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jsomerson Any Novel’s Negative Twenty Questions

I'm skeptical that one can tell which novels were plotted out beforehand just by sensing how neatly they're integrated. Isn't it possible (indeed likely) that someone who wrote in a piecemeal jumpy fashion also pays careful attention to consistency?

Wasn't that in fact the author's point with his "negative twenty questions" analogy, that novelists who write in that piecemeal jumpy way nevertheless achieve coherence through careful attention to their constraints?

jsomerson The Bristol Chaotic Pendulum

Nicely put. I often consider this problem when I think counterfactually: "What would have happened if I missed the train? Where would I be right now if I hadn't lost my pencil two days ago?"

I have an instinct to just dismiss this kind of musing, because I think to myself that even the smallest changes propagate in wildly unpredictable ways, with potentially vast consequences -- think "the butterfly effect"-- and so it's pointless to even try to reason counterfactually.

But of course it's not pointless, and our minds do this naturally all the time: holding everything else equal, we're constantly twisting this knob and that one, imagining all kinds of possible worlds, exploring the space of what could have been.

jsomerson Why 37signals advice is irrelevant and unhelpful

That's not an accurate summary, or at least it's not complete. I took the author's main points to be that (a) 37Signals's offerings are viewed by customers as investment opportunities instead of as consumable goods, and that (b) people are thus more willing to pay for 37Signals's stuff than for the mere "consumption-services" offered elsewhere. The author implies that this is the case even if those consumption-services provide a lot of utility.

Point being that in the author's mind, it's not that 37Signals is making great products while everyone else isn't. It's that 37Signals is making great products that are seen as productivity tools and hence as investments, rather than as simple absolute costs.

jsomerson Nomic: "...a game in which changing the rules is a move."

Hofstadter wrote about this in a column for Scientific American. The article appears in his collection, "Metamagical Themas," and Google Books has most of it here: http://books.google.com/books?id=o8jzWF7rD6oC&dq=metamag....

jsomerson The Examined Life, Age 8

See also http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/children/ and a wonderful book by Gareth Matthews, "Dialogues with Children."

jsomerson The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

I don't know why, but I always seem to count backward from 2000, so that I end up thinking of 1996 as being roughly four years ago. Gets me every time.

jsomerson Ask HN: Review my side project - Reel Roulette

Why not the frontlog?

Site looks great, by the way. One thing I'll say is that I ran into the same reel after just two clicks -- this should be pretty easy to avoid, either by shuffling an array of reels (rather than pulling one out at random), or by tracking which reels I've seen in a session variable.

Good luck!

jsomerson The Genius in All of Us

I wonder how much the ability to persevere in the face of difficulty is affected by a person's genes?

Exactly. The authors of that famous paper, "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," said something along these same lines in their conclusion: that we should begin "viewing expert performers not simply as domain-specific experts but as experts in maintaining high levels of practice and improving performance."

jsomerson Ask HN: Try my Jeopardy game

I built this game using the data made freely available by j-archive.com (a wonderful site). It's "multiplayer"---so you'll get the most fun out of it if you've got some chums around. But there is also a single-player "study mode" at /blast.

I'm worried that the site (made using Ruby on Rails) won't stand up to serious traffic, and so I'd appreciate some advice / info on that front. Please forgive me if you notice sloppy performance. Also, have low expectations re: bugs and the like.

Finally, I am working on a "real-time" multiplayer version using the Juggernaut plugin for Rails. I'd say it's about 40% of the way there. I'd be happy to open the code up if anyone wants to pitch in. If nothing else my rake task for scraping j-archive might be useful to other folks.

jsomerson [dead]

Odds are good that the paper that actually proves P != P (a) will be written in TeX, (b) will not include references to introductory algorithms textbooks, Wikipedia pages, and lecture slides, (c) will not conclude by saying "There is no relevant related work on the goal to really solve the P versus NP question," (d) will not be littered with grammatical errors, and (e) will be written by an author who already has many publications on the arxiv.

Which is not to say that there's no good thought in here...

jsomerson Making Undergrad CS More Enticing at Stanford

I liked this, from the video:

> "Think about the time that you're living in, right, like Don Knuth, who's considered the father of computer science, is still alive and he's in this department. It's sort of like you're geometers and you're living in the time of Euclid."

jsomerson [dead]

Looks like this thing is having trouble handling the load. It's running off a 256MB slice at slicehost, and odds are good that I configured it poorly (though I just followed the steps in their articles).

Thoughts?

jsomerson [dead]

Yeah, you have to get used to the "answer checker". Once you do, though, it's a breeze. (Maybe I'm biased because I have played hundreds of games (including 22 in one night!)).

jsomerson [dead]

I built this game using the data made freely available by j-archive.com (a wonderful site). It's multiplayer---so you'll get the most fun out of it if you've got some chums around. There is also a single-player "study mode" at /blast.

jsomerson The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'

The author's objection to graduate school in the humanities has less to do with a lack of intellectual rigor than with the structure of the job market in that part of the academy.

So I think your comment is somewhat misleading in connecting this article (or "these articles") to your own criticism. (Which criticism may of course be valid on its own terms.)

jsomerson [dead]

Essentially every sentence in this article includes some ungrounded, sweeping claim (parroted from a single "report") about boys in general. Unbelievable that this has gained so much traction here without comment.

jsomerson Dissertations on His Dudeness... (Big Lebowski)

The Dude doesn't not care. The Dude abides. There is a world of difference.

jsomerson Ask HN: More types of flagging?

I like this idea of being able to hide comments and stories from submitters with accounts fewer than N days old, where N is a setting that each user can tweak.

jsomerson EtherPad Open Source Release

Man, I can't wait to build this locally. In its raw form I expect it to work great for essay writing, etc., but I can imagine all kinds of cool modifications, like allowing cross-pad hyperlinks. Let the hacking begin!

Edit: I realize that a local build makes very poor use of etherpad's killer feature--its super-fast realtime collaboration--but the biggest draw for me was actually their "playback" mode.

jsomerson Tenacity is a key attribute in successful entrepreneurs

Is anyone surprised that "tenacity is a key attribute in successful entrepreneurs"? Has anyone learned anything by reading this post?

In my view this submission is vapid to the point of being flag-worthy. Evidence: after two hours this piece has generated zero actual discussion.

jsomerson DIY book scanning

As an alternative, I've been using a fast feed scanner to digitize my books. The obvious downside is that they need to be cut first.

I was inspired by this blog post: http://sealedabstract.com/?p=410

jsomerson EtherPad Back Online Until Open Sourced

This is one of those stories I'll tell the next time someone asks me what's so special about the "hacker" community.

jsomerson Indiana Jones Initial Story Concept Transcript

It probably helps that there are just three guys here, and that they have by this point already worked together very successfully on The Empire Strikes Back, which was a large, long, and very similar project. So there's an unusual amount of trust and know-how in this room.

jsomerson [dead]

"costed" --> "cost".

jsomerson Rule 110, or, how a little orange dot becomes a universal computer

Whoops, sorry about that. I've now calmed down the script and (significantly) limited the number of iterations.

There is a small blinking orange square in the top left-hand corner of the page that should start the cascade if you click or hit any key. May only work in FF atm.

jsomerson [dead]

...signalling that its owner is so rich he can afford to copy the lower class and still get invited to parties.

I don't think this explains why upper middle class suburban kids wear "ghetto" clothes. I think it has more to do with a kind of insecurity about being wealthy, and in particular a fear of being "spoiled."

It kind of reminds me of how a lot of kids I knew in college (myself included) got a kick out of living a bit more rugged than usual--for a while I bragged about not having a pillow, for instance, partly because there seemed to be a competition going on among my friends for who could be most frugal.

(Of course, saving is a good idea and plenty of people have trouble affording college, so it would be silly to begrudge them for that. But there's definitely a kind of signalling going on, too, and I don't think it's as related to peacocks as this post's author claims.)

jsomerson The human brain, it turns out, is even more efficient than previous estimates

Sure the news is the same, but Jonah Lehrer is probably the better writer.

jsomerson [dead]

Has anyone else tried this? I've only gone a few days (never on purpose), and the result is some pretty oily, flat, ugly hair. I never thought that going longer would restore things to normal.

jsomerson The New Nostradamus (2007)

A list of the predictions this guy got right (at the end of the article, and sprinkled throughout) is near useless when unaccompanied by a list of everything he got wrong.

jsomerson Robot hand ties knots, dribbles a ball, and uses tweezers (video)

Wow.

One way I could imagine this technology being applied is in a glove that white people could take to Chinese restaurants for operating chopsticks.