Readit NewsIn a previous avatar, Raghavan was a pure theoretical computer scientist. As a student, he won the best student paper in FOCS, the Machtey award, which is kind of a big deal. The work was related to randomized rounding, which is a bread-and-butter technique for LP relaxation approaches to integer optimization, similar to knapsack problems.
This is not to defend any bad decisions he may have made at Google and Yahoo, but to make him an anonymous clueless corporate honcho who is good only at scheming and wrecking companies is bizarre. All this information, moreover, is available on Wikipedia and (cough) Google scholar.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FtMADIMAAAAJ&hl=en...
Surely YOU can't be serious. The author was very clearly comparing this guy to much more famous and heavily derided figures like Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. I don't think co-authoring a text on randomized algorithms gets you the same notoriety as being the head of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter...
What makes Conway's Life particularly "catchy" (along with other 2D CAs) seems to be the motion. Humans love watching stuff move, especially when the motion is partly predictable and partly surprising -- i.e., like a screen-saver, not like TV static. And they like watching things blow up. A lot of Lifenthusiasts probably got their start by aiming gliders at carefully balanced Life patterns and gleefully watching the resulting explosions... it's a lot more fun than actually blowing things up, because you can always hit Undo and run it all over again, no harm done!
Buying a house comes with a lot of responsibility and you basically give up any freedoms to be able to pay your mortgage, saved up for any repairs, and hope that a natural disaster doesn't wipe out your largest investment.
Comparatively, we're at the best time to be alive in history. I don't even know where the person I'm replying to lives, but I don't they will receive this message almost instantly.
I can learn about anything I want to, whenever I want.
I can travel almost anywhere without fear of getting lost.
I can order exotic things that I'd never see sticked on local shelves at the click of a mouse.
Life is pretty convenient and amazing and I'm okay sacrificing stress-filled homeownership for other luxuries.
(Not that we should have to, mind you, but that wasn't the question posed.)
An infinite supply of anything to satisfy all of your desires does not lead to a fulfilling life -- just one with enough distractions to get you through the next day.
Recently there was an interview with Takrowlek Dejrat [1] and he talks about how defense was something that they spent a lot of time with first as kids training, which is different than this generation of fighters. Which I find to be true in my own training, I often feel like working on defense is something we only drill as an after-thought to offense.
And the mention of your "untrained" friend being unable to enjoy a traditional Muay Thai fight the way _you_ can just reeks of some kind of odd elitism. My guess is you saw a topic about fighting on HN and couldn't wait to tell us all that you trained.
Do earthquakes have a propagation speed? Might she have felt it before me?