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

Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 181 posts

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#161

Post by Shrezzing »

rafram wrote: post #54
Shrezzing wrote: post #29

This is somewhat off-topic, but does Wolfram have a degenerative muscle illness? He puts his right hand down at around 30 minutes, and then doesn't move it again for hours. That and his unmoving legs are strikingly reminiscent of a friend who had MS.

He gestures with both his hands frequently throughout the entire video, not just before the 30 minute mark. I think this is just confirmation bias. And frankly, if he did have a degenerative muscle illness, that would be nobody’s business but his own.

That's fair, and you're entirely correct that its nobody's business but his own.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#162

Post by falcor84 »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #148
duped wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that it's not exactly what we consider notebooks now, but Knuth was writing about literate programming several years before MathCAD.

Knuth's literate programming notably differs from notebooks in that it was designed to write explanations meant for humans, which meant that the author could present the code in chunks in the narrative sequence; the code did not have to be in execution order, unlike notebooks.

>the code did not have to be in execution order

I'm not clear on this. Is it not just about having the function definitions in an arbitrary order just like all of us mortals do? Is there anything special about the code structure that Knuth proposes?

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#163

Post by danpalmer »

dachworker wrote: post #45
danpalmer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're very traditional – I don't think software or engineering is their edge, and I suspect they outsource a lot of that to cheaper locations – they seem themselves as being more research focused. Their Glassdoor reviews used to be a bit dodgy too, nothing you wouldn't be able to guess after watching 10 minutes of any video of you-know-who though. They are also just small, only a few hundred people if I rem…

Wait, isn't software their product? Or are you distinguishing between their infrastructural and their math/science libraries?

Software is their product, but my guess is there's a separation between the product and research side which will be filled with Phds, and the "build" side which I expect is outsourced or offshored.

What I really mean is that I don't think they see themselves as an engineering company in the way FAANG do, or an "AI" company, but probably more like a maths/science department at a university.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#164

Post by hughesjj »

nomilk wrote: post #78
namirez wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a bit apprehensive since I don’t know SW personally, but what my friend described sounded like a borderline abusive behavior. Basically he treated people like they were stupid and shouted at them when they made mistakes.

I think it’s a shared trait among the ultra successful (think: bezos, jobs, musk, wolfram), that they unrelentingly pursue good ideas. In that relentless pursuit, people will inevitably have their (bad) ideas shot down. Wolfram becomes audibly irritated at bad ideas, but mostly only when they should have been better, more complete, better explained (in their interest of time, for example) etc. I think most of those w…

> that they unrelentingly pursue good ideas.

They also unrelentingly pursue bad ones. 3D fire phone interface, boring company + everything with Twitter, trying to fight cancer with a fruitarian diet ....

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#165

Post by bdjsiqoocwk »

nojvek wrote: post #134

I liked his interview with Lex Fridman. He's full of himself but has interesting things to say. WolframAlpha is a gem on its on right. Yeah we have Gemini, GPT, Mixtral but when it comes to actual compositional compute, Wolfram alpha gets you the right answer and shows you the math.

I was never impressed by Wolfram alpha.

In the for hour conversation on topic, he asks "if you want to know the weights of various dinosaurs, you can ask Wolfram alpha and it will tell you". So I asked it "what's the weight of a stegaussaurus", and it gave me some number. The i asked it "what's the total weight of all the stegaussaurus that ever lived" and it gave me some nonsense about the average [don't remember] for the population of the US. It didn't even understand the question. Calling it compute is overestimating it by as much as Wolfram overestimates himself.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#166

Post by bdjsiqoocwk »

leto_ii wrote: post #152
JackFr wrote: post #89

He's like an actually smart version of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Arrogant, egotistical and dismissive but at least he has real math chops.

Taleb has math chops, what are you talking about? He's also quite a bit less self-aggrandizing. Otoh, they do seem to like reach other, which in my book does cast some doubt on taleb's ability to judge people...

What math chops does taleb have? The same ones as any options trader, as far as I can tell.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#167

Post by bdjsiqoocwk »

Mistletoe wrote: post #52
jack_riminton wrote: post #9

Somehow people who are most convinced of their genius are the least interesting to me. Contrast with Roger Penrose and you couldn't meet a more humble, interesting and interested conversationalist

Feynman never needed to tell you how smart he was, it just flowed out naturally as he talked about things in his beautiful clear way.

Jesus Christ what an awful example. If there's one thing that feynman did whenever he met anyone, was made it clear to them that he's smarter.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#168

Post by physicsguy »

ThisIsMyAltAcct wrote: post #38
physicsguy wrote: post #18

"It all started when I invented cellular automata, this thing that will revolutionise computing... at some point."

Is this an actual quote from the video? I'm not going to scrub through 4 hours of footage to find out, sorry.

No, of course not, it's just me parodying Stephen Wolfram every time he speaks/writes. He wrote a book called 'A New Kind of Science' claiming all this stuff in about 2002 which was widely criticised by scientists as overstating it's claims and much less important than he thinks it is, but he's been talking like that ever since pretty much.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#169

Post by burning_hamster »

andbberger wrote: post #153
defrost wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a mild takedown in the set of all Wolfram slams. See, for example: A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity (2002) http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ I met Wolfram some 20 years before that review when he was on a world tour promoting the earliest iterations of Mathematica, the first iteration post his symbolic differentation work. This was the period when cellular automata, Mandelbrot…

shalizi is overwhelmingly charming. i have wanted to work with him for years, as much for the whimsy of his website as our overlap in research interests

Not to mention a fantastic writer. Already his PhD thesis was brilliant, and one of the few [1] I have ever read cover-to-cover. "Advanced data analysis from an elementary point of view" is one of my go-to recommendations for people (scientists) that have had some exposure to different concepts in data analysis (typically some regression and PCA), but want to acquire a more systematic understanding. His writing is charming as ever, his exposition exceptionally clean and straightforward, the math as simple as possible but not simpler, the advice practical. He manages to walk the very fine line in mathematical writing of being rigorous enough that the reader feels being taken seriously, while being engaging enough and maintaining a pace that allows one to actually finish the whole book without burning out.

[1] Four, to be exact, and that number includes my own.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#170

Post by seanhunter »

bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #166
leto_ii wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taleb has math chops, what are you talking about? He's also quite a bit less self-aggrandizing. Otoh, they do seem to like reach other, which in my book does cast some doubt on taleb's ability to judge people...

What math chops does taleb have? The same ones as any options trader, as far as I can tell.

On the options desk that I was a quant on[1] the traders were extremely dismissive of Taleb's math chops since in his book "Taleb on Risk: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options" he clearly doesn't understand delta hedging, which is a pretty fundamental concept, particularly if you're writing a book about managing options risk.

[1] Equity Exotics and Hybrids at Goldman in London circa 2005 or so.

Post reply on HN