mathgenius

Great article. One thing missing: find some genius programmer and learn from them! It can be just a couple of hours of watching them work, or pairing with them, etc.

I'd suggest hanging out with some other creatives, of whatever flavour interests you. It's hard to light the fire all by yourself!

The Vic-20 had about that much, what a glorious beast it was.

This zipper stuff is for immutable data structures.. For us normal folk that just use & abuse array's we don't need zippers. :-). Just kidding. I am dieing to find a use for zippers tho, i'm not a functional programmer.

> accessing an arbitrary list index is O(N)

I think you mean linked-list here. Parent is talking about "arrays".

I love how Matt Levine is alternately hilarious, and then dry as dust. It's like he wants everyone to suffer what lawyers go through on a daily basis, so he lures you in with some light hearted funny, and then before you know it, you're in the middle of reading some long sentence in a contract that's so convoluted you just want to pull your eyes out. Ha, good one Matt!

Yeah, it's cpython because you are getting at least some native modules, numpy, pandas, scikit-learn, etc. It's a matter of compiling the c modules to WASM...

How can we even be sure we are the same person as yesterday? Or even five minutes ago.. It's all pretty weird.

Checkout Greg Egan, "Permutation city". He basically takes this idea and runs with it, to great effect. I'm not sure if it's a reductio ad absurdum, or what, but it's very cool.

> Now, if consciousness were a consequence of pure computation, it would be possible to write a clever computer program (let’s call it consciousness.exe) that, when executed on a big enough computer, produces a conscious being.

> ...

This is pretty much the premise of the treatise by the great Australian philosopher Greg Egan, called "Permutation city". It really blew my mind back in the 90's when i first read it. Actually I think I read the short story "Dust" first. High a.f. after reading that.

> But perhaps new biology is not enough. Roger Penrose has argued that an explanation of consciousness does not simply require new biology, but new physics as well. I have to confess that as far-fetched an idea as it is, I am somewhat partial to the idea.

Cool. Me too.

> ... resorting to quantum mechanics or new physics is the last refuge of scoundrels.

Well that escalated fast!

> So I work, always, because I'm anxious

I think most people are like this. It's the religion of the modern age. It is a meditation, that takes us away from our underlying fears. And there's plenty of reasons to be afraid. We are all poor fragile monkeys here, any one of us could get wiped out randomly at any moment. How can you be ok with that? You can't. And so we search for a release. For most of us it is work. Of course there's many other things people try: money, food, sex, drugs...

> associative: addition of additions has the same result as adding the points individually

You should mention the generic rule: P+(Q+R) = (P+Q)+R, even if it's much more tricky to show than P+(P+P)=(P+P)+P.

It's a great story, and would make a good first act for a movie script. Some kind of tragic comedy, maybe with an uplifting ending? [1].

The other thing going on here is that no-one knows what is sentience, anyway. This attitude of "know it when i see it" is just pretty flimsy, as this whole story is making evident.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_(2010_American_film)

You could say the same thing about tradfi.

Seriously, both the finance industry and politics needs to return to a time when it was boring a.f., just ordinary people getting on with their day-to-day jobs. The artists are the ones that should be entertaining us, not the NASDAQ, and not the latest political (bowel) movement.

I'm no expert but I think one of the big ones is Grothendieck's identification of affine schemes with the dual (categorical opposite) of commutative rings. That is, a "space" is just a commutative ring (of functions on it), but you think about it backwards. So a map of "spaces" A->B, is a map of commutative rings A<-B. John Baez has a bunch of TWF's about this stuff that I highly recommend. Also [1].

[1] https://qchu.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/spectra-of-rings-of-co...

I have this idea that the dichotomy between functional & imperative (OOP?) programming is the "same as" the dichotomy in mathematics between algebra and geometry. Some more discussion of this here [1].

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-functional-programming-seen-as-...

> But the vast majority of physicists today think the collapse of the wave-function isn’t a physical process. Because if it was, then it would have to happen instantaneously everywhere.

I'm a physicist and this does not pass the sniff-test. Part of the problem is we don't know what a "physical process" is. And the second sentence just does not follow from the first (if we even knew what the first sentence meant).

This is known as gravitationally induced decoherence. We don't know if there's any truth to this, but people are seriously working on measuring this stuff in the lab. You might like to read what Roger Penrose has to say about it. (Btw, we already know how to combine Maxwell's equations and gravity. This is all classical physics.)

This. Flame that curiosity into an intense burning desire. It's worth at least a x10. Another order of magnitude comes from talking one-one with someone who is living and breathing the work. I just don't get these "give me a list of books to read about mathematics" questions that pop up regularly on HN. Yes it's good to read & do your homework, but that shit is slooow. Even the professionals don't "read" mathematics, they talk to other mathematicians, and they work it out themselves. Understanding is not memorizing. I don't know what it is but it's not that.

> This isn't a hack, it was straight arbitrage.

Yeah, but tradfi has this problem too: sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between straight up trading, and spoofing/otherwise manipulating the market. Maybe the moral of the story is this, that free markets are a myth, and crypto is just making this even more clear.

No, once you have leverage the ratio doesn't matter anymore. It's just whoever has deeper pockets wins.

With leverage you can long or short more than the available supply of tethers. You are effectively creating fake tether with leverage, and then selling it (or buying it). This stuff also happens with equities, commodities, etc.

If there was no leverage, then yes, a 1:1 backed stablecoin would hold it's value.

EDIT: I mean the story here is far from clear, you also need to consider arbitrage bots that act between exchanges, etc. etc.

It recently occurred to me, with the whole LUNA fiasco, that any "stablecoin" that is 1-1 backed by fiat can come under attack from leveraged traders, and get de-pegged. So it really doesn't matter what backing tether has, although more is obviously better. When the music stops it's anyone's guess what will happen.

> (I myself am not a fluent programmer — I have some experience of Haskell and Python and I think a pretty good feel for how to specify an algorithm in a way that makes it implementable by somebody who is a quick coder, and in my collaborations so far have relied on my collaborators to do the coding.)

Aw, this sets off the alarm bells for me. My immediate reaction is that this guy has no clue what he is getting into, apart from his "domain experience" (ie. top level mathematician). Run for the hills, I say.

Have you looked at Huffman coding? I'd recommend the (free) book by David MacKay, it is secretly the "hackers guide to thermodynamics".

http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html

I don't quite see what is "fake" about the "fake artists". They appear to be real artists. Did I missunderstand something?

You already should be able to get the basics of quantum physics. Have you tried starting there? (Feynman Vol III is a good place to start.) Or are you more interested in general (or special) relativity? Definitely check out John Baez's TWF's [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04168

There's a lot of "I" in your comment. My suggestion: find some other people to work with. Once you bring your project into relationship, you will become accountable, and this helps cut down on the fantasy.

Modern calculus (analysis) was invented because people shot themselves in the foot working with topology and wondering exactly what is a "curve" ? I am a big fan of this approach to learning mathematics, just forge ahead and when (if) things fall apart then go back and fix up the foundations. To this end I recommend a couple of books. "The Knot Book" by Adams is a very interesting exploration in topology (without requiring all the years of study at university before you are allowed to learn exactly what a topology is). And in another direction, group theory was invented because the study of symmetry gets very tricky! But if you want to dive in anyway then have a look at Conway's "The symmetries of things". It is a lot of fun. Most modern group theory (or algebra) books don't actually have any pictures of symmetric things, just endless formulas and lemmas. If you want to be a pro, then you gotta learn that stuff, but there's definitely pathways into higher mathematics that don't require you to learn that.

Slashdot -> Technocrat [1] -> HN.

I think Bruce Perens shutdown technocrat.net because it's just a p.i.t.a. running a forum like this [2].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080110105629/http://technocrat...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090104214806/http://technocrat...