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sn9

1,910 karma · joined March 15, 2016

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sn9··on The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?
I'd binge Hillel Wayne's stuff.

https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/formal-methods/

sn9··on Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student (2001)
Are you only ever writing text?

I find that digital solutions can never compare to the freehand drawing of diagrams, symbolic manipulation for solving math, etc.

sn9··on Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft
Have you considered doing this in OCaml?

You'd get most of the benefits of Go and Rust.

sn9··on Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI
If you use the waist measurement to compute your waist to height ratio and it's above 0.5, then you know you almost certainly have too much, and losing weight is the next action.

This was all explained in the link I shared.

sn9··on Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI
Yes, obviously.

But it's a cheap and effective one.

If you've lost 5 inches from your waist as measured from your bellybutton, it's unlikely you've lost zero visceral body fat.

sn9··on Rhombus 1.1 is now available
A Lisp with an HM type system and good error messages might be ideal for LLMs (if you don't want dependent types).
sn9··on Linear algebra done right
Axler is usually recommended as a great second book for linear algebra (unless you're extremely comfortable with proofs).

For a first exposure, these days it's hard to do better than Math Academy [0]. It'll diagnose all your weak points (including what prereqs you might not have) and handle all the scheduling using spaced repetition and knowledge about how the topics relate to each other.

All you have to do is keep showing up and do the work for 30+ minutes per day.

[0] https://www.mathacademy.com/courses/linear-algebra

sn9··on Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI
It only fails to classify people with excess body fat who are in the healthy weight range.

It's really good at catching people who are obese who are overweight.

sn9··on Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI
A waist measurement is the cheapest and simplest way other than just looking.

You want to make sure you measure under similar conditions, like in the morning after relieving yourself (for example).

If it's too high, losing a ~0.5-1 lbs per week while strength and endurance training with progressive overload will get it down sustainably.

https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/visceral-fat-waist-vs-w...

sn9··on Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI
"Overfat" just refers to having too much fat.

"Overweight" can mean the same thing for weight, but it also refers to those with a BMI specifically between 25 and 30, and those with BMIs greater than 30 are classified as "obese".

sn9··on Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI
But it's actually not just being "overfat".

It's specifically a high level of visceral body fat.

Genetics determines which parts of the body gain fat first as you gain fat overall, and some people have the unfortunate genetics to gain it first viscerally and some people have the fortune to gain it there last (and everything in between).

This means that you can have different people with the same body fat percentage but drastically different disease risks.

But yes this was also known already.

That's why it's been recommended to take a waist measurement alongside BMI to get a much more informative screening tool. Waist-to-height ratios are another alternative.

sn9··on AI by Hand
There's also The Little Learner: https://www.thelittlelearner.com/
sn9··on 5th Heat Dome Expands Across Europe: 40°C+ Target Western and Central Europe
Oh okay so you don't understand the difference between a solution that would take decades and a solution that would work instantly to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and you think people recommending the thing that would save lives immediately are somehow uninterested in long term solutions as well.
sn9··on 5th Heat Dome Expands Across Europe: 40°C+ Target Western and Central Europe
I think you misunderstood me lol.

I'm saying we can easily do both.

The only obstacle is morons.

sn9··on 5th Heat Dome Expands Across Europe: 40°C+ Target Western and Central Europe
I would simply not sacrifice hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable (in Europe alone!) for unnecessary performative bullshit and let people install AC while massively subsidizing solar/wind/hydro/nuclear/etc.
sn9··on How to Exist
There are several different popular meditation techniques. It's not a single thing to try.

It's like saying you heard about this food thing and tried eating beans every day for months and didn't see what the fuss was about. But maybe you just needed to try bread and butter!

sn9··on Show HN: I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript
In Firefox, you can just open a new tab in split view.
sn9··on LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences
Math Academy has a Math for Machine Learning course: https://www.mathacademy.com/courses/mathematics-for-machine-...
sn9··on LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences
Yes if you can afford it, then it's absolutely worth it. Nothing better at the moment.

This review lays out how you should think about the costs and benefits: https://jonathanwhitmore.com/posts/2024-09-10-mathacademy/in...

sn9··on The Strongest El Niño Ever
This is completely incoherent, especially since some European governments outlaw or restrict the installation of personal air conditioning in certain kinds of buildings.

Belief in climate change isn't exactly rare in Europe.

sn9··on The Strongest El Niño Ever
It should be more grating that Europe's refusal to adopt air conditioning is murdering their most vulnerable at rates comparable to American gun deaths and (unlike climate change or gun violence) there's a trivial solution that would prevent this immediately instead of waiting decades.
sn9··on A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample
For most of their lives, most people have a rate of 0 learning because they aren't even trying to learn it.
sn9··on A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample
And yet still unknown to more than 99.9% of the population (a conservative estimate).
sn9··on Immersive Linear Algebra Book with Interactive Figures (2015)
Have you read this post on incorporating spaced repetition into teaching linear algebra?

https://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebr...

sn9··on LLM-Integrated Multivariable Calculus Course
This isn't really an answer.

How are you checking the accuracy of the content? Especially if you plan to scale this to hundreds of courses, it doesn't seem like you actually have humans checking.

sn9··on FDA approves new kind of cholesterol pill
Fiber intake has a dose-dependent effect on cholesterol levels.

Obviously some people still need medication if they have particularly unfortunate genetics.

sn9··on FDA approves new kind of cholesterol pill
There isn't a conflict between cholesterol having a useful role in the body and too much being harmful.

There are mountains of evidence establishing a causal relationship between elevated cholesterol levels and heart disease.

sn9··on NYC may require landlords and realtors to disclose the use of AI in listings
I agree with the goals of the policy but I don't understand how it's enforced.

How do you determine if something is enhanced by AI versus just Photoshop or something else? Apart from being physically impossible, I suppose.

sn9··on Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?
I think gstatic.com was down yesterday or something because a ton of websites just stopped working.

Spotify on Android got an order of magnitude slower recently.

These are just the examples that come to mind that I've dealt with from the last 48 hours.

sn9··on Ask HN: Advice for first-year CS students?
Read Cal Newport's books on study habits.

Learn to use Anki to leverage spaced repetition to intentionally put things into your long term memory. This step comes after understanding though.

Don't rely on AI to do anything you don't know how to do yourself. (You can use it to learn, but then make sure you independently verify and internalize the information.)

Use Math Academy to learn math ahead of time. Then take as much math as you can.

Use pen and paper to do your thinking and problem solving before writing a line of code.

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