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CogDisco

125 karma · joined June 2, 2013

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CogDisco··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
Yep. While I'm not focussed on these areas, I know enough from scoping out a "learn about the proof of FLT" course that it's covering all the usual suspects and says the right-enough words. Patching their weaker results with someone else's seem like a good strategy (and I could find the result on arXiv so it isn't obviously hallucinated).

This is very different to believing the proof, which would require at least a pass understanding the general approach, seeing that it all actually fits together, then going deeper. At some point you transition to relying on the Lean all hanging together, but as mathematicians we all draw that line somewhere.

But yeah, makes sense. Same thing if you saw news on someone's new database technique to improve performance. If they say the right words, don't say the wrong words, and if you cared enough you'd do spot checks proportional to the claim. If pressed you'd examine the source code, and run independent checks. But if smells roughly right, that's a good first approximation.

CogDisco··on Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]
Possibly good at starting such a series, then kinda fizzle out.
CogDisco··on Fields Medals 2026
But then there's the opposite in maths where there's an overload on "plain" terminology. "Normal" means a billion different things. Same as "regular" or "simple".

Omitting the human history of a field does not automatically make it easier.

CogDisco··on Why online voting is harder than online banking
Are 99.99% convinced that normal voting is secure?
CogDisco··on Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language
Why not have controls in your program to do these immediate, non-logic changing modifications? It can report the ideal value through a debug interface. No recompiles needed.

I'd also recommend getting used to serialisation/deserialisation. Serde for Rust makes this remarkably easy. Writing every setting to a file is simple if the compiler can do it for you, rather than you walking the long way around.

CogDisco··on How to play with people who are better than you
Assuming you can learn anything from the experience. What you might learn is weird idiosyncrasies and futile tactics playing from desperation. You might learn to not lose so quickly, but that's not the same as winning.
CogDisco··on Decoding the Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculator: Antikythera Mechanism
Do you have a reference for that first point? I couldn't find it on Google, but would be interested to learn about it.
CogDisco··on History Will Not Be Kind to Jony Ive
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that they provide products with consistently high margins, and encourage vendor lock in.
CogDisco··on Tim Cook: Technology companies need to take responsibility for chaos they create
> Apple should... make demands on companies with which it has no relationship, and expect those companies to comply?

Isn't that literally the link above?

CogDisco··on Jeff Hawkins Is Finally Ready to Explain His Brain Research
Do you feel it's likely that he's created something that works and rather than using or elaborating upon his work, and thus bettering their own career, everyone has thought, "Wait a second, isn't this the Palm Pilot guy?" and discarded the idea?

Instead of just cutting out the middle bit of getting a PhD, becoming a professor, setting up a research lab, and mentoring students for decades, and leaping straight to "make a startup from an idea that works", every single person decided to go the hard road because it seems proper?

Your cargo cult idea works - he's arranged all the trappings of being an influential theorist - funding and research labs and media coverage - except perhaps for the one thing that lets him fly: a worthwhile idea.

CogDisco··on Ask HN: What tools have most helped your day-to-day productivity?
Do you have any recommendations for tutorials or guides?
CogDisco··on Ask HN: What is setup for your static blog generator?
I moved to Pelican from WordPress last year and it's been great. I wish there were more resources around for it, though.
CogDisco··on Crick, a time-tracker dashboard, goes open-source
Yes, although Org calls it "clocking".
CogDisco··on Ask HN: How do you manage your day to day work logs?
Org mode with some fairly well-worn templates. My daily log is in datetree format. I have a few agenda options so at my weekly meeting I can get a quick review of what I've done during the week (or quarter if I'm writing quarterly notes).

If I go to a meeting I take notes with pen and paper and transfer them in elaborated form when I return. Good note taking is a skill, though!

I dabbled with an ultra quick template (F12 to write a single line in a mega list with a date stamp at the front of each item, no options, no slowdown). I found the discipline of taking slow notes at the end of every task or day much better than effectively tweeting my day to my future self.

One thing that I've found difficult is having task/project journals that work easily into this flow. Tags help but I found I was duplicating everything in changelogs.

CogDisco··on Science Isn’t Broken (2015)
What would be your plan for papers that cite another one because they are doing a literature review or something akin to "Paper X is wrong"?

There's also a trickier problem in your simple binary flag: papers can have incorrect proofs of correct statements.

I'd love to see a Semantic Web approach where you don't cite papers but results in papers. So while a result in a paper might be wrong, you don't have to throw out all the results in all the papers citing this paper.

CogDisco··on Teeny Tiny Mansion: text adventure game formally proven to have no dead ends
You mean MUDs or MOOs?
CogDisco··on How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple
If they were serious, they'd provide objective evidence for their claims. Papers, source code, numbers. Not "we have the biggest, baddest GPU farm" and refuse to say any more as policy. Under this veil of secrecy and doubletalk, all they have is marketing: Trust the brand rather than objective reality.

Many other companies are mature enough to show their cards but Apple keeps declaring victory. Apple writes its own narrative instead of participating.

There are mature ways for this to shake out and they don't include your strawman dichotomy.

CogDisco··on The first augmented reality social network
Wasn't Ingress an augmented-reality social network? It's been around for years.
CogDisco··on A Password Manager That Doesn't Store Passwords
I think it's more a password manager that doesn't manage passwords.

You can't set an expiry date on a password. You can't change a password if it's compromised. You don't know when a master password was created so you can change it. If you change your master password you have to change every password you care about. You can't introduce new entropy. You have to manually specify a keyword scheme (and presumably store it yourself). You can't store metadata in case the website decides it's changed from usernames to email addresses and you've forgotten which one you used for what. You can't change the master password independently of the individual passwords.

In actual password management, this program makes you specify, store and organize it all yourself. And without significantly more security than a traditional password manager like Keepass.

It seems a bit cocky to call it "Visionary".

CogDisco··on Ask HN: Why would you prefer Emacs over IntelliJ IDEA?
The problem with extracting org-mode into its own application is that a lot of the magic of org-mode comes from emacs. It's not so much being tied up in emacs as sharing and extending the design. By moving org-mode elsewhere, you'd reinvent the wheel and put an artificial division where there doesn't need to be one.

For example, org-babel allows you easy access to any language you have support for in emacs. Same syntax highlighting, same behaviour, same utilities. Improve any of that and org-mode takes advantage of it for basically zero cost.

CogDisco··on Show HN: Lit – a modern literate programming tool
Not bad. Not sure it'd come close to replacing org-habits for me.
CogDisco··on Artificial Philosophy: ethics in computer intelligence
Such a scenario is not so far fetched.

Except that it is. This is not a discussion about self-driving cars because they don't work that way and are a long way off potentially working this way.

This is the age-old trolley problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem), which was never really satisfying as a philosophical problem. You create contrived examples and try to transport that situation to a wider world.

The trolley problem seems to be popular for self-driving cars because it's easy to create horrible situations without engaging with the way the technology actually works. Moreover, you can make the decisions for the computer to fit the situation without having to think about how that'd apply generally.

Or at least, if you're going to do it, go the whole hog: http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/Tissues.htm

CogDisco··on Watchdog Report Says N.S.A. Program Is Illegal and Should End
You have the right to free speech. You don't have the right to freedom from consequence of free speech.
CogDisco··on Bot or Not: Hacker News
I know this is just a fun game, but do you do any double-checking to make sure the bot isn't overfitted and "generating" a fake title that is actually real?