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szon Ask HN: How do geniuses think? How do you think?

1) There are some awesome Feynman interviews on the web.

2) My brain will refuse to learn anything unless I can understand it from first principles. I spend a long time trying to get an intuitive understanding of a problem before starting to try to solve it. When solving a problem, I talk out loud as if I'm trying to persuade another person of my argument, including responding to imagined objections or questions. Often I find myself thinking "wait, what exactly am I saying here? what do I mean by this?" I meta-think, estimating the probability of me misunderstanding something without being aware based on context (e.g. if I think something is easy when really smart people think it's hard, then I probably missed something).

Math is helpful for picking up good thinking habits.

szon Statically Typed Languages Encourage Bad Code

Yep. Haskell is a perfect counterexample (everything is inferred).

szon "Physics shows that cell phones cannot cause cancer"

Quod erat demonstrandum does not mean "and thus I have proven beyond all shadow of a doubt that I am right"; it means, roughly, "that which was to be demonstrated". The usage of QED is correct here.

szon How a Physically Aware Internet Will Change the World

Sounds like the Internet of Things:

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

szon A great logo is recognizable in any form

Tux!

szon Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

CAESAR. http://www.northwestern.edu/caesar/

Everything sucks about it. Everything.

szon How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

Mentioned in the article, and applicable to more than poker:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt_(poker)

szon Why programming languages?

Less ridiculous and more persuasive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c

szon [dead]

Fake, if I'm not mistaken. I think the guy did a series of videos like this.

szon I shared his post at HN and he landed a job on Zendesk

Can you add a link to your original posting?

szon Can you solve it? The Greplin programming challenge

Now I have to try this.

szon The stock market as a single, very big piece of multithreaded software

Humanity as a single, very big piece of multithreaded software:

Minds are processes, reality is shared memory. Crashes happen under suitably bad conditions (e.g. WWII).

I don't see how this per se offers any real insight. You can apply the analogy to almost anything.

szon A minimalist lifestyle does not make you a better person

Again, I'm a college student. Re-buying stuff I threw out based on a naive criterion like that would be terrible with my limited resources.

An inventory would help me better decide what to throw out and keep me organized. If someone built an inventory app that could keep track of purchases via bank reports and OCR'd receipts, I would probably pay for it.

szon A minimalist lifestyle does not make you a better person

I think the author meant better in the sense of morally superior, not happy.

szon A minimalist lifestyle does not make you a better person

I've been wanting to start an inventory of every item I own with the goal of going minimalist but it's so daunting I haven't started yet. And I'm a college student! (Maybe there's room for an app here?)

szon Texify - Online LaTeX equation writer

Nice. I love URL interfaces (phras.in is another good one). Definitely useful for tutoring over IM.

Font looks a bit cartoonish though...

http://texify.com/?$\int_a^b\left(\frac{\partial%20L}{\parti...

szon Ask HN: Learning advanced math

I just got it, and it's huge. Bigger than most dictionaries.

The articles are great. It's a useful resource to look up something you hear a reference to but haven't seen before, or to get more cultural exposure around something you're studying in a narrow context. I recommend it, though you'll need another text for a thorough, linear introduction to a field.

szon The Most Powerful Word In The Human Vocabulary: Perspective

Not exactly original, but well written.

And the choice of words in the title is irrelevant! It doesn't even make sense to argue about the "power" of a word, without a useful definition of power. So don't!

The discussion so far falls squarely under http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-i-stopped-reading-hn/

szon The Principals of 'Pataphysical Programming

I think it's a joke.

szon Lies, damn lies and Chinese science

At Northwestern they actually warned chemistry majors to stay away from Asian journals when doing research, and to stick with reputable ones. Apparently it's not uncommon for these papers to be, if not outright dishonest, misleading about their procedures and results.

szon [dead]

http://xkcd.com/609/

szon Confirmed: Google Me coming this Fall

Ads are where their revenue comes from directly, but other products play a supporting role.

szon Ask HN: What makes a job posting attractive?

Marissa Meyer has a funny story on this:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1526

szon HN: Let's ask Mythbusters to test some hacker myths

Correlation between monitor size/number and productivity

Though I struggle to think of how they might incorporate blowing stuff up, shooting things, and robots into hacker myths.

szon Ask HN: Is there a spectrum of difficulty/prestige in programming?

Haskell (omitted) probably comes in somewhere at the top :)