pattt
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1 year ago
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on: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
Different regions play complementary roles in the global economy. The oversimplified description is that the US drives innovation and risk-taking, Europe prioritizes social welfare and sustainability and Asia powers manufacturing. Forcing everyone to compete in the US-style growth race would be disastrous - imagine the burnouts, resource drain and market instability if every country tried to be Silicon Valley. Plus, many Europeans simply don't share the "get rich quick" mentality - they value work-life balance and social security more. Whether we're being pushed into this growth-obsessed game is another debate. Ideally, regions should focus on their strengths while maintaining independence. Europe can keep its social model while smartly adopting tech, Asia can focus on sustainable industry, and the US can lead in innovation. It's like an ecosystem - diversity makes it stronger. The goal shouldn't be for everyone to play the same exhausting game, but to maintain different approaches that complement each other.
pattt
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1 year ago
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on: ChatGPT Search
If you consider complex forms of life serving as an entropy-increasing phenomenon, then you might as well consider that the evolutionary algorithm is governed by such goals. It's even plausible to take the human behaviors like increasing consumerism and growth-orientation as being connected to this fundamental thermodynamic drive. Perhaps we'll find even more efficient principles to drive our consumption further. <extending on your rant obviously />
pattt
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3 years ago
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on: Unbundling Tools for Thought
I tried taking notes for learning and brainstorming over the years but found it incredibly difficult, not because of a lack of note taking frameworks, apps or technologies but because _sustaining_ this process is hard. Reading posts like these makes me quite envious of author’s dedication. Recently I was contemplating about a possible lightweight middle ground solution where I think a more polished software would certainly help - _highlighting_. Imagine if you could simply highlight/select any text/image on the screen of any app (ok, let’s start with the few), optionally assign different colors, tags and have those highlights automatically synchronized in a sort of a searchable personal diary format. The main feature of such tool would be cropping and indexing what’s already read and seen as opposed to having to summarize/rephrase or enrich it with your own notes. Why I think software in this case reducing friction to a minimum would help? As opposed to taking notes, identifying illuminating corner-stone paragraphs and sentences mostly feels like an implicit process that happens naturally at least in my experience.
pattt
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3 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2023?
GPT3, Stable Diffusion etc. will really kick off. People will start accepting these blackbox Big Data sequence prediction models as a new norm, a powerful assistance for all sorts of domains. There will be some resistance but the argument that one doesn’t need to understand digestion in order to eat food and survive will eventually settle and the path of these models becoming a natural extension of our minds will be laid out. We will see different interfaces (speech recognition, OCR) and pipelines being created to fit these models into real problem solving pipelines and address their inaccuracies, i.e., with additional fact/spec checking and computation logic. some successful startups and products will emerge mostly from folks who already started their ventures into this space.
pattt
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3 years ago
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on: Alien Truth
Fully agreed, the way I'd approach this would be that the said mathematical proofs about certain truths "by definition" rely on human logic as the main building block and substrate. Logic is a human basis of agreeing which seems necessary evolutionary. Counting and separating observable objects turned out to be quite necessary for survival as well. Hence this statement seems to imply that aliens would need to have a corresponding logic reasoning system and observational abilities. If that was the case perhaps there would be a strong inclination to believe that the isomorphic reasoning would be deduced.
pattt
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4 years ago
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on: So you want to study mathematics
Spivak’s Calculus reignited my interest and appreciation in math. Sad to discover the author passed away quite recently. The way of explaining principles and making you do the hard work via problems which I believe is a must with this book, is profoundly astonishing. There’s a lot of mathematical insight packed into those problems, it almost feels you can build up the entire high school and the early uni curriculum from the ground up, for instance there are a number of popular formulas you’d arrive at and derive accidentally while working on those problems. Furthermore it really works your brains by making sure you can reason within the established framework and exercise great doubt. I’m taking this book very slowly.
pattt
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4 years ago
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on: It's OK to not be passionate about your job
To each their own, but overemphasis of the need for passion might just be pushing societies towards even more workaholism. Being passionate about your job you would probably end up spending more hours, much more effort, making it your utmost priority. We could see these as desirable properties for the businesses, but at what cost for individuals?
pattt
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4 years ago
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on: Yoga and meditation do not quiet the ego but instead boost self-enhancement (2018)
Some spiritual traditions and teachers (e.g classical yoga) treat this as a trap, it’s highly advised to forget about your practice and go about your day after the daily session. They maintain that the lifestyle will adjust (or not) naturally depending on one’s needs, and those needs are usually not what the ego wants at least in its initial condition. This includes talking to others about your practice in particular unacquainted ones, any drastic adjustments to one’s diet, schedule. Any sort of excitement or obsession about the practice are detrimental, at least from the classical yoga technology perspective. But then again as the top comment says this really depends on the approach, it seems like marketing such Oriental practices as productivity/wellness hacks with immediate effects provides more excitement and profitability than just following your sensations while steadily performing a few easy looking and un-complicated asanas.
pattt
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4 years ago
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on: IPython 8.0
Any recommended workflow of integrating IPython and vim in 2022 preferably being able to edit the notebooks, execute cells etc.? Currently this is one of the few reasons why I’m running a full-blown IDE with Jupyter integration. A mature plugin for integration having similar qualities to, say, Fugitive, would be vim users dream I suppose.
pattt
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4 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What is something important I should start doing in my 20s?
There are already many great suggestions from others with a number of positive things you can do that will most likely have a good impact on your future, now it's all about you making choices. I'll give you just one and a simple one that I found to be an essential building block when growing up and trying to make sense out of things around which can sometimes become overwhelming.
Exercise independent thought and awareness of yourself (self-inquiry) and those around you.
Give yourself time to do it, sink it in. Time invested in understanding yourself will bring great appreciation for life which will lay a solid foundation for all the positive things to come in your future.
pattt
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4 years ago
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on: Overloaded: Is there simply too much culture?
Very interesting find which can have one ponder about some ideas on the perspective that nothing is really new, just changing shapes. Even if you consider the advent of AI and us striving to build higher intelligence models to me it all just seems to be stemming from solving problems via abstractions (shortcuts) using evolving frameworks of logic and math. Eventually our interest to automate things and discover all the secret sauce of problem solving got us here. However regarding Seneca you might imagine that a long while ago information retrieval wasn't that efficient and required significant amount of patience and planning which one might argue is being "optimized away" with the technology nowadays. This seems to correspond to how our brain works by optimizing energy expenditure. I remember reading somewhere that such optimization is in principle what causes us to make premature assumptions so that we don't have to do the heavy lifting by thoroughly digesting all the information that is being presented to us which is probably what we can experience in peer interactions or just skimming through those articles and comments daily.
pattt
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4 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What’s the Next Big Thing?
Any starting points for some of us who still don't "get it"? Having done an introductory course on Bitcoin (coursera) I found it interesting especially for somebody with a bit of crypto/security background, however it didn't really deliver that long lasting wow effect.
pattt
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5 years ago
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on: Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation
Zen masters also rejected meditation as a means to the spiritual progress because there is no such thing in the tradition. Sitting quietly is more appropriate IMHO.
pattt
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5 years ago
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on: Myths about how the brain works
I'm not somebody well informed about neuroscience hence apologies if I'm implying something that's against the common knowledge in your domain. One impression upon reading articles like these seems to be that there's a lot of research and curiosity about the way brain works together but the core model of "brain is composed of communicating neurons" seems to be generally accepted. Does that suggest that we already understand how a single neuron behaves in isolation? I'm mainly interested in the microscale model from the perspective of simulation, for example in the Wiki page of the Human Brain Project (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project) among the obstacles it's mentioned that "detailed neuron representations are very computationally expensive", does it mean that we already cracked the microscale, i.e., defined exactly how a neuron behaves in a computational (mathematical) model? Perhaps the substantial intricacies of the brain can also arise in the microscale level depending on cellular mechanisms, nutrition and other side effects?
pattt
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5 years ago
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on: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
I personally agree with your sentiment but the two provided advice examples are not comparable, it's not just about giving a birth but also raising your kids which can give your career a good break. Incidentally this perspective also reveals our sad state of priorities.
pattt
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5 years ago
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on: Go typosquatting package relays info to tech firm
Kudos for removing the nation from the title to neutralize the bait and keep it technical. I know this comment doesn't contribute much, just wanted to acknowledge the effort.
pattt
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12 years ago
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on: Facebook reveals friends list even when it’s set to private
1) Create a completely new zero account with no connections.
2) Send a friend request to a user whose "private" friends you want to see.
3) Immediately withdraw your friend request.
4) See the "people you might know" list, voilà.
(at least it used to work for me about a year ago when i was looking for one girl)
pattt
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12 years ago
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on: Ask HN: Do you couchsurf?
I used to quite often until it became too commercialized and bloated in terms of community and service both, now this looks like a promising alternative -
http://www.bewelcome.org/.
pattt
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12 years ago
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on: OpenSSH security advisory
"This vulnerability is mitigated by the difficulty of
pre-loading the heap with a useful callback address and by
any platform address-space layout randomisation applied to
sshd and the shared libraries it depends upon."
Right. But in order for RoP explotation (say chain some libc function calls) to work you'd still have to manipulate the stack arguments in some fancy way, also it's not really sure how trivial is "pre-loading the heap" since it's a post-authentication stage bug as the advisory mentions. Of course these are just speculation, digging into the source code might change perspective :)
pattt
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12 years ago
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on: OpenSSH security advisory
PoC ? Seriously with all the complex OS memory management access control, isolation and randomization features (like security features implemented by OpenBSD) writing a working exploit for this would be a real state of art ..
