skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>If you disagree, consider this thought experiment: Imagine if the entire world spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages, making mutual communication harder? It would be silly.

We do something similar to that already. Kids make up their own lingo when playing, subgroups invent new slangs within a single language, areas make their own dialect, we invent new cultural languages (e.g. music genres) that differentiate us from others, we invent new computer languages despite having existing ones, etc. Heck, even English got developed while other languages already existed.

But that's a question for an alternative reality. It doesn't answer whether it would be better to remove historical languages, and adopt a single (existing or new) one. What I mean is that what would be the best approach in a world that spoke a single language does not really enlighten us about a world that already has many. The world that "spoke a single language" wouldn't have existing living cultures in different languages like us to remove, and thus they'd have nothing to fear of losing.

Besides, languages encode ways of thinking and the culture/history etc of its generations speakers, something that will be lost in a monoculture. Single language = single universal culture = same shit all over the world, no diversity.

And if you think you're still getting diversity within a single country (e.g. because you have stuff ranging from Metallica to the Residents and from Hank Williams and Beyonce to Philip Glass and John Zorn) then you really don't know what actual cultural diversity is.
> Ideally, linguists and historians would document these languages and their cultures, then let them quietly fade. Teaching them to new generations is not only a futile effort, it's less beneficial on net.

I agree to this, and only this, from your comment. There's a lot of romanticism in reviving dead or dying languages that recalls a likeness to the Human Zoo.

But on the other hand, languages and dialects are very tied to the political spheres, which are always on the change, and the languages change with them. Dialects form themselves everywhere: even each household has it's own tiny dialect where some phrases make sense only therewithin. And for language in the modern sense is basically a partially constructed dialect based on a dialect spoken by the ruling class of a dialect continuum, and as dialects and politics are ever-changing animals, languages will always change. While some dialects become closer to a given language, others diverge, or even emerge.

And for lingua francas, they change too. It is possible that English will let it's status go to some other language in the coming centuries, just like Latin, French, Aramhaic, etc. did in the past.

> And most people don't realize how great a cost we pay for having so many languages.

Well, we can't ask people to let go of their identities because we'd rather not do internationalisation.
argentina, costa rica, peru, paraguay, mexico, malaysia, spain, austria and germany issue visas even if you don't have a local job

i'll be happy to answer more questions about argentina, paraguay and spain
Ah right I think that's because the accumulator is a double. I missed that. I think it should still be possible but compilers probably don't bother.
I have no idea, and that's what makes it difficult. It's the purpose of the sentence you quoted.

Consequences are almost always about losing something, and you have to have something to lose it, so you can't punish those who have nothing.

This creates a bizzaro nightmare scenario where the destitute can commit petty crimes with impunity.

I won't pretend to have a solution to this. So far, I'm not sure anybody does.

But that doesn't mean I can't be mad as hell about it. I'm sick of people saying that how people act in the streets here is somehow short of reprehensible.
Doesn't matter. Tesla shipped a deadly and broken technology. That Google won't do the same is good.

Google isn't a car company, they don't need to ship a car. They need to ship a working AI.
Look at the great discussion you started! Thanks for taking the risk of being imprecise to share your thoughts.
if you work remotely staying there short term (up to 6 months), it's not illegal
I would suggest looking at the paper in more detail before saying it's uncontrolled. I found the control just by skimming the figures.
Thoughtful article. Eno refers to hidden processes in systems as AI hinting at their similarity.

I am assuming there are already digital systems in place that monitor "hidden" processes that make a chicken sandwich for example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE).

Such systems could monitor data points and possibly forecast the price (or a great many things) of a chicken sandwich.
What the heck does the term moral instincts mean? Are a snake's instincts immoral for driving it to eat the rat?
The problem with natural selection as pertaining to language is that the language may be great but die because the culture dies off or shrinks or gets assimilated. For example, I don't consider Spanish an efficient or well-designed language in the slightest, but it's very widely spoken because the Spanish are good at conquest. Ainu is very fascinating and possibly more efficient (in terms of syllables per second over syllables per bit of information). The Ainu didn't have much interest in expansion and got more or less assimilated by Japan. Doesn't mean the language got selected against, the _culture_ got selected against.

While language may have an effect on a culture's success, I suspect a culture has much more impact on a language's success. Natural selection is a terrible metric of “good ones” in that case.
Could you clarify on the difference between a single radio telescope having a better PSF, and an array having better angular resolution? What's the difference between those two qualities?
>But the generations aren't separated by geography anymore.

They are. There's immigration, but that's just a tiny fraction of what goes on. We don't move randomly around the world. Even the immigrants come to a place to settle down and start a family and be integrated eventually.

And different countries are also separated by different outlooks on the world, ideas, ways to each. Which is a good thing (and orthogonal to war etc which historically its more about interests -- war can be just as brutal between brothers and similarly thinking people, as civil wars have told us).
In NH, we have the right to shoot trespassers on sight, so long as they die on our property...
Do you have good sources against his general claims? Should I try out bar soap? I'd really like to get to the bottom of this.
For the record, every IBM iSeries uses EBCDIC and those aren't going away any time soon (actually, the OS on those is very advanced and amazing, minus the EBCDIC part).

Also, discarding intellectual curiosity for strict utilitarianism is awfully short-sighted.
> The good ones will survive.

FTFY: the ones with more speakers and more political ties attached.

It's hard to say that a language is better than another one, it's highly subjective. But languages die not because they're worse, but because speaking them is a burden if you are: killed for speaking them, excluded for speaking them, there's no one to speak in the language with, you can't use it to shop or at the doctor's, etc.
Yes.

And it might mean some people get the chance to improve their own countries too, instead of being forced to immigrate (by globalization pressures) and try their luck on another.
Same as the idea of personal or group identity.

People like to be different -- either themselves to others, or their groups to other groups (because they also like to belong. Belonging and being different at the same times translates to groups and subgroups).

And they show that in many ways, language is but one. From clothing to consumption, tons of other things are used to that effect.
I can think of at least two scenarios where that doesn't quite hold: in times of war and also in times when austerity-espousing politicians "have" to make budget cuts and focus those cuts on social welfare programs. Then comes all the flowery language in support of "shared sacrifice" for the greater good. Then, they are usually able to make very persuasive arguments for inflicting short-term pain. One would think these same politicians could use their rhetorical power to help avoid cataclysmic climate change.
Off-topic: Why are code blocks are used for quotes by many people here? They just scroll horizontally forever and are a burden to read.
> An animated video of what it might be like is almost a scene out of Star Wars "Attack of the Clones".

There's the irrelevant pop-culture namedrop that every science article has to have for some reason.
That did happen, although selling your soul for Disney money is not exactly the best choice when you have a reputation for quality over the foreign, no-name imposters. Ultimately, they've got the distribution channels and the reputation, so it will take more years of mediocrity to lose that lead, but I worry, because I remember how excellent they used to be.
Oh, I meant where he's living intellectually. But I think my perception of what classifies an academic is pretty skewed: I managed to code Haskell for money for the first five years of my career (now still sneaking it in at Google in my 20% time), and don't consider myself an academic at all.

Perhaps I also have a European bias here. After the war, the Americans got to play with their computers early on, and their academics ended up with Lisp. The European computer scientists had to wait, and thus had nothing better to do but think. They ended up with types and ML (the family that Haskell sprang from).

These days, it seems that the European tradition has firmly won in the most academic parts of computer science. Lisps are still around, and with Clojure have seen more mainstream success that ever before. But in Academia the only Lispers left standing seem to be the Schemers, and they have warmed up to static types, too. (They did some great work on contracts.)
He specifically asked about long term so I'm sure he already knows about tourist visas. Also it heavily depends on the country. Some short-term visas only allow a 3 month stay not 6.
That seems feasible as long as you give very explicit instructions to the person performing the task. I'm not sure if I could do that without instructions!
If for no other reason, I would be psyched to see a single language win out, especially if it were an alphabetic language that could easily be encoded in 8 bits. Fuck Unicode.
Raw vote totals then?
You are asking for specific legal advice. You really really should talk to a lawyer (and maybe a tax accountant) and not the internet. Many lawyers offer free consultations.
> English prefers to borrow words from other languages. Curiously, it has borrowed hardly any words from Mandarin Chinese.

Besides that there had been much less contact between English speaking countries and China than to, say, German, French or Spanish speaking countries (at least until the Chinese economy began to boom) there is another reason that I can imagine. Since the Chinese dialects/languages are tonal languages their sound is much more foreign to the ear of people who didn't grew up with a tonal languages. Indeed people who learnt to speak one of the Chinese dialects told me one of the first exercises is learning to even consciously perceive the different tones.
I disagree. Besides specialists, I think most people think that Autopilot means it doesn't need supervision. Wiktionary's definition:

A mechanical, electrical, or hydraulic system used to guide a vehicle without assistance from a human being.

"I set the autopilot to due south, so I could get some rest."
> Indeed. I fear AI that stops being dependent on people. Such systems are still far off, I believe. But I don't see why we couldn't intentionally or by accident create a new form of life that could out-compete us, and in the end make us extinct.

Since the line between AI realized in a machine and systems in general is kind of thin and blurry, one could argue that the economy is about to become such a system. If automation can fill all the links in the feedback loop chains of the market, we could one day wake up to see humanity being completely excluded from the economy, which would continue onwards by itself. A Disneyland with no children[0].

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
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I've been working at Kustomer for 5 days but I already love it. The founders are programmers and work alongside us and we just moved to a new fancy and big office—it's awesome!
Improbable. Sharing a pre-determined result with Joe Random Votecounters * number of voting stations = near certainty of someone leaking that, and a field day for the media.

So, while theoretically possible, realistically summed up by "three men can hold a secret, if one of them is dead."

(And specifically here, if I were a conspirator going for a predetermined result, I would want a somewhat close result, yes - but not an almost-tie as seen here. Something like 55:45 or somesuch, not a "every single vote matters" scenario, where a few thousand votes could swing the outcome)
I'm pretty sure it's a prank to get gullible people to try brushing their teeth with bar soap.
Kill Bill on Microsoft Azure
See also: Howard Dean, 2004
but... but... Arabs living in Israel are first class citizens, they are not forced to live on reservations, and they participate in elections and are elected to the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

The occupied West Bank is land that was formerly claimed by--no, not by "Palestine", that wasn't actually a thing--the State of Jordan which also included the territory of Israel in its claimed territory; the state of Jordan gave up its claim to the West Bank when the people living there (according to them, "Jordanians", but people you know as Palestinians) were politically destabilizing to the government of Jordan. To stave off the political threat (look up Black September), the state of Jordan gave up its claim to the West Bank (and to Israel).

Israel only occupied the West Bank when Palestinian lawlessness and terrorist antipathy toward Israel resulted in numerous bloody attacks on the civilian population of Israel. Israel has a much better case for occupation/pacification than Russia does of its occupation and annexation of Ukraine. I (a non Jew) do believe that anti-Semitism is the root cause of so much more anger directed at Israel than is directed at (say) Russia. Think of other disputed territories around the globe. Only in the case of Israel is there so much bitterness by outsiders toward one side, the less violent side, the side that is actually a civilized democracy and obeys rule of law.

And now that I mention it, do you even know what Morocco has been doing for many years in Western Sahara? Look it up, look up Polisario... it's an ethnic conflict. People will read about that and tut-tut and say, wow, that's terrible what the Moroccans have been doing, but quickly return to condemning Israel. And they look at the Hutus and Tutsis and say "well, there is blame to go around on both sides", and now we turn our attention to the tiny state of Israel, largely surrounded by barbarous dictatorships who don't even treat their own citizens well, and low and behold, it's those terrible awful Israelis who are to blame, much moreso than the Russians or Moroccans. Somehow it doesn't seem like there is plenty of blame to go around in this case, eh?

I believe that there are two reasons for bitterness toward Israel.

1) anti Arab racism motivates the belief that "we can't expect Palestinians to behave any better" (hey, maybe we can't, but if you don't want me to accuse you of anti-Semitism, come out and say it)

2) anti Jewish racism motivates the belief that "still, that doesn't justify the way those people are reacting", even though we see plenty of other "peoples" around the world defending themselves.

What are the Israelis defending themselves against? Click around wikipedia for awhile and look at the sheer number of Palestinian attacks directed at Israel month in and month out every year for the past 35 years. Would you put up with that directed at you and yours?
While you are correct, my intent was to serve as a counterpoint to statements like this in the article, "He identified himself and his highly trained colleagues at the NSA as a breed apart — a superior breed, much in the way that soldiers look down on weekend paintballers. Perhaps this shouldn’t be altogether surprising, because arrogance is one of the unfortunate hallmarks of the male-dominated hacker culture."
SPIDERMAN and MICKEY MOUSE RIDE THEIR TRUCK and H
Everything is relative. :) Compared to the add instruction itself, the overflow check is very expensive. But the big problem is that your types widen. E.g:

// x and y are hardware integers >= 0
var z = x + y
for (var i = 0; i < z; i++) {
...
}

If your language used modular arithmetic, 'z' would also be a hardware integer and the induction variable 'i' could be kept in a cpu register. But with real arithmetic using bignums you can't assume that anymore and each iteration of the loop must do a relatively expensive comparison of 'i' against 'z'. In pseudo code:

var z = x + y
var i = 0
if (!hw_int(z)) i = new_bignum(0)
while (true) {
// i < z
if (hw_ints?(i, z)) {
if (i >= z) break
} else {
if (bignum_gte(i, z)) break
}
... body ...
// i++
if (hw_int?(i)) {
i++;
} else {
i = bignum_add(i, 1)
}
}
You're not the only one.

>Not long ago, Paul Saffo, of the Institute for the Future, said to me, “Bill Gates is an introvert. He is not the kind of person you want building the social network of the future.”

Looks like Saffo got his wish, Gates didn't build it.
S-Expressions are fun. When I first learned a Lisp, Scheme in my case, I found them weird but could see the appeal.

When I learned Haskell afterwards, it was the opposite: I thought I'd miss S-Expressions, but I learned to like its more baroque syntax.

S-Expressions have the chief virtue of making even the most crude macro look no different from the most over-engineered builtin to the language from the user's point of view.

And they clearly separate the syntactical space in the language, so that new features (whether as macro or built-in) can always find a space. Compare to the cracks of C they had to fit C++ into.

Haskell might be even worse. The chief obstacle to adding OCaml or-patterns to Haskell (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24700762/or-patterns-in-...) seem to be finding a syntax that's both pleasant and fits between the strands of the fine web in ascii space of already valid Haskell programs.
Thank you. My high school physics classes around lenses and mirrors with the parallel light sources from infinity and the lines coming to a focus at the focal point are coming back to me now. Didn't think about the parallel lines hitting the curved surfaces at any angle and reflecting to the focus. The steering mechanism is much more clearer to me now.
Those details seemed to be highlighted almost, which means Id assume the journalist made them up to anonymise the hacker.
Many larger systems are more than the sum of their parts. Enough that you could consider the grouping it's own entity. Ant hills are the canonical example because individual ants are recognizable as 'animals', but the function of an anthill clearly relies on a complex interaction between more simple ants.

Just as we are made of tiny organisms, bigger systems could be considered to be made of us.
Do You Trust Google with Your Medical Records?
It's going to be interesting to see the effects on manufacturing, esp with the bits and pieces of things that are made with oil.
It's not like Seattle is emptying out in favor of the Eastside, companies are actually moving to the Seattle side because it is better for recruiting (Expedia being a really big example). Some people really like sterile cookie cutter suburbs and the Eastside is perfect for that, but it's not for everyone regardless of how "nice" it is.
"Failure to imagine existence of laws" is not usually a valid defense.
If you really think that Clinton didn't get the votes she got fairly, you're living in a bubble. Sanders supporters have this problem of forgetting that women and minorities exist.

(I can't stand the Clintons, but I don't think they cheated)
> That's the official story. Anybody familiar with Microsoft's history knows they have been trying to lock down the wintel platform for a long time. Creating a "Trusted Computing" environment specifically for DRM purposes has been a goal since "Palladium".

Are you implying Microsoft encouraged Lenovo to disable the firmware toggle for Secure Boot? Even though it's only defective on one model of one manufacturer's computer, and literally any other computer (including the Surface x86 line) can toggle it?

I don't see why they would maliciously introduce Secure Boot and only sabotage it on a very small number of computers.
More specifically anomaly detection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomaly_detection
The "dark side" described here is programmers not using our labor power for the right things, not really a downside to having labor power. Instead of being seduced by fancy campuses, we can insist on better working conditions. I work 15 hours/week, mostly on my own schedule, with low pressure. My free time is more important to me than a six figure salary, living in the valley, or free lunch.

Generally speaking, programmers in the US have the labor power to shape how we work. But many of us buy into a certain idea of what success means and how to get there. Really no one to blame but ourselves on that count.
It is interesting how large cities with a similar problem differ from smaller "towns" like Santa Cruz which have as bad or worse problem (due to concentration/space constraints).

Local individuals here will defend and make excuses for ill behavior, even to the point a few years back -- a local shelter w/ no bed space (waiting list); magically a mentally disturbed individual (inadvertently released) finds bed space due to AB109 or similar; a few days later brutally murders a local business woman who was walking between her house and downtown. When other individuals asked to understand why someone like this magically got bed space, local "homeless advocates" were apoplectic about such questions.

Here, the politics around "homeless issues" are highly polarizing. The ability to have a rationale conversation is almost impossible.

I understand the urge to rant. After 25 years here, some of those "burbs" you mentioned are looking appealing as are other areas in rural california, etc.
Oh, my question was more in the vein of "Obviously the standard notation doesn't make sense here. I assume you are not an idiot, so you must have meant something else."

Alas, jokes and sarcasm don't travel well over text. One of the reasons they are frowned upon in the HN guidelines.