jsomers

(I wrote the article. I'm a longtime HN user. I find that threads here lately have gotten very jumpy-offy -- commenters use a specific article about e.g. icebergs melting to have a conversation about climate change and climate change denial, instead of to talk about the merits of the particular article -- and I was hoping to nudge folks to read the full piece, then comment on specific parts of it. I'm not sure that'll work but figured it's worth a try!)

That made it pretty tough to write: how do you explain dimensionality reduction, PCA, word2vec, etc., and the wonders of high-dimensional "embeddings" (of the sort you find in deep neural nets) when a lot—or all—of these ideas might be new to the reader? I'm not sure—but this was my attempt!

The question I’d ask those physicists is whether Mathematica does the kinds of things Wolfram claims for it / does things other programming languages can’t do. I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was “yes,” I’m just not sure.

Sadly I don’t know a single person who has used Wolfram’s software extensively. I haven’t used it myself extensively. Is that because it’s not what it’s cracked up to be, or because it’s a closed world?

My friend can edit the sheet at will, and the app pulls the data in via JavaScript. Google already sets the right CORS headers.

It makes sense: on a site devoted to news, an article posted so long after it was published has to be especially good.

So I hacked together this page, which links to every HN post with a date in its title earning more than 40 votes. It’s sorted in chronological order to encourage wandering.

Curious to know what you're using to parse the essays into sentences. Isn't that quite difficult in the general case?

Still, the contrasts between these organizations and Bell Labs are crucial. “This was a company that literally dumped technology on our country,” the physics historian Michael Riordan has said of Bell Labs. “I don’t think we’ll see an organization with that kind of record ever again.” The expectation that, say, Google or Apple could behave like Bell Labs—that such companies could invest heavily in basic or applied research and then sprinkle the results freely around California—seems misplaced, if not naive. Such companies don’t exist as part of a highly regulated national public trust. They exist as part of our international capital markets. They are superb at producing a specific and limited range of technology products.

...

“I’ve often said to my old friends that we were very lucky we got to work there, in an environment that I don’t think will ever exist again,” remarks Dick Frenkiel, who worked on the first generation of cellular technology. “It’s hard to say something will never happen again. But with the monopoly gone, with the whole concept of monopoly essentially discredited, how could there ever be a place like that again?”

...

That perceived natural monopoly wasn’t only justified by the phone system’s technological complexity and interdependence; it was also—in an argument that telephone executives made over and over again—a matter of economics. With one company in effect serving the country’s phone customers, some parts of the phone business that were highly profitable, such as long-distance service, could subsidize other aspects that were less profitable, such as local calling. Profits from high-paying corporate customers, moreover, could subsidize service to residential customers. Profits from dense urban areas could subsidize expansion into sparse rural areas. All in all, this kind of “averaging,” as it was sometimes called, helped make telephone service available and affordable for most Americans.

...

In testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Bill Baker asserted that “the notion that Bell Laboratories could endure and function away from AT&T, Western Electric, and the operating integrated Bell System would be laughable were it not so sinister and so ominous.” It was an argument like the one a gifted child might make in favor of preserving his parents’ marriage.

And here's the yc discussion about it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404707.

I do think you have to be excited about discrete math to really plow through the problems, but the nice thing is, discrete math is the easiest kind of math to get hooked on, just because it's not much more than fancy counting.

As a rule this is a pretty impoverished epistemic strategy.

That converted into about a doubling of my RSS subscriber base to just over 100.

But culling RSS subscribers seems to be mostly a game of posting and linking and getting buzz on close a daily basis, whereas I'll occasionally have one or two months of inactivity.

Otherwise, somewhere between 0.5 and 1% of visitors ever check out other posts.

The overall point being that Google Docs does a lot more than I need. YMMV.

This "diffly" app is my first cut at a solution.

It uses Google's diff-match-patch to do the diff. There's no toolbar or lasso or any of that - comments use the Markdown hyperlink syntax, and insertions/deletions are tracked automatically.

My initial reaction is to agree with Gladwell, even to go further: I want to say that what we're doing when we focus on the "how" instead of the "what" in stories of modern mass communication is fetishizing indisputably "authentic" uses of technologies whose trivializing influence we fear or are at least insecure about.

But new platforms like Twitter could plausibly be changing the dynamics of political revolutions (etc.) in such significant ways that it really is worth talking about above and beyond the ground-level facts of the stories themselves.

I think Gladwell's just exhausted by the conversation.

The chief aims of the conference were, first, to estimate values for terms of the Drake equation, and second, to devise strategies for contact. So all these top American and Soviet scientists had to discuss a remarkable range of topics—everything from the chemical origins of life, to the anthropology of early civilizations, to the problem of encoding messages in a form comprehensible to intelligences vastly unlike ourselves.

It's possibly the most interesting thing I've ever read.

For a while I thought where I wrote mattered, but after producing good and bad just about everywhere I decided to just go with whatever jumps to mind first.

I'm amused when I look back at my "breadcrumbs," but I don't know if they're useful. They're just a record of a struggle you already went through. So it's not like you're going to learn a whole lot of new stuff.

Where they're useful is when you think to yourself, "maybe the way I phrased it was better." I did that a number of times, and probably wouldn't have been able to if I hadn't used etherpad.

It's really tough to say. I bet a lot of the benefits would accrue over the long run.

Your number feels right—I've written a number of "successful" HN posts myself, and they've all taken about 6-10 hours to write—but I wouldn't want to make the kind of statement you've made, that "for the most part this rule seems to hold well," until I've seen lots and lots of data.

Archimedes taught us that a small quantity added to itself often enough becomes a large quantity (or, in proverbial terms, every little bit helps). When it comes to accomplishing the bulk of the world’s work, and, in particular, when it comes to writing a book, I believe that the converse of Archimedes’ teaching is also true: the only way to write a large book is to keep writing a small bit of it, steadily every day, with no exception, with no holiday. A good technique, to help the steadiness of your rate of production, is to stop each day by priming the pump for the next day. What will you begin with tomorrow? What is the content of the next section to be; what is its title?