Viewing profile — scottishcow

Well surely it's a matter of degree (and also chronological trends) we're talking about here. My writing may not be perfectly clear but other commenters seem to understand my point…

> Then I don't understand who this question is supposed to be directed at: To the HN community of course. > My answer would be that none of the activities you list (with the possib…

Never said it does, was it confusing? Maybe my English needs more work.

So universities are conspicuous consumption, internships are conspicuous consumption, entrepreneurship is conspicuous consumption. Perhaps the simple fact is that most people are m…

My take is that GP simply doesn’t have any experience with engineering research .

You make it sound as if the author is some middling engineer building smartphones for Apple. An EE professor at a well-regarded research university deals with the scientific method…

Japan has a long history of appreciating quirky (often useless) inventions, I think there’s a certain aesthetic quality to these gadgets that resists easy definition. https://en.wi…

Lots of great resources here, but as mentioned in the essay signaling based on external validation is still crucial. (OP seems to have won a Thiel Fellowship, I’d assume that has a…

This is tangential to the author's argument but it's amusing to see how the word "kawaii" has taken a life of its own in the West. In Japan we often make gratuitous use of English …

The legal drinking age in Japan is 20 (will be lowered to 18 in 2022), but attitudes toward teenagers drinking alcohol has historically been extremely lax here.

This is interesting! Seems we can make everything interactive these days with a simple mix of electronics and ML. Discoverability might be an issue though, I already have trouble r…

Granted 16 isn't a lot, but that's actually a higher citation count than the vast majority of academic papers. Anyways, thinking of citations as a reliable proxy for paper quality …

> Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time. Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful compani…

PageRank is a popularity contest, not sure why you’d put so much trust into it as a reliable proxy for content quality. Lots of crap can be popular. Perhaps Google is doing a decen…

The public doesn’t owe anything to academics; whether or not they decide to pay attention to literature of a certain field, it is their choice. I was merely stating my observation …

Why is it perplexing? People put more trust in fields where researchers follow (or are expected to follow, at least) the scientific method. I work in what may be called a "soft" sc…

If there really is a Newton of social robots the credit should go to Sony’s aibo — the vaguely Japanese-sounding names of Jibo, Kuri, etc. are dead giveaways of who’s the real OG h…

They're popular because they're considered Insta-worthy here in Japan, their rise pretty much coincides with that of Instagram.

> n=10 Yes interesting idea for a study but only 10 participants, presumably all around the same age. Too bad this is what passes off as scholarship in Human-Computer Interaction n…

The author makes a rather arbitrary distinction between "dumb" and "smart" technologies - trains are now considered "dumb" technology? I live in Tokyo and that was never my impress…

Despite the financial collapse in the early 90s, throughout the decade Japanese youths still had one of the highest levels of disposable income in the world so that probably had an…

Brings back memories of tangible interface research around the year 2000, these ideas seemed to have so much potential back then. Unfortunately nobody has come up with a convincing…

> The true problem with surveillance is the asymmetry of it all. This argument reminds me of those pro-gun arguments: we can't prevent guns from falling into the hands of wrongdoer…

Surprised to hear this about Barabasi, I'm no physicist but enjoyed reading his books on network science as a layperson. Is there any published criticism against his work? His pape…