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Is encountering function notation and the symbol for the set of real numbers all that different from encountering unfamiliar vocabulary? It is slightly harder to Google for notation, but otherwise I do not see a major difference.

In the Wikipedia page you linked, I immediately encounter several terms that I do not know the meaning of. I must either click through or search separately to fill in my own gaps.

Your criticism is not totally disagreeable, but we have to wonder where to draw the line. Is a "Hacker's Guide to Numerical Analysis" obligated to hold your hand all the way through basic notation? The notation that you mention in your comment are the "Hello world" of mathematics.

This just reads like a teardown of another person. As a reader, I come away with very little. There is the faint hint of a defense of Google's processes against Noam's criticism, but no real defense is ever made. The entire counterargument is: Noam thinks aspect X of Google is bad, but Noam is a stinky doodoo head, so let's not take his thoughts too seriously here.

I'd ask you to consider whether it was a good use of your time to write this. It certainly was not a good use of my time to read it, but maybe this comment will make up for my mistake. I say this as someone who is sympathetic to the idea that many executives spend too much time huffing their own gases.

I don't know. For a sufficiently large change, it isn't necessarily in your company's best interest to try to keep you happy. You have banked knowledge and skill in X. You have limited skill in Y but wish to learn. The loss of some fraction of X is always going to hurt the company more than your gain in Y will benefit them, so they are going to try to keep you doing as much of X as possible for as long as possible. If they were to let you switch to Y, they'd have to have already needed a junior person there, and they will now have to replace the person doing X. Maybe this is a small vs large company thing, but I think it is entirely possible to "typecast" yourself into a corner such that the best thing you can do if you want to pivot is jump ship.

Sounds like a bad captain, entirely reactive and not proactive at all. Those people were brought onto the boat to perform these duties but were given no oversight? Why didn't the captain have any knowledge of the fires that were happening so often? The captain had no idea what was being used by the cooks? He didn't talk to the people who bought the fish oil? Never had a meal with any of the lookouts or fishermen?

The captain should be the one to jump overboard in your story.

I am only claiming that the comment is not abusive. If it violates the snark guideline or similar, then sure, lock it up and throw away the key.

You may find that comment disagreeable, but it is hardly abusive. The neutered tone sung by most Hacker News castrati seems to have made folks forget what passion reads like.

I think your skepticism is well-placed. If this were a "30 day creative programming" course, I wonder what the HN reaction would be. My guess is that it would be: just pick a project and go for it, you don't need a class to start learning. Maybe atoms inspire more trepidation than bits though.

Thanks for the answers. More questions if you're feeling up to it:

Will there be any sort of requirements to "demonstrate progress" to the funders (even if that means the results of a failed experiment or some sort of open lab notebook)?

Does all research need to terminate in a paper (as opposed to, say, tooling)?

In fact, how does accountability work in this system? Do researchers need to provide a provisional timeline? Research can fail or take unexpected turns away from the initial goal, and this may or may not make funders nervous. I guess this might be a way of asking: are participants funding people, or are they funding projects?

Will there be requirements to make all papers produced freely available? All source code? Is this at the researcher's discretion?

Suppose something profitable, or merely patentable, comes out of a Strato funded stint. Do the funders have any stake in such an outcome?

This sort of thing excites me, so I do hope you find some sort of success.

What are some ways this will differ from Patreon and similar platforms? Put another way, what are some changes being made to that funding model to better support machine learning research specifically?

Supposing this platform is successful, is there an interest in expanding beyond machine learning? Why machine learning specifically? Is it what you know best, or is there some other reason to fovus specifically on ML?

I'm going to ignore "being an artist" and "being a writer" and assume you want to work on technical things. I'm also going to ignore academia because that opens a whole new can of worms about what it means to be independent within academia, how to achieve that independence, whether it is worth it, etc. But you should note that I think most people who want to work in the "independent, technical, research-first" mode would traditionally pursue academia.

Anyway, examples: Colin Percival runs Tarsnap by himself, and it turns a profit.

As another commenter mentioned, there are independent game developers who get to do technically interesting work (e.g. Marc Ten Bosch, who got a SIGGRAPH paper out along the way while making Miegakure, or Jonathan Blow, who is building a programming language [although his team grows and shrinks, so he must be acting in a management capacity, or at least like a film director]).

Sylph Bioscience is a lean team of three that seems to me to be doing very interesting work (and I don't think any of them have "traditional" educational backgrounds, though I might be wrong).

Matt Keeter works a day job and pumped out a SIGGRAPH paper largely for fun.

You can do consulting, freelance, contract work, etc. etc. until you land on what you want.

You can start some technical product with the aim to sell it in its entirety ASAP to some other entity (though of course the less work you put in on the "business-bits," the less you'll be selling that product for).

It's going to be harder to find these things or make them happen, and often they may not be very financially attractive compared to more standard paths (nor are they necessarily stable), but it seems that autonomy and creative control don't come for free in this life: you have to trade off money, time, stability, and status to do things in this manner.

Do independent thinkers read essays that tell them how to think independently?

The irony may have been intentional on the author's part, but I still won't read the essay. Bad juju.

Thank you, that helped!

Thank you for clarifying. I was familiar with the notation A^B for the set of all f: A -> B, but this seemed like something more (and it does appear to be).

Putting some links I looked at here to save someone a few seconds of Googling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_object https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/exponential+object

Are you actually even a little interested in any of these things? You mention other things being more interesting. You might be telling yourself something.

Obviously we do not live in a bubblegum dream world and you may not always be able to follow your interests exactly, but I have to imagine that if you examine those things that "seemed more interesting," you may find a new career in there. And if you don't find a new career because those things don't make any money, then maybe don't beat yourself up too much for not wanting to become better at a job that only serves to fund your true interests.

Alright, now let's hear the case for inconsistency.

What do you mean by "functions are exponentials"?

Nice, can't wait for the armada of "Slack consultants."

That is certainly a real distinction, though I think your point about immigrant families not knowing "the game" is probably the better one. If parents know how the admissions game is played, then they can throw capital (fiscal and/or social) at the problem. A non-tenured biology professor is by no means wealthy, but their daughter will almost certainly have an easier time finding a lab to volunteer at in high school than the child of the owner of a successful car dealership. So wealth is an advantage conditional on knowing the rules of the game, and you've raised an important point: a lot of families don't even know the rules of the game!

I don't disagree with your point about admissions (and in fact I came from a family that had good income but both parents never went to college, so had little advice to give).

Still: your family was already well near the 75th percentile nationally for the time. In what sense would that not be wealthy?