Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | more hyperpallium2's comments login

Pedantry: the only exception I could think of is a timer (delay, alarm clock), where the output is when, not what. sleep 10

Yes, information technology is for processing information.

Any transformation can be decomposed into lossy and lossless components (aka bijectve and non-bijective; reversible and non-reversible). The nice thing is that the lossless component can be automatically checked for that property.



> Luck is when opportunity meets preparedness.


And success is being lucky repeatedly, so you can't really plan for it; only be disqualified if you're below the minimum entry point of preparedness.

Anyone telling you that they worked hard to achieve their current success is falling to the survivor bias fallacy.


There's an interesting approach to "consciousness", as what you are aware of, consciously. i.e. attention management. Animals are conscious of their environment in this way. But because humans also have a lot of models going on internally, the mechanism adapts to that (perhaps higher mammals too; I don't recall). This fits nicely with your experience and the submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373806

I wonder if our "conscious reasoning" is really just attending to a column that does that? Certainly, formal reasoning is a skill that is learnt and practiced - perhaps not so different from a manual skill. We can also suppose pattern-matching on this, to get intuition and hunches. All old ideas, but perhaps neuroanatomy is advancing sufficiently to test them?

Also: Minsky's Society of Mind



Folding, glasses or projection seem the only ways to smaller yet bigger.

On a folding phone, I found the hinge is noticable on a blank screen - but not when watching a video. Not sure how it will go with a terminal, but if a window doesn't cross the hinge, would it matter?


Further to your point, a lecturer who has long understood something can find it hard to understand how someone could misunderstand it - the kinds of misunderstandings they night have.

aside/ school teachers are different, they learn typical misunderstandings with experience.


All the extraordinarily intelligent people I've known worked unbelievably hard.


Huh. Most of the smartest people I know are really pretty lazy. They'll put a lot of effort into something they care about, but they're usually aware of the effort-to-reward ratio.

The hardest workers I know are the ones of ordinary intelligence. They have jobs that require more hours for less money, and often have families to take care of as well.

I don't think of anybody in my circle of acquaintances who's genuinely dumb, so I can't vouch for what happens once intelligence really dips far below average. Still, my anecdotal experience is that the really smart people are only kind of ordinarily diligent.


I don't think Feynman laid out that technique, as such? It seems inferred, indirectly supported by a patchwork of quotes about other things. Doesn't mean it's not true or useful, of course!

Another Feynmann Technique (also not actually said by him, but of him. https://wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

  You write down the problem.
  You think very hard.
  Then you write down the answer. 
Even this facetiousness includes getting so clear on the problem that you can write it down (I think this also implies looking at the problem detials, not assuming). Douglas Adams based a whole trilogy on its importance.

In my experience, for ordinary problems, this is so important that it often directly reveals the solution in itself.


I need to update the article with a bit more background I stumbled upon today: https://medium.com/taking-note/learning-from-the-feynman-tec....


> This technique is derived from Feynman’s studying methods when he was a student at Princeton.

A compelling essay would be to rigorously argue that this indeed was his technique. It would be a lot of work, long, and I suspect you won't find support for some elements; you'd have to modify your proposition. In particular, although he does do each of these things, I don't think they are chronological or form a systematic "technique". It may be easier to argue for them separately, as e.g. The Four Feynman Techniques.

Then, reference that essay from a shorter, lighter overview, like the one submitted here.


That 40% is an opportunity for a leaner competitor! Which is how YC started out.


Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: