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Rondam Ramblings
Personal blog · blog.rongarret.infophilosophyscience
Rondam Ramblings is a personal blog at blog.rongarret.info about philosophy and science. Since 2012, 51 different Hacker News readers have linked it 357 times, most often “Geek business myths (2006)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Preaching the gospel of evidence, experiment and reason since 2003.
Most-linked posts?
- Geek business myths (2006)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2012-12-03
- Are Parallel Universes Real?4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-10-18
- Why Lisp?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-05-07
- Lisping at JPL Revisited4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-01-28
- /2009/10/wealth-production-mechanisms-followup.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-10-07
- A catalog of wealth-creation mechanisms (2009)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-05-16
- /2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.html2 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-03-13
- /2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-worlds.html2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-04-27
- A bugged life (2008)2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-03-22
- A simple solution to credit card fraud, and why you won't see it any time soon2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-02-22
What Hacker News says?
> There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was Here are some data points I collected at the time: https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster... https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/09/esata-on-snow-leopard.ht... In retrospect Snow Leopard deserves the love it eventually got, but at the time it was not entirely clear. > Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just p…
Comment linking /2009/09/esata-on-snow-leopard.html
on “Apple needs a Snow Sequoia”Submitted MailChimp deleted my account with no warning as a story · 715 points
HN discussion> And regarding your link and the very clever ontology it is based on: science is not composed only of the scientific method, it is also composed of human scientists. And if one is to replace "the scientific method" with "scientists" in that piece, the truth value of all of the statements changes drastically. Yes, that's true. But I'm not defending scientists, I am defending science -- since you are demanding precis…
Comment linking /2024/03/a-clean-sheet-introduction-to.html
on “Daniel Dennett has died”Submitted Things I wish someone had told me before I started angel investing as a story · 602 points
HN discussionHard to say without knowing more specifically what you are referring to. This has been a very long thread. But maybe this; https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/04/three-myths-about-scient... will answer your question. See myth #3.
Comment linking /2024/04/three-myths-about-scientific-method.html
on “Daniel Dennett has died”Submitted I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup attempts as a story · 547 points
HN discussionDid I point you to this already? https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h... Did you read it? Do you accept it? Propositions are ideas, i.e. they exist in a different ontological category than material objects like earth (note no quotation marks). The word "earth" (with quotes) is an idea, one that happens to refer to earth, i.e. the material object referred to by the word "earth", which happens…
Comment linking /2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.html
on “Daniel Dennett has died”Submitted Court found NSA surveillance unconstitutional in 2011 as a story · 444 points
HN discussion> I think you would agree that Fermat's last theorem isn't true by virtue of its utility for counting sheep or anything like that. Similarly, I don't think that the fact the physical world exists in the manner suggested by sense-data is true by virtue of its utility for preventing us from dying. I actually would not agree with either of those. > Are you saying that if there were no humans (or anything capable of enc…
Comment linking /2023/01/an-intuitive-counterexample-to-axiom-of.html
on “Daniel Dennett has died”Submitted Income inequality is not the problem, it's a symptom as a story · 433 points
HN discussionYou could have saved yourself a lot of typing by just saying that you are citing the ontological argument for God as your example. But OK... I will start by asking you to define what you mean by "exist". But before you do that you should read this: https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h... But I will also happily concede that something other than the universe exists. Quantum fields exist and th…
Comment linking /2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.html
on “Daniel Dennett has died”Submitted Why Lisp? as a story · 322 points
HN discussionYes, it answers these questions for all of those things except quantum fields. Why those fields exist we do not yet know, and may never know. But reducing the question to a single thing with an unknown origin rather than many things with (allegedly) unknown origins is still progress, particularly since that last remaining "thing" is not actually a thing that exists. And if you want to go down that rabbit hole, you s…
Comment linking /2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.html
on “Daniel Dennett has died”Submitted A catalog of wealth-creation mechanisms (2009) as a story · 303 points
HN discussionI'm not an expert either. I'm a computer scientist, not a physicist. But the math behind QM -- at least the parts that matter for this discussion -- is pretty straightforward linear algebra. Really, anyone can learn it. So don't take my word for it, look into it and decide for yourself. You can start here: https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Physics-Princeton-Foundati... https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Experi…
Comment linking /2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-worlds.html
on “Daniel Dennett has died”Submitted My simplified response to Paul Graham's simplified essay as a story · 243 points
HN discussionThere is a huge survivorship bias in people's theories of what it takes to succeed economically. Working hard improves your odds, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for success. Luck plays a huge role, starting with who your parents are. Nonetheless, the ranks of the successful are chock-full of people who worked hard and who think that they can draw a straight line between their hard work and their success,…
Comment linking /2009/10/travelogue-beauty-and-desperation-in.html
on “On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't”Submitted Beware of sudo on OS X as a story · 223 points
HN discussionYou have to either postulate randomness or describe how it arises from determinism. I don't see any other logical possibility. BTW, see this: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9906015 for a valiant effort to extract randomness from determinism, and this: https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-wo... for my critique.
Comment linking /2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-worlds.html
on “The Google Willow Thing”Submitted The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November as a story · 203 points
HN discussionThat's true, but "less strict" is understating the case pretty seriously. It's not enough for experimental physicists to lack free will. To rescue local hidden variables, nothing in the universe can have free will, not even God. That's a bridge too far for most people. (It's a bridge too far for me , and I'm an atheist! :-) Note also that superdeterminism is unfalsifiable. Since we are finite beings living in a fini…
Comment linking /2018/01/a-multilogue-on-free-will.html
on “The Google Willow Thing”Submitted Why Lisp? (2015) as a story · 157 points
HN discussionIt doesn't surprise me a bit that this happened in Nevada. That state puts on a good show of being governed by the rule of law, but in fact it is corrupt to its core. And they don't just screw the elderly and the gambling-addicted. I learned this the hard way back in 2011: http://blog.rongarret.info/2010/12/cosmo-and-me-part-1.html http://blog.rongarret.info/2011/01/cosmo-and-me-part-2.html http://blog.rongarret.inf…
Comment linking /2012/01/i-am-about-to-be-silenced.html
on “How the Elderly Lose Their Rights”Submitted Yes, code is data, but that's not what makes Lisp cool as a story · 154 points
HN discussionI know that me-too type posts are frowned upon here on HN, but in this case I think an exception is warranted. Too many scientists ensconce themselves in the ivory tower and treat the rest of the world with attitudes ranging from indifference to outright disdain. I also want to thank you for not following that model. On a totally unrelated note, I've been trying to wrap my brain around coherent states and the photon…
Comment linking /2018/05/a-quantum-mechanics-puzzle-part-drei.html
on “I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA”Submitted The sum of all the positive integers is not -1/12 as a story · 140 points
HN discussion> The whole "lawsuits cost millions" thing is a myth That may be, but they can easily cost many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lawyers typically bill at multiple hundreds of dollars an hour so it doesn't take a lot of hours to rack up five- or six-figure costs. That's high-stakes poker for most people. I once sued a neighbor for their barking dog. It cost me over $10,000 before I pulled the plug. https://…
Comment linking /2009/07/dog-days.html
on “ProctorU is dystopian spyware”Submitted A simple solution to credit card fraud, and why you won't see it any time soon as a story · 138 points
HN discussion> Really? Yes. http://blog.rongarret.info/2016/09/the-greatest-traitors-in-...
Comment linking /2016/09/the-greatest-traitors-in-american.html
on “Washington Post Is First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source”Submitted In defense of the Google Chef (2011) as a story · 132 points
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