd go to sleep in 10 minutes. If I get frustrated that my robot keeps falling over I could read about it for days.

drchewbacca··on PlantNet – App that helps identify plants from pictures
I tried their plant identification game. I think they could really benefit from hiring a game designer.

It would be possible to make something pretty cool out of the database I think.

drchewbacca··on Where is the fashionable mathematics?
If you can program you might like Metamath, it feels quite a lot like writing code.

Here is the main site. http://us.metamath.org/index.html

Here is the book which can help with understanding. http://us.metamath.org/downloads/metamath.pdf

Here are some tutorials for MMJ2 which is the main proof assistant to use, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1jSu6GGefBm7RBP0Id2S...

it can be found here, http://us.metamath.org/#mmj2

Here are some beginners proof exercises which are a good place to start out

http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmtheorems289.html#mm28844b

I will warn you though it is a bit like the wild west, it is not easy to accomplish anything and it is exciting to be on the frontier.

The community is really cool, you can chat with them here.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/metamath

drchewbacca··on What people get wrong about Bertrand Russell
There is an interesting, if quite technical, answer here about Goodstein's Theorem which is a very reasonable number theory theorem which cannot be proven in first order logic.

So questions around statements which are true but not provable in certain logical systems do have concrete examples and are interesting imo.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/625223/do-we-know-i...

drchewbacca··on Fashionable Problems
I'm not sure, I'm not an expert, it says here the twin prime conjecture itself is still unproven.

"On April 17, 2013, Yitang Zhang announced a proof that for some integer N that is less than 70 million, there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by N."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime

drchewbacca··on Fashionable Problems
In mathematics I'd put forward the conjecture that "for every proven theorem you could ask at least 5 more similar questions which are unproven."

For example it is proven there are infinitely many primes. Are there infinitely primes that differ by 2? By n for any n? Are there infinitely many palindromic primes? Are there infinitely many primes of form n^2 + 1? Is there always a prime between n^2 and (n+1)^2?

If this is true then, assuming there are 200k proven theorems, there would be >1m unproven but readily stated theorems which would mean it wouldn't be too hard to find areas no one is looking into.

drchewbacca··on Amazon CodeGuru – Preview
I think you can set it to only scan when new pull requests are made. So you could commit your libraries etc without asking for review and then turn it on only for code you have written.

I might be wrong though.

drchewbacca··on Tesla’s European gigafactory will be built in Berlin
Also Elon recently said he has started managing by rhymes. He said

"If the schedule is long it's wrong, if it's tight it's right. The best part is no part, the best process is no process."

All the hacking away of parts and processes pays off with speed.

drchewbacca··on When Britain and France Almost Merged into One Country (2017)
There were many more claims too, if Henry V had lived longer it might have happened then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_claims_to_the_French_t...

drchewbacca··on Andrej Karpathy talks about how Tesla's NNs are structured and trained [video]
If you get rejected just edit 10 words on your resume and then resubmit. Do this a 100hz and you'll get in eventually :)
drchewbacca··on Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis
Does anyone know a good comparison of the cost of Nuclear with Solar + Batteries? I feel like just comparing against panels alone isn't really helpful.

I would imagine that if we really cared about climate change the best approach would be maximal effort on all fronts. So build renewables as fast as we can and build nuclear as fast as we can. That would be the quickest way to get carbon emissions to 0.

We could always spend the latter half of the century decommissioning the nuclear again.

drchewbacca··on Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning
Kasparov comments on chess computers in an interview with Thierry Paunin on pages 4-5 of issue 55 of Jeux & Stratégie (published in 1989):

‘Question: ... Two top grandmasters have gone down to chess computers: Portisch against “Leonardo” and Larsen against “Deep Thought”. It is well known that you have strong views on this subject. Will a computer be world champion, one day ...?

Kasparov: Ridiculous! A machine will always remain a machine, that is to say a tool to help the player work and prepare. Never shall I be beaten by a machine! Never will a program be invented which surpasses human intelligence. And when I say intelligence, I also mean intuition and imagination. Can you see a machine writing a novel or poetry? Better still, can you imagine a machine conducting this interview instead of you? With me replying to its questions?’

drchewbacca··on Ask HN: What is your passive income 2019?
I invest in Tesla stock and it would be great if a lot of people could also agree that's a good idea :)
drchewbacca··on The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
There's this ted talk to a similar effect, timing is the most important factor in a startups success.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpx7gpSqbY&t=1s

drchewbacca··on New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics
One nuance is that if you want to live forever you only need to hit longevity escape velocity where every year there is another discovery which buys you another year of healthy life.

Of course it might lead to living to 800 and being confined to a wheelchair by 80.

drchewbacca··on English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
> If we want to select a common language

I think you're making an assumption that there is some central authority that has the power to make this selection on behalf of everyone.

I think the reality is that each person is making language learning choices based on their own utility. It's a network effect situation where everyone wants to learn the most popular language. English is ahead for historical reasons but that is enough.

drchewbacca··on China Grew Two Cotton Leaves on the Moon
I loved it, best thing I've seen in a while. Though I haven't read the book and didn't know how great it was.
drchewbacca··on Starship Prototype Unveiled
I find it odd that Russia hasn't fought back and tried to do a reusable program of it's own. Putin talks big talk about wanting to develop high tech industries so why just give up on space?

His nuclear cruise missile program is so lame by comparison.

drchewbacca··on Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?
In general I think if you are very unhappy it makes sense to change things up. It is possible to do a PhD later in life if you want to.

It might help you to change the area you live, get a job and see what that is like. It will help you see what is good and bad about academia and just working a normal job and that will let you make an informed decision about how to proceed.

Also I agree totally the interactive theorem proving is the future.

drchewbacca··on Starship Prototype Unveiled
I am so amazed by the genius of making it out of steel. It's just so completely counter intuitive but has accelerated their progress so much.

If they told you the stats of the material, better strength at cryo tempertures meaning mass reduction, higher melting point meaning minimal heat shielding and great thermal conductivity it would be easy to imagine it was some new super composite. Then your head explodes when they tell you it's 2% the cost of what they were using before and it's so easy to work with they don't even need a factory they can just weld it in a field.

Imo Elon is starting to get into contention for greatest engineer of all time.

drchewbacca··on Number theorist fears many proofs widely considered to be true are wrong
My preferred proof assistant is definitely Metamath, I think it just needs a big company to come along and build an awesome front end for it and it will become the standard.
drchewbacca··on Number theorist fears many proofs widely considered to be true are wrong
Metamath is awesome if you're willing to slum it :)

https://jiggerwit.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/the-architecture-...

drchewbacca··on Number theorist fears many proofs widely considered to be true are wrong
It's not really like that. NN's are only used when searching for new proofs or steps which can be used to fill in details, the verification of a finished proof is done by a classical program by a series of substitutions which are very straightforward and spelled out in detail.

Here is an example.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.02644.pdf

drchewbacca··on Yogababble
I like this guys youtube channel.(I think it's the same guy anyway.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjksNqQAVbA

drchewbacca··on At Tech’s Leading Edge, Worry About a Concentration of Power
Is there anyone who thinks we shouldn't break up these large companies on anti-trust grounds?

Imo it's got to the point where if you have a bad idea your startup fails and if you have a good idea they will copy it and your startup fails. Even companies like spotify and slack which have "made it" are now threatened by Google Music + Apple Music and by Microsoft Teams.

Would be interested to hear other opinions.

drchewbacca··on Whole Foods Will Cut Health-Care Benefits for Nearly 2k Employees
I think how systems are setup does matter though.

For example if you are running for a congressional seat which is 50% republican voters and 50% democrats I would imagine that being a moderate centrist is probably a relatively good strategy.

If the seat is 80% one side then probably you want to be much more extreme in that direction because what the other 20% thinks doesn't matter so much.

However I agree, the internet was meant to make us all open minded and tolerant and yet has had the opposite impact.

drchewbacca··on Whole Foods Will Cut Health-Care Benefits for Nearly 2k Employees
In the UK we have the NHS and it is so great. There's waiting lists but basically you never worry about healthcare, it's always there when you need it and it's all (pretty much) free at the point of use. It's almost certainly the best thing we've got.
drchewbacca··on Whole Foods Will Cut Health-Care Benefits for Nearly 2k Employees
As an outsider I think other core problems of the US are corporate capture of the legislative process and gerrymandering pushing candidates to extreme positions.
drchewbacca··on Troubles with the AWS web console
Ok yeah I think it was changing the policy that access I couldn't get to work.

Again it may be that is super easy and I fucked up something obvious however I tried a lot of times a lot of different ways until I gave up in rage.

drchewbacca··on Troubles with the AWS web console
So this was a while ago and I fully admit it might have been me being stupid.

However when I was doing it I don't think there was a "Use this bucket to host a website" button. Instead you had to give the bucket a special type of permissions which meant anyone could see the contents but no one could write to it. I kept following the guide as closely as I could but I couldn't get it to take.

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