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sajidon The sad story of Heisenberg's doctoral oral exam (1998)

Einstein was not a very good mathematician. This quote from David Hilbert sums it up well:

“Every boy in the streets of Göttingen understands more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein. Yet, in spite of that, Einstein did the work and not the mathematicians.”

sajidon What's Amazon's market share? 35% or 5%?

Amazon's current market share (whether online or overall US retail) is not the point.

The point is how fast is that market share growing and where will it be in (say) 10 years time?

sajidon Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

This article should be more accurately titled "Mensa membership associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests"

sajidon The Dumb Idea Paradox: Why Great Ideas Often Start Out by Sounding Dumb

A lot of the best startups (Airbnb, Uber) started with what was actually a dumb idea. But that dumb idea was in the neighbourhood of a very good idea, and the founders were flexible enough and persistent enough to navigate the startup from the former to the latter.

sajidon The Long Term Stock Exchange

The tools look really good: https://ltse.com/tools

sajidon Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

Nash said "the same way", not the "the same voice":

“the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.” - Sylvia Nasar, "A Beautiful Mind"

sajidon Vinod Khosla with Sam Altman on How to Build the Future [video]

The signal to noise ratio in this video is extremely high.

sajidon Ask HN: Why does iOS accept GoogleCookies in Safari and doesn't sandbox it?

App data is normally sandboxed. However, Keychain items can be shared between apps using keychain groups.

sajidon VC Chamath Palihapitiya on Falling for “Ponzi Scheme” of Silicon Valley (21:47)

Great interview.

On the ground insight into venture incentives and how they are misaligned with the needs of startups and founders.

"Grow real, grow slow, like Amazon."

sajidon Titans of Mathematics Clash Over Epic Proof of ABC Conjecture

https://galoisrepresentations.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/the-a...

Terence Tao and Peter Scholze (and others) join the discussion in the comments section.

sajidon Jack Ma's Original Sales Pitch in 1999

Ironic, that in the video, he urges his colleagues to emulate the American startup work ethic. Nowadays, it's the other way around.

sajidon Detected an anomaly in YouTube search for Laravel

There is note which reads "An improvement to our data collection system was applied from 05/08/2017."

sajidon Ask HN: Was there a 'remote' Y Combinator course coming up?

https://www.startupschool.org

sajidon Decades-Old Graph Problem Yields to Amateur Mathematician

Interesting tidbit, there was a bug in the computer assisted part of the proof (now fixed):

"Many thanks to Brendan McKay and Gordon Royle for letting me know overnight that they had successfully 4-coloured my 1567er; as a result I found a bug in the part of my code that implements the relaxation described in section 5.4 and now it agrees. "

Source: https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2018/04/10/aubrey-de-grey-the...

sajidon The Merge

I fear this is wishful thinking. Advances in AI are progressing a lot quicker than advances in neural interfaces. So we will most probably have superhuman AI long before we have neural interfaces.

And at that point it's game over for homo sapiens.

sajidon Facebook's new 'early bird' spy tool is just the tip of the iceberg

Identifying and squashing potential threats has been part of Facebook's playbook from the very early days. It's not surprising at all that they have developed internal tools and systems to formalize the process and make it more efficient.

sajidon Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (2002)

The author implies that the idiom 'shelling out' has its origins in shell money, I'm pretty skeptical of that claim:

https://wordhistories.net/2016/09/21/shell-out/

sajidon Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8

sajidon What role did autism play in human evolution?

I think the argument is that although autism itself might be detrimental, the broad autism phenotype may have proved beneficial in human history.

sajidon When You Lose Weight, Where Does It Go? The Answer May Surprise You

Ok, I should have said that matter is conserved, because that's what the author is really talking about (even though he also calls it mass).

In any case, mass can't be converted to energy either because mass already is energy (that's what e = mc^2 means).

sajidon When You Lose Weight, Where Does It Go? The Answer May Surprise You

It's correct, mass is conserved in chemical reactions. The energy doesn't come from converting mass, it comes from rearranging atoms in molecules (which releases chemical energy).

sajidon Raymond Smullyan has died

I'm surprised to learn that he's from Far Rockaway (just like Feynman). I had assumed he was British for some reason.

sajidon What Is Knot Theory? Why Is It in Mathematics? [pdf]

I find it remarkable that it took humans so long (1849) to start mathematically investigating something as fundamental as knots.

sajidon E-mail from Bill (1994)

Reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg.

sajidon Feynman on Fermat's Last Theorem

If FLT hadn't already been proven then Feynman's argument would explain away the substantial numerical evidence collected in it's favor. In other words, it would suggest that FLT is just a statistical accident and true for no particular reason.

Of course, we now know that FLT is related to deep ideas in number theory.

sajidon Racism is spreading like arsenic in the water supply

It's not that half the UK is racist. It's that the racists now think half the UK agrees with them.

sajidon The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

"This seems really simple and obvious to me. So what am I missing?"

Personal identity is a deep philosophical problem - see Derek Parfit's 'Reasons and Persons'.

sajidon [dead]

"cut out the middle man"

Autonomous cars are an existential threat to Uber. It doesn't make sense for a manufacturer like Tesla or Google to leave money on the table like that. Hence Musk's reticence on commenting.