mikehain · HackerTrans

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

For years I've been engaged in an enormous decluttering project in the house I grew up in. Aside from filling a few huge dumpsters, I went on countless trips to scrap yards to recycle metal stuff, to Best Buy for electronics recycling, to auto parts stores to get rid of old motor oil, to thrift stores to donate useful things, and to a hazardous materials disposal facility where I had to pay nearly $700 to responsibly dispose of fertilizers, antifreeze, old paint, and so on. I also spent entire days digitizing huge amounts of photos and documents. It has been a very time-consuming project. My piece of advice to help prevent this kind of situation is to keep a big "thrift store donation bin" beside your trash and recycling bins.

mikehain

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

I've been recently enjoying a YouTube channel by a guy who turned his yard into a sustainable "food forest"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng-VskDFPpM

That is the video that led me to it, but after I saw it I went back through his video history to see how he got the whole project started and to see his progress over the years. He has a video in there where he recommends a series of books that he learned from, like Albert Howard's "An Agricultural Testament," Sepp Holzer's "Permaculture," and Masanobu Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution." I've gotten started reading the first two and they're really great books.

mikehain

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

I'm a fan of DuckDuckGo and I've found myself using it more and more these days. I actually had to change my launcher on Android because the default Google Go launcher that comes packed with the Moto X Pure has no option to remove the Google search from every home page. I switched over to Nova launcher just so I could put a DDG search bar in its place.

mikehain

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Relevant is this quote from another link recently posted here on HN: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/08/when-it-comes...

"Europe has more stringent privacy regulations than the United States. In general, Americans tend to mistrust government and trust corporations. Europeans tend to trust government and mistrust corporations. The result is that there are more controls over government surveillance in the U.S. than in Europe. On the other hand, Europe constrains its corporations to a much greater degree than the U.S. does. U.S. law has a hands-off way of treating internet companies. Computerized systems, for example, are exempt from many normal product-liability laws. This was originally done out of the fear of stifling innovation."

mikehain

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

I was reading Augustine one day and was struck by a passage that referred a silent reading in a way that made it seem quite uncommon in those days. Here it is, referring to Ambrose of Milan:

"When he was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. He did not restrict access to anyone coming in, nor was it customary even for a visitor to be announced. Very often when we were there, we saw him silently reading and never otherwise. After sitting for a long time in silence (for who would dare to burden him in such intent concentration?) we used to go away. We supposed that in the brief time he could find for his mind's refreshment, free from the hubbub of other people's troubles, he would not want to be invited to consider another problem. We wondered if he read silently perhaps to protect himself in case he had a hearer interested and intent on the matter, to whom he might have to expound the text being read if it contained difficulties, or who might wish to debate some difficult questions. If his time were used up in that way, he would get through fewer books than he wished. Besides, the need to preserve his voice, which used easily to become hoarse, could have been a very fair reason for silent reading. Whatever motive he had for his habit, this man had a good reason for what he did."

mikehain

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Thanks for this site. I think the Snapchat breach finally explains why I've been getting so many scam phone calls in the past few years.

mikehain

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Philosophy often revolves around questions of purpose in life, and any non-mathematician might wonder why someone would devote their life to the study of advanced math. The question of purpose becomes even more interesting when a mathematician spends decades solving theoretical math problems that have no immediate practical use in engineering or programming. Any mathematician who's engaged in such problems wouldn't have any trouble understanding his own motives; for him, the philosophy is so obvious that it goes without saying. But an outsider might see his actions as inexplicable - as inexplicable as an ascetic monk spending a week meditating on a frigid mountaintop.

Philosophy functions as an aid in that understanding. The mathematician might read it and recognize truth, if it is written well, and a non-mathematician might be able to learn the rationale for devoting one's life to math. It might have a strong enough effect to make someone gravitate towards that type of life.

Different works in the philosophy of math could deal with different aspects of the mathematical life, such as the inherent beauty of an elegant proof, and it could also go into the larger, more long-term purposes of math, whose effects might not be recognized until long after the mathematician is dead.

I would think that the best philosophy of math would need to be written by a mathematician. An issue with philosophy is that it's quite difficult to write it well. There is a lot of philosophy out there that's poorly-written. It might suffer from a lack of clarity or simply be inaccurate. To have a brilliant philosophy of math, you would need a person who is both a skilled mathematician and a skilled writer. That is a rare thing.

mikehain

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

I used to have an issue with writing classes in college. Since the writers-to-be in the class aren't experts in any particular field, they are forced to pick sides in ridiculous polemic topics just to fill a page. This transfers over to the real world in the form of frivolous articles written to provide a constant stream of content to a readership.

People like engineers and other folks with technical jobs have some of the best writing material to work with - all they really need to do is recount their day's work and the problems they've encountered, and any non-expert interested in the field can read and learn from it.

There is a plumber who lives in my state who publishes video documentation of every job he goes on. Since I'm not a plumber, I learned a ton from these videos. All of the things he did would seem basic to anyone in his field, but for a lay person like myself, his videos were extremely educational.

mikehain

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

This reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT9i99D_9gI

It also reminds me of the "two dot" illusion from psychology: http://i.imgur.com/j8sEFuT.jpg

If you close your left eye and look at the left dot with your right eye, the other dot should disappear (you might need to adjust your distance from the monitor). Your eye has a blind spot that uses the surrounding information to fill in the blank space, much like what these deep learning algorithms are doing.

mikehain

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Another classic book to look at is "Letters from a Stoic" by Seneca the Younger, published by Penguin Classics. Seneca is perhaps my favorite of the Stoics.

mikehain

10 tahun yang laludiscuss

That place was my home on the internet for nearly a decade. It was a wonderful community and I'm glad to have been a part of it. I'll really miss the "What Are You Reading?" thread. Everyone on there had such fine taste. We had a good run, friends. I guess I'll move along.

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