Wow, Toyota being given some love?! I thought there was a blanket ban on all things Toyota so the community isn't forced to admit that all things agile are actually from the manufacturing industry, decades ago. Where might this lead? Might we be forced to consider that much has been borrowed from architecture? Or math? But then, it will be so much more difficult to feel good about dwindling list of contributions software programmers have born to the world.
i used to work at an institutional investment firm. a huge one. (say it like trump) huuuuuge. we had lots of economists. i chilled with them. i partied with them. and when we partied, when the booze flowed and we all shared sordid stories about how our jobs really went down, they basically said the work they did was, meh, adding very little, and at times no, marginal value and that most of the time the traders did their own thing regardless.
also, lets not forget what happened to south america when the chicago school of economics prescribed its bitter medicine. they're still recovering/reeling both economically and culturally.
so, i shudder when i read that some of the most influential and active corporations, those determining the way of our society/culture and economy, are adding all these PhDs from a discipline whose track record is absolutely crap from both a social/cultural and an economic angle. (full disclosure i have a b.s. in economics, so, yes, i understand some of what an economist does)
even if we accomplish all this and more, we have still not answered the question, "what is the 'good life'?" because that is not a technical question. we can put off death. we can increase quality of life during the later years of life. and this is important and beneficial work. but, nothing in this work intrinsically speaks to existential issues we face. we may use these technologies as a paradigm through which to attempt to grapple with existential issues, but none of these issues can only be 'solved' with the correct technical tools.
so when your comment begins:
"Every time an existential post is made here, I have to remind people:"
I read that as a global claim (global claims are almost never true) and arrogant (in that you "have to remind people", "thank you for reminding us! what would we do without you!")
First to respond to reasoning behind my first line, maybe I should've said "Every time an existential post _like this_ is made." It's pretty clear that one of the points of the website showing the 52x90 grid is to remind us that we have only a few decades of life left. (And I believe that's the wrong way to look at it in this day and age.) And people responded accordingly in a depressing manner. This has happened multiple times in the past, hence my "I have to remind people".
As for the rest of your response (and after reading your other comments), honestly you're not making a whole lot of sense. Should we stop using technological solutions to make our lives better as much as we can, because they don't solve all your existential issues? (or did I commit a red herring again by thinking you might be committing a 'perfect solution fallacy'?).
Re: ad hominem critiques. I thought they were duly deserved. Your comment came across, to me, as condescending and arrogant, both qualities of the person putting forth the argument, rather than the argument. So, the critique will by necessity be "to the man" (or woman).
As to, you not being able to make sense out of my other comments. That's not necessarily my fault.
eventually even atoms will stop spinning. i think what the commenter was getting at, is that, immortality is impossible, and so finding meaning in a life that must eventually end, is still important.
also, your argument, red herring. the commenter didn't say, let's all be happy that old age is crap. at all. that was you. you said that. why? idk.
Again you're not making much sense. 'To reconsider getting old and dying as negative' is as close to 'consider philosophies in which old age and dying is not negative' as it can get.
Please look at a description of 'red herring' [0] and kindly elaborate how it applies to my response.
"A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue."
And, this is exactly why I keep "losing my password" for my HN account, so that I have to take a break from participating. I didn't need to look to Wikipedia know what a Red Herring is. And it's a waste of my time spelling it out for others when they could figure it out themselves.
So, it works like this:
You said: "If you believe getting old, and sick, and miserable, and then dying, is good or natural or the way it is supposed to be, then I respectfully disagree with you."
But the person you were replying to said:"If you consider aging and death in old age as a negative, perhaps you should reconsider your philosophy, instead of chasing immortality."
their comment..
If P, perhaps Q.
P = "you consider aging and death in old age as a negative"
Q = "you should reconsider your philosophy" & "[not] chasing immortality"
and your comment...
"If P, then Q."
P = "you believe getting old, and sick, and miserable, and then dying, is good or natural or the way it is supposed to be"
Q = "I respectfully disagree with you"
so, the "P"s are at issue, as both "Q"s can roughly be translated into, "no", "false"
P[1] = "you consider aging and death in old age as a negative"
compared to...
P[2] = "you believe getting old, and sick, and miserable, and then dying, is good or natural or the way it is supposed to be"
Not the same.
The original comment simply said, it's not necessarily bad. You said, "you're" arguing it is good, or natural, or the way it's supposed to be.
Again, red herring: "A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue."
You're misstatement of the original comment so distorts the issue that we're now arguing about whether "death is natural and inevitable" or "death is good". That is not what the original issue was. So, to reply to your comment, is to be distracted from a relevant or important issue. One would have been misled to go down that path.
logic 101. but hey, you have more karma points than me. so, what does logic really have against that.
Asking for someone to offer an argument for the claim that "it is worth while considering other life philosophies other than those that lead to chasing immortality and viewing the end of one's own life as a negative", is kinda, well, quite frankly you sound either too naive to the world to understand the wisdom in such a claim, or you are too stubborn to allow any world view other than yours to be entertained.
Either way, life philosophies that would reflect such a claim don't have comment length "arguments" that would be convincing to anyone on any level. Some things do not lend themselves to logic. Some things require more than a few paragraphs and an argument. And sometimes, those things, are best served by parsimony, rather than loquacious debate.
So your response is that if a cute soundbite is not enough to have me nodding agreeably maybe I am not wordly enough?
You have made the exact same argument that you are defending, it boils down to "you do not understand my world view, if you understood more maybe you would."
I understand not everything fits in a comment box, but when you choose to participate in a discussion then a one line excerpt of "wisdom" is hardly useful. You cannot just imply someone is wrong and not discuss why. This isn't twitter, there is room to get started.
All I ask is some substance above "Have you considered that you might be wrong?"
Because yes, I have considered that, and I am eager to talk about it.
HN is, barely, a step above twitter. If one were to pick the bottom 20% of comments from HN, it would be ignorant, biased, group think, poor logic, borderline bigoted (but mainly ignorant).
I don't expect that you'd be nodding agreeably. But I do think one with a bit more perspective might engage in a more productive manner.
All I have done is suggest that the parent comment's argument was shallow and ultimately unhelpful. The intention was to illicit some in depth discussion, hence my questions and my views added afterwards.
All you have done in both your comments is slight the platform and slight myself, adding nothing.
I believe I understand his argument; It would be a waste to spend life chasing immortality, as you would waste the only life you had in search of more of it, thus getting to truly enjoy neither.
But I am still glad there are people chasing it, as it means we get to enjoy more life than if they were not.
The parent comment's sentiment only really makes sense if you yourself are chasing more life, and even then only if you are destined to fail. The last 50 years alone should show us that more quality life is an extremely reasonable goal. Adding nearly 20 years to the average life expectancy, from 60 to 80 for males in Australia for example.
And yet Mathematica is not nearly as effective as math when done by pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician.
The value of maths is 1) it's "open-source", 2) it's free to use, 3) if you want to switch from one module to another (say, number theory to category theory) you are able to do so using the same tools (pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician), and so long as the two "modules" are inter-operable it flows so beautifully. If they are not, then you get to try to figure out ways to make them so.
That, imho, is why I think all these open source packages keep popping up. Math itself is the ultimate "open source". And in doing math one is not limited to command line interface, left-to-right, line-by-line tools. Compare the experience of writing out a derivative in LaTeX vs on paper. LaTeX is an exercise in causing pain and frustration to oneself. On paper, it feels as though you're writing music.
I like Mathematica and find it a sometimes, very useful tool. I've taken over two dozen University courses in mathematics, including topology, abstract algebra, analysis, combinatorics, number theory, etc. Yet, even simply equations can stump my rather meager ability to solve them and this is where Mathematica is so useful. You can use it interactively to quickly traverse the difficult ground on the way to insight or a solution about your problems.
Consider the simple looking problem, find the definite integral of sin(x^2) from 0 to positive infinity. This is a real expression that that occurs naturally in the study of electromagnetism.
Solving this is beyond the ability of most practicing mathematicians to just sit down and noodle out an answer. The integral in known as the Fresnel integral and has the pretty answer of sqrt(pi/2)/2. Mathematica gives me the answer in just a second.
Yes, I've tried SageMath, which is said to build on sympy as well as numpy, scipy, R, maxima, and other math related projects. It's really quite capable considering that it is an open source project. It supports notebooks, like Mathematica, and the programming is done in Python, which is much more widely known that the Mathematica programming language. I like it's wide open nature and the programming in Python. However, there are still some rough spots where the different technologies come together. Mathematica on the other hand is expensive but it is very polished.
SageMath, http://www.sagemath.org, is perfect for those that can't afford Mathematica or want to leverage their existing knowledge of Python. It solves the Fresnel Integral too. Please consider supporting the SageMath project.
I should have said:
"And yet Mathematica is <sometimes> not nearly as effective as math when done by pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician."
I wasn't meaning to imply that Mathematica has no value or has little value. It's indeed awesome both productivity wise and for just enjoying the exercise of doing math.
I was trying, and doing a poor job, to give reasons why pencil and paper has value. Not to the exclusion of Mathematica or more so than Mathematica. Just, that it still has tons of value. And that, maybe that is what these open source projects are trying to recreate that Mathematica has not yet captured.
I personally do enjoy sometimes doing written math. I manually matrix-multiplied the three axis rotation functions (see the three one-axis rotation functions, and the result of multiplying them) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_formalisms_in_three_d...)
But of course these days I just let the computer do rotations for me.
I think the interesting product idea here would be something I've never seen: a canvas on a tablet that acts like pencil and paper (drawing) but also "helps" by recognizing what you write, converting it to a formal language, and validating/verifying it. sort of the mathematica notebook, but more like a notepad
you are describing a very limited view of what it means to do mathematics. and no, all of mathematics is not open source. much of it is locked behind institutional barriers.
also, i don't understand this fervent attitude that something must be free and open source to be useful. a lot of open source software is complete trash. there is a reason why people pay to use tools like matlab, labview, and mathematica. it is because their value exceeds their cost.
i believe the phrase is "software is only free if your time is worthless". There are plenty of counterexamples to this (where there is free software that greatly increases the productivity of the user, without a great deal of time spent moving up the learning curve).
In the case of Mathematica there is a ton that is "locked away behind institution barriers". Mathematica contains millions of lines of code dedicated to implementing clever algorithms for making their root finder and other things work really, really well. but those are all internal source code lines within the company.
I've seen this play out across multiple industries. A good example is SAS and R. There are certain parts of FDA new drug applications that require, specifically, the SAS implementation of a statistical routine, and you can't use R because it doesn't implement the routine in a bit-identical manner. However, a spokesperson from SAS once said, "You'd never fly in an airplane designed by open source software" to which Boeing responded "we use open source software to design our airplanes"
A lot of (free | non-free) software is complete trash.
The advantage of free software is that it never dies; someone can always, if they want/need, pick it up and use/extend it. You don't have to hope a company does go bust, and pay them for the product and/or support, and keep upgrading your devices to newer, still supported versions. Ok, some of that applies to free software but if you want to you could stick with the old versions, or make changes yourself, or pay someone to. These avenues just aren't open with closed source software.
Some people won't be able to afford the commercial products, and the free ones might not be as good/polished but if they get (most of) the job done then they fill a niche.
>The advantage of free software is that it never dies; someone can always, if they want/need, pick it up and use/extend it.
That's a theoretical advantage. In practice lots of things needs to be true for this to happen, even if there's a large user based depending on an abandoned open source program: the code needs to be easily approachable, there should be people willing to extend it who also have the required programming skills etc.
Tons of projects that had lots of users have died or languished.
Heck, even something as popular as GTK+ -- the project is still available, but development has stalled to a halt, and there was a cry of despair from the maintainer that it was just one (one) person doing 90% of the work. If that can happen to GTK+ which is used by millions and powers Gnome, GIMP etc, consider all the other stuff.
Besides, this same theoretical advantage ("never tries") in theory is also potentially true for a proprietary product. Even if the parent company folds, the code and product could always be bought and revived in the future.
I use mathematica to do engineering, not math. But there are definitely people who do recreational mathematics with computers, and some of them have shown things that can't be done with pencil and paper. The proof for the four color theorem is a nice example of this. Computers are useful tools for doing things we can't execute quickly by hand, or cleverly approximate/solve through more elegant methods.
Or I can use Mathematica to get my derivative, plug it into my numerical optimization routine and not have to think about it again. That's a much better feeling to me.
