skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a physics genius. But to me it seems like the enthusiasm for this theory is based on some very old cultural assumptions about man vs. nature.

For example:

> “If I were a character in a computer game, I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical,” said Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “That just reflects the computer code in which it was written.”

Computers are not exempt from nature, of course. The reason a computer works is because the physical laws of our universe can be described mathematically. If quantum theory didn't work mathematically, then neither would a computer.

So Tegmark is probably assigning the correlation the wrong way. A computer can only exist in a universe with mathematical physical laws; therefore the detection of mathematical laws doesn't tell us whether we're in a computer ourselves.

Likewise:

> Furthermore, ideas from information theory keep showing up in physics. “In my research I found this very strange thing,” said James Gates, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland. “I was driven to error-correcting codes—they’re what make browsers work. So why were they in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry?

Information is also not exempt from nature; it is a physical thing that is subject to the same laws of the universe as anything else. And what we call information theory arose from our study of real physical systems, like telegraphs and telephones.

Now, maybe information theory will turn out to be a better mathematical framework for describing the laws of the universe. But that does not mean that it is any more likely that we're living in a simulation. One mathematical framework is not more "natural" than another. And there are plenty of examples of where a math framework developed in one context became useful in another.

We use computers, and I think we still see ourselves as somehow distinct from the rest of nature. This lends itself to a somewhat supernatural way of thinking, like "I use a computer to manage information, so therefore if everything is information, then there must be a super-me running a super-computer."

But taking scientific theory at face value, a computer running SimCity is just as natural as a cat, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze. If our theory says that everything is information, then so are we, and so are our computers--so there is no need for anything else to explain that.
Fair point on the z-score still to simple but better than a ratio.

As far as the LLN, also right but this assumes that PayScale has anywhere close to enough datapoints for that number to be reached which I would question. Also not sure if we can consider the LLN in the same way if you are comparing a total population with a sample here?

That I guess is the other compounding factor actually, the population of Software Engineers is actually just a sample of the overall population of "the general public's income" and so that does impact this as well. We're not comparing group A to group B but rather group A to group ABC...N.
Here's an example

> Long, long ago, the Sahara was not quite so dry as it is now. There were rivers then, which have dried up since. When there was water, food would grow, and people could keep sheep and cattle. In those days there were several large cities there. But when the water began to dry up, the ground became sandy and nothing would grow. Then, whenever the wind blew, the sand was carried along and began to cover up the houses and temples. The people had moved away because their food would not grow, and soon the sand completely covered the old cities.
But the simulation doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be complete. Maybe only you and your friends are actually being simulated, and everything else is just a partial stub. Maybe only the relevant parts are rendered.

I actually read Nick Bostrum's original paper and it's a pretty interesting read. Basically it looks at the long tail end of things. When you predict things waaay into the future, you tend to gain accuracy for macro predictions.

For example: our sun will most likely run out of energy and die out one day. The plate border in East Africa will most likely break apart at some point causing that continent to split.

The big one: humanity will one day go extinct. ... or...we'll expand to Mars and other parts of the solar system and thrive for millions of years. There are other options of course (we get blown back to the stone age, some humans survive and technology has to restart from a few thousand years ago...repeatedly...until we either leave this planet or go extinct).

If our machine understanding continues to grow, we should be able to eventually make machines that can simulate parts of the world we're in. So either we've already done that (some other we), and we (you and I we) are the products of their simulation ... or we'll go extinct one day.

...or simulating this world, perfectly or imperfectly, isn't possibly at all. ... and we'll go extinct one day.
I am not a libertarian, but I can tell you that you are confusing generic corporate capitalists with libertarians because they often sound the same. Real libertarians believe some junk about ideal world with minimal government. Corporate capitalists are sometimes libertarian but usually just spout libertarian stuff because it sells better than being honest about their power ambitions.

Basically, don't confuse corrupt power-mongers who use libertarian propaganda at times with actual libertarians.
I think it would be cool to ask them to create a web app for a non-profit, which you could then open-source.
So you're saying colonialism was a net negative for the African people because of small pox? And therefore should never have occurred? I disagree, and say it was a net positive for the African people.

If it had never occurred and Africans never learned to read or write, and gained the help of western science and medicine, then the descendants of those affected by small pox would be succumbing to preventable maladies far more than they are today. Which would total a far greater poor health and suffering tally, far beyond the initial small pox problem or what have you.

But then again, maybe you're right that the world be better off if Africa had just been left entirely alone, an island unto itself.
Conversations are better when you do some work to understand existing information first. If you don't know anything it's not a conversation, you're asking for spoon feeding.
Presumably image stabilisation is easier too. Although the camera looks huge so probably only for fixed mounting at the moment.
We have certifications for building and maintaining networks. I don't understand why we don't certify people regulating networks.

On the other hand... that opens up questions on when certifications are required. Do judges need to be certified to rule on plumbing law?
I would embed it in an iframe and be done with it
The only cars that get that kind of range are boxy compacts being driven at 80+mph and mostly because they place such a premium on space that the gas tank winds up being 10gal or smaller. Those cars also have an out the door price of under 20k even when moderately optioned. Nothing that's remotely like the 3 gets that kind of range.
Most of the text in the warrant appears to be boilerplate language that is legally required or at least legally advisable in case it is ever challenged in court. I'm sure FBI agents have template word documents they keep, detailing their experience and relevant basic facts about each kind of case and then they just fill in the blanks when they have a case of that genre. This way no one can argue that the judge was not apprised of the basic facts.
You could make that argument about a bunch of things: prostitution, drugs, auto mechanics, etc. But I don't see much push to license these things rather than criminalize them or ignore them. Drugs cost society a huge amount in many ways, but there's been no push to license that until just recently with marijuana. Mechanics aren't licensed, though they do have a totally private certification system. How many people have died from bad chiropractors, compared to cars breaking down (not so much now, but in the old days this was probably a problem) or using tainted illegal drugs? And how many people have died by going to chiropractors or other such quacks instead of real doctors? Steve Jobs is a good example of the latter.
I agree and thank you for the feedback, for its defense, this was barely the first draft and really skims over the thoughts and follows them as they arrive. It is by no means a revised and generalized piece.
Couldn't it also be "LisP", as the abbreviation for "List Processing"?
Haggard: "Funny you mention that, Johnny."

Cash: "What?"

Haggard: "San Quentin."

Cash: "Why's that?"

Haggard: "The first time I ever saw you perform, it was at San Quentin."

Cash: "I don't remember you being in that show, Merle."

Haggard: "I was in the audience, Johnny."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-merle-h...
DevOps Library: Issue 3 (4/11/2016)
Are you referring to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? Of course, that still doesn't mean we're necessarily in a simulation!
Here is everything you ever wanted to know about the law as it applies to material omissions from search warrants:

https://www.fletc.gov/sites/default/files/imported_files/tra...
While good, sort of scary because a lot of small players would host ads to get revenue and some of the ads would be filed with sexual content, even though these websites aren't even porn sites. Just some random humor site or some fortunate teller site, so if this were really true, wouldn't we be be looked at!?
Chat.center and Facebook's Unique Chat ID
On Saturday I published a story on Medium called "Dear Zuck, What the Fuck" - https://medium.com/@kteare/dear-zuck-fuck-84d9c1bdba26#.8mm0qbhhz. Insiders here at HN described it as link bait. Another said he didn't understand the point. Commenters said that the accusation related to the look of FB Messenger and that this look is common to many apps, including iMessage and others that pre-date chat.center.

These comments miss the point. Of course there are links in my story, although they are clearly not bait... This is the internet, so I did use the basic link tools. But the links are not "bait". The intent of the links is clear from the context and nobody who clicks would have been baited.

More inportant. The article does not accuse Facebook of copying a UI. Indeed it explicitly says that may be a reasonable and obvious UI. It accuses them of copying the entire concept of a Unique chat ID (a human readable URL pointing to a SaaS chat service), and then of linking that from any end point - to the owner of the ID via a Webb and mobile app, linked via SaaS.

Until Friday chat.center was novel in offering such a service. We fully integrate into the DNS using this approach, making chat ID's open. There is no requirement of a clicker to "join" anything.

Facebook has definitely duplicated our service. They may or may not have copied it.

These are reasonable reasons for my article and for my complaint, but also reasons for explaining to the world what has happened and what I as the founder of chat.center think about it.

To put this article into the context of click bait, or to suggest I am complaining about a UI being stolen are both mistaken.

Keith Teare
http://chat.center/keith
The one thing that I can't find from Anker or any other reputable, reasonably-priced supplier (last time I checked, anyway) is a single-port charger that is small enough, horizontally and vertically, to not sprawl out onto adjacent outlets in a power strip.

I don't understand why this is so hard. My first smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, came with one, but it failed within a year and Samsung wanted like $50 for a branded replacement.
Why? What did you switch to?
I thought the answer would be no because there are computable and non-computable functions. If we are in a simulation then we should not be able to reason about them.

Also then p!=np.
How Computers Can Tell What They’re Looking At
You're probably getting upvoted because there's a kernel of truth in it. Many of the very intelligent people I know have followed this line of thought at one point or another. I have as well, multiple times.

It keeps coming back to "what's the point of what I'm doing?" and I've personally yet to find any sort of answer that speaks to any sort of higher truth than "I'm here, now what?"
Measuring wealth without adjusting for lifecycle effects (which is how it's usually done) is a meaningless exercise. A doctor four years into his or her career almost certainly has negative wealth, while any retiree not solely depending on a government pension presumably has some reasonable wealth.
I'm aware, but I think the efficiency of these methods is rather circumstantial: they work well because of the way our computers are organized. What you are comparing are two simulation methods, with are both very far removed from what they simulate.

Instead, imagine implementing HashLife inside a Game of Life universe. It is possible, because the system is Turing complete, but the overhead would be horrific: probably thousands of cells for each cell you try to simulate. You would have to duplicate the cache all over the place to minimize roundtrip costs, each cell would be a whole machinery to allow signals to be routed there, plus logic to handle synchronization issues between each "unit", and so on.

It's a very neat idea that works very well with our computer systems, but if you were to implement it using the resources of the simulated system, it would be a catastrophe. And similarly, I don't think you could build a physical "cache" that can simulate physical interactions faster than they happen, except in a few contrived cases.
If you just count time when the pump is pumping some of the really old pumps could definitely fill a compact with a small gas tank in 15-20sec. While that's not the norm but it's definitely possible.
Why "apparently"? It seems like a sensible theory. You seem to have issues with reality, it may offend your noble sensibilities but real it is. Beauty is objective, there's ugly and then there's attractive.

Holding hands, giving likes to politically correct comments on reddit and facebook to each other and singing kumbaya wont change reality.
But SF is an outlier for cost of living. And anyone in the U.S. can still buy a toaster for $25 no matter where you live etc.
I am definitely in the this idea is nuts camp. It's the equivalent of a couple of cell in Conway's game of life trying to figure out what computer architecture the program is running on, who build the computer and what our universe looks like. Arguments like simulating ancestors and whatnot implicitly assume that the computer owners are in some sense similar to us which seems totally unjustified, we have certainly simulate way more things that are different from us than similar to us. What justification do we have that concepts like space and time and simulating something and ancestors even make sense in the outer universe?

Or mathematics. Mathematics is of course good at describing our universe, we created it for that. Well, that is probably a bit too simplistic but anyway. And what would you expect the outer universe to be like? A structureless random mess without rules that could be described by mathematics? How would you make a simulation in such an environment? If you have some time to kill or want to write a science fiction novel, go ahead, think about it, but there are certainly more relevant problems to our existence than pondering whether we are one or a billion levels deep in a stack of simulations.
Including sexual lubricants

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i7_-NtJeB4

Someone has to review them...
seems to devalue the practice of ritualism, while mocking the social constructs of presumably a city. maybe try reflecting on one or the other instead of devaluing the potency of each.
These are great examples but other than the authors personal preferences its not clear what makes these examples effective.

It would be good to understand the underlying philosophy and style of communication for each example, so you can piece together what would work best for your project and brand. Not all of them are the same.
I'll accept that software engineering is a profession when software engineers accept the same level of responsibility for their work that doctors and lawyers do.

When that happens, brace yourself for a never ending stream of malpractice suits.
The Books I Kept
I didn't stipulate how to disclose it, only that the right thing is to disclose it. I doubt you'd suggest the person should live in denial and/or not fight for his rights in some manner. Disclosing things doesn't necessarily include stupidly getting oneself killed by revealing them in a poor manner, i.e. inappropriately or unskillfully. After all, that would hardly do a good job of revealing the fact it's his right to have his own sexual preference, wouldn't you say? The important question is how to do things, not what to do. Given this, would you agree now?
"Ads filled with sexual content"!="child porn"
Can somebody in the know please summarize the major changes from 5.0 to 5.1 for every day developers? I found the changelog a little too detailed to read and grep.
How do you demolish a skyscraper? (2012)
I'm curious as to also why they just don't go for full Salsa20 and do 32-bit words instead, seems like a logical quick fix upgrade that might break the decryption.
is there any type of index better than compressed bitsets when you have per-column index and you want to AND,OR, basically combine them ?

If your index is denser than ~.1 and sparser than ~.9, a simple bitmap is almost certainly the fastest solution for union and intersections, and likely the most compact as well. SIMD is so simple and fast over these that they are hard to beat.

At higher or lower densities than this, "something else" is probably better. The idea of a compressed bitset (like Roaring) is to use a different encoding depending on the density. So in that sense, a compressed bitset is the best you can do.

That said, there is still lots of room for improvement among compressed bitsets. Among other things, I don't think there are any that yet deal well with "inverted selection" for very high densities. Most papers just avoid the issue by assuming "stop lists", which might not be possible in a real world database. Intersections between different density columns using different encodings still has lots of optimization potential too.
You are in a desert of dunes. The day to day is between two dunes. You look up, you see sand.

There are mountains in the distance. If you never walk up to the top of the dune, you won't know that, and if you don't make it a habit, you'll quickly forget that you saw them.

Your life can be a procession of views of sand grains in between a few dunes, or it can be a deliberate migration towards the mountains.

We are not terribly far from an ascension that will completely change the human condition, make it irrelevant as to what we our ancestors were in the evolutionary past, and make it possible to choose everything about what we will be. The future is glorious, golden, and accelerating. You can work towards that, or you can choose to ignore it.
If all it takes is "a few grams of sugar" to feel full, maybe it makes sense for you to go go ahead and have a bit in addition to your otherwise healthy diet. For me, the key to nutritional success is finding something that's sustainable and being able to listen to your body. And a few grams of sugar here and there aren't going to make or break anything (besides ketosis).
Euthanize everyone over 40.
yes, I know, but 1/1000 may be. what if it's loaded over http behind the scene without any display? still transmitted over your network. What if the site just got hacked?
I recently discovered AvE and now bigclive. I'm not sure how I missed this particular internet rabbit hole but I love it.
It's specifically referring to child porn, rather than generic adult content.

That said, the UK equivalent, the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) effectively blacklisted Wikipedia, because of the Scorpions' album cover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_...
http://xkcd.com/220/

http://xkcd.com/167/

Yeah, sometimes you lose sight about what's beautiful in life. But its the human inside of you who determines whether life is beautiful or not.

Why does anything matter? Is it all just a meaningless "ritual"? Maybe, if you don't care. But that doesn't seem like a very healthy mindset to keep yourself into.

Life only has the meaning that you assign to it. Others will judge you for "meaningless" tasks, or you yourself may feel like things are meaningless at times. That's normal. Congratulations, you've rediscovered existentialism. Now either play the ritual of philosophy and find meaning in that discovery, or play something else.

In any case, seeing life as a serious of "meaningless rituals" ignores the beauty and discovery that life gives us. We all have that phase in our life where we lose meaning, but one day you'll come back around and discover the reason why you continue to march forward.

And at that point, you'll rediscover beauty and adventure. Life will be interesting. Today is not that day for you yet however.
Good to see I'm not the only one :D
It makes me wonder what would happen to us if we didn’t have any more rituals to perform or standardized games to wake up to.

We'd develop them again. We didn't get the set we have by accident.

Some variation would be found, certainly, but cultures around the world converged on many similar notions reaching where we are today.
"HTML5 was released in 2014 as the result of a concerted effort by the W3C HTML Working Group." - Sure looks like one.
Instapaper Weekly is seeking sponsorships
Interesting. I wonder what the business model is. Advertising? Subsidy from different stores? I would be interested to hear from the owners. What was the inspiration and what problem does it solve?

But a few things. I don't see the real advantage of this over pen & paper & talking.

How much on average could it help me save? Including travel time.

I don't know about anyone else, but my shopping lists are open to change depending on what's available, in season, and how much time I have to shop.
Agreed, but then that's literature's way of saying anything, the more prolix the better.
>. I don't think you'd have much of a leg to stand on if you were to publish John and Jane Doe's humdrum bedroom activities.

Stand on against what? You seem to be arguing that it should be perfectly OK to do exactly that.
Most email is spam. Most cash contains traces of drugs. Most BitTorrent content infringes copyright.

Is that supposed to justify a raid of anyone who runs a mail server or pays in cash or torrents a Debian ISO?

For that matter, given the whole Three Felonies a Day thing, most postal mail is in fact sent by criminals too.

There is a reason we have a law against theft and not a law against crowbars.
See my response below about child porn. Thanks.
I wish there were more shots of the device - that said, I really love the form factor from the front.
There's an epic rant on this topic here, https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25401 , by Nassim Taleb, one of the 21st century's greatest masters of epic rants.

This Mean Absolute Deviation is a very useful error estimator. Unfortunately it, unlike the standard deviation, requires two passes over a dataset to compute.
Newspaper Publishers Fire Off a Cease and Desist Letter to Ad-Blocking Browser
Categories: An implementation of category theory in Coq
Looks like picking the simpler option precisely because it was simpler was the sensible choice. I've had no issues with react-simple-router: it routes, it works with react, what else do you really need?
> I do think that the days of being purely ops and needing nothing but shell scripting are going away though. You gotta pick up some python or similar at this point.

Maybe 5-10 years down the line, but not this year or next.