[HN Gopher] Open Questions
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Open Questions
Author : ianyanusko
Score : 89 points
Date : 2023-04-24 18:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gwern.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (gwern.net)
| gavinhoward wrote:
| > Does listening to music while working serve as a distraction,
| or motivation?
|
| Both. It depends on what I am doing.
|
| If programming with completely new stuff, I need silence (but
| can't stand it). If programming stuff that is familiar, but still
| new, music is perfect, as long as it's not slow.
|
| If writing, I do best when listening to music that corresponds
| with the mood of the current scene.
|
| > Why does writing in the morning (anecdotally so far) seem to be
| so effective for writers, even ones who are not morning persons?
| While programmers, which seems like a similar occupation, are
| invariably owls?
|
| Funnily enough, I write best at night when I'm slightly sleep
| deprived.
|
| I've had more people praise my _writing_ for a technical document
| [1] written during late nights than for anything else. They
| specifically praised the _snark_ , which was just the result of a
| sleep-deprived brain.
|
| I'm not sure why, but I have a hunch: I'm a little autistic and
| can be quite stilted; however, a sleep-deprived brain can go a
| little haywire. Going a little haywire seems to make me more
| human.
|
| This is like the Ballmer Peak [2], except that this doesn't work
| for me when programming.
|
| I'm currently working on code and a novel. I'm trying to get into
| the habit of programming when I'm fresh and writing the novel or
| technical documentation when I'm tired.
|
| [1]:
| https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/bc/src/branch/master/manua...
|
| [2]: https://xkcd.com/323/
| ebuck wrote:
| One of the laziest submissions of open questions. Most have
| completely uninteresting well known answers:
|
| * Obesity: We are eating more. We are eating higher calorie
| foods. We are also eating more sugar. The days of cooking raw
| foods in the home are few, and when we do, we do so by cooking
| with pre-prepared items that tend to have high caloric intake
| without many of the previous dietary benefits.
|
| Most families are down to one non-starchy vegetable a day,
| arguing that the tiny amount of pasta sauce counts as a vegetable
| as it contains tomatoes, ignoring the added sugar. To fix this,
| people are willing to sell us a never ending stream of services
| and advice, where the most effective advice is deemed
| uninteresting compared to the attention grabbing advice.
|
| Our health industry has spawned a wellness industry, where we are
| being told that blending our fruits and vegetables (releasing
| more sugar) need to be sweetened with honey (more sugar) as it is
| more healthy than table sugar. Here is a clue, just don't blend
| the stuff and eat it; but, that would hardly spawn an industry.
|
| - Alcohol: Yes, there have been numerous studies that moderate
| wine drinking can have health benefits. The main issue is that
| drinking in the USA probably involves at a minimum more alcohol
| than would qualify as healthy, and it is a relative health
| benefit that can easily be cancelled by too much ethanol.
|
| Here's a hint, food is a mixture. Drinking gin-and-tonics might
| also prevent malaria, a health benefit, but give you cirrhosis of
| the liver, a health hazard. Mixtures do that.
|
| - Boogers: Any biology student knows that they are primarily
| comprised of sugars, and are a mixture of sugar, whatever else is
| in the nose, and water. Why do they come in so many varieties?
| Sugar is flexible, making up trees, sugar glass, sugar for your
| coffee, and much, much more. No news here.
|
| - Jeanne Calment: Most people believe she took over the identity
| of a relative to avoid inheritance tax. The French government
| refuses to entertain this idea, as they prefer to have a national
| icon. This is well covered in the article, but in a fit of "let's
| disregard the contradicting ideas" is summarily dismissed with
| "the fraud theory seems highly unlikely to explain the Calment
| anomaly" because, they're already believing Clament is an anomaly
| and thus cannot believe she isn't.
|
| Oddly enough the Clament story is just like the other items in
| the list. If you start from a position of believing something is
| unusual, you have to assume that any bland explanation must fail
| because it wouldn't make it an unusual item.
| bombcar wrote:
| There are massive industries that depend on never shaving with
| Occam's Razor.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| > We are eating more. We are eating higher calorie foods. We
| are also eating more sugar.
|
| So lab animals on controlled diets are sneaking out to the
| grocery store?
| telotortium wrote:
| Submitted before, but the URL changed (it was split out from a
| "Notes" page): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18394756
| csours wrote:
| > Obesity Epidemic: Why do humans, pets, and even lab animals of
| many species kept in controlled lab conditions on standardized
| diets appear to be increasingly obese over the 20th century? What
| could explain all of them simultaneously becoming obese? (Is it
| literally something in the water?)
|
| I think it would help us if we understood why this problem is so
| hard to understand and what our blind spots are.
|
| ---
|
| It is easy to see the problems that an obese person has. It is
| easy to feel like they should know better and make changes for
| their health. It looks like a big problem that should be taken
| seriously.
|
| But that's not how that person got there. 1-5 pounds of excess
| fat does not feel like a big problem. Fat gain is usually quite
| slow and steady, and the body has time to get used to it. In
| other words, it's not a problem that suddenly shows up in a
| person's life, and it doesn't physically feel like a problem
| (until it's too late).
|
| ---
|
| Hunger doesn't have a number. Scientists have an aversion to
| studying things that don't have numbers. It doesn't feel like
| serious science.
|
| Hunger isn't weakness or failure, it's a whole body response to
| lack of nutrients.
|
| Hunger isn't one thing, it's a bunch of body sensations and
| psychological triggers and conditioning.
|
| Hunger acts like a one-way valve - there is a strong negative
| feeling for a moderate lack of nutrients, there is no equivalent
| feeling for a moderate excess of nutrients. People can often lose
| fat while dieting, but then gain it back. That has been described
| as the hunger set-point. Winter is coming and losing your energy
| supply may kill you (says evolution).
|
| Hunger is not comparable between people. I don't know how bad you
| feel when you miss a meal, and you don't know how bad I feel.
|
| ---
|
| I can eat like a king at every meal, every day. I can eat like a
| king of a different country every single day. I'm never limited
| to boring food.
|
| Corporations make money from "adding value" to food, advertising
| it and selling it. The value add is to make food very tasty -
| sugar, salt, fat, flavor. There's no pressure at the corporate
| level to market food in accordance with health goals. The "sugar
| tax" has been thoroughly demonized.
|
| The problem with gravy and sauces is not just the caloric
| content. It is the inducement to eat more. An experiment: buy
| unsalted and salted nuts of your choice (or unflavored and
| flavored rice cakes, etc). Eat as many of the unflavored item as
| you care to. Now think about eating the flavored version. Did you
| suddenly feel like you could eat more? Your gut and your mind
| talk to each other. If you taste something good or even imagine
| tasting something good, and it is different enough from something
| you just ate, your body will tell you that you are still hungry.
|
| ---
|
| On the calories out side, studies show that exercise has little
| effect on fat by itself. Exercise is good for health, but
| remember that your body will tell you to eat more to make up for
| it.
|
| ---
|
| Advice time: Learn to control hunger. This may take quite a lot
| of effort and learning. I recommend the books "The Hungry Brain"
| and "Burn".
|
| Eat boring food high in protein and fiber.
|
| Find exercise that you enjoy.
|
| Control your food environment. If you have snacks around, your
| brain will remember them. If you have snacks within reach, your
| body may start eating them without conscious command.
| ebuck wrote:
| There's a lot of real diet research, the kind that is peer-
| reviewed, double-blind, and likely to never make it into a news
| article.
|
| That said, you offered some of the best advice I've seen:
|
| | Eat boring food high in protein and fiber.
|
| Which is effectively the opposite of nearly every kind of snack
| food that is currently popular.
| Dowwie wrote:
| - The Hungry Brain: https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Brain-
| Outsmarting-Instincts-Ov...
|
| - Burn: https://www.amazon.com/Burn-Research-Really-Calories-
| Healthy...
| bawolff wrote:
| > It is easy to see the problems that an obese person has. It
| is easy to feel like they should know better and make changes
| for their health. It looks like a big problem that should be
| taken seriously.
|
| If the article is correct (haven't verified myself), that lab
| animals on a controlled diet are more obesse now than in the
| past, that contradicts basically everything you wrote.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You will have a hard time finding controlled animal diets
| from long ago that were actually controlled. At the 80's and
| 90's there was a wave of scientific articles about how diet
| impacts lab animals, all new because most labs never bothered
| to look before.
| zamalek wrote:
| > Alcohol Hormesis: Does moderate alcohol or wine consumption
| have any health benefits, or not?
|
| Am I mis-remembering recent studies showing that alcohol does no
| good whatsoever for health (in contrast to earlier studies to the
| contrary)? Or is this just one of those that stays an open
| question in the hope that someone proves it true?
| darawk wrote:
| There have been recent studies that said that, just like at one
| time there were recent studies that said the opposite. Neither
| is sufficiently strong evidence to be dispositive, though I'd
| probably lean towards the more recent ones.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No, it's one of those that comes up with unconvincing results
| in alternating directions every six months, and whose press
| releases everyone in "light" news reports on.
|
| IIRC, that last negative one (of course I might be a year out
| of phase with you) proved that alcohol consumption doesn't do
| anyone any good at any amount by redefining "anyone" and "good"
| and telling us what we already knew about esophageal cancers
| and alcoholism.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| I love the design aesthetics of this wiki. It also makes me happy
| that someone bothered with a custom tool stack and hosting
| solution to get something near to exactly what they wanted.
| Here's a page describing this:
|
| https://gwern.net/design
| gamegoblin wrote:
| With tools like GPT4 around, this kind of labor of love becomes
| much less laborious. What gwern has done is absolutely insane
| for the era it was made, but I find myself becoming so much
| more ambitious with taking on stuff like this with GPT4
| assistance. In the last couple months I've coded my first
| browser plugins, custom HTML5 renderers, physics simulators,
| etc. Never would have done it without the AI boost.
|
| There will be a whole lot more "custom stack to get exactly
| what you want" going around in the near future, pretty
| exciting.
| dbtc wrote:
| I'm curious to try some program-assisted programming. What's
| your setup with GPT4 assistance?
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| I appreciate your comment, its not a bad comment, but I must
| say that I am SO exhausted with GPT getting brought up on
| EVERY post on HN regardless of what the post is about. It
| feels like I am being advertised to and it makes me doubt the
| authenticity of the comments.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| I hear you. I actually thought about this when making the
| comment, but decided to make it because the website at
| hand, gwern, is also deeply interested in AI and GPT and
| has a lot of posts about it.
|
| It does feel a bit like the mid 2010s when everyone was
| talking about applying blockchain to everything. The
| difference, I think, is that the proof is in the pudding. I
| have browser plugins and HTML5 physics simulators now that
| I didn't have just months ago.
|
| Re: your particular issue, I am not joking, you should use
| ChatGPT to help you write a browser plugin that simply
| blocks those comments. The browser plugin I mentioned that
| I used GPT to create is actually for blocking low-effort HN
| comments. My HN browsing experience is _much_ better
| because of it.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| Your suggestion cracked me up. That's absolutely
| hilarious, also practical.
|
| And agreed - the hype feels like blockchain on steroids,
| but unlike blockchain, it is truly a transformative
| technology that is breaking open the floodgates to many
| new avenues of technological development, so the hype is
| certainly warranted.
| renewiltord wrote:
| You can write the plugin really easily. He's right. You
| should do it. Much better than getting annoyed.
| larve wrote:
| It's so very hard to not do that when the tool has become
| so transformational in your life, not just in one area, but
| across the board. I am in the same boat of being so
| ambitious with my personal projects these days, now that
| the drudgery is gone, that it's hard to communicate to
| people who haven't tried it how it changes your experience
| of "almost everything making it on HN."
|
| gwern's page having so much about GPT makes it a prime
| candidate, and I think there is a link between LLM
| fascination and wanting to build your own stack and
| pursuing your own intellectual path. It is a fascinating
| tool for personal growth, much more so than at a team or
| industry level.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Gwern's site isn't a wiki, though?
| dsr_ wrote:
| "Gwern.net is implemented as a static website compiled via
| Hakyll from Pandoc Markdown and hosted on a dedicated server
| (due to expensive cloud bandwidth)."
|
| I would say that the distinguishing characteristics of a wiki
| are:
|
| - it is intended as a general repository of human-readable
| articles [x]
|
| - it is designed so that authorized users can edit articles
| easily [x]
|
| - it has affordances for lots of linking, internally and
| externally [x]
|
| So, from the viewpoint of Gwern Branwen and only Gwern, it's
| wiki-like.
|
| Nobody else has authorization or easy article editing, as far
| as I know. So for everyone else, it's just a really
| interesting site.
| _dain_ wrote:
| I love the aesthetics, but he must have screwed up something
| lately, because it slows my Firefox to a crawl now.
| jmcomets wrote:
| > Why does writing in the morning (anecdotally so far) seem to be
| so effective for writers, even ones who are not morning persons?
| While programmers, which seems like a similar occupation, are
| invariably owls?
|
| Also anecdotal, but I've met my share of early bird programmers.
| I often wonder how much of these habits are driven by
| ~~stereotypes~~ culture, since theoretically your energy level
| depends mostly on your lifestyle.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Another consideration is that people write differently
| depending on their state of mind/body.
|
| I effectively can't do "work" writing at night. But I've found
| that fiction, humor, and other creative writing can benefit
| from being in a different headspace. Being tired to the point
| of feeling a bit punch-drunk can take you to interesting
| places. The few times I've truly surprised myself, I was
| writing in a somewhat (not drug-induced) altered state.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| A hunch: paper vs. screens or, going fully digital, paper-like
| software vs. terminal-like software. Microsoft Word, MacOS
| Pages, WordPress WYSIWYG, etc. come with the default background
| bright and was/is a pain to change; terminals, IDEs, code
| editors, etc. come with the default background dark and is a
| pain to read lots of code on a bright background and interface
| with other tools, mostly dark backgrounds.
| bawolff wrote:
| I am a night owl, but most productive in the morning (if not
| exhausted). I dont think the two are as connected as people
| think. You need to be not tired to be productive, but there is
| more than that to it.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I feel exactly the same. Never been well-represented by the
| owl / lark dichotomy.
| ebuck wrote:
| Perhaps the boring explanation is, if you don't start writing
| in the morning, you're already doing something else when you
| think you should start writing.
|
| I program equally well early in the morning or late at night,
| basically the two times in the day when my daily tasks are
| mostly settled. If I advertise early morning programming, it
| doesn't feed into the mantra of "hard working" in corporate USA
| as well as the "burning the midnight oil" tropes.
|
| So, I come into the office two hours early and get my
| programming done before the meetings start and get little to no
| recognition, or I stay three hours late doing the same and get
| lots of recognition. Savvy people will soon learn to feed the
| trope of working hard, working late, especially when it can
| excuse a late entry to work (but arriving early never permits a
| late exit).
|
| I'd say the late night hacker is more a stereotype driven by
| culture.
| cptcobalt wrote:
| Yeah, I think it's stereotypes + reinforcement of peer groups
| that follow similar schedules as you.
|
| I am a pretty ok writer & programmer in the morning; my
| productivity & quality of work falls off after 2pm. Under
| pressure, I'd much rather go to bed early and wake up very
| early to work on a next-day project.
| slindsey wrote:
| Maybe others can sympathize with my personal experience. I'm a
| morning person. But mentally, I can't completely focus when
| there's things that I have to do later. I'm always worried
| about those upcoming things (responsibilities, meetings, kids,
| etc). By programming at night, after everything else is done, I
| can truly focus. Getting in the flow, I'm not tired and I'm
| completely absorbed by the current task. No future
| distractions.
| nwienert wrote:
| Night is also quiet and peaceful.
|
| No one is up or going to be up, likely. People aren't outside
| making noise. No inbound calls, less inbound emails or chats.
| Less notifications across social media.
| tlb wrote:
| Interruptions are costly to both programmers and writers. But I
| don't think writers get interrupted as much, so they can work
| during normal waking hours. Programmers get interrupted a lot
| if they work during business hours because their projects
| usually interconnect with other people's projects.
| aeturnum wrote:
| From a history point of view, early mainframe programmers were
| required to be night owls. Mainframes were expected to be
| running all day doing the calculations they were purchased to
| do - the only time they were allowed to be idle for development
| and maintenance was after the close of business. This is also
| the source, to a certain extent, of the unusual freedoms
| programmers often enjoy within organizations. They needed to
| have unusually free access to the most expensive equipment (and
| the building in general) and weren't supervised in person by
| the usual hierarchy of bosses.[1]
|
| [1] From The Computer Boys Take Over, a very good basic history
| of the professsion:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9247209-the-computer-boy...
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Why did it take until the late 20th century for Brazilian Jiu-
| Jitsu to develop [...] every major country has long lineages of
| specialized competitive martial arts and tremendous incentive to
| find martial arts which worked and quick feedback loops?_
|
| Well, _do_ societies have a tremendous incentive to find unarmed
| martial arts which work?
|
| If my tribe faces an existential threat from the next tribe over,
| wouldn't I pick up a stick?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Gwern is wrong about this. Around 1900 catch wrestling was well
| established in Europe, and had many similar techniques to BJJ.
| I consider this an existence proof for him being wrong; it
| seems unlikely that these were the only two points where it
| developed.
|
| Catch wrestling split in two ways. On one side, it had
| submissions banned and became Olympic freestyle wrestling. On
| the other, they played up the drama and it became modern
| professional wrestling.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Martial arts in Brazil have had to have a notion of "cover",
| the other big one pretends to be a dance, because it was
| outlawed to practice martial arts.
|
| https://www.abada.org/capoeira-history/
|
| I think rather than look at the results, it is interesting to
| look at the forcing functions the results operated under.
| adastra22 wrote:
| For the record, BJJ doesn't "work" in a context of general
| fighting. BJJ has a strong focus on going to the ground and
| fighting within the rules of BJJ/MMA competitions. You do that
| in real life or death environment and you're dead.
|
| BJJ didn't develop until the 20th century because the
| competitive rules in which that style of mock fighting is most
| effective didn't solidify until the 20th century.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| BJJ worked in the early UFCs because the Gracies were among
| the very few competitors who had participated in MMA matches
| previously (having trained for Vale Tudo matches). A pure BJJ
| fighter today would get demolished by anyone training for
| MMA, but arguably Royce wasn't a pure BJJ fighter at the
| beginning of the UFC.
|
| On top of that Severn, Frye, and Coleman all came from
| western wrestling backgrounds and they did pretty well in
| UFC...
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Is this true generally? I could see that being the case in a
| 1 vs many situation, but one on one my gut says probably not.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Yes, sport fighting is not like survival fighting because
| anything that would cause permanent damage is against the
| rules. Against the rules doesn't get trained or practiced.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 1:1 fighting is extremely exceptional from a real world
| perspective. All real world fighting will be either
| many:many, or 1:many, or you should assume so as you never
| know that your assailant doesn't have a friend somewhere
| nearby.
|
| If you engages in BJJ like ground fighting techniques, it'd
| be like that scene in Indiana Jones where the crazy
| swordsman final boss shows up, and Indy just shoots the
| guy. Some other guy would come over and step on your neck,
| stab you, or just shoot you while you're down, or your
| opponent will gouge your eyes out, because that's the real
| world response. Historical fighting manuals are pretty
| explicit: never, ever get caught on the ground or you're
| dead.
|
| It's just that most of the ways in which a standing person
| would attack a nearby person on the ground are so dangerous
| that they are outlawed from sport competition, and so
| ironically even the notoriously "everything goes" MMA ends
| up favoring ground game and devolve into wrestling matches.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| MMA fighters are often asked in interviews about techniques
| for real street fights. The answer is always to sucker puck
| then gouge the eyes and throat.
|
| BJJ is well suited for the octagon. Allow small joint
| manipulation and most of the technique goes out the window.
| 83457 wrote:
| It is really a combination of factors. No holds barred fighting
| in Brazil was very important. Not emphasizing standup wrestling
| / grappling and focusing on finishing a fight as part of a
| sport was not common. Judo/jujitsu had all the components of
| BJJ and even practitioners focusing on ground (ie Judoka that
| taught the Gracies). However, the agreed on rules of Judo
| focused more and more on standing techniques with rules ending
| a fight on throw to back, resulting in leaving behind many
| aspects of the ground game in Japan from years past.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| Having trained BJJ and some Judo, I have come to appreciate
| the idea that if you land a proper judo throw on someone in a
| street fight, i.e. on concrete, and you put someone down hard
| on concrete, the fight is almost certainly over.
|
| The same applies for wrestling high-crotch or blast double.
| If you put someone down hard on the nearest solid object or
| concrete, there's a good chance the fight is immediately
| over.
|
| That said, in a real scrappy fight, landing a proper judo
| through is a tall order. I've seen high level black belts
| fail to land clean throws on spazzy white belts. They get
| them down and technically win, but not cleanly, and not with
| the force needed to end the fight. Newaza (ground techniques,
| i.e. BJJ) comes in there to help finish.
|
| Pure BJJ is great if you are fighting on dirt, and great to
| know defensively if you _do_ find yourself ambushed or
| otherwise on the ground in an altercation. But in a real
| fight you should do your best to put the other guy down hard,
| get on top, and stay on top. Modern BJJ in particular is far
| too willing to concede top position, though modern MMA is
| thankfully pushing back on this some.
| iamnotsure wrote:
| Schizophrenia occurrence may be somewhat related to the inverse
| of Dunbar's number, this is only partially about biology /
| genetics, just as computers are also about software and not only
| about hardware.
| qez2 wrote:
| [dead]
| pwillia7 wrote:
| The something in the water link goes to a paper that is a copy of
| Dracula from what I can tell -- https://osf.io/x4fk3/
| vient wrote:
| It seems that paper authors themselves replaced whole paper
| with a Dracula story in the latest revision. You can download
| previous versions [0], they contain fewer Draculas.
|
| [0] https://osf.io/download/5fa6d1f29c7a4e006ca006be/?version=4
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(page generated 2023-04-25 23:01 UTC)