tps5

People always say that math students don't learn about applications of math.

This was never the case for me. When I learned trig ratios, I always understood some basic things that trig ratios could be used for. The teacher always introduced some applications, we always had a lot of word problems, and I could fill in the gaps myself.

Same for calculus. When I learned calculus, I always understood some things that calculus could be used for.

So I understood how those things could be applied to general, everyday sorts of problems. What was missing, though, was that I had nothing to which I could apply those techniques, besides homework.

Learning math (and reading STEM papers) has become easier for me since I now have actual problems to solve. Don't get me wrong: I'm not solving particularly challenging problems or using particularly advanced math. Nothing that tens of thousands of people haven't done before me. But I do need to understand the problems, solutions, and some of the context in order to successfully implement them. This provides a motivation that was always missing before.

I suspect this general narrative is true for a lot of people: that having an actual problem to solve is almost necessary to get a student to really learn the material, instead of just coasting along for a grade.

You're entitled to your opinion, but posting that thesis and saying it's "more truthful" is tremendously silly.

You should be able to understand that it's a hypothesis you find convincing without evangelizing it as "truthful."

I don't see any evidence that this is a "facial recognition system."

It's likely hard to legislate against software that attempts to detect if there is a person, what their expression is, and guesses at their gender.

You could imagine that job being done by a person (just noting how many people stopped at the advertisement, and what their expression was). I don't think there's really a way to make that illegal.

I suppose I think it's something that people should be aware of, though.

On some level it's hard to believe that people say things like this, especially out loud and with women present.

(But I do believe it)

I don't understand this attitude. Atom's look/feel/functionality/default keybinds are based on sublime text. Sublime text is a lot faster/more reliable. Atom has a large community building addons for it.

Take your pick. I used atom until I got annoyed by how it choked on large files and crashed semi-frequently.

> I also don't know how an ISP would get your actual internet history if the website uses HTTPS.

Your ISP can (and likely does) monitor your DNS queries, which (as far as I know) are not encrypted.

Personally I think the net neutrality stuff is a tad overblown. I'd vote for maintaining it, but I've never been particularly convinced by the whole "surveillance state/beyond-orwellian/ISP censoring your speech" arguments that get thrown around on HN, among other places.

I think the problems with ISPs are more practical: they overcharge, provide shitty service, have no incentive to upgrade their infrastructure, and clearly collude with one another. Therefore they need to be regulated.

> I don't think its any coincidence that TV and movies show the murderous and thieving side of piracy as to condition us to be appalled by them, in general.

Is this really true? There's a long history of sympathetic portrayals of drug culture, from Trainspotting (novel and movie) to A Scanner Darkly (novel and movie) to Jesus' Son (novel and movie) to Pineapple Express (mainstream movie), and a whole lot more.

This seems right to me.

the analogy I'd use is driving a car versus sitting in a passenger seat of a car. When I'm a passenger, I never remember the route we took. I retain almost no information about lefts and rights and landmarks. But if I'm driving, I really only have to drive to a place once to remember the way.

Your argument sounds a lot like "criminals will always find a way, no point in gun control." The thing is, that argument can be applied to all laws. Why even have laws? Criminals will always find a way.

Look, I agree that anonymity is important. I agree that the world is better if some things are kept absolutely private, from everyone, to whatever extent is possible. But let's not pretend that there aren't trade-offs.

Do you have any references to recommend on this subject?

If "love of money as a possession" is so rare, then how come so many people who have huge amounts of money don't spend it?

Anyway, the general point here is that as you acquire more dollars, the relative value (to you) of a dollar diminishes. That's all the parent post was saying.

It does seems somewhat bizarre to see someone so successful still behave so ruthlessly in order to make money. Of course, that's my snap judgement. Levandowski may not be motivated by money at all. Although I doubt he's motivated by weekend trips to Puerto Rico either.

Here's Keynes with another perspective:

> When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

I know plenty of men who lived through that era (and one man who was born 4 years after Feynman) who are not in the slightest bit sexist. Or are at least far too polite to show it.

Feynman was clearly a bit of a prick. It also appears that he behaved rudely toward women [0]. In my opinion, the fact that there were some (significant) negative aspects of his personality doesn't take anything away from what he accomplished, or from the (significant) positive aspects of his personality.

[0] http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

I know a lot of people who found The Road incredibly depressing. But I thought it was optimistic and the most moving thing I've ever read.

I haven't read Blood Meridian yet, but Child of God (another McCarthy novel) definitely lacks the optimism of The Road.

As for this article, I think that the subconscious fascinates almost everyone. The reason we have psychology (in my opinion, of course) is that it's apparent to almost all of us that there's something going on under there.

Everyone has anecdotes like the one mentioned in this article, where a solution to a problem appears in a dream or pops into someone's head immediately after waking.

Some pretty highly regarded economists in the past century have backed up the idea of a land value tax. Does that alone make it a great idea? No, but I think it makes the parent comment seem pretty silly.

I certainly have an opinion, but (like I said) it's not a strong one. I don't understand all the moving pieces and all the incentives involved here, but I'd be interested in seeing some more knowledgeable people talk about the LVT.

It's not a horrible idea. It's an old idea that's been popular with various economists including (gasp) Adam Smith: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

(I don't know enough about this subject to have a strong opinion either way, but I feel pretty confident saying that this isn't a terrible idea)

I have no idea what "native" means in this context, care to elaborate?

Agreed: the writing is poor for reasons unrelated to grammar.

I agree that saying they "suffer from illusions" is silly. But the rest of your analysis here seems off.

There's no reason to lionize these people and act like "society rejected them." It's just (comparatively) easy to not work in the modern world, in first world countries, and these people didn't.

I don't think there's that much more we can say.

Can I check out Apple Maps in a browser? I'd like to take a look, but I don't have easy access to ios or macos.

The screenshots do look fantastic.

(Not a criticism of Apple if this isn't possible)

I never see anyone talking about google's elevation data for buildings and the process they've used to drape imagery over that elevation data. I wonder why that is? Maybe this isn't a hard problem and it's just a question of getting high quality data. Still, I've never seen any other company come close to this.

I do wonder what exactly is new here in terms of a casual user browsing the landscape. Google maps 3D offers, more or less, the same experience. And that's been around for a while.

Still, it's hard to be negative about this. The result is quite clearly better than every other comparable technology I've seen.

> no sane programmer in this day and age would ever use anything other than open source.

Apparently I'm insane. Well, good to know I guess.

> If I went around on some other private forum and said "all people who share attribute X with tps5 are sub-human and should be subservient to me" is that more or less okay?

Yeah, it's okay.

I would say that, because we are coworkers, you are obligated to treat me respectfully, whatever your personal beliefs. If you treat me poorly, and I complain, the issue is the fact that you treated me poorly, not your whacko belief system.

If this guy behaved improperly towards women, then I have no problem with him being "removed from the community." But posting X whacko opinion on Y message board should not hurt you professionally. That applies equally to racism and holocaust-denial and whatever other fringe beliefs you can come up with.

I don't think you get it.

It doesn't matter what some guy posts on some message board (unless it's a threat, an incitement of violence, or something along those lines). It doesn't matter if he says he believes in "Gorean philosophy," whatever the hell that is.

What matters are his actions. If he's treating women disrespectfully then, by all means, throw him out. But he's allowed to believe whatever the hell he wants, and the idea that he should face repercussions for his beliefs is wrong, whatever age he was when he came to those beliefs.

Sure, there's going to be some correlation between holding misogynistic beliefs and inappropriate behavior toward women, but we don't punish the beliefs, we just punish the behavior. That's what makes this a free society.

> Perhaps at some point online publishers [will] find a new way to solicit advertising from reputable companies that pay properly.

Someone get on this.

I don't think the language is the slightest bit confusing. I also think your definition of "web server" is wrong. I would say a web server is a program that processes HTTP requests and optionally responds with something (commonly HTML, but can respond with data of any format).

That includes apache, nginx, etc. It also includes programs written in X language that process HTTP requests.

I think you have to be careful about how you're using the concept of "manufacturing consent."

Part of what makes that idea so plausible to me is that there's no need for conspiracy. It's not the "mainstream media setting out to trick people" and it wouldn't be "google and facebook setting out to trick people." It's also not the government (or any other body) coercing the media into toeing some policy line.

The factors that result in "the manufacture of consent" are tangled and hard to pin down. Most of them boil down to internalized assumptions leading to the inability to think objectively about geopolitics.

> One of my colleagues went on to ascribe the ‘horribleness’ of many computer systems in everyday use to the “brusque masculinism” of their creation.

The idea that males must be more "brusque" than females is the same thing as saying that females are "attentive and caring" (in comparison to males). It's just an old stereotype.

I didn't think this article said anything new, or well.

The perspective is simply that it isn't the job of the media to say what's right or wrong, just to report what happened. They're not saying "these aren't terrorist attacks" only that the word "terrorist" is editorializing, which isn't their job.

My perspective is that it's unclear to me what you gain by describing something as a "terrorist attack" as opposed to just an "attack." I'll make up my own mind whether it's a terrorist attack or not.

I find Reuters fairly unbiased, although at the end of the day individual editors and reporters all have individual biases. If you have a recommendation for a less biased news source than Reuters please share.

I think you're right that the "modern" perspective seems to be: "bias is unavoidable, so be clear about your bias." This is why it's not considered wrong for newspapers to endorse candidates, or for the NY Times editorial board to write a weekly admonition to the new administration.

I tend to agree with you on some level. I don't necessarily think it's possible to be completely unbiased, but I'd still like it to be the goal.

Reuters is pretty good for that sort of thing (for instance they don't use the term terrorism because they see it as a value judgement).