Hacker News Reader

gone35on Lattice Shapes of Rings of Integers of Number Fields: An Artist's Rendering [pdf]

"Respected research math is dominated by men of a certain attitude. Even allowing for individual variation, there is still a tendency towards an oppressive atmosphere, which is carefully maintained and even championed by those who find it conducive to success."

This is def consistent my personal experience... Not so much sexism (nowadays at least) but a strange mix of ageism, cult of innate 'genius', and gymnastics/ballet-like, endurance/bravado-focused ultracompetitiveness [1,2,3]. I increasingly blame Hardy's bestseller --and his abiding influence on mathematics culture worldwide-- for it.

(Also I can't believe such a diss was accepted in the first place... Sign of changing times.)

[1] https://mathbabe.org/2014/08/15/i-love-math-and-i-hate-the-f...

[2] http://listeningtogolem.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-invisible-p...

[3] https://mathbabe.org/2015/01/16/representation-of-women-and-...

gone35on Agents that imagine and plan

Not my field either but prima facie it does seem suspiciously close to good-old hallucinated feedback-like techniques, POMDPs, etc in the planning / ML-oriented robotics community (see e.g. [1]). Didn't read too carefully though...

[1] Boots, et al. (2011) Closing the learning-planning loop with predictive state representations. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0278364911404092

gone35on The slow death of the electric guitar

Listen to those back to back and if you still find no subtleties or sensitivity go check a doctor ;) Now seriously, it's fine not to like them, but you have to concede these are very well done pieces of art.

De gustibus non est disputandum...

gone35on The Horror in the Standard Library

11. "Do we have the IP core for this?"

12. "Where is my electron microscope?"

gone35on Category Theory, Syntactically (2016)

If your examples are made only of the thing you're trying to explain, they're not examples.

That's just recursive definition. Some concepts demonstrably can't be exemplified otherwise.

gone35on Why Juicero’s Press Is So Expensive

No: all that fructose can definitely be bad for you.

http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/fresh-juice-drinks-health...

gone35on What a stranger taught me about Japan

IMO, in word2vec terms:

Pico Iyer = Thomas Friedman + Deepak Chopra.

(I bet it actually is the case.)

gone35on The web looks like shit

If you don't like the way The Outline looks, that's your opinion, but we made it that way ON PURPOSE.

It's not just how it looks (utterly horrid on desktop, IMO), but its ostensible (anti-)usability too...

[FWIW, it freaking crashed my old iPad (not just Safari, but the whole OS), and lost all my tabs. But who cares about users right?]

gone35on Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?

[...] and test them against data

No, in fact they don't. It's hard to believe, I know.

gone35on Category Theory for Programmers (2014)

Understated comment of the decade!

gone35on The AI Misinformation Epidemic

Your response, and the ostensible fact my critique went completely over your head, probably shows you should definitely spend more time familiarizing yourself with the discipline, before going around defending it.

You should start with 'calibration' in economics. No, it is not quite what you (seem to) think it is. No, it is not quite "the same type of thing" as p-hacking and low-powered studies in psychology. (Whose poor reliability, by the way, is almost common knowledge by now.)

Look it up, and see how the sausage is made.

gone35on The AI Misinformation Epidemic

Sure. The first NBER paper in [1] features the following jewel (p.34):

"B. Calibration

To quantitatively decompose the contribution of different factors to the growth of shadow banks and fintech firms, we first have to calibrate the model to the conforming loan market data."

I can tell you with a straight face that is not normal science. Economists themselves increasingly recognize so-called "calibration" is a farce.

gone35on Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

You can easily find the evidence yourself, if you care. It's everywhere in the literature.

For starters though, try this dumb little quiz (not that I expect it will change your mind):

https://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/how-privileged-are-you

gone35on The Story of a Lucky Economist

If you haven't studied economics in graduate school, you may not be aware of the extent to which freshwater-like fundamentalism is embedded in the core ansätze of the discipline.

gone35on The Story of a Lucky Economist

[...]which is that centralised bureaucracy and decision making can be very harmful.

Or very useful --sometimes even demonstrably so (e.g. tragedy of the commons).

gone35on The Story of a Lucky Economist

An example of groupthink?

Freshwater macro, for one.

gone35on R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind

That's in part because, unaccountably, '_' denotes assignment in S.

gone35on Ask HN: What should I tell my cousin who wants to go to a “coding boot camp”?

I'm all for equality, but manifestly not for 'positive discrimination'.

Control theory-wise, perhaps it's demonstrably impossible to obtain the former without some measure of the latter, unfortunately.

gone35on The power of role models

Does anyone here really have any role models that were influential to their interest in the field?

Yes.

gone35on Practical Cryptography

[...]cryptography is the study and practice of obscuring information

What about authentication?

gone35on Breakthrough in the quantum transfer of information between matter and light

Excess correlations.

gone35on Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

I know it was out of line, Scott: I've been lurking for years, and know the guidelines.

You cannot ignore though the insane, unprecedented emotional context we're in right now as a nation. Anyway I apologize.

gone35on Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

Thank you for pointing that out. I apologize for the impropriety.

gone35on California secession, calexit

Honestly this is not as far-fetched as it seems: a west coast + east coast union would be one of the largest economies of the world.

http://www.yescalifornia.org/

gone35on The P=?NP Poll (2002) [pdf]

Sure, but then again ex falso quodlibet... Just ask the academic cryptography community[1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0010019

gone35on How “Black Mirror” Gets Its Barely Sci-Fi Tech Just Right

"Fan-fiction" level of writing. Everything so obvious with tired tropes. A critique to social media that could be done by an imaginative high school kid.

Funny: that's exactly what I think about the whole series. I have (guiltily) watched all three seasons with anticipation, and I still don't really see what the big deal is.

But then de gustibus non est disputandum, so that's just me.

gone35on 'Black Mirror' Is Back, Reflecting Our Technological Fears

Maybe de gustibus non est disputandum?

gone35on Why the internet only just works (2006)

Security, if you ask me.

gone35on D-Wave Founder's New Startup Combines AI, Robots, and Monkeys in Exo-Suits

[...]in actual professional circles the research they're performing isn't met with as much derision[...]

Yes it is.

gone35on Qualities of clean code

As a woman in (academic) CS, thank you. It is a small thing, but all those tiny slaps in the face do end up adding up at the end of the day...