skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Saying that it is 'smart talk' implies that smart people are talking about it?

I keep reading paraphrases of basically that idea in articles and blog posts. Another phrase which means the same thing refers to getting enough data, or declares that data is king. The latter often implies that what's happening is an automation and repackaging of human intelligence.

Saying that the value in the Chinese Room argument is in showing how we have difficulty overcoming our biases is a clever inversion, more a funny debate tactic than serious defense of Searle.

It's not even a funny debate tactic, if no one is actually defending the Chinese Room argument. In other words, there is a value in looking at why people are interested in the argument, despite the fact it fails.

I don't think using brain biology and logic over intuition needs to be defended.

The way that we apply science and logic in the context of our cultural understanding and human biases does need to be examined, however. History shows this quite clearly.

I think it's very telling that instead of engaging in an analysis of the intuitions and biases which apply to human beings thinking about consciousness, you are merely interested in the dead-horse beating exhortation of the supremacy of arguments which have already been won. I think an examination of the above situation has tremendous value for people thinking seriously about AI's implications for future society.

For example, there is a story about Murray Gell-Mann and how he flummoxed his grad students by being just slightly faster at getting to the next idea in conversations. One day, his grad students played a practical joke on him by enumerating all of the implications of a new line of thinking, ahead of time when he wasn't there, memorizing them, then blurting out the next idea when he met with them later. I also had a professor like that. He never thought things I never thought of, but he was always saying them just as I was formulating the idea, but before I could speak it.

I think it's well worth it, to examine exactly what we mean when we think of someone being more or less intelligent. I suspect it will have important implications if and when we do develop a sentient AI.
BCH-ABC vs BCH-SV was a online flame war that only really involved the 4th largest coin (BCH). But why would it be the cause of this latest downward slide?

There's a theory that the BCH-ABC vs BCH-SV war brought to light: that "trustless" doesn't really mean trustless. It means "trustless, as long as you trust the coin". Innately, the BCH-ABC vs BCH-SV flamewar destroyed the notion of trustless and decentralized.

Anyway, I don't really know why BTC has done so poorly here. And the correlation to the BCH-ABC vs BCH-SV war may have just been coincidence. But its worth thinking about and discussing... maybe we can learn something from the past few weeks.

--------

Alternatively: "Store of Value" was a self-defeating prophesy. BTC was a "good" store of value, until it lost 50%+ in just a week or two. So as BTC fell, it just fell harder and harder, as the "store of value" argument was defeated.
Is it really though?
I've tried out Exceptions in most languages and Go's error handling stuck out to me as the first one that is clear what it does, which of course is the mantra of the language.
No, it just means your boss likes you.
Someone Convince Me an iPhone Wallet Case Isn't the Dumbest Idea in the World
Rich Hickey stands for good design. That means saying "no" to a lot if ideas that are good, but not part of the vision, and it means not running experiments on your users in the main releases. Whether he reaches that ideal, I dunno, but he lays out the vision pretty clearly when he speaks. It isn't the only way, but it is Clojure's way.

When he talks about customers and stakeholders, he is talking about people who have bought in to that design. It is very easy to support his position here. Rich knows exactly how he wants to program and the man is a visionary of data-driven programming and thinking. If you don't like that vision, maybe don't use Clojure and find a different lisp.

Great design is a very foreign idea to a lot of mainstream software developers - most of them, sooner or later, go for the "big rewrite" because they didn't get the design right to start with. Things like Python 2 -> 3 spring to mind (breaking changes to print! whoever thought that was a good idea didn't respect the language users). With that rational, he is promising not to do exactly what the Python people did.
> drift detection

As of 2 weeks ago[0] drift detection exists, but coverage is poor[1].

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/11/aws-cloud...

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...
>Broadly yes, but I'm guessing this one was sparked by this thread

Ok, I see the possible confusion. I wasn't trying to say they were related to the same event. I was trying to point out they were related themes.

When I read today's post, I had an immediate sense of déjà vu. No wonder, he used the word "entitlement" repeatedly in both posts a year apart. (Counted 11 times in today's post and 4 times in October 2017.) He also mentioned personal sacrifices of losing money on Clojure in both posts. (The "retirement money" in today's post and "$200k" in last year's post.)

I don't follow Clojure closely but the meta question/observation is that there seems to be a profoundly broken misunderstanding and recurring pattern of negative interaction between the Clojure community and Cognitec that causes Rich Hickey to express his frustration in way that other folks Ruby's Matz, Rust's Hoare, didn't have to express. (Maybe Hoare left years before the Rust community could turn on him and accuse Mozilla of holding back progress in the language (and therefore Rich's predicament is inevitable if one stays involved long enough) -- I dunno.)

Yes, different specific triggers but the same type of frustrated response. I thought they were over a year apart but you're saying the frustrations are unleashed every couple of months so that's news to me.
This Is the Way the Paper Crumples
Hi HN frequenters!
I like how simple `atom`s are to work with in reagent.cljs (compared to redux), but I mostly use JavaScript at work. Until recently, there didn't seem to be a good way to implement them for react without wrapping react entirely like reagent does. But the new Hooks API proposal exposes some bits that make reagent-like atoms possible! So here they are. I'd love feedback on the idea and the implementation. There are links in the GitHub README to play with a pre-made IDE/project on CodeSandbox.io if you like!
That’s really cherry picking dates. Use 12 months instead of Dec 31st and it’s only down 50%, not 80%. Use 18 months and it’s actually in the green.

Bitcoin is volatile. No one disputes that.
Is golang dying? Is it losing steam at all?
A. Damn, I would think a CTO would know to quit this dispute and fork his own purportedly superior version, if his company's survival is so dependent on it.

B. Really like the elegant style (visually, though the writing is also elegant!) of your blog.
Projects fail because of bad code quality and architecture all the time. Monads and functional purity are simple tools that help tame and manage these issues.

I've seen a number of projects (often in JavaScript or Python) fail because of poor effect management—but if you don't have much experience with functional programming, you'd see it as yet another project failing because of bad development practices or lack of discipline.

With experience, it became pretty clear that what we needed were not iron-willed, self-disciplined developers but just better tools, of which effect management (ie monads) and functional programming are some of the most powerful.
In many languages invented since c that have errors as values, you can use something akin to a specialized monad to sequence things which may fail together.

For example, in rust you could use:

let res1 = w.Write(...)?;
let res2 = w.Write(res1)?;

In haskell, you can use do notation or monad binding to do a similar thing.

Of course C doesn't have a good type system that allows this sort of thing; it was created before such type systems were well known.

I would expect any modern language to at least recognize that there are good ways to sequence and compose types.
That is a sobering article.

It's clear that Sci-Hub is the only viable strategy.
Which other similar situations are you thinking of?
"Liberal" and "conservative" also have very different meanings depending on country and context, and I don't see how opposition to the Stasi or GDR government automatically makes someone a conservative. Gauck was supported by the Social Democrats and the Greens, both of which are very progressive (well to the left of US democrats).
> It is just as likely that the original author will turn malicious

it absolutely isn't. The original author is a real person, with a twitter account, with a profile photo, with videos of talking at conferences. I accepted the code in my project because such author wouldn't get away with injecting the code with a backdoor. But a random alias that quietly takes over a package I didn't even know was abandoned because the author was too lazy to write "This package is no longer maintained" in the readme? That didn't give me any chance...
HHVM can't make its way entirely back to core, and is in fact completely separating from PHP entirely now[1]. If I recall correctly, while PHP7 implemented better op-caching, it has _not_ implemented JIT compilation yet.

1. https://hhvm.com/blog/2017/09/18/the-future-of-hhvm.html
> trustless, as long as you trust the coin

What is your intended meaning here?
Exactly. Both ways have have costs and benefits. It's certainly easy take this one example and say, "All projects should optimize for this very rare failure case." But you can bet that if he just closed his 700 packages down, we'd have plenty of people explaining how that was the wrong solution, that he should work to find maintainers.

As far as I'm concerned all of this "he should have" stuff is more proof that he's right: maintaining a popular open-source package for free can be no fun at all.
Too many amazon haters in HN
Is there a cert to go along with the courses?
With open source you have an easy recourse: the fork.

With a game, movie or another peice of culture, the law can hinder your fork. If you want to make the Star Wars episode you wish had existed, you have to navigate the tretcherous waters of fair use and copyright. There are also plenty of tales of indie game developers attempting to remix a game from their childhood on a new platform only to get a cease and desist as soon as the rights holders get wind of it.
It comes back to:

"The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing"

Problem is - hubris is generally considered a virtue.
Your latest comment seems to be replying to someone with a fascination with the specific number 1/137, which I do not have, and some related tangents. I'll try to refocus the points of contention between us.

This whole thread started because the top comment said that a physics theory predicted the value of the fine-structure constant. Which is wrong, as the fine-structure constant is one of fundamental constants of the universe and one _whose value is not predicted by any theory_.

At this stage, two claims are in tension.

The first is your claim, that QED predicts the fine-structure constant once you measure the magnetic moment of the electron using several thousand Feynman diagrams.

The second claim is Feynman, himself, literally writing in his book titled _QED_, that we have no idea how to predict the value of this constant.

Could it be that Feynman overlooked the fact that he, himself, predicted the value of the fine-structure constant? He thought that not being able to predict its value was such an unsolved problem as to call it "one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics"? That "all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it"?

The long and the short of it is that I think you're missing something much deeper. Yes, _once you measure_ something that has a tight coupling with the fine-structure constant, you now know the value of the fine-structure constant. But, before you made that measurement you DO NOT KNOW and further CANNOT PREDICT the value of the fine-structure constant. If you could, you'd be able to claim your own Nobel prize.
If you are productive you will have enemies.

Perhaps even, the more productive you are, the more enemies you will make.

People who are particularly unproductive tend to think that the world owes them something.
Anybody who ever called it a store of value was disputing that.
As a game developer: Amen!

I had been doing that a long time when one of my producers (on his first game) wanted to be on the forums to interact with "fans". I think he was excited and thought it would be satisfying to interact with people who were playing the game we developed. I remember thinking it would be like that when I started. Don't get me wrong, most gamers, like most people, are terrific. But they get drowned out by the disgruntled.
Loyalty and valuation are not equivalent to entitlement.
By this logic you are making the same mistake as both.
This is when you buy.
A friend of mine was looking at the metrics for a project he was managing and saw that the bug rate of commits after 4pm was much higher. So then he introduced a new rule against committing after 4pm, resulting in a big drop in the bug rate. He chalked it up to less committing while fatigued and rushing to get things done to go home.
I was surprised to find this is missing. I do hope they add this.
My main point is that the word "Trustless" has been abused repeatedly over the past year. "Bitcoin Trustless" doesn't mean what most people think it meant.

And it was most obvious when people were forced to pick sides in the BCH-ABC vs BCH-SV flamewars.
Rich Hickey has given so much to the world of software and systems design. The value exchange has most likely not been reciprocal. Nor has it been sufficiently respectful, based on this message. People like Rich that give so much are rare. And people that understand how to respectfully recognize that seem to be becoming more rare.

Of course, one can remember that life is not fair, and people are often shitty even without being conscious of it, and that Rich has freely chosen to pursue this path.

But this leads me to a few questions: If you agree with what I have written above, and what Rich has written in this message, then how can we tip the scales just a little bit further towards respect and reciprocation? What kind of gestures, gifts, and generosities do you think are appropriate? What improved efforts to educate consumers of open source software would be effective? Further still, what kind of culture do we want?
I did not do that anywhere, especially in the comment you're responding to. It's Hickey who attempts to make such claim, not me.
Hopefully it'll be sliced into smaller channels than 2.4 was. Also, 3 frequencies gives more room than 2.
air detonation is for max damage. "The air burst is.. to allow the shockwave of the fission or fusion driven explosion to bounce off the ground and back into itself, creating a shockwave that is more forceful than one from a detonation at ground level." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_burst
Thank you for pointing this out, there are so many niches where fans/consumers are taking the creators to task for some grievance or other.

One positive way to interpret this is to recognize that fans are passionate and want the project to succeed and fulfill all their dreams.

But reality is a harsh mistress and not all dreams will be realized.
Oh, I see. Thanks. I assumed the JS engine was written in Rust!
I would say Zocdoc is the best example of B2C company tackling a regulated industry (healthcare) through a marketplace that I have come across. It does seem to me that more startups are tackling the professional services layer with B2B solutions at this point. i.e. helping a lawyer process documents for discovery or allowing a doctor to more quickly process medical images for diagnosis.

It seems to me, physician groups, law firms, accounting firms and architecture firms have all consolidated over the years, making B2B solutions fit better with status quo.

I also think it is really hard for a marketplace to prevent future service transactions from occurring offline. As anyone who has used TaskRabbit knows, the first thing that happens is you usually get a direct number from the end provider and a lower rate to skip the marketplace in the future.
Ok, but think about how many other ways you could fix that by wrapping battle tested interpreters.
BSDs or Illumos may be good alternatives to Linux (2017)
Regarding That might explain cost disease in the public sector, but I don’t know if it’s sufficient... and what follows, it's worth considering that the US struggles to get the private and public part right, when a strong institution is needed.

When we get more government in the US, we usually don't get a powerful and effective public institution, responsible for delivering a service directly to the people, staffed with dedicated public servants. Instead, we generally get a tangle of regulation and a large private industrial complex.

A major exception to this -- though they are becoming less so -- are the various branches of the military. They overlap with one another and thus come into conflict; but all soldiers are dedicated public servants.

Immediately adjacent to the military is the US arsenal system, or military industrial complex, a web of not-really-competing companies that the DoD tries to manage via complex and demanding contracts.
4 Firsts of NASA's InSight Mars Lander
Yes , it's the reality, i think it's better for the creator to learn and act to be the actual dictator. This might mean ignoring those community suggestion/request that they don't like. kinda like linus which I admire.
The pretty obvious explanation as to why it is doing poorly is that it was a bubble. People bought it because it was going up, which caused it to go up further. Now that it's going down, nobody wants to buy it and a lot of people want to sell it.

As far as I can see, there's no particular reason to expect the slide to end here. Stocks have a valuation floor based on income and assets. Commodities have floors based on the people who use those commodities to create economic value. Most currencies have a floor for many reasons, but partly because a central bank will stand behind it and defend its price. Bitcoin has none of those.
Real talk, you have to plan your bitcoin hodling around tax season, with the worst possible outcomes always in mind. Wait until next March, when US taxes are due, or until next May after the timely returns have been paid off already...

"The market can remain irrational for longer than you will remain solvent." I certainly am not one who has made out, inasmuch, like a bandit as many Bitcoin investors may have, but I've been following Bitcoin for a long time (as long as it's been around) and the best, most outlasting advice, true in most markets and not unique or special at all in any way is still "don't put all your eggs in one basket."

If taxes come to be accepted in Bitcoin across the nation, this might turn out to be a game-changer. Or it might mean nothing. I don't know what the state taxes are like in Ohio[1], but this is an interesting development to be sure. Regardless, you should continue to plan around the uncertainty that comes on either side of "tax season." Bitcoin or not.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/25/ohio-becomes-the-first-sta...
At this level, it offers a near-perfect example of the very definition of esoteric.
Exceptions are a strawman.

Compare it to another modern language such as rust. Go does not have a stdlib mechanism for converting error types into each other (akin to rust's Into), it doesn't have the idea of mapping values together (akin to rust's carrier operator which is basically like monad do syntax), it doesn't have a way to create a list of errors by default (akin to 'cause' in rust), it doesn't have a way to generate concrete error types for your functions (like the 'failures' or 'error-chain' libraries in rust, which can't be written in go due to a lack of macros and generics and sum types).

It doesn't have a way to match on all possible concrete error values (akin to 'match' in rust or other sum-type things) or to do thing slike '.and_then' or '.map_err' or so on.

Go's error handling is downright insulting in a language that wasn't built at the same time as c.
> Developers don't trust code, they trust people

well the code doesn't write itself, so partially true. But ultimately it's about accountability. If Dominic himself added the backdoor, his presence in the community would end that day. If an anonymous alias does that, we don't even know who to blame. Dominic's fault is not the backdoor, but the irresponsibility of handing over a used package to an anonymous alias. Not being clear about the fact that the package is abandoned. I wouldn't depend on an abandoned package, if I knew that.
The alternative is just as bad, a multi block try and catch mess that is in Java!
Machhindranath jatra Nepal
> Google has a wiki page for their developers telling them to never ever use PHP for any google project.

I didn't know that, but it makes sense - the things that PHP's good for (getting a web-based service backed by some sort of datastore up and ready to receive requests) are not the things that Google (on the whole) cares about.

Google instead cares that the thing can be improved and maintained by your colleagues, few of whom know PHP.
You are perfectly entitled to write that Star Wars fanfic. Here's a whole directory of it: https://www.fanfiction.net/movie/Star-Wars/

You are not entitled to make money off it, just like you aren't entitled to make money off that open source project you forked.
Well, the difference is that the hate is coming from different directions. PHP is hated by nearly everyone except pure pragmatist. Go is hated by somewhat experienced programmers which find the absence of certain features inconvenient.

That said, I like them both somehow. PHP was the first programming language I learned beyond simple hello-world like programs (today, I use it mostly for prototypes only) and Go is my language of choice for performance-intensive tools.

In the end, I have not met any language yet, you can not hate. Smalltalk is beautiful, but can't do arithmetics properly (e.g., `1 + 2 * 3` == 9). Lisp lets you write correct programs, but breaks your parenthesis key. C++ can be fast, but actually doing it is hard and have you ever solved one of those template-error riddles?
Announcing Rust 2018 Beta release
You might just want to look into rclone, which supports S3 and many other cloud services natively.
By that theory, you should be putting your money in the Venezuelan Bolivar. If a big fall means a big buying opportunity, then the Bolivar's the clear winner, as it has fallen farther.
What was the reason for not accepting his suggestions ?.
It hasn't - a JIT compiler (if it comes) will come in PHP 8.
Too bad we are not renewing CDC funding for fighting global disease outbreaks.

https://www.google.com/search?q=cdc+funding+trump&source=lmn...
Likely the commenter is referring to development environments, where it is common for infra to be put in bizarre states by actors performing changes. Terraform alone is does not constitute change control.
How Social Media and AI Hijack Your Brain (discussion with Tristan Harris)