skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The content of this whole wing of thinking is "you have to have a brain-like system to have a brain-like thing". Which, fair. But what's crazy-making about it is that people have decided this sort of insight says something about mathematics and metaphysics, which it does not.

For example, this:

This observation which they refer to as the “hard problem of content” or the “covariance-is-not-content principle” is that systems acting on covariance information, while acting on information, do not constitute content-bearing systems, because to bear content is to embody claims about how things stand, when in fact they merely embody capacities to affect the world.

is just complete nonsense, and to extract the charitable reading I put in quotes above, you have to read closely for paragraph after paragrah to see that what's going on is the word "content" is reserved to mean "things brain-like things do in a brain-like way to other brain-like things in a context built for brain-like things."

Again, okay! But: it's wildly misleading to frame this as being about mathematical logic or the metaphysics of symbols, syntax and semantics.
Ask HN: What book should I read next?
Just finished re-reading The Martian, now I fancy some nonfiction. Any recommendations?
Replying to Domain Abuse Mail
He can be both a ruthless business man and a generous philanthropist. (I'm not expressing a view on either.) Humans are full of contradictions.
If you read the article that does not at all seem to be the case.
You Can’t Power Your House with Your Electric Car
Try this, it must be hilarious:

https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accentures-future-system...
Has the author read Brandom?
Honorable mentions are “blockchain” and “internet of things” :)
I agree, we shouldn't be in any of the wars we are in today. But that is like saying we shouldn't try to reign in pork barrel politics because there is so much spent on war. Or we shouldn't try to save on maintenance, software, labor, etc... you name it "because we spend so much on war".

Alien research is faith based, not fact based.
The Ender is a great printer if you're cool with it catching fire. In several of the 3d printing groups I'm in, the most common question is "what's the best printer around $300" I can get. The most common answer is something like "try not to scrimp and get the Prusa instead." That's a fairly tone deaf answer to someone truly budget constrained, though if the price is double their budget. But for an extra fifty bucks--that's a no brainer.

Print jobs can easily go 24 hours and fires are fairly catastrophic. I think Prusa just hit the ball out of the park with this pricepoint and approach assuming they are using their usual reliable, vetted components. I have never seen a report of a fire with a Prusa.
> Other rich people donate anonymously

How do you know?
I think it's a combination of PR and probably some genuine development as a person. He has been pretty open about being maniacally focused on Microsoft's success in the earlier years, even to the point where he views it as a mistake or at least a mistaken approach. My impression is that Melinda has done a lot to help him soften his edge and do some introspection and grow as a friend, father, and husband. Warren Buffet, too, who has also taken what I think is a pretty impressive trajectory of maturation as a person.

So overall I agree with you there is probably some of the titan of industry reforming his reputation kind of thing going on (like Carnegie, Rockefeller et al). But I think there is probably a little more than that going on, as well, and I think that deeper authenticity is probably what gives people hope, although that hope culturally may end up distorted through the infatuation with his power to get to the "world's greatest guy" thing. Which I think he would probably reject, himself, if you asked him.
Abebooks is owned by amazon.
I heard the story was that Epstein was talking to Bill and Melinda about their daughter's appearnace in a 'scary' way that made them both feel uncomfortable.

Or that might have been one of Epstein's other associates.
I use a 64 mb CF card for photos
>
In short, literally none of this stuff is actually new. Indeed, as Oliver Traldi has pointed out, the entire contemporary debate around ‘free speech’ and ‘political correctness’ bears an uncanny likeness to 1990s controversies on these same topics. Perhaps George Santayana was right when he declared that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Um, how far ago does the author think the 90s are? Yes, many of the same arguments from the 90s are happening now. It's not because people who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. It's because a large number of people were alive in the 90s and now and are having the same debate still.
The question isn't putting their opinions into the public record, it's the wisdom of maintaining the relationship in the first place.

Epstein was convicted of sex trafficking in 2008, eleven years before his story became national news. A cursory Google search of his name anytime after his conviction would have turned that up. And yet all these luminaries were happy to continue keeping his company and taking his money through those eleven years -- until he became a public relations liability.

Even if they privately had regrets about maintaining a relationship with Epstein, clearly those regrets weren't strong enough for any of them to actually, you know, do anything.
The Future of AI
Do you think AI will have a negavite or positive effect on human life?
I often see the word “company” and “corporation” used interchangeably. But a corporation is just a machine invented by humans; a “company” is a group of people.

A company, of run properly, is a great way to get people together to accomplish a complex objective. A corporation is merely one of the tools they use.

If you think of people / companions (same roots) as, you know, actual humans, your business will typically be more effective.
'organize' != 'delete'
Separate companies can still collude and cooperate for larger mutual ends... especially if they're only nominally separate.
My favorite idea about arguing positions is the "steel man" approach. From [0]:

A straw man is a misrepresentation of someone's position or argument that is easy to defeat: a "steel man" is an improvement of someone's position or argument that is harder to defeat than their originally stated position or argument.

This idea is also given as the highest level of disagreement in the hierarchy given in [1], which builds upon pg's hierarchy given in [2].

[0] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FhH8m5n8qGSSHsAgG/better-dis...

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
I see your perspective, I started in small teams doing flight simulator development splitting my time between C and Assembly for 3D and Lisp for AI. I don't disagree that static typing can band-aid over bad process and churn, but it is but good process can eliminate the need for it and empower a good team of knowledgeable developers the ability to outperform a larger team.

I wholeheartedly agree, about unit tests and comments, I have come to find unit test to be a cargo cult, and that they may actually cost more cycles than they save in the way most orgs implement them.

And comments while great are not code, they don't thrown stack traces when they are out of date.

I am very good at team building and maintaining developers in my organizations for a long period of time. This helps in our preference for using dynamic and flexible languages like LISP and Javascript.
nah, that makes brains hurt. can't be that.
What did Bill Gates do in the 1990s? Bundle IE with Windows? Pay Dell not to install BeOS? Maybe those are antitrust violations, and bad business conduct, but they’re not inherently immoral. Meanwhile, spending billions and tons of personal time and expertise to solve world problems is inherently moral.
There are obviously different levels of detail. I would be suspicious if two book reports contained significant passages with the exact same phrasing. I wouldn’t be surprised if two book reports for the same book noticed very similar themes.
You can shout at bureaucrats. You have some basic rights. You can demand escalation of your issue. You can't do much when your Google account is banned.
...tell that to the yazidi. You think they didnt't all have smartphones while they were being massacred and enslaved a couple years ago?
Interesting article but wow. What a click bait title
Charities report anonymous donations.
I don't think he is seen as the worlds greatest guy, but typically he is seen as positive. Big part of it is probably him admitting his bad behavior when building Microsoft (the business). He matured as a person. But more importantly, the fact that he know tries to actively do good things.

Look at other super rich, and what they do in comparison...
That is great news. Thank you.
Did Bill Gates ignore some warning signs? Sure. On the other hand, Jeffrey Epstein from all appearances was a billionaire who was close to many other wealthy and influential individuals, and claimed that he wanted to help the Gates Foundation. When you're spending your days talking to people and saying "for every X dollars you give us, we can save another life" you probably end up looking at things differently.

If I were in Bill Gates' shoes and thought there was a chance that Jeffrey Epstein would provide (personally and via his connections) enough money to save hundreds of thousands of lives... honestly? I would absolutely ignore the "convicted sex offender" thing too. Because, you know, hundreds of thousands of lives.
> I have so many questions

You should ask a ninja!

https://www.youtube.com/user/digitalfilmmaker
I liked this link from that dead post below

https://twitter.com/nickwiger/status/1183086808046829568
Wow, this one was absolutely amazing - good find! :)
Well, yes. I would go so far to say that _usually_, when one doesn't like something that many other people do, it's because they're missing what drew those other people in.
Cover? That's your response to the Gates Foundation's philanthropy—that it's cover for shady stuff? Really? Whatever did they do that was so horrific compared to everything the foundation has achieved?
Not a Googler, but I think the answer is: yes. At least, it is for my monorepo company.

Usually somebody else has already gone through the work of doing it for you. Sometimes there are tools that do the translation for you. For example, Go modules are quite easy to translate to a BUILD file.

It’s actually not as bad as it sounds. You only have to do the hard stuff once, and every engineer in the org who uses it in the future is thankful for it.
I feel your pain. I hope you remember in the future:

Unless a backup can be verified, it is not a backup.

Backing up to a complex or binary format is trouble.
NYT hopefully has a lot more they aren't reporting. I'd hate to think they'd write an article like this just because they met a few times. But who knows with NYT these days.

Not that I want Bill to be the bad guy, but if he is, it should come up. Enough with the preying on the vulnerable. This is 2019

Is it me or is it pretty obvious that Epstein's ploy was to implicitly blackmail rich people after seducing them with young women?
reply
There are a lot of museums, historic sites, schools, etc with names of donors on plaques hanging on some wall, and many of them attribute very large donations to "anonymous donor."
That's true it's speculation and I should have qualified it as such. The reason I felt motivated to state it that way though is because it seems so obvious to me that the explanations coming from these companies are marketing that contradict the technical reality. As far as other cryptocurrency people, there are a lot of people who think very differently and everyone has their own view, so maybe the negative generalizations should be tempered.

But you got your generalization in there so what the heck, here is mine.
The mainstream community is rife with people who accept marketing and propaganda as truth, but often it turns out to be just "bullshit" and companies or governments were actually just doing selfish things to help themselves strategically.
Roughly two months ago. Windows and Android. A few things that make it very tough for me:

Autofilling. Chrome is just so much better and it's something I have to do a lot for my business. I'm always buying random parts from random places and a lot of them don't have the best-designed forms. Chrome handles them much better. There's just so much friction removed when you don't have to type all your info, especially on a phone, or pull out your credit card. I now have my credit card number memorized thanks to having to do so so much with Firefox. I had the same credit card for years, but with chrome I so rarely had to actually pull it out that I couldn't have told you more than the last 4 digits.

Chrome's built in password management is just better at picking up logins and passwords too when forms aren't designed really well.

I get a lot more performance issues with Firefox. I have to force close it sometimes. Never happened with chrome. It's not super frequent by any means but it happens.

Lot of websites don't work in Firefox and I have to open them in Chrome which is likely not Firefox's fault the majority of the time, just developers not testing in Firefox, but still quite annoying to me.
This nonsensicaly-titled article is somewhere between a rehash of "the map is the not the territory / one cannot pass from the informal to the formal by purely formal means" and Sokal-esque gobbledygook.
forrester.com
The reason I upvoted was with intent to review later. I personally found that after two semesters of linear and a BS Mathematics I didn’t know jack about linear algebra. I came to the conclusion that I should’ve studied physics or engineering if I’d wanted to actually learn how to use it!
I am not blaming the "state of the world" I am saying it's pure waste to spend money on researching fantasy projects.

Military spending is a strawman whataboutism.

It's not about "cuts" it's about sanity. There are no aliens, no proof of aliens, nothing. These programs should not have been started in the first place.

If these peoples lives are so devoid of meaning that they have to spend their lives researching fantasies, they should fund in themselves instead of taking tax payer money for it.
So in other words embedded hardware programming hasn’t changed a bit.
Good marketing and PR changed his image.
How often do you see bad guys create something comparable to the Gates Foundation?
>That Gates played hard in the business world doesn't take away from the above.

i mean doesn't it? this "playing a game well" as a proxy for fairness/justice/merit metaphor as a source of legitimacy i think is strained in business. if you play basketball well and win a championship then you showed merit because the rules are tight - it's very hard to win by another means than being talented (i.e. cheating). the exception that proves the rule is how upset people get when basketball players "flop". business is the one game where the only rule is "don't get caught" so it doesn't seem correct to reason that since he did well he played fair.
Russia explained: Vladimir Pozner at Ideas for Tomorrow Talk (2012)
I was unfamiliar with that explanation for his movements, thanks for sharing. I'm still skeptical, but you have made me reassess how likely it is to be fake.
Bazel has this via the 'visibility' attribute on packages and build rules: https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/skylark/build-style...
yeah, Ctrl+F "type" gives 4 (non-title) occurrences, all of them in the first two paragraphs. the rest seems to be related to AI and the problems of making it "actually refer to the real world". weird!

EDIT2: i think the author is actually talking about cogsci "mental propositions". (see my other comment)
I read a really interesting article some years ago how the rich setup charity foundations to hide from taxes. I donate to your foundation some large amount and you do the same.

Then employ your family members to run the foundation and pay them a huge salary.

I can’t validate this, but I recall the article.
Yes, the new narrative seems much worse. I wonder if it's the truth this time.
According to the article, Gates visited Epstein in Epstein's apartment several times. So that doesn't really square with Gate's being an unwilling participant.

It's a weird story. It's hard to imagine Gates, whose foundation is the largest charitable organization in the world, really needed Epsteins advice on setting up charitable funds, which seems to be the official line. And Gates certainly wouldn't need help networking or coming up with $$.
When Apple Sherlocks you, you Moriarty them in return.

Hear: Make your product better and more feature rich, focusing on a narrow segment of the mass market Apple is trying to serve.
Never type like that on this site again.
Rockefeller, Carnegie, Barnum, Kraft, Walton, Koch?
I feel like we have at least 10 weekly front page articles on "<billionaire> is a terrible person, if I was a billionaire I would use my fortune much more morally" (sure you would). It takes a certain amount of obliviousness then, to go into these comments sections and declare "I don't know why everyone thinks <billionaire> is a great guy!". Are these people self aware? Are they androids?
No fexprs? https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html
Presumably there is a lot more the NYT didn't report because it was unsubstantiated. You don't write these kind of pieces against someone super powerful for no reason.
That's super awesome, thanks!
Antony Cummins' channel[0] is also a good source for "real" ninja history.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkRwb4iXDfw-6FEgqkCQqUQ
How often do you see bad guys with wealth comparable to Bill Gates?

There are only a handful of people in this category, and plenty of them were nasty people who donated a lot to charity. What about Pablo Escobar? He donated a ton to the communities he operated in, and many of those people choose to forgive his sins because of that. I don't though.
what is your alternative to opencv?
Warren runs ‘fake’ FB ad attacking Zuckerberg over inaction on misinformation
> VCS access control are the wrong tool for solving the "people use code they shouldn't" complaint.

I agree

> The actual solution are build system ACLs.

Or, maybe, better languages enforcing better design. In most of the cases artifacts and libraries are not related to the domain, engineers create them just to establish artificial boundaries between code components, isolate irrelated things, enforce encapsulation and avoid accidental mixing of metalanguages.

It would be lot better to have a smart compiler for this.

A tool which can prevent us from mixing different abstraction layers, creating unneccessary horizontal links between our components, etc, etc.

I have a couple of ideas how such a thing may look like.
oracle.com!
Cloud-to-Butt failed me when I clicked on a link for cloudflare, which had been rewritten for buttflare.com while I was at work.
This is not what TFA is about, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bujinkan

In terms of career options, I know there is at least one group within the US Marine Corps, and a private military contractor in San Francisco which recruits from their own dojo.
There was a rumor when I was in econ grad school that there was a huge bug in Stata in the nineties affecting standard error calculations, rendering a large fraction of the studies from that time invalid.
>Writing code in research is quite different from writing code in industry.

Depends on which industry. For example, writing code in research is actually a lot like writing Excel macros in Finance.
Is New Urbanism only for leftists?
> propositions are not necessarily types

could you expand on this?
The article is highlighting some exceptions to the usual rule.
I think you'd probably be interested in Gerard 't Hooft's latest work: https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548 It's rather, shall we say, controversial (that is: widely rejected by his peers), but it's an attempt to construct a framework through which the laws of the universe can be interpreted as deterministic which leverages the sorts of epistemological concepts you seem to be interested in.

(That being said: I personally find "is there an amoeba on Europa?" to be supremely interesting, but to each their own.)
He used to be reviled enough during the 1990s to receive literal pies in the face. [0]

He has done some good of course, but some people tend to see anyone "giving away money" == faultless saint.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK6SS8CXYZo
I don't understand how items get in my "feed" to start with. I don't understand the flow of items, display, work, or attention.

Some of the words you're using make me want to join in, others make me want to run.

Make me want to play: timeless insights, memory techniques, insightful post, timeless content.

Make me want to run: social network, community of your peers.

But really, I don't know how it works, how I'd interact with it, how content is submitted, ...

... and I don't have time to sign up as an experiment to play.

Personally, I like a bullet list that conveys the usage flow.

Hope that helps.
Make no mistake - humans are only able to live there while burning copious amounts of hydrocarbons to stay warm and/or generate electricity. And they don't live particularly well.

Also at the massive cost to the surrounding environment.

I guess Inuits live in the extreme cold as well, but their entire world population is smaller than the city of Norilsk.
This worked very well for the Tailwind CSS docs!

"Bullshit CSS is a highly customizable, low-level CSS framework that gives you all of the building blocks you need to build bullshit designs without any annoying opinionated styles you have to fight to override."
Perhaps it's partially an overcorrection of his previous reputation and an inevitable comparison to the low bar that Steve Jobs set in his personal life. The thinking being that Gates was a nasty shark in business that was ruthless but at least he wasn't as bad as Jobs in abandoning his daughter.
I think strong arming PC manufacturers to stymie the creation of a viable competitor to Microsoft Windows (which in early iterations was really a terrible product, in my opinion, and very hostile to developers) may have hindered the computer revolution by several years- But obviously we can never know the outcome of counterfactuals for sure.
It's been a while, but ISTR that in an early arc Naruto passes an exam for promotion to the next ninja rank after turning in an empty sheet for the essay portion.
This piece reads like it was authored by Bill Gates’ PR team. The Times has to do better than this. They do not question a single assertion and take it all as fact.

> Ms. Arnold said Mr. Gates and the foundation had been unaware that Mr. Epstein had been seeking any fee.

> Some of the Gates Foundation employees said they had been unaware of Mr. Epstein’s criminal record and had been shocked to learn that the foundation was working with a sex offender.

> In March 2013, Mr. Gates flew on Mr. Epstein’s Gulfstream plane from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach, Fla., according to a flight manifest. Ms. Arnold said Mr. Gates — who has his own $40 million jet — hadn’t been aware it was Mr. Epstein’s plane.

> Mr. Epstein complained to an acquaintance at the end of 2014 that Mr. Gates had stopped talking to him, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

Obviously, everyone is in damage control mode and looking to distance themselves from Epstein, but there is a very good chance that Bill Gates and others knew exactly what he was involved in and went along with it anyway.

How do you fly on someone’s private plane without realizing it is their plane?
Prusa makes the best open source 3D printers. This makes it cheaper. No different than when RaspPi announces a new board.
In the pipeline!