Silamoth

I asked this elsewhere, but do you have an example of this knowledge? Have prediction markets ever revealed genuine knowledge? If so, has anyone ever acted on the newly revealed knowledge in a meaningful way?

What insights are being gained? Every time this topic comes up, I see someone vaguely mentioning insights from prediction markets. But no one ever has concrete examples - real or even hypothetical.

Can you give an example of insights derived from prediction markets? Who benefited from the insights, and how did they act on the insights?

1. At a certain point, the idea of growth must be criticized. Unless, of course, you think infinite growth is possible.

2. Claiming the modern capitalism’s “cult of line go up” has anything to do with humans leaving caves is a stretch at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. Humans left caves out of a desire to create better lives. Stable shelter, better quality and variety food, tools to make life easier, clothing to protect us, etc. Plus probably some human desire for exploration. None of that is driving capitalists who insist “line must go up”.

We have more than enough to go around. We cannot grow infinitely. Greed is holding us back from caring for our entire human population.

Huh? You got any sources on that? I’ve never heard anyone say a non-Delaware LLC is a bad idea. And most sources seem to say incorporating in your home state is usually the right call.

It’s not “random”, it’s whatever you’ve configured it to on your machine. Your choice of (e.g.) 3 spaces per tab shouldn’t be forced onto me if I prefer (e.g.) 4 spaces per tab. As long as you’re on your machine, you’ll see exactly the amount of code indentation you prefer - not something “random”. On someone else’s machine, well, that’s up to their preference, and it’s hard to complain about how someone else has their machine setup.

TL;DR: This is a feature, not a bug

I don’t think it’s accurate to say Roblox replaced Gary’s Mod. They both released in 2006, and they’ve always targeted different audiences. Roblox has always targeted younger kids while Gary’s Mod has targeted older kids, teenagers, and adults. Roblox has had a weird resurgence in the past few years, but it didn’t replace Gary’s Mod. Heck, I’d reckon it was always more popular than Gary’s Mod among younger kids (I know I had friends who were obsessed with Roblox circa ~2009, but I didn’t hear about Gary’s Mod until I was a teenager).

Basically anywhere you need to scan a QR code to get in, you can have a pass in Apple Wallet. I’ve never stored payment info in Apple Wallet. But every time I take a flight, I store my boarding pass in Apple Wallet. It’s than printing a physical boarding pass, it automatically updates metadata (e.g., flight times, gates), and it’s nicer than just a picture.

Previously, you could only add passes if the company supported it. So most airlines have Apple Wallet passes, but most gyms don’t. This update will allow you to create your own passes. Basically just storing the QR codes (and maybe some metadata?) in one easy-to-use place on your phone. I can imagine this being convenient for daily use so you don’t have to track a gym tag with a QR code and a library tag with a QR code, etc. Also nice for tickets to events.

Ayn Rand was a pretty terrible person. But you’re right that there are some interesting ideas in her books. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead is exceedingly interesting as a person living genuinely without much regard for societal norms and expectations. There’s some weird stuff in that book, but Howard Roark is very interesting. A trimmed down version of The Fountainhead would be much better received, I think. (It’s over 700 pages and has some odd and unnecessary scenes where some of Ayn Rand’s less-than-great views probably shine through. It would also just benefit from some good editing.)

Very interesting article! We need more microforests in urban and suburban areas. Better for air quality, better for the climate, better for bugs, and, frankly, better and nicer for people. A nice wooded area with some biodiversity is much more pleasant to exist around then stroads, parking lots, and concrete buildings.

What does national ID have to do with government surveillance?

For what it’s worth, there are many areas of programming where dependency injection is almost never used. Game dev, data science, and embedded systems, for example, rarely use dependency injection. It’s definitely most common in enterprise Java code and less common in Python, C, or C++. And even then, not everyone uses the term “seam”.

At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.

I’m not saying cars shouldn’t ever exist. The ‘last mile problem’ is a thing, and proper self-driving cars could be good for part of that (especially after a train and bus if you have lots of stuff). But you want to sleep in a vehicle with lots of storage space while driving across the country? That’s called a train. Nothing new needed.

In a lot (most?) companies, management serves as the bosses over engineers. So good luck telling your boss they’re not allowed in your meeting.

I stopped wearing my Apple Watch because notifications were too distracting when trying to work (even with Work Focus, I want some notifications, but I don’t want my wrist buzzing and lighting up all the time). I don’t miss it. The only real use I ever got was GPS directions when riding a bike or electronic scooter. I guess I also tracked my runs with it. But I don’t use those often enough, and I can wear the watch for those situations if needed.

I do also love the idea, though. I think part of the limiting factor is that you can’t attach sensors or peripherals to it. Even with a hackable watch like in TFA, there’s only so much you could add without it getting bulky. And the screen is too small to do much with.

There’s a similar situation in game dev. Players are very good at identifying problems - this isn’t fun, this feels too hard, etc. However, the solutions they suggest are often terrible, resulting in broken, unfun games. The same advice applies: Figure out what’s actually wrong and fix that.

Is that level really too hard, or did you just fail to properly introduce a new ability? Is the story boring, or is the story taking away from the enjoyable gameplay?

That’s such a good one! I wish more people understood this. It seems management and business types always want some upfront plan. And I get it, to an extent. But we’ve learned this isn’t a very effective way to build software. You can’t think of all possible problems ahead of time, especially the first time around. Refactoring to solve problems with a flexible architecture it better than designing yourself into a rigid architecture that can’t adapt as you learn the problem space.

Statistics is absolutely fundamental to data science. But I’m not sure this relates to the above idea of “laws” being internally contradictory?

That’s how I understand it as well. It’s not about an abstract ideal of duplication but about making your life easier and your software less buggy. If you have to manually change something in 5 different places, there’s a good chance you’ll forget one of those places at some point and introduce a bug.

> Andrej Karpathy…is the most famous person on Git Hub

Is he really? I’ve only heard of him because HN is obsessed with his “AI” takes. Is he really that popular outside of this bubble?

Genuine question: Who uses stars on GitHub? Even if I use a library or tool, it’s never once occurred to me to give it a star on GitHub. Is this a real thing people do? And if so, why?

Very interesting article! I love reading about hacking in the classical sense: Using a system in way it’s not intended to accomplish an unexpected/unintended outcome. It’s a shame the media has perverted the term to exclusively refer to cyber attackers (“crackers”).

In some ways, I feel the hacker mindset embodies how I like to approach systems and problems. I like to dig in, get my hands dirty, and see how things work. In programming, this often means a lot of stack traces, breakpoints, and print statements. I’ve jumped into a lot of new areas and figured things out on my own.

But on the other hand, I often feel my hacker mindset isn’t nearly as well-developed as some people I meet. That’s probably a lot of imposter syndrome talking. But the things some people do are amazing, things I’d never even think to fathom, let alone attempt, let alone succeed at.

Care to share what those “other things” you’re concerned about are? If you mean what I suspect you do, then this is a complete false equivalence. But it’s hard to evaluate when you don’t actually state your claim or concerns.

Calling Richard Feynman a “professional bongo player” is hardly an honest description. He was a Nobel prize winning physics professor renowned for his problem-solving abilities. He was certainly qualified to analyze the Challenger explosion.

That’s funny because I don’t see civil engineers being “glazed” much online. Usually they’re the butt of jokes and ridicule from other engineering majors who perceive civil engineering as less ‘rigorous’ than other disciplines. I’m curious where you see this civil engineering “glazing”?

Ehh, that seems pretty reductive. I could just as easily claim women love games with character customization or games with deep stories. All of these things may have some truth to them. But (1) it’s unclear how universal this is and (2) it’s unclear if this differentiates women from men or is just something people in general like. “Good character design” is incredibly vague and appreciated by a lot of people.

Great article! Needless gendering absolutely hinders innnovation, in game design and elsewhere. (Not to mention the unfairness, oppression, and general absurdity).

Slightly unrelated, but the point about tutorials starting with the “basics”, i.e., “making a character move and attack” is interesting. On the one hand, if you have a strong enough grasp on programming fundamentals, it should be pretty easy to take what you learn there and make a “dress-up game”. Heck, a basic dress-up game shouldn’t be any harder than a platformer.

But if you lack that fundamental knowledge and are only interested in games, you need to develop it somehow, and you don’t want to build ‘boring’ console apps; games should be a platform for learning programming. So I agree wholeheartedly with the author: we need more diversity in introductory game programming tutorials!

Of course, that brings us to another can of worms with programming education: Tutorial Hell. But beginners need to start somewhere, and that somewhere should motivate them to continue learning and exploring on their own.

Am I the only one disappointed this was about some LLM slop and not digital signal processing? DSP is a well-established technical acronym, so I expected to hear about a new Python DSP library. Oh well.

It’s had an impact on software for sure. Now I have to fix my coworker’s AI slop code all the time. I guess it could be a positive for my job security. But acting like “AI” has had a wildly positive impact on software seems, at best, a simplification and, at worst, the opposite of reality.

I feel this article's argument is weak, largely for one key reason: They don't clearly define anything. Their references might clarify some things, but not all. They argue against "general problem-solving strategies" with a reference to Polya, but they don't provide a clear definition of what these strategies entail. How broad is the set of strategies they're arguing against? What are some examples of such strategies? I'd like something beyond two sentences on Polya.

Furthermore, what audience and level of mathematics education are we discussing? The goals (and hence appropriate metrics of success) are certainly different for high schoolers targeting non-STEM careers vs. engineering undergrads vs. math grad students. The authors reference "aspiring mathematicians" and "domain specific mathematical problem-solving skills", indicating they're arguing about education for math majors, or at least students in STEM fields. In that case, the argument is somewhat meaningless - who's arguing math majors shouldn't learn math-specific skills? But, as I understand it, the argument for general problem-solving skills is that students outside of math don't actually need many specific math skills. Instead, math is a vessel for teaching logic, reasoning, and problem-solving skills. Then again, this might not be the type of problem-solving the authors are referencing - as I said above, it's not very clear.

On a similar note, they cite evidence that studying worked examples is more effective than "general problem-solving strategies", citing an "improvement in subsequent problem-solving performance" without explaining how this performance is measured. If students are tested on specific problem types, of course they'll perform better when taught strategies for those specific problem types. But it's not clear that this is meaningful. For STEM majors, sure, solving specific problems is a skill worth cultivating. But for most students, solving specific problems isn't as important as learning logic, reasoning, and general problem-solving skills. In my anecdotal experience tutoring math, students tend to just memorize strategies for specific problem types instead of learning transferable logic and reasoning skills because that's what's tested. I'd be curious to see which method of learning facilitates better performance on a more general problem-solving test of some sort.

Now, I'm not an education researcher or an educator of any sort. But I am passionate about good STEM education, especially in math. I genuinely feel that math education fails most students, at least here in America. If I'm being generous, this article is a well-intentioned but poorly-executed argument for effective math education strategies. If I'm not being so generous, this article advocates for the status quo in math education that forces students to slog through years of math classes for little discernible benefit. Either way, it's a disappointing article with a poorly-explained thesis.

Godot is easily my favorite game engine. The node system is simple yet powerful, truly a joy to use. For the most part, I feel like I have a good level of control over my projects without having to get too low-level. It doesn't feel like I have to organize my code around the engine's architecture, like with Unity or Unreal. Godot is also free and open-source and very lightweight. Support for C# and 3D has been improving, especially with Godot 4.0. And it has pretty good cross-platform support.