mdnahas

I worked on formal proof in 2014, but abandoned it when I realized academic mathematicians would never use it. Formal proof would have helped math’s consumers: better search, fewer mistakes, easier translation (to other human languages), etc.. But academic mathematicians didn’t care about math’s users very much.

Now that there are tools that help math’s consumers and because the economy of proof production wasn’t oriented towards consumers, there is a real chance that academic mathematicians get sidelined.

A sweet video showing an inventor did love his wife.

From the Halloween episode of comedy show Saturday Night Live.

Beautiful tribute montage.

Ed Glaeser is a Harvard economist and has a paper about how racism was promoted by those making money from it. That seems more believable to me.

https://glaeser.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/political-...

As I heard it, Germany refused to carry the Usenet channel alt.sexy.bald.captain because the thought it was porn. It was a Picard fan club.

The market way to deal with outliers is to have an options market. Basically, it is an insurance market for providing electricity on a tight day. Texas has a different way of handling it that I don’t like.

A big problem in the electricity market is that most customers don’t respond to supply shocks. They pay the same price in an emergency as in normal times. So, when it got very cold and power plants started shutting down, they used more electricity because they needed more heat! The one electricity provider who did pass on higher prices to customers and reduced consumption, Griddy Energy, was roasted in the media. Because customers didn’t respond to the shortage, utilities had to. They instituted “rolling blackouts”, which we really just blackouts for any grid that didn’t have a hospital on it.

As an economist, I wondered what the capitalist equivalent of communist central planners would be. Sometimes it is futures markets and sometimes it’s consultants like McKinsey. They are a way of passing information between competitors in a market, to achieve controlled growth, market segmentation, etc.

They also serve as a part-time strategy group for the company. The company couldn’t afford that quality of people full time and they wouldn’t have as much experience as at a consultancy. And having temporary people not beholden to a superior might result in more honest reports.

So, it’s not necessarily flimflam. But I do worry a group of people who determine a company’s strategy and rarely stick around to implement it and measure it’s end result.

My thought: Claude may not have fixed the bugs, but avoided the problem for the poster’s use cases. “Fixing a bug”, in my mind, means solving all problems for all use cases. And Claude didn’t have to do that.

The insertion of NOPs is a great way to remove a function call that might have crashed the program. If you didn’t need anything that function did, you’ve solved your problem but not fixed the bug.

It varies by car. For my Honda, I believe disconnecting the antenna is enough. I looked at a Toyota and the antenna is shared. To disable the phone-home you had to disconnect a box … but that’s difficult. The box is also designed to call 911 or 999 emergency services and is connected to the microphone and one of the speakers. You have to rewire those if you want to use the microphone with your cellphone or play any stereo sound. Do your research before buying or disconnecting things.

Yes, that’s very true. I recognized that in 2014. It was hard, but I stopped doing research on formal proof.

I got an economics degree and found that the City of Austin to pay off its $3 billion dollar pension debt … and encountered the same problem you mentioned, again. Except this time my plan is to run for City Council and be their next-level superior.

As a consumer of mathematics, I want to attack the author’s idea of “what that work was meant to achieve in the first place”.

I do a lot of programming that uses mathematics. I designed the error recovery file format “par2”. I worked as a quantitative trader.

What do I want from math? To be able to search math results, understand them, and apply them. But academic mathematicians are so inwardly focused - as these authors so obviously are - that it does all of these badly! Search is still with words, not symbols and formulae. As for comprehension, many math papers are unreadable to those not in the cliche of mathematicians in that specialty. And even applied math papers don’t ship code or specify the operations explicitly.

I wanted to fix this and in 2013 I worked on formal proof. It makes symbol search and application easy. I found out that the tools had been usable for decades at that point. But mathematicians didn’t use them because they had that inward focus and didn’t give a damn about math consumers.

AI is enabling formal proof. It will carry mathematics into the computer age, which the field should have joined with every other industry in the 1970’s! I welcome it. Math will get used more and that is what the work was meant to achieve in the first place.

A businessman I talked to said that United is investing in smaller airplane manufacturers in hopes of breaking the Boeing-AirBus duopoly. Thus, giving commitments here and to Boom Supersonic.

I just looked at Strawberry. Spotify is done via a GStreamer plug-in. It looks like you have to compile it yourself.

I know someone who calls it “Scamerica”.

One cause is Congress not doing its job for 30 years. The other is the advertising funding model - website users are not the customers. Therefore, websites - especially news sites - aren’t delivering useful information to their users because that doesn’t make more money.

Therefore author is right. Reinforcement learning with this ecosystem is dangerous.

During Trump 1.0, retaliatory tariffs were targeted at swing states. E.g., on Harley-Davidsons manufactured in Wisconsin. The goal was to make it politically painful to the president and undermine his reelection chances.

I imagine Carney is picking industries that are assymetricly painful to the USA or, since Trump isn’t up for re-election, congressional Republicans.

Economist here. Yes! Politicians choose to promote certain economists. I’m tired of answering questions about Modern Monetary Theory, which Bernie Sanders chose to promote. The creator is from an economics department ranked 259th. It’s a duuuumb theory.

https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.econdept.html

AI helps with computation. The closest historical analogies are gears and vacuum-tubes/transistors.

Technologies seem to be adopted wider and faster now. See smartphone adoption rates. I agree the transition will happen quickly.

Waymo cars are doubling every 9 months. They’re on pace to replace all taxi/Uber/Lyft drivers in 9 years.

It’s a great insight and fun to think about. Perfect for HN.

If I put on my academic-paper-reviewer hat, I’d probably ask: what does that insight get us? What knowledge can we pull from databases into compilers? If we convert compiler/linker/loader operations into database lingo, then do we see patterns or more insights that let us resolve existing controversies/problems?

I haven’t read the author’s academic paper, so I don’t know what he considered the contribution to be. The contribution is “what knowledge was learned that improved the world”. The insight is enough for a minor paper, in my opinion. But if you can show it is the key to tackling an existing problem, that would be a great paper.

Academic reviews are rough. Hasty, inconsistent, often poorly written or incomplete. Responses can be random with good papers getting harsh reviews. Don’t take it too personally. Sometimes the information in a communication isn’t in the content - it is what it says about the communicator. Keep working on your writing and thinking clearly and your odds of better reviews improve … but will never be 100%!

I host a parallel translation of the original book on Peano’s Axioms. If you have comments on either the Latin or English translation, they’d be very welcome!

(My 2 years of high school Latin from a Latin-Mass priest is helpful, but insufficient.)

https://github.com/mdnahas/Peano_Book/

As someone with an Italian grandmother and both a CS and Econ degree, I got a great laugh out of this joke! Bravo!

Not in dr_scully’s reply is that his thesis says haemoglobin is not static. Blood flow to the skin can vary over time.

A German woman told me about her trip to Ireland: She tried to buy a bus ticket from the driver, like she did at home. But, in Ireland, you have to buy it at the station. The driver pulled up next to the station and said, “Run in there and buy you ticket quick! I’ll wait for you.” She did it in complete disbelief. “This would never happen in Germany!”, she said.

My worry is learning and innovation. When companies sold physical devices, other companies could learn from them and improve them. We invented patents to provide economic support for innovation.

But, with services, nothing is exposed. Every innovation can be a trade secret. That makes it harder to learn and harder for cross pollination of ideas.

It probably won’t be good for employees either. Another company won’t bid for your skills as high, since you will take a longer time to train to work on their system.

Economist here. There are 3 parties and I’d focus on the investor’s perspective. The investor gives money to the intermediary company that signs a contract with the using company. If the contract fails, the intermediary still has the asset and can still make money. It can still payback the investor.

If the investor was given a bond, it is possible they aren’t paid back in full. And that’s where I would worry. The Great Recession was so bad because bond rating agencies marked bad bonds as investment-grade. That is, bonds you could rely on. When “sure future money” isn’t sure, the system glitches.

Economist and former trader here. I did a quick skim and this market is badly structured. According to Claude, the method use to compute the prices for large sales is based on experts who use the activity on a small spot market, the details of some larger off market transactions that they find out about, and don’t publish their method. The wholesaler buyers using that price for their large contracts are … stupid. I’m not surprised that egg producers placed lots of non-trading bid - it is a common manipulation in markets. I’m shocked that wholesaler buyers accepted a system where it could have a large effect.

I would expect a small settlement because it is hard to compute the fraud’s effect on prices. The “experts” at Urner Barry who set the price don’t publish their method. Thus, prosecutors would have to be conservative about what they could prove in court.

My definition of a cult is a group where members don’t trust people outside the group. We have a lot of news sources saying that we should not trust other news sources. Especially statements like “that other news source lied once, so you should never trust them.” I think this promoted mistrust has created a lot of cults.

When members of a cult don’t trust outsiders, it allows their beliefs to drift away from reality. They’re not getting the feedback necessary to keep information grounded. And reality is a great mechanism for keeping beliefs unified. The creation of cults has splintered the USA.

I think the Internet has helped foster this. It made it cheaper and easier to create a new news source. It is cheaper and easier to fund that news source through ads or direct payments from customers. And the resulting market incentivizes news sources to keep customers by denigrating the competition, which creates cults.

We need to redesign the market for news sources, to disincentivize that behavior.

I read “Enlightenment Now” and it is full of beautiful graphs of quality of life over time improving. More GDP, less hunger, longer life spans.

There was one odd graph. It showed that rising GDP lead to more happiness in every country except one: the USA.

My father designed processors. He says all electronics are analog. Some just pretends to act digital.

Another suggestion: update an estimate of words known after every word. E.g. start out with a range of 0 to 170,000. Then after the first word, show 100 to 170,000. Etc.

Users get drops of information and can stop whenever they feel. I stopped well before 100.