Hacker News Reader

lake_vincenton What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?

It's not the discussion that makes you a crank. It's publishing a paper claiming you have solved something that you haven't even begun to understand. It's bypassing peer review. It's ignoring all the literature out there and claiming that is somehow a virtue.

You have an interesting idea? Go ahead, please share it! But it's not productive to just start with "Look everybody, I solved it!"

It just wastes everyone's time. For example, this paper. It would take a lot of time to sit down and work through the math until I find a specific error in it. But the barren abstract and reference sections strongly suggest that would be a huge waste of my time and energy.

Mochizuki pulled this stunt with the ABC conjecture. Wasted YEARS of mathematicians' time just to arrive at the conclusion it was all elaborate mathematical smoke and mirrors. The guy is an egotistical asshole with a messiah complex, and managed to burn a lot of PhD students by chasing his red herring. Not cool.

lake_vincenton What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?

The abstract kills me.

"A Hadamard factorization of the Riemann Xi-function is constructed to characterize the zeros of the zeta function."

Like, dude, you are claiming to solve a Millennium problem, you're gonna have to put a little more effort into explaining, ya know, the breakthrough...

We care about the Riemann Hypothesis not for the theorem itself, but because the methods used to solve it will surely be revolutionary and it's those methods that are important, not the theorem.

That's what makes it a Millennium problem. So a paper like this immediately shows the author doesn't even understand why the problem is important, let alone its solution.

lake_vincenton The Jupyter+Git problem is now solved

Oh man, thank you. I grew up with C++ and Java as my main languages, so I always feel more at home with a py file.

Notebooks never caught on with me.

lake_vincenton Email doesn't suck – it's email clients that need improving

Agreed. My company uses Google Workspace, and I find the Gmail UI/UX absolutely unbearable in every way. I personally like Outlook (or rather what it used to be), and just wish for a clean Outlook for Gmail integration.

But the nightmare that is IMAP has prevented me from ever succeeding in cleanly integrating the two. In fact, the general experience of using Microsoft and Google products together is quite frustrating. I get that they are competitors, but not acknowledging the multi-platform reality of modern work and forcing me to suffer because you can't be healthy adversaries, is really ridiculous and I resent both companies for their user-hostile practices.

Looking at you too, Apple.

lake_vincenton JetBrains Research

swoons

lake_vincenton JetBrains Research

Oh wow, they have a HoTT research group? That's very interesting, and exciting. I'd love a JetBrains automated proof assistant.

lake_vincenton Mindustry – Open-Source Game

Oh no, it's on mobile? I just assumed it was not on mobile because it's FOSS.

My productivity karma was trending up this week. Was.

lake_vincenton U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

Cleverly not false, just misrepresented. What they choose to measure and not measure is what allows for a certain ability to coax the numbers in a certain direction.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/vineerbhansali/2021/02/23/why-p...

lake_vincenton U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

https://www.forbes.com/sites/vineerbhansali/2021/02/23/why-p...

What the Fed calls inflation is not what you think it is.

lake_vincenton Learning algebra in my 60s

I am very glad to hear that! Enjoy :)

I recommend the Art of Problem Solving community as a great place to start. I have no affiliation with them, they're just awesome for math learners of all levels.

lake_vincenton A physical wiring diagram for the human immune system

Holy moly, I don't know anything about the content, but this is straight up data science porn. Those visuals are stunning.

lake_vincenton Learning algebra in my 60s

Very well said! It is true that once you grok this technique, you are basically unstoppable. It does make for slow progress at first, but it's worth it.

Edit: I went to grad school for math, and I got there by pretty much doing what you described!

lake_vincenton Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

Yes, go find an experienced person to do it with. Microdoses are fine to do alone, but anything beyond that and you will want a guide.

It can be an unpredictable experience, even in the right setting, so that is why traditionally, entheogens are always consumed in the presence of a shaman/guide.

Edit: How to find them? Go make friends with some artists or hippies. The pizza delivery guy with a crystal necklace? Ask him to hang out :)

lake_vincenton Ask HN: Where to find people who love to learn?

Your local public library is a great place to start. Look to their clubs and events for passionate people doing what they love.

lake_vincenton It is time to stop teaching frequentism to non-statisticians (2012)

I also don't like when it's framed as an "either-or" dichotomy.

It's like a programming language - there is no "best" one in general, you just have to learn how to choose the best tool for the job at hand, understanding each tool's strengths and weaknesses. It's not that mysterious.

lake_vincenton What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

The book is the explanation :)

lake_vincenton The endless search for a crypto use case

Well said. I don't understand why there's always so much hand-wringing and pearl-clutching over crypto.

lake_vincenton Why is Burnout so common among developers?

That is a completely incorrect analogy! Our species had tens of thousands of years to adapt to primitive work. Computers have been around for less than a century. We haven't even begun to adapt.

lake_vincenton Why is Burnout so common among developers?

I think the cold, hard truth is that dev work is so far removed from the kind of work that our bodies and minds have evolved the capacity to do comfortably, that you are constantly in a state of disharmony with your self.

Without constant, active measures to counteract the damage from being at a screen 60 hours a week, your body will atrophy, you will get RSI's, and you will burnout.

It is deeply inhuman work, and the amount of adaptation required is insane. Personally, I am only doing this work for the money, and when I have enough saved, I am going to retire early and become a baker or something.

lake_vincenton You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are? (2018)

For those who hate Twitter threads as much as I do:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html

lake_vincenton Knuth changes his mind on Bernoulli number B_1

Yes, but it is an art. I would recommend taking it to a reputable used book store. They will sometimes have traditional bookbinding skills, if they carry lots of old books.

lake_vincenton Ask HN: Higher order derivatives in everyday life?

Wait, meaning the third derivative of the what is already the second derivative of position - so snap = 5th derivative of position? Is there an intuitive explanation for this?

Just checking my understanding.

lake_vincenton San Francisco votes overwhelmingly to recall progressive DA Chesa Boudin

"Boudin also became the first San Francisco DA to file homicide charges against city police officers."

Wonder if that has anything to do with it.

Edit: I am literally wondering - I have no knowledge of the situation.

lake_vincenton The man who invented relaxation (2015)

If you want to really understand relaxation, try looking into tai chi and Qigong. These arts are profoundly rooted in relaxing in an extremely deep way. You don't realize just how much tension you have in your body, and it actually takes a long time to work through these layers of tension (which build up over our whole lives) until you can truly experience full relaxation.

I did yoga and zen meditation for years, but once I started practicing tai chi and Qigong, it was a whole different ball game. It's kind of hard to explain, because I was so completely unaware of just how deeply rooted and pervasive the stress and tension in my body was. Tai chi and Qigong have changed my life - I experience so much less chronic pain, and feel so much healthier and robust than I did with just yoga and seated meditation.

YMMV, as I got pretty lucky in finding an extraordinarily good teacher, but I cannot recommend it highly enough.

lake_vincenton Could cancer cells’ iron addiction be their Achilles heel?

Sources?? Would love to learn more

lake_vincenton UN Climate change is so severe we're running out of time to adapt

I honestly feel that the only "out" for us at this point is some kind of miraculous scientific discovery on the order of Einstein's theories that enables the development of some extraordinarily futuristic tech to save us. Obviously not realistic, but there is a one in a trillion chance of it happening, and it's kind of our only hope.

lake_vincenton Winning Wordle

LOUIE

PARTY

has also been so effective for me it almost takes the fun out of it. Usually get it in 3/6, but never more than 4.

lake_vincenton Facebook staff now to be known as “Metamates”

Wanna know the best part? The CTO also said that they got the term from....wait for it...Douglas Hofstadter.

Let that sink in for a moment.

I think ol' Dougie was trolling them and never thought they might actually run with it.

Edit: source for the incredulous https://mobile.twitter.com/boztank/status/149366154542687027...

lake_vincenton Internal Facebook Note: Here Is a “Psychological Trick” to Target Teens

BuzzfeedNews has surprisingly high journalistic standards, actually.

lake_vincenton Turboencabulator

Thanks for this. I hear D-Wave is working on super symmetrical turbotopology, and I'm extremely excited about the Lambert cohomology research breakthroughs that might come from this incredibly important work.