All of Singularity7337's Comments + Replies

3Kevin
Because at their best, Hacker News discussions are more useful than the actual story. Hacker News isn't my site and it is effectively run as a non-profit anyways.
9mattnewport
Hacker News isn't really a blog and it's certainly not Kevin's blog unless Paul Graham is posting here under a extremely deceptive user name.

What about the gamma function is bad? Is it the offset relation to the factorial?

1Sniffnoy
Yeah. It's artificially introduced (why the s-1 power?) and is basically just confusing. Gamma function isn't really something I've had reason to use myself, so I'm just going on the fact that I've heard lots of people complain about this and never anyone defending it, to conclude that it really is as dumb as it looks.

Uh, how is e^(pi*i) = 1 lame?

1dclayh
Maybe because e^0 = 1?

I don't see myself with ten fingers as a posthuman anyway.

Has anybody else wished that the value of the symbol, pi, was doubled? It becomes far more intuitive this way--this may even affect uptake of trigonometry in school. This rates up with declaring the electron's charge as negative rather than positive.

2Thomas
http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.pdf
2simplicio
One can dream. :) Pi relates to diameter; it'd be much nicer if it related to radius directly instead. Personally, I want to replace the kg in the mks system with a new symbol and name: I want to go back to calling it the "grave" (as it was called at one time in France), having the symbol capital gamma. Then we wouldn't have the annoying fact of a prefixed unit as a basic unit of the system.
3rortian
e^(pi*i) = -1 Anything else: lame.
3zero_call
No. This is nowhere near like the metric vs. english units debate. (If you want to talk about changing units, you should put your weight on that boat instead, as it's much more of a serious issue.) Pi is already well defined, anyways. It's defined according to its historical contextual meaning, regarding diameter, for which the factor of 2 does not appear.
0Sniffnoy
Definitely. 2pi appears so much more often than pi.
0wnoise
Meh. 2 Pi shows up a lot, but so does Pi, and so does Pi/2. I think I'd rather cut it in half, actually, as fractions are more painful than integer multiples.
4RobinZ
I read an argument to that effect on the Internet, but I don't have any strong feelings - maybe if I were writing a philosophical conlang I would make the change, but not normally. You may as well argue for base four arithmetic.
wnoise130

Even outside the joke template, "I like my ..." is a statement purely about preferences, not about actually having multiple concurrently. And "my" in English is not purely about ownership, but about relations, ownership being just one specific and quite common relation. (Consider "my school", "my employer", or "my friend").

2[anonymous]
He's engaged. They're adorable.

Well, yes, it is meant to mean "elite". There are several variations of it, though.

Good point. I admit to being confused by the use of "suck" and singularity. But certainly--a dystopian singularity will leave perhaps nothing to laugh at.

7orthonormal
And a great many Singularity scenarios will just leave nothing to laugh.

Perhaps it is wrong to use the same digit to refer to separate letters. 133+ is OK, 1337 is OK, but 7337 seems to break that criteria. Point noted.

2wedrifid
More to the point, 1337 is the popular convention. If the numbers were not meant as a reference to the convention then they would be more silly than they already are.
3wedrifid
That is a significant claim. Not least because it implies that given that a singularity occurs it will be a singularity that doesn't suck. (Better as a goal than it is as a prediction.)

Just in case you hadn't actually known this: "I like my women the way I like my coffee" is an archetypical joke beginning, like "Two men walked into a bar" or "How many [profession members] does it take to screw in a lightbulb?". I saw it as more a clever twist on the genre of the joke than as a statement of steven0461's philosophy.

wedrifid120

Voted down. Rationally, your statement indicates you presently have multiple women

You know what? I read the comment a second time and I actually don't even think it indicates that, even when being literal. It doesn't indicate that he is presently drinking two cups of coffee either.

9FAWS
You confuse rationalism with straw Vulcanism
6mattnewport
Voted down for spelling 1337 wrong in your username.
4Furcas
You're confusing rationalism with pedantry and humorlessness.

It looks like you say:

"To that end, I want to start off by considering some comfortable examples, where someone else is the butt of the joke, and then consider examples which might make you more uneasy."

This is before you mention software development. Software developers are over-represented in general on the internet, and I sort of glazed over and wondered if I was back on Reddit/digg/slashdot/... .

8mattnewport
I don't think 'the internet' and 'Reddit/digg/slashdot/...' are really the same thing anymore... Software developers are a disproportionate percentage of participants in some parts of the internet but probably not on, say, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube or many of the other sites with the highest traffic. It is not really true any more that software developers are 'over-represented in general on the internet'. They probably are on this particular site however.

I'm curious--I was under the impression that lesswrong.com was a community dedicated to rationality. Some may be like your father--good at math, but bad at navigating computers. Why did you assume that people on this site are computer oriented?

5Morendil
That's a fair question. I know that a number of people here are programmers, for one thing. For another, I deliberately aimed very low with the anecdote about "clueless users", so that even LW readers who are not programmers would feel, with respect to someone that clueless, the same way I feel with respect to my dad, whose confusions about computers are quite a bit more sophisticated. The implication isn't that the reader is a computer expert, but that they have some area of expertise in which they feel as clued in as I feel in computers, and I'm inviting them to identify with me when I tell the anecdote about my dad. Would it make more sense for you if I amended the sentence starting "If you are a software developer", so that it read "I'm a software developer, so for me that tends to be..."

How was it? Did you manage to extend your talk with some questions?

Would love to see the video. It would be great to see what can be done.

With regards to Karma, it could be equal up and down. This is less likely if you were checking it. Digg allows you to view plus and minus karma counts separately, for one.