Recent but great talk posted here, What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System [1] by Prof. Michael Levin. He talks about how long term low energy electrical networks between all cells in living organisms shape how the organism grows. I think what he talks about will be the future of medicine as it allows for an amazing degree of high level control over how animals grow.
Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
81–90 of 205 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like English is not your first language ..? He’s very articulate, and not only does he make a lot of sense, I’ve never seen him caught in a lie. And I have no idea what makes you think it’s pub talk, I’m from the land of pubs (Ireland) and I’ve never heard anyone talk like he does in one.
what good does it do pointing that out, if it's even true? it's clear they meant articulate and public.
“Pub talk” is a thing, and “can’t discern from overengineered pub talk” makes sense.
“Can’t discern from overengineered public talk” is plausible, but it would be very unusual to phrase it that way.
It’s not really clear that he meant "public."
Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is a very controversial figure in both Greece and Europe as a whole.
Controversial in the very least. I also got the impression that he was quite anti-EU with his whole Greece rhetoric during the discussions about another Greek buyout. Maybe I got him wrong..?
From the talk he appears everything but anti-EU. If you carefully listen to him, what he aims at is a federal-EU. He also justify the collapse of high-balance-deficit countries with the fact everyone is in the Eurozone. Therefore fuelling the borrow of capital that won’t be repaid, until bankruptcy.
Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
#84Alex Hannold's Ted Talk on how he free soloed El Cap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iM6M_7wBMc Another favorite one of mine was Jimmy Chin talking about how they shot Free Solo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq_vvnxZ6I0
To other people not getting what free solo is, it means climbing a cliff without ropes.
Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
#85Why Germany cannot and should not pay to save the Eurozone, by Yanis Varoufakis (Video in English) http://www.cesifo-group.de/de/ifoHome/events/seminars/Muench...
At around 15'40", Varoufakis says that Bretton Woods collapsed in 1971. I'm not enough of an economist/historian to understand this reference. Is he talking about the dollar going off of the gold standard? If so, why is he equating Bretton Woods with this arrangement (ie the dollar being on the gold standard?) Edit: nm, found this from the US National Bureau of Economic Research: https://www.nber.org/chapters/c6876.p…
The Bretton Woods system was a predecessor of the Eurozone (Fixed exchange rate currency). Saying, that in order to have a healthy common monetary union you need to have a federal union first. Otherwise things crashes, as happened to bretton woods and as it’s happening on the eurozone
Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
#86"Q: Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? A: Because Keynote Speakers Make Bad Life Decisions and Are Poor Role Models" James Mickens https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...
This is definitely the most hilarious one, James is a genius.
Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
#87The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Create It. But Is It Already Too Late? by Alan Kay https://videocast.nih.gov/Summary.asp?Live=28442&bhcp=1
Kay begins at 4:00.
Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
#88This one struck a chord for me, related to trying to share your personal/health situation at work, not a topic that is talked about alot - https://ministryoftesting.com/dojo/lessons/i-have-a-secret-a...
Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure that he doesn't understand it, or is it possible that you haven't worked with the same scale of systems he has? Here's my response to his talk, which I found insightful: https://lobste.rs/s/zdvg9y/maybe_not_rich_hickey#c_povjwe Also, I think your comment suffers from the problem here, where you invoke "type theory" without any elaboration: https://lobste.rs/s/zdvg9y/maybe_not_rich_hickey#c_ioeyob Rich ha…
But protos and Haskell's type system solve different problems. Perhaps, maybe, public apis like protos shouldn't encode requiredness of any piece of data (I actually fully agree with this). But that says nothing about whether or not my private/internal method to act on a proto should care. Another way of putting this is that requiredness ahiuslnt be defined across clients (as in a proto), but defining it within a con…
> But protos and Haskell's type system solve different problems.
That's pretty much my point. Hickey is very clear what domains he's talking about, which are similar to the domains that protos are used in -- long-lived, "open world" information systems with many pieces of code operating on the same data.
People saying "Rich Hickey doesn't understand type systems" are missing the point. He's making a specific argument backed up by experience, and they are making a vague one. I don't want to mischaracterize anyone, but often I see nothing more than "always use the strictest types possible because it catches bugs", which is naive.
I agree with your statement about private/internal methods. I would also say that is the "easy" problem. You can change those types whenever you want, so you don't really have to worry about modelling it incorrectly. What Hickey is talking about is situations where you're interfacing with systems you don't control, and you can't upgrade everything at once.
Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
At around 15'40", Varoufakis says that Bretton Woods collapsed in 1971. I'm not enough of an economist/historian to understand this reference. Is he talking about the dollar going off of the gold standard? If so, why is he equating Bretton Woods with this arrangement (ie the dollar being on the gold standard?) Edit: nm, found this from the US National Bureau of Economic Research: https://www.nber.org/chapters/c6876.p…
The Bretton Woods system was a predecessor of the Eurozone (Fixed exchange rate currency). Saying, that in order to have a healthy common monetary union you need to have a federal union first. Otherwise things crashes, as happened to bretton woods and as it’s happening on the eurozone
The Euro is not fixed to anything, but its value floats freely like any other currency. It is "fixed" to Eurozone members in the sense that they can't value/devalue it by themselves.
Comparing the Bretton Woods system to the Eurozone is not a direct comparison