I can't do anything productive or mentally taxing on long flights, I don't know if it's the air pressure or premature jetlag or what, but I have a very hard time exercising my will. What I do enjoy, though (in addition to the Marvel comics movies – I only watch them on planes) is reading documentation. It's a great time to sit down with an in-depth manual and just soak up information you didn't have before. You don't have to do anything, or make anything, you just learn how something works. Another related activity is reading a bunch of code that I know I'll be working on in the near future. There's something very pleasurable about absorbing a codebase while at the same time completely excusing myself from actually doing anything.
I've experienced the same thing. I had planned to spend a 14hr flight gaming and after 4hrs, had neither the ability not will to continue. I'm completely uninformed on the subject, but wondered whether it was the effect of a thinner atmosphere on cognitive abilities.
Another one of those threads that causes intense navel-gazing, shame, and mounting disgust in my gut for myself as I realize that everyone around me is working hard to better themselves while I just binge-watch movies.... and then my eyes glaze over as I mollify myself with the movies until I forget that this thread exists.
Life is short, enjoy your time watching movies.
I have wasted a lot of time being busy (reading non-fiction, TED talks etc) that did not translate into any noticeable self improvement or progress in my life. I have feeling a lot of people makes that mistake too.
>did not translate into any noticeable self improvement
I've thought about this topic often, and I bounce around on where I stand on it (unsure if I'm just being pedantic or something).
I'm currently of the mind that infotainment like (early) ted talks, a large subset of conference talks, and all "Smarter Every Day"-like Youtube channels are overall no better than general trash entertainment. With general entertainment, you know what it is and self-limit, whereas the former present themselves as a valuable use of your time, and often make you _feel_ like your doing something "good" (I'm learning!), but the actual take away is often at best a factiod that you still couldn't even talk about in any depth.
That's all well, but let's don't forget the opportunity cost.
One can enjoy anything, e.g. food, but then they get to 300 lbs and they look back, and say wtf did I let this happen?
So enjoyment alone is not a safe criterion...
>I have wasted a lot of time being busy (reading non-fiction, TED talks etc) that did not translate into any noticeable self improvement or progress in my life. I have feeling a lot of people makes that mistake too.
That's a valid point though. There's even a name for it "productivity porn".
I'm being that pedantic guy now, but I think you misunderstand opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of eating food wouldn't be the negative consequences of eating food. Rather, it would be the negative consequences of not doing something else that you would have done if you hadn't been eating the food.
The easiest example is that the opportunity cost of going to university is 4 years of steady income. But students believe its worth it because the future income they'd receive instead is hopefully more than worth the opportunity cost.
>I'm being that pedantic guy now, but I think you misunderstand opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of eating food wouldn't be the negative consequences of eating food. Rather, it would be the negative consequences of not doing something else that you would have done if you hadn't been eating the food.
Thanks, I know what opportunity cost is, I just digressed when I gave the example into a "too much of a good thing" case instead of "what else you could be doing in that time" case.
> Life is short, enjoy your time watching movies. I have wasted a lot of time being busy (reading non-fiction, TED talks etc) that did not translate into any noticeable self improvement or progress in my life. I have feeling a lot of people makes that mistake too.
I'm not sure that I agree that it is a 'mistake' to read non-fiction even if it doesn't explicitly translate into self-improvement or progress. If you enjoy reading non-fiction, then why can't it be an end in itself just like watching movies can be? (I don't like TED talks, so I won't comment on those, but I would make the same argument if you do.)
I find I enjoy watching documentaries and reading technical/history/biography books often more than fiction. Because fiction is, ultimately, fake and manipulative.
I'm reading your comment as implying that fiction is more manipulative than nonfiction? If that's true, I'd be curious to hear more about your reasons for that. Don't mean that in a challenging way, this is just a topic I've been thinking about.
The problem I have with biographies and documentaries is that they overlay order and narrative on this 'messy and unpredictable' reality. If anything, that's more manipulative than a good novel that is rooted in deep research/domain knowledge and that doesn't claim to be 'objective'.
Historical accounts are always biased, usually according to the political correctness of the time they were written. For example, the Founding Fathers went from hero to goat to hero to goat and are now morphing back to heroic status with the play "Hamilton".
Civil War heroes are goats today, even having their memorials removed.
Edison has gone from hero to goat. He'll be a hero again in a few decades.
It's the job of a professional historian to try and discern the truth from all this. But whatever truth there is in fiction is impossible to determine if you know nothing about history.
Of course they are. The challenging part is reading different accounts of the same events, and attempting to discern the truth. For example, was Edison a good guy or a bad guy? Did he invent the lightbulb or steal it? And if you find something interesting, you can dig into it and find out more. Not so with a novel.
Fictional universes evolve into 'canon', where certain explanations are correct and others are dismissed. Star Trek, Star Wars, etc., famously have 'canon'. People get wrapped around the axle arguing canon. This is ridiculous, as it's all made up nonsense.
Good point on reading multiple viewpoints. As for fiction, there are a few writers who say true and interesting things about the world but they don't write Star Wars novels. I'd say "Disgrace" by Coetzee and "Demons" by Dostoevsky are examples.
You do realize 'fiction' is more than just Dan Brown and Star Trek, right? Some of the best novels I've read are basically historical/biographical accounts that just don't pretend they're anything but one person's biased take on things.
Instead of reading historical/biographical fiction, why not read the real thing? For example, read "Stuka Pilot" by Rudel. It's an account of fighting in WW2 that would be dismissed as ridiculous if it was a Hollywood movie, but it is all real and documented.
Another is "Reach for the Sky" by Bader. Chuck Yeager's biography is also a treat.
Then watch that absurd "Flyboys" Hollywood fiction. What a piece of trash in comparison.
- something really funny ( new different angle or more complex. I actually find lots of old/pref liked comedians no longer funny)
- something which is between easy and hard. A lot of stuff becomes easier and easier after a while.
I've always just read this as people on Hacker News feel more compelled than I do to be productive all the time. I have a corporate gig, and need to be my most productive self during work hours (he said, while commenting on HN during work hours), so I'm not as hard on myself outside of work. Maybe if I had a different mentality I could create the next Facebook or Uber or who knows what, but honestly I'm pretty happy as is. Don't have shame, friend. You are who you are. Better yourself by being a well rounded, nice person, not by spending all your free time reading books or watching TED talks.
A bit cynical, but my guess is the vast majority of people forcing themselves to consume productive media are not retaining anything and just don't want to feel like they're wasting time.
And as the sibling comment said, nothing wrong with a good movie. Enjoy your life.
I've been getting better, though, and I don't mean getting better by reading more technical literature, listening to more podcasts, and doing more programming in my free time.
Instead I mean accepting the fact that I simply don't enjoy those things and the way forward is to let go of the shame I feel for not liking them. There are plenty of things I do want to do in my free time, and I'm going to do those things. Every once in a while that thing is reading something technical or writing a program. In fact, I find that I enjoy those things more often when I'm not trying to force myself to do them.
I used to have quite a large stack of technical books I bought and then never read. Now the local Goodwill has them. Hopefully the next owner is someone who actually enjoys them.
Good movies are nothing to be ashamed of. While you may not be learning new facts about science and tech, you're interacting with different emotional models and stories depicting human interactions. Awhile ago I saw research confirming the link between watching a lot of movies and increase in emotional intellect (same people, over time), but I can't google it up now.
Watching videos can only help you develop a superficial understanding, anyway. A superficial understanding is a good place to start, but videos have usually been a form of procrastination for me, even when the content's been ostensibly serious.
Also reading Feynman's Lectures on Physics [0]. He presents loads of topics in a way that I think captures a lot of the beauty and cleverness of physics while focusing more on building intuition and understanding than on specific math techniques that often come up in physics courses.
I think they're a good way to learn about physics without a ton of background. I also find they're nice to read when studying for my physics exams, just because of Feynman's unique approach to teaching.
Never had a mindset to understand what sometimes are they talking about in humanities. Recently found this series of short and clear leactures on many of such topics.
Philosophy of the Humanities
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPeStI124dee1ByfcDzRv...
Then this category theory keeps popping up everywhere, completly incomprehensible, seems like mathematicians are gone mad. I found that this lectures help like no others to catch up to them.
Category theory for programmers by Bartosz Milewski
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbgaMIhjbmEnaH_LTkxLI...
I've started watching Raymond Hettinger's talks lately. He's a core dev on Python. I love them, the guy is charismatic, very smart and his Python knowledge constantly impresses me.
This is cool. I really love these type of posts where the people under discussion is not in the main stream but should have been popular in programming groups. John Carmack talks also is of that type. Very charismatic and delivers his speech standing at the same place with minimal movement for over an hour and talking from the fundamentals to the extreme details of the topics.
Just as a side note for all these wonderful youtube resources. You can use this recently discussed tool on hacker news [0] youtube-dl [1] for downloading youtube videos. There's also this video transcoder Handbrake [2] that uses ffmpeg [3] under the hood if the previous tool spits out a video in a format that is not specifically mkv or mp4 (whichever of those two you prefer).
I like to watch the map that shows the where the plane is. As the agony of travel bares on after hour and hour, you watch as you get closer closer to escaping your hellish existence in a tin can at 30k feet.
I look at the map then take a sip of whiskey. Map, whiskey. Then I suck the last of the whiskey from the ice cubes while cracking open another bottle. Map, whiskey. Day dream a little.
A kindred spirit. I always spend long flights watching martial arts movies and drinking tomato juice. I'm too uncomfortable and tired on flights to do anything productive.
It is quite well documented (I think at least a couple of studies have been made) that tomato juice is one of the few things that actually taste better on airplanes. The low pressure and high noise level affects how we perceive flavors.
I know this is not answering the question from the poster but I found meditation very helpful during my recent 15 hours flight.
It is very rare to find such a long time alone in an almost quite and non-stimulating environment. Getting meals served to you on your seat and knowing that you are
stuck here for next many hours takes away the planning ahead part of the head. I found it easier to be with my breath and thoughts.
I also drifted in and out of sleep during this time and felt very relaxed. It helped me upon landing to minimize effects of Jet lag. I believe it was more helpful than any talk or video and could also help getting some good insights.
I'd like to add that my morning 1-2 hour commute is much more enjoyable if I do some exercise before it. If not, I have trouble staying put/sleeping/concentrating on work/meditating, etc. Also, someone recommended to me recently to get a massage before a flight. I'll try that next time.
Anybody even remotely involved in designing anyth9ing connected to a network should watch Raph Koster's GDC talk about the ethical issues involved in developing AR and VR games. Except it's not really about "games" as we usually use the term. "Twitter" is a "virtual world"/MMO where they only bothered to built the chat feature.
This is really about the ethics and responsibilities that come with managing social spaces or infrastructure that people use to interact socially (which necessarily includes the problems that humans always have). The MMOs (and the MUDs/etc before 0them) have been working on these problems for decades. That doesn't mean they have the solution, but that experience does include a lot of lessons about what not to do; far too many projects are choosing to learn those lessons the hard way.
For 5-6 hour flights, it's usually a combination of things for me:
- Videos related to whatever technology will be pertinent at the meeting I'm flying in for.
- Distraction movies: Bourne Identity, etc.
- Anime I'm currently binge-watching.
- Games on my phone.
- Printed technical articles I've been procrastinating about reading.
Honestly, how virtuous/edifying my in-flight activities are depends on how much sleep I got the night before. This is one reason I dislike early-morning flights - they leav me zonked and unable to make good use of my in-flight solitude.
Side note: On Android, I just discovered "Movies Anywhere". It was a great tool for downloading DRM's movies/shows for my last trip.
This is a talk by Professor Fritz Henglein about how to sort general datasets in linear time. Most people in industry do not believe this is possible, but it's actually part of a family of well-researched techniques.
https://youtu.be/sz9ZlZIRDAg
It's been six years since the talk... Why hasn't someone drilled down through all the irrelevant typing goo, and shown how to sort integers in linear time? Where does the standard proof that optimal algorithms are Ω(n log n) break?
> Why hasn't someone drilled down through all the irrelevant typing goo, and shown how to sort integers in linear time?
I mean, if that's all you want Radix sort and American Flag sort are wikipedia fodder.
As for the "typing goo" is, uh, fairly important for how it's derived and what it does. A lot of advanced CS work uses it now, because it's quite powerful. A huge amount of pure-CS research is done in that world.
I guess we don't see this work in more contexts because it's just very very difficult to get it right. Edward Kmett, who is globally recognized for his talent in the field, did a haskell implementation which we all use and love, but it's pretty excruciating to implement it outside of a functional and generic language (and it is genuinely hard to do it in a language without general side effects, so you get difficulty from both sides).
I think a lot of folks in industry just don't think it matters. Certainly when I talk to my peers they suggest it doesn't matter to their work at all.
One particularly interesting work was computing specific types relational algebras producing products in linear time, which is pretty cool: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1706372 (btw, sorry, ACM is down tonight they're showing us their cloudflare).
This is not new stuff in the world of graduate CS, anymore than succinct data structures or wavelet trees. It's seldom applied in industry, but many of these techniques and sorts are taught as upper division courses in recent, algorithm-and-theory intensive CS programs. That stuff just doesn't make it out of academia very fast these days. Academics face a lot of pushback from industry now with disruptive findings. Look at how Emin Gun Sirer has been blackballed by the cryptocurrency community, for example. Look at how steadfastly folks have stood by JWT despite Lentczner's team's work on a better alternative in Macaroons.
Where is the Haskell implementation? Are there public benchmarks of its asymptotic performance?
I'm pretty sure a worst-case linear sorting algorithm would have multiple NYT articles about it.
EDIT: The edits to the parent since I made this comment make it look a bit silly. It made more sense in the context I was initially responding to.
EDIT 2: Thanks for linking the paper. From there:
> As Proposition 1.1 and the corresponding well-known combinatorial lower bound of Ω(n log n) (Knuth 1998, Section 5.3.1) for comparison-based sorting show, we cannot accomplish efficient generic partitioning and linear-time sorting by using black-box binary comparison functions as specifications of equivalence or ordering relations. Instead, we show how to construct efficient discriminators by structural recursion on specifications defined compositionally in an expressive domain-specific language for denoting equivalence and ordering relations.
Which sounds like the advantage I speculated on in the grandchild below. I understand, now, and it's a nice result. Thanks for pointing it out.
Which, by the way, contains boatloads of novel work. It uses internal parallel execution to work around some of the problems with discrimination passes between two groups. Cutting edge stuff.
It's haskell. People like you have chips on their shoulder about "typing goo." I'm sure one day someone will write a golang implementation then go to some inventor-centric conference and be hailed as a genius tho, as per usual.
But, did you not know about Radix sort or American Flag sort? Counting sort is a common stupid silicon valley interview question, and has been in the ruby code katas since like 2003. So as keen as I am to see this work widely distributed, it's not totally unprecedented the way you make it out to be.
Hey, want to know another surprising one? With a proper pre-encoding you can compress an (extremely long) binary value and answer questions about how many bits in a given range have occured (a popcount) in constant time. You can also, by extension, figure out the offset of the Nth hot bit appears, in O(1) time. Pretty surprising, huh? Especially when you realize that the entire space of 32 bit integers is only 512mb as a fully realized bitfield, 32x smaller than actually storing one instance of every integer.
No I'm afraid they don't. I confess I regret this conversation. I've gotten very little out of it other than a confrontstonal attitude from you and a bunch of confusingly worded challenges.
It's easy to see that you two weren't on the same page for quite a bit. I can't see a confrontational attitude. Please avoid belittling the other commenter - they never asked for a long-winded explanation (slightly bragging?) but were obviously only lacking a bit of essential knowledge (O(n log n) is for comparison based sorts).
Anyways, thanks for posting the links, although I'm not sure I will get anything out of it :-)
In general asymptotic analyses (including the well-known O(n log n) bound for comparison based sort) assume a model where operations like compare, swap, arithmetics, etc. are constant-time. So they only work for bounded integers, practically speaking.
If you want to know for the general case, you need to adapt your machine model and redo the analysis. Operations will likely be not constant-time but something like log(x) where x is the size of the integer at hand. But of course, that's up to you and what you want to do and how you build your machine.
I think this isolation is done to critique the algorithm in question in isolation of any underlying structure.
What's cool about Discrimination sort is that it does, in fact, can give these linearity guarantees for most kinds of data a computer can represent, including things like strings which have variable length or structs. There are some caveats there, but they're easy enough to work with that nearly every default structure in haskell as seen here: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/discrimination-0.3/docs/D...
Note particularly the instance for [a], and that you can extend it to something like Data.Text's codepoints (and this would work out of the box with something like ByteString's chunked form).
"typing goo". Generally complaining about the methods used by someone with a novel-peer reviewed result and demanding further and further reductive summarization on your terms, defining said terms with phrases like "typing goo" is bad form.
Further suggesting a lack of credibility by suggesting press coverage should be in place is confrontational.
I lost my temper after you did these things a few times. I apologize.
And yes, it can get O(n) performance with Arbitrary length integers. These analysis exclude underlying comparison times.
> suggesting a lack of credibility by suggesting press coverage should be in place is confrontational.
You edited out the context I was responding to, there. As I recall, you were originally explaining the "six years" in terms of it just being hard to get academic results into the mainstream. That seemed extremely unlikely for such a well-known result.
I'm not bothered by your invective or personal attacks, but editing your comments so that my responses are out of context is pretty disturbing.
I edited a cloned paragraph with a missing sentence that was accidentally added. I prepared that reply on mobile, and that can happen because you don't see scroll bars.
The literal and figurative content weren't changed. I just removed duplication and improve the flow of the post.
And this channel did a great compilation that introduces to all Chomsky's works. Table of contents is in the video description. Topics are: War, State Power, and American Exceptionalism. Capitalism, Neoliberalism, and Corporate Propaganda. Anarchism, Libertarian Socialism, and Classical Liberalism. Science, Philosophy, and Language.
Noam Chomsky - The Essentials https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1umiaNjOinE
By the same guys who gave the talk on how common most physical keys were? That one was a blast, too. Wouldn't you know that a key which opens one Kone elevator opens EVERY Kone elevator...
For that long time period you might want to watch "A Glorious Accident". Wim Kazyer sits down with Daniel Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks and Stephen Toulmin (and Rupert Sheldrake) to do one-on-one interviews. Then all of them sit down together for 3 1/2 hours at a round table and have a wide-ranging discussion. Wim Kazyer acts as a kind of moderator, Rupert Sheldrake, who has written books like "The Science Delusion" acts as a kind of antagonist.
It won't take up a whole long flight, but one of the best TED talks ever is Jill Bolte Taylor's talk. She's a neuro-anatomist who had a stroke and reports from the inside about what goes on, with significant implications for what kind of choices we make in life:
It might be a good opportunity to close your eyes and listen to many of the amazing (but nearly always way too long, IMHO) interviews available on developer podcasts like Software Engineering Daily, Microsoft Research, Hanselminutes, IndieHackers, etc. You get to listen to some great conversations and if you fall asleep, it's a bonus!
Netflix now lets you download many (most?) of their films, I always get some documentaries and fictional shows of my destination. For France I watched a documentary on the national soccer team and a comedy special by Jacky Bloom.
Hurtling through the air, surrounded by 200+ of the most fascinating and complex entities in the universe—fellow beings who share many of my hopes and fears—I always end up watching Batman vs Superman
I think there was some good info in there but I also couldn’t help thinking ‘this guy is just lumping together all of the tech buzzwords of the last 2 years’.
Terence McKenna's lectures from the Earth Trust Foundation conference are really great, if you're into that sort of thing. There are four parts, totaling ~6.5 hours.
Split my time between documentaries that can be downloaded from Netflix, usually of middling quality, and whatever audiobook caught my attention in the days before flight.
Being a bigger guy, unless I get the upgrade I can’t do anything with a keyboard so doing much productive is out of the question.
Recent highlights have been Sour Grapes and the Rotten series on Netflix, and Ray Dalits Principles on Audible.
I like to listen to the "Coding Blocks" pad cast on long drives (most every weekend). They go over a book like "Clean Code"[1] a chapter at a time and distill the high points in an entertaining fashion.
I am currently studying a language so long flights are just the perfect time to "quiz myself" in that language. Either by flash-card videos or un-subtitled dubs of a movie in that language
I am studying mandarin, I could probably be using my time doing some writing in my commute. I use a plethora of apps / download youtube videos / rosetta stone
One more flight, and I will be an expert in javascript. At least theorically, since I never wrote a single line of js code ...i can only read books while on flight, but not to code.
Watch something you normally wouldn't watch if you had a choice but might find interesting. It's a good way to force yourself out of your comfort zone.
To answer your question, Jordan Peterson's video lectures series, "Maps of Meaning" (You would need internet access to YouTube).
For long flights, I buy magazines in the airport shop (Wired and Scientific American). I also have my music collection on Spotify on my phone with wireless Bose headphones to listen to. Also, several books on Kindle on my phone (now reading "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind"). Don't forget a spare battery. Or, sometimes I check the plane's movie list for a new release I haven't seen and watch that.
Reminded me of college, when we had to write several pages of assembly code (that was 6 years ago). Fun exercise, not so much when your grade depends on it.
You really wish for a paranthesis counting pen when you have to write pages and pages of LISP (I think it was Common Lisp in our case) on paper for an exam.
