bambataa (u/bambataa)

bambataa commented on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity stefantheard.com/silicon-... · Posted by u/mooreds

ZhadruOmjar · 2 years ago

In my experience there has never been a good time to be a founding engineer even in companies that have later made it. It's much better to join the company 1-3 years prior to IPO/Sale where you get many of the benefits but significantly less stress. If I had worked at startups I would have been taking a 30-40% pay cut compared to the roles I did work and none of those startups have gone anywhere with most crashing and burning.

bambataa · 2 years ago

I’ve heard this a few times. Could you elaborate why? Surely at that point, less you are hired to a very senior role, you are going to get a very small equity % and a lot of the capitalisation growth has already been priced in? In exchange it is far less risky.

Do you just go for the market salary and treat the equity as a minor plus?

bambataa commented on Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test psypost.org/scientists-pu... · Posted by u/nickcotter

alephnerd · 2 years ago

Geographic arguments are a very common tool in pop Social Sciences, for example the correlation between landlocked states and poverty or supposed American exceptionalism due to the fertile Midwest (while ignoring similar agrarian immigrant countries like Brazil and Argentina).

Furthermore, the kinds of argumements that Diamond would provide weren't actually "tested" per say. Social Sciences are a "Science" (albeit flawed in some shape or form), but are dependent on validating a hypothesis in a reproducible manner as well, hence why economics has basically become applied math since the 50s (and similar changes in other fields like Sociology, Linguistics, Polticial Science, and Anthro as well)

There isn't much difference between grifters like Perun or Zeihan and Jared Diamond.

Also, Jared Diamond doesn't have a background in Economics or Political Science - he is an Ecologist/Environmental Scientist (and one of the best ones at that), and as such reading GGS induces Dunning-Kruger for those with a background in Comparitive Politics.

bambataa · 2 years ago

Perrin the guy on YouTube? What’s wrong with him?

bambataa commented on ChatGPT went berserk garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/RafelMri

seanhunter · 2 years ago

Nothing. It's Gary Marcus though and he's carved a niche for himself with doing this sort of thing. It's strange to me that it's given airtime on hn but there you go.

bambataa · 2 years ago

I kinda feel sorry for Gary Marcus. He’s carved this niche as an LLM critic and must have been delighted to have this bug to post about.

I stopped reading his Substack because he was always trying to find a negative. Meanwhile I use LLMs most days and find them very useful.

bambataa commented on A Terribly Serious adventure: Philosophy and war at Oxford washingtonpost.com/books/... · Posted by u/pepys

mjburgess · 2 years ago

I think this is the wrong conclusion. The issue is that "from no premises, come no conclusions" and philosophy has no internal mechanism to treat any premises as axiomatic. (Whereas, eg., the sciences treat empiricism, causes, experimentation, universal regularities, etc. all as axioms).

Science "has no answers" either if you deny its premises.

So all systems of "answers" are just systems where we find some set of propositions so nearly certain that we take them as axioms and hence believe what follows.

You can, and indeed should, do this with philosophy too. If you find that science has answers, then just take its premises as axiomatic -- and throw away all philosophy which denies them.

That arguments can be advanced against those premises has no epistemic status. Arguments can be advanced against any arguments. And move to "deny the premieses" is always available.

Sceptics regard this as interesting and important. It isnt. Knowledge, truth, belief, reality etc. are not set by what has arguments. The hidden premise to this scepticism is that "cognition & arugmentation are the foundation of knowledge & reality" -- deny this, and the whole manic schizophrenic enterprise disappears in a puff.

Philosophy, then, has tones and tones of answers.

bambataa · 2 years ago

That’s interesting, thank you.

Does it not leave inaccessible vast swathes of philosophy where, almost by definition, science cannot contribute answers? Such as the nature of numbers and other metaphysical things.

I haven’t heard of the areas you mention in a sibling comment, so I’ll look them up. Do you find that you need to refocus attention to areas where scientific premises are useful as axioms so that progress can be made?

bambataa commented on A Terribly Serious adventure: Philosophy and war at Oxford washingtonpost.com/books/... · Posted by u/pepys

bambataa · 2 years ago

I’ve read the book under review and would recommend it.

Philosophy has always appealed to me but disappointed because it never seems to settle on answers. There’s a bit in the book where Kleene (I think?) is advising young academic philosophers to go into logic instead as at least there they’ll get answers.

Someone in the book describes philosophy’s truth value as less like scientific inquiry and more like poetry done in logical argument. That seemed like a potentially valuable way of looking at it.

bambataa commented on Relearning math as an adult gmays.com/how-im-relearni... · Posted by u/gmays

juunpp · 2 years ago

That's basically what it is. There is nothing to learn from this post other than "smash that beta sign-up button".

Has anyone tried that course? Is it any good?

bambataa · 2 years ago

I have been doing the Math for ML course and would recommend.

I have UK A level math but not Further Math, so up to basic calculus. But I forgot most of it and so Math Academy has me going through a lot of the Math Foundation units along the way.

I was initially put off by the monthly price, as it is quite steep. The clincher is that about a year before starting Math Academy I had gone through the Open University’s MST124/125 textbooks (covering the same stuff as Foundations). Except even after a year I’d already forgotten most of it.

Math Academy learning feels much more robust, since it includes spaced reviews and regular tests. I record things in Anki but it’s useful to have regular practice questions too. I also use ChatGPT to spell out things and find it works well at this level.

Some things I’d like Math Academy to have:

- ability to skip lessons (I don’t want to spend ages going over symbolic integration again)

- a reference page to track unlocked material, maybe with Anki integration

- fewer multiple choice questions and more in depth problems

- proof-based math. I’m told this is coming but the degree-level courses have missed their estimated due dates.

I will definitely finish Math for ML and then do linear algebra and multivariate calculus. You’d still need a good textbook to do them rigorously, but I think Math Academy sets you up well.

bambataa commented on High school math doesn't prepare most students for their college majors hechingerreport.org/proof... · Posted by u/bikenaga

addicted · 2 years ago

Basically what we’ve found is that students need a better understanding of statistics, visualizations, etc.

But just because these are mathematical concepts why do they have to replace math in the curriculum? Logically, shouldn’t they replace the least valuable parts of the curriculum, irrespective of whether that’s math or not?

So the question really shouldn’t be statistics vs calculus (or advanced algebra) but rather statistics vs whatever is considered the weakest part of the curriculum across the board, not just limited to the field statistics belongs to.

bambataa · 2 years ago

Peak HN.

Where do you find this shared view of what is considered the least valuable part of the curriculum?

bambataa commented on Berlin's famed nightclubs, losing customers, face an uncertain future npr.org/2023/11/03/120986... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

neom · 2 years ago

I've been to Berghain quite a few times, each time I wore the same thing. black dress shoes no socks, black knee length "cut jean" shorts, and a white dress shirt 3 buttons undone. Never had any issues, I got the impression your vibe matters a lot more than how you're dressed? I love Berghain, it's great spot, crazy how kind and fun everyone is when you're in there.

bambataa · 2 years ago

Aren’t dress shoes without socks very sweaty and painful to wear?

bambataa commented on Iowa man files lawsuit after being arrested twice for criticizing the police reason.com/2023/10/13/iow... · Posted by u/fortran77

freedomben · 2 years ago

> to pretend like “Defund the Police” ever meant “stop paying all police and don’t do anything different” is purposeful ignorance at this point (2.5 years after it was popularized).

You may not like it, but you don't control what "defund the police" means to everyone. There absolutely are people who mean it different ways, and it's not "willful ignorance", it's just the standard linguistic challenge of using an ambiguous pithy expression which then becomes overloaded as different people try to declare "what it really means."

bambataa · 2 years ago

“Defund the police” is a terrible slogan.

“Oh what we mean by that is actually the opposite where we want to redistribute funding in different ways blah blah blah”.

And all a critic has to do is “left wing radicals say they want to defund the police”.

bambataa commented on Amazon training video on handling unionizing activity (2018) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=AQeGB... · Posted by u/throwaway429310

FridayNightTV · 2 years ago

> For those that want to follow, what are good online shopping alternatives?

In Blighty, Argos.

No counterfeit stuff (which frankly, should be a given), same day delivery and a good network of bricks'n'mortar shops (with pick-up and drop-off) if you need it.

http://www.argos.co.uk/

bambataa · 2 years ago

If you are concerned by the ethics of Amazon I don’t see how Argos is a step up:

https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/content/news/argos-buzz-bingo-a...

https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/business/union-takes-l...