abraxasz · HackerTrans

12 年前議論

Only slightly related but I read "masters of doom" recently and I can't recommend it highly enough. It is a very entertaining read even if you are not crazy over video games. It tells the story of the two Johns, and mention Commander Keen among other things. Great read

abraxasz

12 年前議論

I think it again depends on what you mean by hacker. If a web developer is passionate about web development, learns everything he can about it, enjoys doing it, and approaches it like an aesthete, then according to the author he is a webdev hacker (or whatever you want to call it). There are many other definitions of "hacker" that wouldn't include the aforementioned web developer (I'm thinking of Eric Raymond's essay on the topic). In the end, there doesn't seem to be a broad agreement on the topic.

abraxasz

12 年前議論

I think the problem is more (6) deliberate practice is hard to define. Some people believe that just sitting and doing problem sets is deliberate practice. Some people believe that hacking on a side project is deliberate practice of programming skills. I don't think that any of those two examples would qualify as deliberate practice.

abraxasz

12 年前議論

If so this should really have been made clearer in the press coverage because it is very different from the way I and probably other people understood it. I understand that soundclound would need a way to make money, and what you describe seems like a very reasonable way to proceed. However, a youtube-like or spotify-like ads system would likely be much harder to sell to users.

abraxasz

12 年前議論

Didn't know about unmode! I checked it out and I like it very much, thanks for sharing!

abraxasz

12 年前議論

Didn't know about unmode! I checked it out and I like it very much, thanks for sharing!

abraxasz

12 年前議論

That was exactly my thought when I read the comment. I would be very curious to know if I'm missing something here, but it seems obvious to me that if a publicly owned company can do something better and cheaper (cheaper not only just for these people but also for the taxpayer, I don't know if that's the case here) then how is that a bad thing?

abraxasz

12 年前議論

I agree with your remarks. One reason, however, why I still enjoy reading articles on the site from time to time is that they almost always make me think. Their perspectives, however flawed, have the merit of being strongly coherent, and trying to find what's wrong with an article turns out to be a very good exercise in judgment.

abraxasz

12 年前議論

I had a similar thought when I watched the video. Actually, I thought about the concept of 'Quality' as introduced in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Two moments in particular:

- the consistent lighting part: the guy is making this giant epic thing, so you'd think he would cut himself some slack on what really looks like a detail (I wouldn't have noticed it, especially not in this type of game). And yet, the guy absolutely obsesses over it because, you know, that's how it feels right.

- the 'aging' part, when he explains how he kept upgrading old sprites or levels as his skills improved so they "would match up to his standard".

And the best part is that the guy doesn't come off as being arrogant or anything. Just a dude, making the game he would like to play, and making sure it's as good as he dreams it to be. Inspiring.

abraxasz

12 年前議論

Ok, so I do believe that CEO's are usually overpaid with regard to their performance. That being said, I am not convinced by the methodology used in the study, specifically the period used for measuring the performance: 3 years. It sounds like a lot of time, but actually, I would expect a truly great CEO to undertake projects with a 5 years or more horizon. There's this great interview of Bezos discussing the point of focusing on quarterly results vs long term. So an alternative explanation for the findings could be: the highest paid CEOs invest in 5-10 years projects, so their results after 3 years are below average.

Again, I repeat that even before reading the study, I intuitively agreed with their conclusion, but I'm not so sure about their argument to prove it

abraxasz

12 年前議論

Genuine question: The article goes on and on about how making the apps paid in developing countries would make more sense than using ads, etc, etc.. Ok, I see the point. But is it really that different from the developed countries? How much do they get per user in advertisement? How much would it cost me if I wanted to opt out of advertisement? I don't know if people in general prefer ads, but if I had to pay, say $5 a year for a an ad-free whatsapp, I'd gladly pay. Is it ridiculously low compare to what they make with ads?

abraxasz

12 年前議論

I'm not a specialist of FP, so please take what I say with a grain of salt. Before answering your questions, here's a preliminary point:

0) The problem is that FP is not really defined anywhere, or rather, everyone has its own definition. I was wondering about the definition of FP about a month ago, and discussed it with my roommate who's a phd student in programming languages. The conclusion of this 2-hour long conversation was: well FP is kind of a fuzzy concept. The concepts of FP languages, typed languages, static languages, etc.. all tend to conflate. Some people will consider that Scheme, Python, Ruby, Scala, Haskell, OCaml, R are all FP languages. Some will say that only Haskell and OCaml really are. Whatever..

Keeping that in mind, here some attempts at answers:

1) In a very loose sense, I guess that you can say that, and to make it possible, you need some constructs in your language, the minimum requirements being higher order functions, and maybe closures. I'd say that's the minimum, but again I'm no specialist. But then if you want to push this "no globals" moto to its logical extreme, you get to a point where you can't even use a "print" function, since it has some side effects. Haskell does, and solves the problem with monads. But to have monads you need a very particular type system, which leads to the question of wether you need a type system to go FP all the way? I don't know. Someone more knowledgeable should answer that

2) I don't know about hardware. But like I said, FP can deal with state. In fact, even hardcore FP as embodied by Haskell can deal with state. It's not trivial to wrap your head around the concept, but it's worth giving it a shot.

abraxasz

12 年前議論

These are only speculations, but here are points based on my own habits:

1) The most important criterion for me when looking for a store, is walking distance. I don't want to bike, or drive to the store. So the closest store is almost guaranteed to win my business.

2) The second most important criterion is the price. I'm still a student so I'm a bit careful with my spending. So if a store is much much cheaper, and not too much further, then I might go there when I have big errands to run.

3) I am pretty much insensitive to the layout of the store. I'm already walking 10-15 minutes to get there, so 30 seconds between milk and bread is no problem really

Anyway, my point is that in my case, the reason why the "better" store doesn't win is that I don't really care about the criterion used to define it as "better". So going back to your point, a store doesn't have anything to do to serve my interest other than being close to my apartment and lowering the prices. The rest is almost totally irrelevant to me.

abraxasz

12 年前議論

Thanks for sharing, that was a wonderful essay, highly recommended!

abraxasz

12 年前議論

"None of the executives who signed the letter are scheduled to appear at today’s Senate hearing. Witnesses on the agenda include Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole, NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett and FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano."

The lineup they have is hilarious. It probably went something like:

- [senate] James, do you think we should end mass surveillance

- [Cole] No

- [senate] Dick, whaddya think?

- [Ledgett] Nope, it's allright

- [senate] Ok, Mark?

- [Giuliano] Meh, nah, I think we're fine

- [senate] Well then, after extensive consultation with all interested parties, blablabla

(I know, I know, it's way overboard, I don't believe it myself, but that's the first thing that came to mind when I read the quote, and I had a good laugh)

abraxasz

12 年前議論

Let me quote an excerpt from Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman (p. 127 from my edition): "... I had a very good group [..] clever boys from high school who had an engineering ability". So yes, it was a team of people, but those working on this specific problem seem to have been high schoolers or recently graduated kids :)

abraxasz

12 年前議論

Off the top of my head:

* John Karmack's game engines for Commander Keen, Doom, Quake * Palmer Luckey's original Rift design * Feynman's "parallel" computer at Los Alamos

And many many more if you include mathematical / physical discoveries although these are not strictly speaking "technological feats". I would add that I do not agree with Zuck's statement, no matter how many examples I can come up with (and despite the fact that I'm myself under 30)

abraxasz

12 年前議論

I read the book a while back and it is absolutely fantastic. What I understand about monads, I learnt it from this book (no other exposition of monads ever made sense to me), and I particularly like his progression functors -> applicative functors -> monads. I think it's the clearest way to proceed (certainly helped me a lot anyways)

abraxasz

12 年前議論

It seems like this depends on the universities (and maybe also on undergrad vs grad), but I've done my masters, and am currently doing my phd at an Ivy in the US, and I've been pleasantly surprised to find out that we are almost never required to buy any books. Often, the professor uploads a set of very comprehensive notes accumulated over the previous years to complement the notes we take in class. It's happened (three times out of maybe 8 classes) that the professor is writing his own book on the subject, and so is giving us free copies. So instead of requiring books, the professor indicates which books are interesting/useful references on the subject and puts them on reserve in the library for the students of the class. I think it's a good system.

One thing though. This is doable in science because, well a theorem is a theorem. But about humanities where you have to study specific texts or corpora? I don't think there's much choice there..

abraxasz

13 年前議論

I know that it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, and that given the awesome work they are doing, this is worth the hassle. But I'd like to make a comment concerning the payment method. Last week I make my very first donation to Wikipedia. How did it happen? I saw the usual banner, and then, one of the payment options was Amazon. So I entered an amount, clicked the "pay with amazon", and was done. No entering my credit card, filling out forms, or anything. Zero friction. Amazon style. At this moment I realized that the reason why I hadn't donated before isn't that I didn't think the cause was worthy, but simply that the perceived hassle outweighed my desire to give. They removed that friction, they got my money.

So again, given the work they are doing, that's no excuse for not donating. But still, I wonder if that would boost the donations..

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