HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

forkandwait

2,804 karma · joined November 16, 2009

submissionscomments
forkandwait··on Physics in 100 Years
Let me up the ante so to speak: I would say that if an educated Greek or Roman from between 300 B.C. (Periclean Athens) to 250 A.D. (Marcus Aurelius) were to show up in 2015, they would spend about a week tripping on the gadgetry (and pissing themselves --literally, in fear -- the first time they rode in a car), but then they would probably think -- oh, yeah, there are a few changes, but nothing big. Except for the steam engine, fertilizer (finally, enough food), and birth control, maybe, but only for their social implications.

The social/ cultural changes are what matters, I think, and the technology is actually much less important.

On the other hand, I think if you brought an Afghani tribesmen from the 1950s into modern US, they would be more blown away and have a harder time adjusting, (EDIT: even though they would be more familiar than an ancient Greek or Roman with telephones, cars, etc).

forkandwait··on Physics in 100 Years
Perhaps Geometric Algebra is a big piece of that in the works?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_algebra

Re Scheme as notation (or APL/ J many years ago) -- when I hear a programming language proposed as a replacement for math, I always wonder "how does that make proving theorems easier?" I haven't read Sussman's book, and he is way smart, but I have listened to lots of APL weanies say "Really, it's just like math" but ... no, it isn't...

EDIT: I just glanced at the first part of Sussman's book on Classical Mechanics, and it looked like Lagrangian mathematics to me, no new notation in the first few sections.

forkandwait··on Ask HN: Feeling pressured to accept startup job offer quickly
Lame, red flag, tell them to stuff it.
forkandwait··on Too Much Calculus – Gilbert Strang (2001) [pdf]
Another perspective: I am trying to teach myself physics from Morin's books, and for the first time I see how well structured was my lower division calc sequence d for this application.
forkandwait··on Ending the open office epidemic
The office I want is two big well lit rooms, one quiet one loud, and rolling desks assigned to emplyees.
forkandwait··on Shitphone: A Love Story
I recently dropped and broke my smartphone, which, by Iphone standards was probably shit, but it cost 300.00 bucks, which is nice for me. I bought a $40.00 ZTE piece of stinker at Target, and I am a VERY satisfied customer.

I can look up restaurant addresses, read HN, shop for crap on Amazon and REI, play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup while waiting for a haircut, and send all the texts and make all the phone calls I want. If I run it over or fall overboard with it in my pocket I don't care. With the money I saved I bought the shittiest Garmin GPS available for about $100.00, which I can even use without a cell network. Sometimes my friends complain about the sound on my shitty phone, but I don't care.

Plus, I stare at a computer all fucking day, I know all I need to know about programming for at least the next five years of stateworker career, and I would FAR rather read a print book, go for a sailboat ride, have a dinner party, or dig some vegetables than spend another f-ing second computing even with a really nice screen.

Oh -- I write this on a 12 year old macbook running FreeBSD, which I used for my dissertation, from ~2000 lines of Octave matrix code to typing it up in Lyx/ Latex. Works far better than any new Windows piece of crap for actual computing, isn't occupying space in a landfill, and I have money left over to buy rain gear and boots for getting outside.

It's not shit -- it's manure...

forkandwait··on Like Humans, Apes Make Irrational Economic Decisions
Yawn... I'm amazed that people are amazed that naive rational choice theory predicts anything.
forkandwait··on Why science is so hard to believe
Great articulation.

Additionally, much medical science (and almost all of social/ psych/ econ "science") is in the very low level of confidence realm (a few studies based on survey / interview data, or maybe just a single study hyped by lame media).

forkandwait··on Game Theory Calls Cooperation Into Question
Perhaps "cooperation brings game theory into question" would be a better title?
forkandwait··on Has modern Linux lost its way? Some thoughts on Jessie
For simplicity and clarity of design, may I suggest FreeBSD? Though I am not sure I would want to run Gnome or any of those crazy things -- I run Joe's Window Manager, jwm, because all I need from a window manager is to manage windows, not handle file types or show me a directory tree or emulate the the MS task bar or whatever.
forkandwait··on Alibaba begins drone delivery trials in China
Not to be a downer, but I think the whole drone delivery thing, at least for now, nothing but a media show. Worked great for Amazon, .... (Maybe the technology will evolve enough later to be cost effective, and tests are important on that path.)
forkandwait··on Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
> Something that succeeds as well as Java has to have some actual value.

Like cigarettes?

forkandwait··on Why I Believe New York's Art Scene Is Doomed
> In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally?

Very much so, but it is hard to find professional work in truly rural places (less than 20,000 with no big job source like a university or a capital).

However, I think the sweet spot in the US are either small towns with a county population of about 300k population with a research university or the (even better) small to midsize cities like Austin, Portland (both), Milwaukee, Cedar Rapids, etc.

Just riffing, FWIW

forkandwait··on SpaceX: “Close, but no cigar. This time”
How about hedging your statement to "not CURRENTLY feasible using TODAY'S materials and structural concepts (trusses, etc)". Space flight and industrial production of fertilizer were both considered impossibilities when first proposed.
forkandwait··on Goats fighting America's plant invasion
Once there is a Portlandia episode where they eat goat it will be all over the place...
forkandwait··on How academia's liberal bias is killing social science
Forgive me, but I firmly believe that the social sciences are very little more than ideology and power struggle dressed up in the scant bit of data and successful experimental prediction available, leavened with lots of faulty a priori reasoning. This goes for both economics, which toes a rightist capitalist line consistently, and for the leftist weanie disciplines of sociology and anthropology. Everybody is tied up in maintaining business power or getting funding for questionable social programs, respectively. Yuck.
forkandwait··on The California Ideology (1995)
I couldn't stomach reading the entire link, but I think your post is quite lovely.

One thing I wonder, is whether the next new thing will be thought out first and then executed, or executed almost by mistake, in pieces, only being seen to take shape as a social trend once it has assembled itself, little link by little link, from the ground up. Two of my favorite social paradigms/ trends/ somethings (which I believe are almost, but not quite spent) -- Christianity, Capitalism -- have done just that. Sure there is theory that happens along the way (St. Paul, Milton Friedman), but it is actually in the thick of the action as people jockey for power (in the wide, Nietzschean sense). (Edit: FYI, this is almost straight Foucault, except he believed in some naive French justice and couldn't take the Nietzschean medicine full strength). (Edit, 2: If I remember, Uncle Fritz also predicted that God would give his last shudder and be finally dead about two centuries after the publishing of Genealogy of Morals about 1889... I love that guy... Just 75 more years...)

Another thing I wonder, is didn't Nietzsche also predict that only once we finally finish our utter boredom with empty ideologies that make us feel safe will we be free to start realizing our potential as human beings? And, he promised, there will be LOTS of good music....

forkandwait··on The California Ideology (1995)
> You wouldn't see people cracking open beers at 2:00 on a "Summer Friday" in a New York shop.

And cracking beers at 2:00pm doesn't mean much if you are coding all day from home on Saturday, if you ask me.

forkandwait··on How Products Are Made
How did you start it? It would be great to have one in the Puget sound.
forkandwait··on Fossil – Simple, high-reliability, distributed software configuration management
It is weird -- I think SCM should mean "source control management" NOT "software configuration management", but the latter is what the website has.
forkandwait··on DragonFly BSD 4.0 released
Does anyone know if DragonFly's code gets merged inro the FreeBSD codebase?
forkandwait··on Open Sourcing a Failed Startup
The quality of software varies significantly in general, we just get to see the open source.
forkandwait··on Standards for Scientific Graphic Presentation
My two go-to theorists for data presentation:

William Cleveland: http://www.stat.purdue.edu/~wsc/

Jacques Bertin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bertin

Blog post was cool, especially to hear about the systematization of subway graphics, but if you say "scientific graphic" you have to read those guys immediately. (And the person whose name begins with "T" is a bit overrated in my estimation).

forkandwait··on Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl
Yes, because you rarely need upvar, but when you do, only tcl has it.

Also, i know of no other language with macro like substitution along with real local variables.

forkandwait··on Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl
Tcl is my favorite scripting language for these five reasons:

+ It combines macro ish text substitution with really, really, really good scoping and loop constructs.

+ A built in event handler is awesome.

+ Tk widgets look just fine for the one off GUI that routinizes a single repetitive task.

+ (Surprisingly) I almost never need float math in a script, one of the things it's not good at.

+ Tcl doesn't try to provide what should be done in C anyway (Python, Perl, Ruby I'm looking at you....)

forkandwait··on Too Many Kids Quit Science Because They Don't Think They're Smart
Public education is about imposing class structure, not encouraging excellence. If we decided to execute for real, we could be swimming in young engineers.
forkandwait··on The Affordable Care Act: Who Was Helped Most
My wife and I want to start an astroturfing tracker website. Perhaps we have a few candidates? A ShowHN someday?
forkandwait··on Some Ebola experts worry virus may spread more easily than assumed
It never ceases to amaze me how much humanity clings to the feeling that they understand something, even when history tells us that surprises are far more common than predictability. It seems to me that planning for Ebola (or a battle, or climate change, or the economy, or anything vaguely important) wouldn't be something along the lines of "Ok, we know what's going on, no need to freak out or to spend any extra effort" but "Wow, these things go sideways all the time, let's assume our models are limited, in ways we don't even know yet, and throw everything we have at it; even then we will probably be lucky if we dodge a disaster."

I really don't have any more confidence because the CDC has been saying "it will be fine" than I did when the Japanese officials said Fukushima would be fine.

Enough optimism for the morning...

forkandwait··on On a farm in Missouri, a radical experiment in self-sufficiency (2013)
A link to the person's website: http://opensourceecology.org/

Also, I always want to remind folks of an immensely successful experiment in communal living, the Hutterites (who love technology, by the way, unlike the Ahmish):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite

forkandwait··on Town Becomes a Beer Ad, but Residents Don’t Feel Like a Party
The blow to collective dignity may well be a bigger loss than the 2,000,000. The message is something like your small town can be the next Tijuana. So now arrive the losers (alcoholic frat wannabes ) and the parasites (liquor companies and other purveyors of vice). A lot of them will stay, bringing both cash and fucked up behavior, and the town may drift toward being a place that caters toward the worst of humanity (yuck). Some folks will be happy for that, seeing the money, but some of us are disgusted, seeing the degradation on all sides, whether selling or buying. No, I don't like Bourbon Street or Indian Casinos either, no matter how much money gets made.
← PreviousPage 8 of 21Next →