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Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

This blog used to be called Cantor's Paradise or something like that. Article is an ok popular-level description of uncomputability, focusing mostly on biographical details of early researchers in the field (Turing, Church, etc). As with other articles from the same blog, it mostly rehashes info well known from other sources. There's nothing exactly wrong with it, but I don't really see what is gained.

I'm nowhere near a real expert in this topic but almost everything I've seen in the blog so far, I've already seen elsewhere, quite a lot of it in Wikipedia. Nothing is copied or anything like that, but there are only so many ways to tell the same stories.

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Why so much negativity? Especially as it is discouraged here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

I know these topics, yet find the presentation nice (structure, style, images). Nothing new? Well, good popular-level articles are often in the "nothing new" category.

I got annoyed that this blog appeared here repeatedly under another name and after a while I stopped clicking on it, but then it showed up again under a new name and I clicked. The author has since explained that the blog is published under the two names on separate hosting sites (medium and substack), which I guess makes sense. That's much better than changing names to slip past people's filters, which we've all seen from time to time.

Since you're quoting HN rules I would point to the one saying not to use HN for promotion. These posts do come across to me as promotional, once there have been more than one or two of them. That all said, it is an ok article. I'll leave the other issues up to others going forward.

Indeed! I’m not claiming to change the world or anything, I just like writing about this stuff

Can I ask why you changed the name of the blog?

I didn’t change it, I moved my content to Substack (under the name Privatdozent). Cantor’s Paradise is still on Medium

Fair enough, thanks.

Dear Jørgen Veisdal:

Fair enough.

But it would be helpful if the article could be updated to

get some information corrected as pointed out in other posts

on this page.

I know plenty about computability, and found this to be a fun read. Especially since when being taught it my teachers didn’t spend the time going over the biographies of the people involved.

History of the people involved is indeed very

interesting. Particularly recommend the BBC2 film "Dangerous

Knowledge".

BTW: The article "Turing Uncomputability" got some of the

history wrong about the 1930 interaction between von Neumann

and Gödel. See the following:

     Jan von Plato. "In search of the sources of 
       incompleteness" Proceedings of the International 
       Congress of Mathematicians. 2018.

Sure you can learn all of this stuff on Wikipedia, but the difference here is that the author has turned it into a narrative, given it character, and a stylish presentation.

Like many people today, I have an attention problem. But my eyes were glued to the screen for this whole article.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia is often not a reliable source of

information because its articles are posted and maintained by

largely unaccountable anonymous parties.

I'd say it's pretty reliable overall.

It's useful enough to have gained an effective monopoly.

However, it cannot be relied upon in specific instances.

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