hnuser355

My (I would consider) fairly deranged father was astounded that repeated beatings, threats to kill or abandon me, encouragements to commit suicide etc. caused 12 year old me to have anxiety and develop odd social behaviors and diagnosed me with having a demon. He brought someone from his church (who later went to jail for pedophilia) to examine me for demons, and took my instant dislike of the guy as more evidence for them. My friend who immigrated from India at a young age was astounded that people believe in these things in America when I told him the story. I suppose he associated it only with less educated / developed parts of the world.

This is practiced at St. John’s school or whatever where I believed students are made to read that comic sections book, newton principia, that book about blood

When I began reading many works of the doctors of the church daily frankly my worldview began to evolve and change quickly

All of those seem like they’re actually much worse career choices than being a writer. Why would he recommend people to do this? Is it a joke

Reminds me of some weirdo bodybuilder on YouTube who advised a viewer suffering from depression to become a mercenary in Africa to cure it

I know some American parents who very much believe what you said, but they think that it only applies to other people and not themselves.

Your high school must have been tougher than mine

FORTRAN is definitely still used all over the place in scientific computing... If you go to a CS department that does some engineering work and work on numerical you might have to write some.

Neuroscience is the most powerful science, because the human brain is what does science in the first place.

I want to do a 12 year gigadegree that is structured from undergrad to doctoral program to postdoc(s)

I mean I worked with people at Kmart who had fairly quick intellects and encyclopedic knowledge of some random thing like radios, definitions of words, and every pop hit of the last several decades

It’s so funny when you think about it. People are scouring the globe looking for places to put their money. They’ll hire armies of people to look for places to put their money. If I remember right Felix Dennis talked about this a lot in his book.

And for anyone who wants to know why unmodified gradient descent may be considered a piece of shit in certain circumstances

http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenbrock_function

Gradient descent with a good line search (Wolfe conditions) applies to the multidimensional case should converge to min, but it might take you thousands of iterations. Newton’s method or something might take <50.

But machine learning practitioners will know why gradient algorithms are often preferred despite this

I think Facebook is fine for the demographic its designers are/were (educated middle class and above elite). All of its problems seem to me to result from extending its service to the frankly deranged masses of humanity and not fencing them in enough.

It is! That’s exactly what I’ve done. Who knows if this will continue indefinitely though.

I don’t know any of machine learning but I’ve heard folks in some fields will prefer a gradient descent algorithm even though it doesn’t have nice convergence speed because the Hessian (Hessian approximation) will be too huge or difficult to calculate

Who would say such a thing?

For me it was cause I wanted to beat the shit out of my curve and get scholarship money and letters for grad school. Similar sentiments are found in Hardy’s book I think. If you spend enough time around math professors you will certainly hear a story about so-and-so who is now an acclaimed mathematician who showed up for some undergraduate course when he was 17 or something extremely confused about what the “meaning” of the material was but figured out how to solve all the problems and get an A cause he cared about being good at it (and had the ability to do so).

If you don’t know what a food is you can just go with them and then you’ll know after

Haha, as if the average US university graduate is joining the ruling class

Yeah, I thought it’s known that many successful products are not really engineering based

Math textbooks

Hmm, I know some bosses who really enjoyed making people “accountable” but didn’t seem to enjoy knowing what they were doing, articulating a realistic vision, or making coherent decisions. Why do poor bosses only seem to like that part of the job?

Well a lot of folks are working on it. I’m not sure if anyone has done anything strikingly successful with eg spiking neural networks or something.

These guys built a more biologically plausible model and got it to do very simple tasks

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a5c4/19fcd6ea6f33be067b665e...

Don’t know if their lab has had more success or not on practical tasks but that’s not really the point I guess

That’s interesting. Perhaps the intention is to completely ruin the employee’s dignity and will (and render them more compliant) by forcing them to beg several fat middle managers for the privilege of doing their own job.

Re:3

Frankly, I think a lot of managers in some places (maybe places you wouldn’t like to work) would care more about their employee being good at inflating their accomplishments and engaging in low-scale office warfare with people outside the group than having really good technical skills.

At one of my employers I was hired at a probably bad time in my life where I was quite unskilled technically (spend a whole day or something to write a fairly simply SQL query), but I would start small office fights (and contribute to office fights of my manager) over any perceived slight, and always view anything my team, me, or my manager did as delusionally impactful and important and loudly proclaim it to everyone around. They bent over backwards to keep me on board. But the technical level of this group was extremely low, so if this was in a group where someone else could verify that I wasn’t that good it may have played out in a more normal manner.

As I invested a lot in my technical skills and got a lot better/more efficient at my actual work (while caring less about fighting office people about their choice of wording in an email or something) they all began to hate me, with my manager wondering aloud to me why I had become so much worse of an employee after a great start.

Hmm, that’s true. Many might consider this a reasonable argument for the product not being bad.

No & yes. But I feel like a lot of guys confuse extroversion with being “alpha” or successful or whatever when in reality you can just be socially normal and not have such weird hangups.

I feel like people are so extra about sex. I had more sex than I probably need to in my lifetime when I was younger and I’m not sure there was a point. Sex->restaurant->sex->work just makes you fat and unhappy. Now my life is not that stable and I work all the time so I don’t want to find a partner if I don’t think I’ll be a good one. Also not interested in dating or having sex with randoms or friends. So I guess there we have it. I wish incel guys would just focus on having a fulfilling life and learning to socialize normally and then they’d probably get a girlfriend anyway.

When I visited Portland me and a friend tried to go to that ice cream spot everyone loves. Way too long so we went to the book store instead

Hmm, hours is weird and beyond my limits but many restaurants serve quite good ramen many enjoy.