scottishcow

9 ms·

1.
by scottishcow 6y ago
Well surely it's a matter of degree (and also chronological trends) we're talking about here. My writing may not be perfectly clear but other commenters seem to understand my point, nuanced discussions may be difficult but not imp
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by scottishcow 6y ago
> Then I don't understand who this question is supposed to be directed at: To the HN community of course. > My answer would be that none of the activities you list (with the possible exception of the kind of wannabe entrepreneurs
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by scottishcow 6y ago
Never said it does, was it confusing? Maybe my English needs more work.
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by scottishcow 6y ago
So universities are conspicuous consumption, internships are conspicuous consumption, entrepreneurship is conspicuous consumption. Perhaps the simple fact is that most people are motivated by the need for social validation, and only a tiny
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by scottishcow 6y ago
My take is that GP simply doesn’t have any experience with engineering research .
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by scottishcow 6y ago
You make it sound as if the author is some middling engineer building smartphones for Apple. An EE professor at a well-regarded research university deals with the scientific method all the time . Whatever opinion you may have about the art
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by scottishcow 6y ago
Japan has a long history of appreciating quirky (often useless) inventions, I think there’s a certain aesthetic quality to these gadgets that resists easy definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chindōgu https:&#x2F
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by scottishcow 6y ago
Lots of great resources here, but as mentioned in the essay signaling based on external validation is still crucial. (OP seems to have won a Thiel Fellowship, I’d assume that has a stronger signaling value than your typical college degree.)
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by scottishcow 6y ago
This is tangential to the author's argument but it's amusing to see how the word "kawaii" has taken a life of its own in the West. In Japan we often make gratuitous use of English words ( yokomoji , lit. "sideways-w
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by scottishcow 6y ago
The legal drinking age in Japan is 20 (will be lowered to 18 in 2022), but attitudes toward teenagers drinking alcohol has historically been extremely lax here.
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by scottishcow 6y ago
This is interesting! Seems we can make everything interactive these days with a simple mix of electronics and ML. Discoverability might be an issue though, I already have trouble remembering all the gesture combinations on the Macbook tra
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by scottishcow 6y ago
Granted 16 isn't a lot, but that's actually a higher citation count than the vast majority of academic papers. Anyways, thinking of citations as a reliable proxy for paper quality is like ranking artists by how many followers they
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by scottishcow 6y ago
> Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time. Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful companies after getting their PhDs. I'm a bit envious of
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by scottishcow 6y ago
PageRank is a popularity contest, not sure why you’d put so much trust into it as a reliable proxy for content quality. Lots of crap can be popular. Perhaps Google is doing a decent job eliminating crap from their search results (debatable)
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by scottishcow 7y ago
The public doesn’t owe anything to academics; whether or not they decide to pay attention to literature of a certain field, it is their choice. I was merely stating my observation that while many seem to consider it worthwhile to pay some l
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by scottishcow 7y ago
Why is it perplexing? People put more trust in fields where researchers follow (or are expected to follow, at least) the scientific method. I work in what may be called a "soft" science field, I don't complain when people don
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by scottishcow 7y ago
If there really is a Newton of social robots the credit should go to Sony’s aibo — the vaguely Japanese-sounding names of Jibo, Kuri, etc. are dead giveaways of who’s the real OG here. Anyways aibo came out around 2000 I think, if social ro
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by scottishcow 7y ago
They're popular because they're considered Insta-worthy here in Japan, their rise pretty much coincides with that of Instagram.
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by scottishcow 7y ago
> n=10 Yes interesting idea for a study but only 10 participants, presumably all around the same age. Too bad this is what passes off as scholarship in Human-Computer Interaction nowadays. I remember seeing a paper from CHI (the top conf
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by scottishcow 7y ago
The author makes a rather arbitrary distinction between "dumb" and "smart" technologies - trains are now considered "dumb" technology? I live in Tokyo and that was never my impression, they're as smart as
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by scottishcow 7y ago
Despite the financial collapse in the early 90s, throughout the decade Japanese youths still had one of the highest levels of disposable income in the world so that probably had an effect. You could be making the most obscure music, film, o
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by scottishcow 7y ago
Brings back memories of tangible interface research around the year 2000, these ideas seemed to have so much potential back then. Unfortunately nobody has come up with a convincing argument as to exactly why we need tangibles, aside from
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by scottishcow 7y ago
> The true problem with surveillance is the asymmetry of it all. This argument reminds me of those pro-gun arguments: we can't prevent guns from falling into the hands of wrongdoers, so let's allow everyone to arm themselves
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by scottishcow 7y ago
Surprised to hear this about Barabasi, I'm no physicist but enjoyed reading his books on network science as a layperson. Is there any published criticism against his work? His papers get cited everywhere, I know citations are more metr
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by scottishcow 7y ago
Just to remind you all, this is coming from a country whose cybersecurity minister claims to have "never touched a PC in his life". https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026
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by scottishcow 7y ago
Sorta reminds me of What's Up Tiger Lily https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Up,_Tiger_Lily%3F
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by scottishcow 7y ago
This thread may be of interest: https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/3lnpt6/is_jake_adels... It's not like he acts with any apparent agenda or malice, the guy just has no regard for facts. Everyt
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by scottishcow 8y ago
It amuses me how Western media outlets continue to quote Adelstein, his entire shtick consists of spouting made up stuff about Japan to Western reporters with no means of fact-checking. I guess it goes both ways though, the self-proclaimed