jasonhong

23 ms·

1.
by jasonhong 8d ago
There was a recent link on HN about Tao explaining Six Essential Mathematical Concepts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49503521 Here's an excerpt of the video where he explains his idea: https://www.you
2.
by jasonhong 29d ago
I saw Jim Clark (of SGI and Netscape fame) talk one time about his new healthcare startup (Healtheon). He said something insightful that captures a lot of why it's hard to get things done in general: one person's inefficiency is s
3.
by jasonhong 1mo ago
Replace "passengers" with "users" and replace "airport workers" with "product team members", and you have a good argument for why good usability and good service design really matter in the world.
4.
by jasonhong 2mo ago
I heard an interview with him this morning, where he's already in China. Some of his stated reasons for the move (also listed in the articles below) include the slashed research funding in the USA, increasing restrictions on research a
5.
by jasonhong 2mo ago
Whether China is immigration friendly or not is debatable. However, here's a recent announcement from last week: Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Omar M. Yaghi joins Tsinghua University full-time https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/
6.
by jasonhong 3mo ago
It's worth pointing out that sometimes, some papers just become part of the general context of things and are no longer explicitly cited. Or people cite textbooks or general survey papers instead. For example, take a look at Albert Ein
7.
by jasonhong 4mo ago
Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science... Yes, it is possible to complete a PhD in 3-4 years, but it's not really good for your career. The bar our department sets for a PhD is that at th
8.
by jasonhong 4mo ago
We're working on AI user testing, to make it dramatically faster and cheaper for product managers and dev teams to find major usability issues with web sites. Give us a web site and a task users would do (e.g. "Add a pink shirt to
9.
by jasonhong 6mo ago
Two concepts that help explain the original article are Diffusion of Innovations and Social Proof. Diffusion of Innovations is a widely cited theory explaining why people do or don't adopt any kind of innovation, from boiling water to
10.
by jasonhong 6mo ago
I saw Jim Clark (founder of SGI, Netscape, Healtheon) talk one time about entrepreneurship. He said something that compactly explains a lot of issues humanity faces in general: "One person's inefficiency is someone else's bot
11.
by jasonhong 8mo ago
I've used The Design of Everyday Things in many classes I teach. I would agree that it's not practical, but that's not its goal. Instead, it gives you frameworks for thinking about things as well as vocabulary for talking abo
12.
by jasonhong 8mo ago
Wanted to share this funny SETI@home prank that Monzy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade ) did in 1999, where he created a fake VB app that tricked a coworker into believing that his computer successfull
13.
by jasonhong 11mo ago
Lichess has a series of puzzles you can try where underpromotion is the theme (which is unfortunately a major giveaway to solving these puzzles, since they otherwise be rather hard to solve) https://lichess.org/training&#x2F
14.
by jasonhong 1y ago
The general term for what you're describing here is a Dominant Design, and it has a lot of the characteristics of what you intuited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design
15.
by jasonhong 1y ago
In May earlier this year, the New York Times had a similar article about AI not replacing radiologists: https://archive.is/cw1Zt It has similar insights, and good comments from doctors and from Hinton: “It can augment, assi
16.
by jasonhong 1y ago
It costs a non-trivial amount of money to file a patent in the USA
17.
by jasonhong 1y ago
The last person in usually gets the best deal, in that they can get preference and push everyone else (previous investors, founders, and employees) down. If things goes south, they get their money out before anyone else.
18.
by jasonhong 1y ago
Having been on the program committee for some of these conferences, this issue of limiting number of submissions was being discussed long before GenAI. Specifically, there was talk of a few highly prolific security researchers that submitte
19.
by jasonhong 1y ago
I'd also add (4) be incredibly curious about lots of things; (5) surround yourself with other smart, curious, and committed people who have a culture of critiquing ideas; and (6) devote a lot of time to deep thinking.
20.
by jasonhong 1y ago
I'd say it's worse than that. This new policy of vetting will be extremely high cost in terms of time, money, and lost opportunities for students and universities, while also be rather useless in practice. Seriously, what student
21.
by jasonhong 1y ago
What is the basis for your assertion? Pretty much every list of top universities in the world routinely lists a large number of US universities. For example, in the Shanghai ranking, 16 of the top 20 universities are in the USA. https:&#x2
22.
by jasonhong 1y ago
Incidentally, IEEE Spectrum published a fascinating interview with Dr. Garwin just a few months ago. https://spectrum.ieee.org/richard-garwin > At IBM, where he worked from 1952 to 1993, Garwin was a key contributor or a
23.
by jasonhong 1y ago
My colleagues who studied this issue told me that there were several patents on bus tracking, making it cost prohibitive for many cities. It also led to the Tiramisu project, which used people's smartphones to track buses and how crowd
24.
by jasonhong 1y ago
This post is a great example of whataboutism and distracting people from the big picture: science funding works and has led to a large number of innovations that many of us here on HN use every day. The original article talks about several
25.
by jasonhong 1y ago
Having served on several NSF review panels, NSF (and academia in general) manages conflicts of interest rather seriously. You cannot review proposals if you have collaborated with any of the investigators of a proposal within the past few y
26.
by jasonhong 1y ago
This was recently discussed on Hacker News about two weeks ago. See this blog post by Steve Blank talking about the rise of research universities and why the USA is a science powerhouse. https://steveblank.com/2025/04&#
27.
by jasonhong 1y ago
They do control what it's spent on. There are volumes of compliance about how you can spend the money. For example, can't use the funds on food, alcohol, paying rent, bribing people (yes, seriously, some idiot tried it and then th
28.
by jasonhong 1y ago
First, it's highly unclear a priori which scientific discoveries will pay off. The discoverer of Green Fluorescent Protein was denied funding, with others eventually winning the Nobel Prize for it. Same for mRNA vaccines, most recently
29.
by jasonhong 1y ago
Optimal relative to what? And more seriously, name any large program, government or corporate, that is "optimal". Google, Duolingo, and DataBricks are three multibillion dollar tech companies based in part on NSF research. The ret
30.
by jasonhong 2y ago
Interestingly, the main article mentions Bill Thurston's paper "On Proof and Progress in Mathematics" ( https://www.math.toronto.edu/mccann/199/thurston.pdf ), but doesn't mention a quote from th

More ›