Category Archives: amaths-wars

開山祖師牛 2

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* I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at crossroads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest.

o Experiment and Theory in Physics (1943), p. 44

— Max Born

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If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein

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2010.11.08 Monday ACHK

Firing customers

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Firing the customers you can’t possibly please gives you the bandwidth and resources to coddle the ones that truly deserve your attention and repay you with referrals, applause and loyalty.

— Seth Godin

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2010.11.06 Saturday ACHK

First priority, 2

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Startup 3

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Consulting is where product companies go to die.

By which I mean not that it has to make something physical, but that it has to have one thing it sells to many people, rather than doing custom work for individual clients. Custom work doesn’t scale. To be a startup you need to be the band that sells a million copies of a song, not the band that makes money by playing at individual weddings and bar mitzvahs.

* “How to Fund a Startup”, November 2005

— Paul Graham

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2010.11.05 Friday ACHK

Easy 2

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The secret to making things easy: avoid hard problems

That may seem obvious, but in my experience most engineers prefer to focus on the hard problems. Working on hard problems is impressive to other engineers, but it’s not a great way to build successful products.

— Paul Buchheit

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2010.11.04 Thursday ACHK

Life is easy

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There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

— Warren Buffett

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Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

— Ralph W. Emerson on Art

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2010.11.03 Wednesday ACHK

Principles 4

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25 I started to be able to organize my information.

27 I started to be able to get rid of my OCD 80%.

28 I started to able to understand “principles”, i.e. “follow the natural laws”.

— Me@2010.02.23

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2010.11.01 Monday (c) ACHK

C, Lisp, and Smalltalk

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Design and Research 2

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You can see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Java, were created for other people to use.

If you think you’re designing something for idiots, the odds are that you’re not designing something good, even for idiots.

— Paul Graham

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2010.10.29 Friday ACHK

The liar’s punishment

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* Just as the liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.

— The Two Pioneers

— George Bernard Shaw

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2010.10.28 Thursday ACHK

Annus mirabilis

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Annus mirabilis is a Latin phrase meaning “wonderful year” or “year of wonders” (or “year of miracles”). It was used originally to refer to the year 1666, but is today also used to refer to different years with events of major importance such as 1905 when Albert Einstein published his breakthrough four articles on Physics.

1666 – Isaac Newton

In the year 1666, Isaac Newton made revolutionary inventions and discoveries in calculus, motion, optics and gravitation. As such, it has later been called Isaac Newton’s “Annus Mirabilis.” It is this year when Isaac Newton observed an apple falling from a tree, and hit upon gravitation (Newton’s apple). He was afforded the time to work on his theories due to the closure of Cambridge University by an outbreak of plague. Going to his country home, he thought about many things that, in Cambridge, he did not have the opportunity to do with such devotion.

1905 – Albert Einstein

The year 1905 has very much been linked to the term “annus mirabilis,” as Albert Einstein made important discoveries concerning the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and the special theory of relativity. These articles were published in Annalen der Physik.

— Wikipedia on Annus mirabilis

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2010.10.27 Wednesday ACHK

How to do what you love, 3

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There are two ways to do work you love: (a) to make money, then work on what you love, or (b) to get a job where you get paid to work on stuff you love. In practice the first phases of both consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and in (b) the second phase is less secure.

— Paul Graham

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2010.10.22 Friday ACHK

Peter Norvig

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# Norvig talks about the job interview process at Google and says that the best signal is if somebody has worked with one of their employees and they can vouch for the candidate. He also talks about “resume predictor” that takes resume attributes such as experience, winning a programming contest, working on open source project etc and predicts fit. He also mentions assigning of scores 1 to 4 by interviewers and generally turning down candidates who get a 1 by any of the interviewers unless someone at Google fights for hiring them.

— Wikipedia on Coders at Work

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2010.10.21 Thursday ACHK

Noam Chomsky

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So when you go to graduate school in the natural sciences, you’re immediately brought into critical inquiry – and, in fact, what you’re learning is kind of a craft; you don’t really teach science, people sort of get the idea how to do it as apprentices, hopefully by working with good people. But the goal is to learn how to do creative work, and to challenge everything […] people have to be trained for creativity and disobedience – because there is no other way you can do science. But in the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on […] people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much.

* In Understanding Power, 2002

— Noam Chomsky

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2010.10.20 Wednesday ACHK

尼采的哲學思想

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理想的社會制度

尼采曾在《反基督》一書中，粗略的道出他所認為理想的社會制度。

他把社會階級分成三等：

第一等是最有精神力量的菁英份子，創造價值，由他們擔任統治者的角色。

第二等人是意志或性格堅強的人，他們聽命於第一階級，負責維護社會秩序及執法。

等三等人是最多數的平庸大眾，滿足於他們平凡的生活。

尼采也強調對於建立一個理想的社會而言這三種階級都是不可或缺的。他也不贊成以強凌弱，他認為高等人善待比他低等的人是應該的。「事實上，如果要有例外的人，平凡的人是首先就需要的必然：高等文化依存於其上。例外的人應該對待平凡者比他自己和同等級者更溫柔，這不是出自內心的禮貌 — 這根本是他的義務。」，這種「例外的人」甚至可以用「具有基督心靈的羅馬凱撒」來形容。

至於如何實行這種社會制度？尼采對於這個問題則沒有答覆。

— 尼采的哲學思想, 維基百科

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2010.10.18 Monday ACHK

Total Perspective Vortex

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The Total Perspective Vortex is allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected.

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”

Located on Frogstar World B, the machine was originally invented by one Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife. Because she was forever nagging him for having no sense of proportion, he decided to invent something that would show her what having a sense of proportion really meant. Unfortunately the shock of being placed in the Vortex destroyed her brain, but Trin Tragula’s grief was tempered by the knowledge that he had been right and she had been wrong. In Adams’s words, the Total Perspective Vortex illustrated that “In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

— Wikipedia on Technology in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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2010.10.17 Sunday ACHK