Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Questions

patrickcollison.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 493 posts

Re: Questions

#71

Post by tsmarsh »

ramijames wrote: post #16
panic wrote: post #8

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? > Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can…

I love books, don't get me wrong, but they do age. This is especially true of books that are specialty related. Take a book from the 70s on computers, on medicine or psychology, on prehistory, on history, etc. They are all likely to be significantly outdated compared to their modern counterparts. There is much to be said for the modern way of information transference: it is always most up to date.

Whilst your core point about books aging is absolutely true I think thats mostly the mass market publications designed to ease entry than actual papers.

Similarly, anything writen about an implementation is short lived. The Idiots Guide to Windows 98 is less useful today than it was in 1998 and is getting less useful with time.

Lovelace, Babbage, Turing, McCarthy et al are still seminal. But these are academic papers that focus on what is possible to compute and how one might construct an implementation.

There are some interesting edge cases too. Is the Gang of Four Design Patterns still relevent? Its not embarassing, but its not as applicable as it used to be.

Re: Questions

#72

Post by bachbach »

joefreeman wrote: post #22

> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? I recently read Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and suspect the answer lies in there. The examples Patrick lists are all service industries driven by labour costs. This probably influences the following two questions too (project delays and GDP).

In the construction industry there are no bullshit jobs. Zero.

However only 50% of the house price comes from the construction industry, I have another comment suggesting part of why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18040633

Re: Questions

#73

Post by reitanqild »

fredsir wrote: post #69
reitanqild wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I found this to be almost impossible to achieve when I moved from Norway to Australia. > Do you mean that you preferred the life you led in Australia to the one in Denmark? Calling a Norwegian a Dane is about as popular as saying a Canadian is from USA or calling an American British I guess ;-)

Ah, a simple mistake :)

That's what I guessed :-)

(Seems I've offended someone else though, but I have no idea why.)

Re: Questions

#74

Post by ck425 »

unixhero wrote: post #47
chucky wrote: post #35

> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more…

Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of…

Hmmm interesting observation about the long dark winters. Edinburgh similarly has a disproportionately successful tech industry (it's the same latitude as Moscow) and Estonia has also done very well in tech (for many other reasons but that might be a contributing factor).

Re: Questions

#75

Post by dasmoth »

_wzsf wrote: post #36

Not to be critical, but I pose this question in response: Why do billionaires so often love to muse about interesting things outside of their field, get attention and praise for their thoughts, and then publicly allocate only tiny portions of their wealth and time to these projects so ineffectually while passing down the majority of their wealth to disinterested heirs? e.g. Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Edgar Prince, Stev…

It’s a good question, but there are counter-examples too (Bill Gates, arguably Elon Musk) and I’d argue that these get more attention and praise — so on the whole things may not be too badly out of kilter.

Re: Questions

#76

Post by laurentl »

gomox wrote: post #53
rahimnathwani wrote: post #5

"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?" Because relative prices (e.g. the ratio of the price of a 42" TV to the price of a cinema ticket) are constantly changing due to changes in technology and competitive dynamics. Some things have gotten (and continue to get) much cheaper due to technological progress and economies of scale. So, relative to those, anything that hasn't benefited from the same trend…

On a more cynical perspective, capitalism is effective at extracting the most money from consumers. People will pay almost anything for the really essential things: health, housing, air, food and water. Education is essentially the only reproducible way to pay for all of the above. Therefore, any sufficiently late stage capitalist society has extremely high costs for all of those areas: it's just the stuff people wil…

It’s called price elasticity.

It basically means that you’re much more willing to pay a large price for a product you need and which has no substitute than for a commodity product. Which is why stunts like multiplying the price of a drug by 1000 regularly make the news.

Note that this is purely about price (ie the value you assign to the product) and has very little to do with its actual cost.

Furthermore, since you have no incentive to lower your price (indeed, you can hike it up any time you need to show more profits), well there’s no incentive to improve the underlying production process (ie lower costs) or improve the product. This goes IMO a long way in explaining the college and healthcare examples in the article.

Re: Questions

#77

Post by Kiro »

coldtea wrote: post #58
fredsir wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quality of life was insanely better there, > yet somehow I missed the possibility to sit down and be productive in some narrow topic. Do you mean that you preferred the life you led in Australia to the one in Norway? If not, how do you mean that quality of life was insanely better?

Why wouldn't they prefer it?

Nothing beats sitting in front of a computer in the dark.

Re: Questions

#78

Post by [deleted] »

bachbach wrote: post #68

There needs to be a club of people focusing on these sorts of questions consistently. There are only so many Gwerns and Scott Alexanders and Dredmorbiuses out there. There really are not that many people out there thinking about and discussing the Big Ideas and you keep running into the same ones over time. I fear many club members are lost in the blogosphere and near impossible to find with Google. Some possible ans…

[deleted]

Re: Questions

#79

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

JepZ wrote: post #57
panic wrote: post #8

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? > Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can…

There are very few people who want to read many books that are 1000 years old. The few books that interest more people can be converted to newer formats, the few people that want to read all old books will have to use extra tools to do so. That said, I am not a particular fan of books. They take a lot of physical space, are heavy and age. So as long as we stick to reasonable formats (e.g., text-based, non-binary), it…

The Bible and the Koran would easily be on the world's best seller lists if they weren't excluded by default.

You might argue - and I would agree - that this is not necessarily a good thing as far as content goes.

But the point is that putting something into writing snd giving it a tangible form on paper gives it an inherent stability and authority missing from digital media.

We tend of think of digital media as temporary, disposable, relatively low value simulacra of a Real Thing.

Digital media can be hacked, edited, deleted, and lost when the power goes off.

A copy of a book from hundreds or thousands of years ago is just going to sit there for some indefinite period. (Which actually depends on the quality of the paper - but in theory could be centuries.)

This is not about practical reproduction and storage technologies, it's about persistence and tangibility.

A book is a tangible object which has some independence from its surroundings. After printing, it's going to exist unless you destroy it. If you print many copies the contents are geographically distributed and it becomes very hard to destroy them all.

A file depends on complex infrastructure. If the power goes down, it's gone. If the file format becomes obsolete, it's gone. (This has actually happened to many video and audio formats.) If there's an EMP event, it's gone.

And it's not just a tangible difference, but a cultural. We have a fundamentally different relationship with digital data than we do with tangible objects, and this influences the value we place on their cultural payload.

Re: Questions

#80

Post by throwawaybbqed »

tsmarsh wrote: post #71
ramijames wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love books, don't get me wrong, but they do age. This is especially true of books that are specialty related. Take a book from the 70s on computers, on medicine or psychology, on prehistory, on history, etc. They are all likely to be significantly outdated compared to their modern counterparts. There is much to be said for the modern way of information transference: it is always most up to date.

Whilst your core point about books aging is absolutely true I think thats mostly the mass market publications designed to ease entry than actual papers. Similarly, anything writen about an implementation is short lived. The Idiots Guide to Windows 98 is less useful today than it was in 1998 and is getting less useful with time. Lovelace, Babbage, Turing, McCarthy et al are still seminal. But these are academic papers…

As an aside, what would be today's ideal intro to design patterns?

Now .. on topic ... I had a roomful of books collected from my youth. I cleaned out my room at my parents house some years ago ... and pretty much everything got chucked. The only books that I kept were seminal books like Knuth, Cormen, Gang of Four, TCP/IP series (v6 kinda makes them out-of-date too). All my MFC books ... java books .. pretty much all of it was out of date. I had an epiphany .. CS does not age well at all.

I no longer buy physical books ... I got a subscription to Safari and love it. Also consume tons of content on e-learning platforms. But .. I really miss real books.

Post reply on HN