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Gormisdomai

655 karma · joined February 6, 2014

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Gormisdomai··on Elderly pair giggle like children as they dip their toes in the sea (2019)
I shared this because I think the pictured wheelchairs are an example of how there are likely many low hanging fruit when it comes to technology to materially improve the lives of the elderly.
Gormisdomai··on How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
I'm UK based and can't hit it on home wifi
Gormisdomai··on How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
This is a useful note on using PACs to set up proxies for just one site:

> Incidentally, you do not need to be running a web server to use the .pac file. You can access it via a file:// type URL. For example (note the 3 slashes): file:///Users/username/Library/proxy.pac

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2004010109555326...

Gormisdomai··on What Is Applied Category Theory? (2018)
"On first reading, it seems magical and deep, but once you grok the proof, it feels like a relatively trivial observation. The whole thing is just about ____ composition!"

I think if you replace _____ with the right word almost every result I've seen in my (albeit somewhat limited) exposure to category theory can be described this way.

(not that that detracts from your answer!)

Gormisdomai··on Show HN: Dumbdown – A dumb alternative to Markdown
This name makes it very hard to give to end users.
Gormisdomai··on Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime
my physics teacher would always say that "Gravity is not a force, but we experience a force due to gravity and call it weight"
Gormisdomai··on Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission
Yeah Iran remains massively homophobic and hostile to LGBT rights - the variety of approaches taken shows that there is scope for the laws to be interpreted as compatible. I'd argue that claiming that LGBT rights are irreconcilable with Islamic law makes things worse overall.
Gormisdomai··on Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission
I think "impossible to reconcile with the codified teachings of religion X" and "would receive negative feedback / appear intolerant to people currently practicing religion X" are different claims. Though I totally agree the latter is a good argument for why "universal tolerance" is not a straightforward concept.

Specifically: I'm disputing the theological claim "Being a practicing L, G, B, or T or pro any of them is against sharia, the Catechism, and against the rules of many major Protestant sects like Mormons." That's not really a settled question.

Gormisdomai··on Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission
Your high level point about universal tolerance stands - but you might like to challenge some of your object level assumptions about world religions and LGBT. Iranian theocratic leadership for example officially does not think that being trans is against sharia and the nation carries out more gender reassignment surgeries than any country except Thailand (not that their treatment of trans people is perfect by any means).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights_in_Iran

Gormisdomai··on Instant.page
Presumably this won't work on mobile because there's no hover to trigger the pre-loading. I wonder if there's something else that could be used there.
Gormisdomai··on Project Oberon
Related and potentially interesting to HN, a short memo from the creator of the Oberon language (that backs the OS) comparing it to LISP:

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Miscellaneous/Styles.pdf

Gormisdomai··on Reflections on Trusting Trust (1984) [pdf]
I've always wanted to write something about how this is a more general philosophical problem that goes beyond computer security. Even Descartes failed to be skeptical enough to account for it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_circle
Gormisdomai··on Hosting your entire web application using S3 and CloudFront
This is very cool! What was the overall cost of running the rest of the infrastructure (beyond just the Lambda bit)?
Gormisdomai··on Who the Hell Is This Joyce (1928)
"Your last two works have been more amusing and exciting to write than they will ever be to read."

Part of this message would be good for programmers to hear too

Gormisdomai··on Pain Points of Haskell
Can't it be both?
Gormisdomai··on Personal Wiki for Vim
Vim command which opens the filename under the cursor https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Open_file_under_cursor
Gormisdomai··on Show HN: Basic.css – Classless CSS Starter File
Boring question - could you spell out the point you were trying to make? I'm interested to hear it but it's currently kind of vague.
Gormisdomai··on Symbolic Logic (1897)
Here's an interactive website for trying the system out https://lewiscarrollresources.net/gameoflogic/demonstrator.h...

Does anyone know if this graphical reasoning system something Lewis Carroll invented himself?

It looks like he also wrote a sequel book, about how to turn the system into a game: https://archive.org/details/gameoflogic00carruoft/page/28/mo...

Unfortunately it hasn't been digitised as well as OP

Gormisdomai··on Ask HN: How can I improve my writing
This is the best writing advice I ever received:

"The first rule of style is to have something to say. The second rule of style is to control yourself when, by chance, you have two things to say; say first one, then the other, not both at the same time."

It's a quote by George Polya.

The paragraphs you have written don't seem unprofessional to me.

The best way to improve the "flow" of ideas when you write is to have a clear idea of where one idea ends and the other starts.

For longer pieces of writing, consider intentionally "signposting", by saying meta things like "now that I have explained X, I can set out why Y is so interesting".

Gormisdomai··on Nerd Immunity
Or a president / prime minster who can broadcast to the whole country.
Gormisdomai··on Orca: an esolang for audio-visual live coding
There's a nice demo of this here https://youtu.be/RaI_TuISSJE (with the explanation starting 3 mins in)
Gormisdomai··on Joy (Programming Language)
The coolest part of this article imo is the binrec operator. Do other languages have something similar?
Gormisdomai··on Fortnite and the Metaverse
Maybe we'll keep seeing this article over and over again, but one year the technology will have reached a critical threshold where "cyberspace" is appealing enough to be a real thing?
Gormisdomai··on It’s Time to Build
Regulatory capture seems like a red herring that everyone is fixating on here. Marc is right to mention it, but it's part of a bunch of other things and the most important part is the will of people to actually build and try new stuff, and run through walls to make it happen.
Gormisdomai··on Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?
Genuinely curious about where you read that the UK has no energy security? It's not something I've read about before, but is something I'm pretty invested in as a UK citizen.

The one source I could find was https://www.globalenergyinstitute.org/energy-security-risk-i... which placed the UK in the top 3 countries for energy security (many years running).

Do let me know if you have some data that would change my mind! (and ditto for food security)

Gormisdomai··on I have seen things
"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

I really like this balanced sentiment at the end of the article. It's easier to feel different or weird or out of touch when you affirm for yourself that you're being weird by your own choice - to the extent that you _want_ to be different to everyone else.

It's a nice mean between the two extremes of going full conformist or going full hipster.

Gormisdomai··on Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths
Isn't the preexisting conditions table incredibly uninformative and heavily confounded by the fact that a lot of these conditions are far more prevalent in elderly people?
Gormisdomai··on Artificial Morality
https://bioethics.georgetown.edu/2016/02/oxford-uehiro-prize...

^ This is a link to a relevant article containing an important counterpoint: it argues based on a few assumptions that we should let computers write our moral codes and not the other way around.

Gormisdomai··on Up to 2B times acceleration of scientific simulations with deep neural search
Could you explain the link you're making here? As far as I understand four colour theorem was computer assisted proof in the sense that mathematicians wrote a very specific and analytical definition for it in a logical theorem prover.

The linked article is very different right? Because it's using a neural net to do some kind of probabilistic inference as a heuristic for imperfectly stimulating physical events.

Gormisdomai··on Ask HN: Have you found success and a good work life balance?
I'm skeptical of what you could learn from a thread like this because of the huge selection effects involved
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