Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

I used to run before this latest bug, like a year ago, but I hated it. My only goal was to do a sub 30 minute 5k and I trained for like 8 months with 0 progress and was so dejected I quit. I would show up, run at a 10 min pace for as long as I can, repeat. It felt like shit and I didn’t get better. My growth happened when I just ran 4.5 mph until it was the _bad kind_ of uncomfortable (this is too much stress on my shins vs my legs muscles are building lactic acid). After two weeks, I upped the pace a tiny tiny bit. I spend most of my runs fighting with myself to slow down.

The science behind it is something something aerobic base and running economy. I’m absolutely not an expert, but anecdotally I’ve never had my life improve so much in such a short amount of time by just _running slower_

- The utility of randomness: returning from a machine learning conference in Italy where I had a pretty random (if you do not believe in fate) conversation with a stranger, where suddenly more people stood around and joined in. It basically started with me commenting on one poster "Isn't it amazing how useful randomness is, given there is no pattern/structure in a random sequence, and it costs me nothing to make up?" What I meant is how can something as arbitrary still be useful. Suddenly we started collecting examples: randomized algorthms like the random walker model behind PageRank, Random Forests in machine learning, random numbers for perfect encryption (one time pad), Pentti Kanerva's "Hyperdimensional Computing: An Introduction to Computing in Distributed Representation with High-Dimensional Random Vectors" (thanks to an anonymous Finnish bystander, for I could not recall Kanerva's name at the time) etc. Today, I found a book that studies how random people's travel decisions are: Ennio Cascetta (2009) Random Utility Theory, Heidelberg: Springer.

- hypergraphs: graphs have been very useful representations for so many things in work and life, but they are only for expressing dyadic relations between nodes, whereas their generalizations, hypergraphs can express n-ary relations between nodes.

- how to bring people back to a culture of books & libraries: I collect books and I read a lot. As I teach/lecture also, I often ask my students about their reading habits, and find it shocking that many have never been to a library, and most do not read books. I would like to contribute to changing that (seems harder than finding out whether P = NP?).

```

set editing-mode vi

Control-l clear-screen

```

Also install vimium[0][1] to get vim movements and some useful keybindings in your browsers.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...

> And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.

I totally disagree. StrongLifts (and the Starting Strength book it derives from) starts you with the empty bar. Unless you have a serious medical condition, putting 20kg on your back / chest is unlikely to result in serious bodily harm or damage to musculature. As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. At least, that's how it worked for me (I only made it to ~100kg squats though).

Of course it's great if you can find a good coach. But I think an app like StrongLifts is a viable+reasonable substitute for a coach.