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skermeson In the Singularity Movement, Humans Are So Yesterday

It's not for nothing that the Singularity is referred to as "The Rapture of the Geeks".

In all seriousness, though, the parallels between some forms of Rapture philosophy and some forms of Singularity philosophy are pretty strong. Uploading your mind into a machine is very similar to being taken up to heaven.

skermeson [dead]

Absolutely, seconded. Not only in it's stereotype of geek men (and it's implicit erasure of geek women) but in how the advice could essentially be summed up as "Find this dude that you don't really relate to and cater to his every whim. Watching him play video games while you bake cookies is what every relationship should aspire to." Utter dreck.

skermeson Ask HN: How do you begin the process of developing a web application?

It may work well for you, and you should certainly feel free to work however you like, but I've found that diving into the code as early as possible works better for me.

I'm generally driven by seeing something working, even if it's only working enough that I can see some data on a page or have a single button that makes something happen.

If I can keep a good decoupling between my views and my models it's pretty easy to go back whenever I get the itch and make things look nicer without touching anything else. Unless you have a lot of javascript doing intense dom operations on a page you should be able to redesign it at will without worrying about breaking anything else, so I don't really worry about getting it right the first time, or really any time unless I'm getting ready to show it someone who's going to judge it on visual rather than functional grounds.

I've found (and, again, this may only apply to me and not you) that leaving design for later helps keep me from getting bogged down in details and losing my steam. If I have a very concrete picture of how something should look in my head I start worrying about getting my boxes to line up right and why my line heights are off and all that stuff that doesn't actually contribute to getting anything working. If I've purposely left the design aside I've in essence given myself permission to be okay with things looking crappy until I feel like fixing it, which helps keep me going on things that actually contribute to working code.

skermeson Solving the Alt-Tab Problem

In Visual Studio if you hold alt-Tab it'll pop up a quasimodal dialog that you can navigate through with arrow keys to select the tab you want, or hop into one of VS's panes (properties, ReSharper unit tests, etc). It's much less ideal than being able to just switch to the one you want, but if (like me) you often get stuck with too many tabs to cycle through easily it's at least a way out.

skermeson Regular Heptadecagon Inscribed in a Circle

When I was in school we had a program (I think it was this: http://www.dynamicgeometry.com/) that let you do pretty much exactly that. We were never that ambitious, but it was pretty cool. I remember using it's animation functions to create some limited spirographs by tracing out lines defined by pairs of points moving around circles and things like that.

skermeson In E-Book Era, You Can’t Even Judge a Cover

Seriously? E-books are going to make everyone stop reading because now we can't use our book covers to passively brag to people on the subway how cool/smart/alternative we are?

On the other hand, maybe someone can make a quick buck by selling rewritable/removable "Hi, my book is ________" stickers for the back of kindles.

skermeson 2500 words on the subject of brevity in programming

More importantly, embedding very much non-trivial code in the context of an essay like this is impractical. I don't want (or need) to see an entire application written in both Java and Ruby to get the point. Any code sample that can be reasonably inserted into the text without unduly breaking the flow is going to be simple; hello world is as good as any.

skermeson Ask HN: How many of you founders are girls ?

I suspect the lack of context in your reply made it sound like you were saying that there were zero women founders anywhere, rather than zero women founders in your company.

skermeson XKCD Color Name Survey

From the page: "The survey doesn't have an explicit end. You can continue for as long as you'd like or come back later to do more." So, no, it doesn't have a point at the end.

skermeson Lojban - a logical (human) language

Descended from Loglan, whence came the old joke,

How many Loglan speakers does it take to fix a broken light bulb?

Two. One to fix it, and another to figure out what kind of bulb emits broken light.

In all seriousness, though, one of the things I treasure most about our squishy human languages is how much ambiguity they contain. Being able to construct sentences that mean two (or three, or more) things at once and playing around with the intersections of polysemy (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2079) and listener context is great fun. I feel like you lose some of that when you take inspiration for your language as much from predicate calculus as from Chinese.

skermeson Ask HN: Any cool sites that do IP GeoLocation?

http://goingtorain.com, I think.

skermeson Study HN: The Blame Study Pre-Study (for sociological survey)

I suspect that that's the point of the survey, though. Even though the questions can't be answered definitively, and even though they may really be the wrong questions to ask, we're faced with them on a daily basis.

Shakesville (http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/) has a regular series where they point out how regularly various media outlets write stories about domestic abuse where the story is framed so that the victims (overwhelmingly women) are blamed for their assaults. This is an extreme case, but it's illustrative of how society at large (and each of us at small) doesn't approach blame in a reasoned and careful way that considers all the angles and second- or third-order causes.

I doubt the point of the survey is to actually determine blame for specific events, but to investigate how our faulty meat-brains tend to lay blame when we have limited information.

skermeson More things that don't make sense

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobius_strip

There are plenty of problems with magnetic monopoles, but that was a particularly unfortunate choice of analogy.

skermeson [dead]

But that wasn't the message of the story, at least not how I read it. I thought it was very explicit near the end: "If you are like the bean, when things are at their worst, you get better and change the situation around you." Then there were a few more grafs of meaningless platitudes, but that was really the point that I thought it was driving at.

It wasn't just that different things respond differently, it was that some things respond poorly and the beans respond well. But the metaphor only works if you accept the conclusions and don't try to examine it closer. For example, did either of the characters in the story taste the water? If the whole point is that the beans changed the character of the water, it does your metaphor a great disservice to ignore the fact that the carrots are going to change the flavor (admittedly it's not going to be as nice as the coffee, but it's the exact thing that the center of the parable hinges on).

As an example of what I think is a nicely constructed metaphor, look for the first metaphor in Book I of the Aeneid (too large to reproduce here, check out http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/aeneid.1.i.html and search for "His finny coursers"). It comes in the scene where Poseidon is calming the seas of some rogue winds loosed by Aeolus, and compares him to a "grave and pious man" talking down a rioting crowd. The correspondence between the rioting crowd and the sea is intuitively clear, and the modern innovation of modeling crowd and traffic behavior with techniques from fluid dynamics serves to reinforce it. The image of calming the crowd with "sober words" lends insight into Poseidon's approach toward his domain. On a personal level it also invokes the story of Joshua Norton calming a San Francisco riot by reciting the Lord's Prayer in the street.

The point (which I've taken an awful long time to get to, I apologize) is that unclear and ambiguous metaphors tend in my experience to bely unclear thinking. When I can rewrite a story as I read it to have the opposite meaning as it was supposed to, it suggests to me that it was not written in the first place with a critical eye.

skermeson [dead]

Agreed. It's trite and not nearly as uplifting and inspiring as it's supposed to be.

The thing that always bothers me about these stories is how you could just as easily spin the negative foods into positives and come down hard on the 'good' one. Would you rather be like the carrots that began life rigid and inflexible but learned to adapt and become flexible and malleable; able to adapt to new situations? Or like the eggs, which started out fragile and easy to crack but found a hidden inner strength in adversity? Or are you going to be like coffee and totally decohere in the boiling water, ultimately losing your identity and becoming little more than vapor, able to be blown away by a strong breeze?

A good metaphor has an inner clarity that this just lacks.

skermeson Wolfram Alpha proves that N = N - 1

I can see how it may have been fun, but it doesn't even really rate as dubious.

Not only is one of your premises (a/a = b/b -> a=b) clearly false, but your conclusion doesn't mean anything.

a=b ^ a=b -> n=(n-1) ^ n!=(n-1) is just a contradiction. Your first and second terms together imply n=(n-1) which directly contradicts your third term.

I'm afraid you've simply proved a contradiction, which just means (because of, well, proof by contradiction) that you're arguments are flawed.

skermeson 24% of Tweets Created by Bots

Combined with http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639266, it seems like Twitter is less about inviting millions of strangers into the minutiae of your life than it seems from a naive view.

I seem to remember danah boyd talking about something to that effect at one point; that a lot of the Twitter activity she'd observed among young people was about talking amongst a small circle of friends. The only people really broadcasting on Twitter are people who were already famous for something besides their 140 character brilliance.

skermeson AMD reverses GPGPU trend, announces OpenCL SDK for x86

The big problem is that you can work with some fairly large amounts of data and still have the bus be your bottleneck. I was doing some GPU work a few summers ago that focused on matrix multiplications. We were sending matrices with 8k numbers on a side to the GPU for multiplication and still ending up with the bus being the slowest part of the computation.

skermeson Twitter Sued For Patent Infringement by TechRadium Messaging company.

The thing that feels... unwholesome about this isn't that TechRadium is trying to crush a superior product through a misapplication of patent law; I don't think they're trying to do that at all.

It seems more like they invented a hammer that's custom-designed to pound nails with a square head. No one has a better hammer for that. And then Twitter made a hammer that can pound nails with any kind of head, and does it good enough most of the time. Twitter just happened to solve a more general problem than TechRadium did.

It feels unwholesome because Twitter isn't really a system for sending mass emergency alerts to people. That just happens to be one application of being able to send short messages to a host of devices. And, really, Twitter wouldn't even be in competition with ISIS if it hadn't become absurdly popular for reasons that have nothing to do with emergency alerts. The feeling here of suing someone for getting so popular that an infrastructure has grown around them that lets them do what you do is, again, unwholesome.

skermeson Where to hide your money - advice from a burglar

My mother used to run a daycare and she'd do something similar when someone came to inspect the school to make sure it was okay for kids. She'd leave something small (slightly overflowing wastebasket, some loose toys in a hallway) that the inspector would notice in the first few minutes of the inspection. She found that if they got to mark her down for one or two small things quickly they were less likely to go looking for something later and drum up a serious offense from nothing just to have something to write down.

skermeson Ask HN: If you could 'reinvent' anything what would it be?

As a hovercraft, of course. If we'd started the history of transportation by floating instead of rolling, I think we can all agree humanity would be a much better place right now.

skermeson Seth's Blog: How to make graphs that work

Off the top of my head, I can think of way more than "four reasons I can imagine [I] would want to show someone a graph." How about "look at this interesting pattern in the data," or "look how data set foo correlates with data set bar?" Neither of those fall under "help me figure it out", and they're both telling at least as much of a story as "everything is going great".

Also, while his graph is somewhat more pleasing to my eyes than the original, it still doesn't tell me what I really want to know about that data. I have two questions about that line: what happened with that first really big spike, and does he think that the two similarly-shaped regions that follow it represent the beginning of a cycle that we might see again. His graph is called "Rapid Traffic Growth", but I think there's a more interesting story in there.

skermeson Is a Proof a Proof If No One Can Check It?

This question came up in some of my more abstract classes in college. A few professors in my department were working on slightly different problems in the same general domain of automated mathematical problem solving and proof construction. The general consensus as I remember it was that the simplest way to get around the problem of no human being able to survey these proofs was to do something like this:

1. Define a machine read- and writable logic that can express your theorem and the steps you think it'll take to get there. 2. Write an automated proof-checker that can verify that proofs in this language are correct. 3. Prove the correctness of the checker. 4. Write a program that starts with your axioms and writes out a proof that ends in your theorem. 5. Verify it with the checker.

Now the only proof that needs to be human-surveyable for us to be certain that everything is correct is the one in step 3. The proof created by step 4 can fill up a skyscraper full of hard disks, and as long as the proof checker verifies it we know that it must be correct. Given a simple enough proof language (FOPL, for example) and a suitable programming language (the choice at the time was lisp, I believe) step 3's proof is easily short enough for a human to verify.

The only hole left is the possibility of a subtle machine malfunction that causes the checker to falsely categorize a proof as correct. On modern hardware this possibility is remote enough that once a proof has been verified a number of times by independent researchers on their own hardware we can safely ignore it.

skermeson In 2007, 51% of college students graduated with a job. In 2009, it's 19.7%.

Or they could be translators. They could teach their native language to people whose native language is the one they've learned. They could end up as authors or writing the marketing copy to sell your software in France or on any number of non-self-referential career paths. There are useful places in this world for people who didn't major in applied sciences, too.