Bell's theorem, proving Einstein's intuition was wrong, and that quantum mechanics does have some sort of a spooky action at a distance, (this or that the moon is not necessarily there when you don't look at it). E.g. we have either no locality (cause and effect can't propagate faster than light), or no realism (things don't have a "realness" until measured, e.g. the wave function mode of particles), or superdeterminism (everything is predetermined, no free will, nothing is random, not even the random behavior of quantum particles that seem the most random thing in the world)
Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
211–220 of 839 posts
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#212Nick Cave, on writer's block: "My advice to you is to change your basic relationship to songwriting. You are not the ‘Great Creator’ of your songs, you are simply their servant, and the songs will come to you when you have adequately prepared yourself to receive them. They are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of you, unable to get in." https://www.theredhandfiles.com/do-u-have-any-spare-lyr…
I cannot fathom how this metaphysics would help me at all. And I’m both religious and a film major/screenwriter.
I think productivity rewards focus - deeper focus on discerning the fine details of a problem and actively diving and driving.
Creativity rewards sort of the opposite. It's like letting your gaze wander and see what's around you. Capturing the ideas that fly by like butterflies in a net, and being their steward.
Try doing a side-project based on a whim and then expand it as butterflies collect.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#213"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" More and more, I'm realizing this applies more broadly than just for code. Abstraction is a form of optimization and shouldn't be done before the space has been properly explored to know what abstractions should be built. Standardization is a form of optimization and shouldn't be proposed until there's a body of evidence to support what's being standardized. Failure to…
All fine and well, just consider that Donald Knuth was talking about shaving off some cycles by carefully selecting machine instruction.
Donald Knuth, the same guy that got upset about being forced to use 64-bit pointers in a binary compiled for x86-64 even in programs where he would've been just fine with a 4GB address space.
He didn't exactly mean to say "omg wtf computers are so fast just use create-react-app", but that seems to be the general reception.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#214Compounding, growth etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY Taught me the logical impossibility of the stock market to go up by x% per year, forever. Taught me that getting better today (however small) can give resources to getting better(er?) tomorrow. Taught me that many "experts" just say whatever to get voted in or to get a budget without regards to the absurdity of their own statements, and that many peo…
For me, this type of thinking does the exact opposite in that it has a chilling effect on finding solutions and correctly assessing reality.
While some of what Al Bartlett says is true, that unfettered exponential growth can't go on forever, other statements are misleading or outright false.
He has a soapbox about limiting population growth now (in the US) [0], tied in to concepts of peak oil and other "dark green" talking points. This type of thinking misses the larger picture. The irony is that exponential growth happens all across the board, not just in population growth and energy usage but in innovation for more efficient energy usage and in finding alternative energy sources.
Al Bartlett builds a straw man argument, saying "technological optimists assure use that technology will always solve all of our problems ..." [1] but this isn't true. The argument against Bartlett's statement is that we haven't hit the ceiling on energy that's available to us. This is one of the first issues I have with this thinking: if we were to take his argument at face value, limit population growth, turn down our energy usage and try to live with what we have, then we're setting ourselves up for failure as every other country on the planet shifts to solar because it provides cheaper energy (yes, even to coal) and will only get exponentially cheaper for a good period of time [2] [3].
Here's some simple arithmetic [4]: The average US household consumes 30kWh of energy a day. The available energy falling to the surface of the earth is about 700 * 10^12 kWh per day. That means, at US levels of consumption, the ceiling on just using the sun for our energy needs is 23 trillion people. The earth's population is 7.6 billion now. Even taking Bartlett's estimate of population doubling every 40 years, that's over 400 years of growth.
This is zero-sum thinking and leads to all sorts of "us vs. them" mentality. My first thought is that these are the proto arguments for new forms of eugenics and other oppressive behavior. It also ignores the complexity of the situation of population in the US. I think it's pretty conclusive that strong public education and financial freedom lead to less children. In the US, we already are at sub-replacement but for immigration that boosts our population [5].
I would suggest you take Al Bartlett's advice and not let other people do your thinking for you [6].
[0] https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=4042
[1] https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=3640
[2] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/renewables-cheaper-than-75-perc...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law
[4] https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=4070
[5] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_01-508.pdf
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#215Compounding, growth etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY Taught me the logical impossibility of the stock market to go up by x% per year, forever. Taught me that getting better today (however small) can give resources to getting better(er?) tomorrow. Taught me that many "experts" just say whatever to get voted in or to get a budget without regards to the absurdity of their own statements, and that many peo…
I want to point out the primary indices like the Nasdaq and S&P500 kick out poorly performing companies.
So they very well could go up x% per year if their managers felt like it. It doesn't really bound to the marketcap of its components, just their relative marketcap amongst each other.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#216If your friends--or especially your SO--don't have your back, it's time to move your back. You deserve to have at least one person in your life that is always on your side. Especially for an SO, if they can't do that, get rid of them. Far better to be alone.
Forget your friends. You want a BOSS that has your back. If your boss doesn't have your back, it's time to move jobs.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#217Credit Default Swaps
good times
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#218Ignorance can be bliss. Didn't change my life, but has definitely helped me in a lot of cases, especially recent times. Generally speaking, I can't affect what is currently happening in the news, despite how upsetting it might be, and it won't even affect me in a lot of cases. I try to consume little information for things I don't care about or will have a negative effect on me as a way to spare myself from anxiety.…
I feel a bit conflicted on this idea as I too believe that some things do not require attention. However, I always try to maintain a balance and try to read information if it feels imperative even when I might not be necessarily interested. This topic looks very similar to one's Circle of Competencies.
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#219Ctrl + right arrow moves to the end of a word. Game. Changer.
macOS has emacs style key bindings like this OS-wide.
Ctrl+e: end of line
Ctrl+a: beginning of line
Ctrl+p: go up a line
Ctrl+n: go down a line
Ctrl+f: go forward a character
Ctrl+b: go back a character
etc...
Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
#220The idea that your mind is not you . That "thinking", as a process, is just a tool of your body, just like eyesight, for example. Listening to meditation and mindfulness practitioners like Jon Kobat-Zinn and Eckhart Tolle, I found it absolutely groundbreaking, for myself, to realize that the mind is an instrument that needs training and tuning, and sometimes can lead you astray, and can't be trusted unconditionally.…
Related : you are more what you do than what you think. What you think mostly comes from what you do, and that determines who you are; act more, think less. Do things, don't overthink it.