skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All things in the universe have four measures of velocity. Three of these are easily observable to us in terms of x, y, and z movement. To understand time dilution we need to realize that we are also physically traveling through time.

The total velocity of our <x, y, z, t> vector will always be equal to the speed of light constant, c. You can think of something that has no physical movements as moving forward in time at the speed of light. As x, y, or z increases the magnitude of t will decrease so that the speed of light constant is always achieved.

Why this link has to hold is more complex and I cannot explain it well, but hopefully this gives some insight into time slowing as velocity increases.
> but had my pick of top UC schools.

It's not an Ivy but I would think a UC Berkley diploma would get you practically as much access as any of them. UCLA and maybe UCSB to a great extent as well.
"Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room. "

I have trouble with this too. I think it's actually incorrect, or at least misleading. I think what it's _trying_ to say is that even if an entity can perform a complex task doesn't mean it can understand a complex task.

I think the more important result of this argument is that certain complex tasks can be "pre-baked" into rulesets _by an existing intelligence_. To me this just means that intelligent entities can sort of copy parts of their intelligence into other entities which are not intelligent i.e. computer programming.

I think with this argument they're trying to say "a series of sufficiently complex if statements isn't necessarily intelligent" by choosing something we know computers are good at - string manipulations and applying it to something we consider intelligence - language translation.

The argument holds that the computer is obviously not intelligent because it's just a function that takes a character and outputs another character.

But it needs to be a convincing translation, right? The computer would then be able to spit out not just accurate translations but also properly converted cultural idioms and new combinations of words where one didn't exist in the other language. That requires context of surrounding characters, memory of common language use, statistical analysis and creativity.

One implication that arises from this argument is actually about humans. How do we know that we aren't all just incredibly detailed rulesets ourselves without any actual understanding?

Well, first off - we technically can't prove it for anyone other than ourselves. More pragmatically, it's obvious that we, unlike the computer translator, can probe ourselves and be probed by others on whether or not we understand the subject. It's not like we're a bunch of Boltzmann's Brains that just happened into existence. We evolved intelligence in order to survive, not to "trick" other intelligent beings into thinking we're more intelligent than we are. There's no need for that. There's no one smarter around that we need to "trick".
Don't wipe 128GB of flash.

If you care about this data then you would encrypt it at rest. Having encrypted it at rest there's a key, let's say it's a 256-bit AES key. So now when you throw away the 256-bit AES key the rest of the data is garbage, exactly as worthwhile as if you'd wiped it, but instantly.

A factory restore might take quite a lot longer, but as soon as that key is forgotten the data is gone.
> The first thing to note is that in Japan, housing isn’t an investment. It’s a place to live. The country’s slow population growth means that increases in property values aren’t guaranteed

I feel like this is a misleading way to put it. Japanese houses decrease in value, generally quite severely - the conventional wisdom is that after a few decades you might as well just tear it down and build a new one. So there's very real option value you're losing in the Japanese model; if you have to move in a decade or two, you won't be able to get back the equity you put in.
What's the difference between the coefficients of the furier basis and the weights of a neural network ? Both are ways to approximates functions, aren't they?
100th Anniversary of the Shapley – Curtis Great Debate
How does this compare to ish? I know ish translates x86 into ARM on iOS. How does this work?
You probably have already in a way:

https://www.concretenetwork.com/post-tension/basics.html
The title says customers and his comment mentions: "They want it cheaply so there are no resources to test."

I have never heard of internal customers, I have heared of internal projects ;) . But then the cost are not discussed, deadlines are.

And it's still the mission of the product manager to coordinate features to build.

In case it's only 1 developer, he has to take the lead and say pro's and cons.
That's what I'm saying. It's important but hard to use to differentiate. Everybody says their voltage regulation is high quality. Customers don't know which one is actually better and choose the one with the best price. Then manufacturers start cutting corners because having the best price sells more boards than having the best voltage regulation.
The Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists video by Microsoft Research (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM) really hammered it home for me. It goes slowly and the presenter, in his own words "shuts up and does the math".
In more than 20 years of programming, I've never seen an incompetent programmer get fired.
Sure, totally impossible ::eyeroll:: Open-office type jobs are overwhelmingly computer-facing and easy to do from home. Even if not, a bit of creativity goes a long way -- work in shifts, alternate which days people come in, spread out desks and utilize conference rooms for more space, wear masks.
Trying to get through the Ethics without taking notes is just self-sabotage and a fool's errand to begin with. It's really just work.
The Australian governments track record is bad and we should be critical of that. But I have yet to see important problems with this particular app identified. Lets stick with the facts here rather than 'it must be bad'. People have decompiled the kotlin code and so far I haven't seen anyone report anything bad. Am I missing something?
I got the Covid-19 care guide in my mail box by the Québec government in French only because of Bill 101. Language politics trumps even in case of emergency communications in Québec.
Maybe this will help me get to a zero inbox finally. 65k emails 99% of which are junk.
I think we're all reasonable people here on HN.

I also think we have many different ideas about what's best. (Again, all people I assume are smart.)

This is just a hard scenario. There is no obvious 'best' answer. There may not even be a 'right' answer.
A better approach might be: make sure everything you do for work is sustainable. When it's not, make sure you are letting beneficiaries know. (e.g. Yes, we're working weekends for this release, but it's for X and Y reason, and it won't happen regularly)
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make.
1. Carbon dating. Sure, I get that carbon decays over time and this changes the proportion of isotopes. But why does this give you any information? That carbon didn’t come into existence just to be in that bone, it was made in the sun billions of years before that, so why does the age of the carbon tell us anything about organic matter? The key fact, which I think is not emphasized enough, is that the ratio of isotopes in atmospheric carbon is kept at a constant equilibrium by cosmic rays. So you can use carbon dating to tell roughly when the carbon was pulled out of the atmosphere. Without this additional fact, the concept of carbon dating makes absolutely no sense.

2. The tides. The explanation I was given is roughly something like “the tides happen because the moon’s gravity pulls the water toward it, so you have high tide facing the moon. There’s also a high tide on the opposite side of the earth, for subtle reasons that are too complicated for you to understand right now and I don’t have time to get into that.”

The first problem with this explanation is this: gravitational acceleration affects everything equally right? So it’s not just pulling on the water, it’s also pulling on the earth. So why does the water pull away from the earth? Shouldn’t everything be accelerating at the same rate and staying in the same relative positions?

The second problem is that, when viewed correctly, the explanation for why there is a high tide on the opposite side of the earth as the moon is equally simple to why there is a high tide on the same side as the moon.

The resolution to both these problem is this: tides aren’t actually caused by the pull of the moon’s gravity per se, but are actually caused by the difference in the strength of the pull of the moon’s gravity between near and far sides of the earth, since the strength of the moon’s gravitational pull decreases with distance from the moon. The pull on the near water is stronger than the average pull on the earth, which again is stronger than the pull on the far water. So everything becomes stretched out along the earth-moon axis.

3. This one isn’t so much a problem with the explanation itself, more about how it’s framed. I remember hearing about why the sky is blue, and wondering, “ok, more blue light bounces off it than other colours. But isn’t that essentially the same reason why any other blue thing is blue? Why are we making such a big fuss about the sky in particular? ” A much superior motivating question is “why is the sky blue during midday, but red at sunrise / sunset”? I was relieved when I saw this XKCD that I’m not the only one who felt this way:

https://xkcd.com/1818/
You're still missing the point. There is a point where the systemic rigidity enforced to make automation feasible is far more expensive than the value it actually produces by existing.

I.e. In order to replace those store employees, you have to build all your buildings the same way, stock them in a certain way, hire maintainers to input tracking data, hire auditors to ensure customers aren't tampering with the store.... So on and so forth.

It'd be a great way to protest though. Every customer goes out of their way to disorganize the store until they hire locals.
How to conduct research during a pandemic?
Thinking of it as different 'kinds' of spins isn't quite right.

It's more akin to the direction or axis of the spin being changed, and simply measuring the spin along a certain access will change it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(physics)#Measurement_of_...
Slack won over IRC for me by prohibiting anonymous users. Simply verifying their emails or having it be invite-approvals only was enough to improve my experience dramatically versus IRC’s endless anonymous harassment.
Author here. One interesting aspect that I've learned is the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of public opinion brigades, aka Force 47.

They tried hard to discrete me. My initial report had an error, that is I didn't know that Bluetooth on Android needs ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION permission. A person pointed this out in a comment -- he posted and rewrote it three times. I said thank you and thought that's that, but then he and a bunch of new people commented that since I made that basic mistake I'm immature and inexperienced, therefore the rest of my findings have no merit.

Someone then posted a super long comment, raising a lot of questions about my credibility and intention. The interesting thing is they claimed that they're a student, haven't installed the app, have no intention to do so, but care a lot about privacy. Essentially they want to show that they're merely an underdog bystander standing up against my wrongdoings. I thought this is a very subtle psychological trick, aiming to amplify their attacks.

Other attacks are more direct. For example, a person pointed out that since I don't have many followers on Twitter, I'm not a good engineer. They said I didn't really contribute anything to my public research, but I just took credit from my coauthors. That I am only cleaning toilet at Google, there's nothing proud about that.

After I posted a rebuttal to the developers' rebuttal, a guy [2] dropped this one-line comment:

>cái vụ này bắt đầu thấy nhảm rồi. Lập luận của anh Thái cũng không còn chặt chẽ như trước nữa.

Which translates to "This is getting nonsense. Thai's argument is not as strict as before".

The title of the guy's blog [3] is, I kid you not, "There's always only one truth: Communist Party of Vietnam.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_brigades

[2] https://www.blogger.com/profile/17567201928186857755

[3] http://phichnuocnong.blogspot.com/
>I don't get that at all, NixOS is a fundamentally improved way of managing your operating system.

In what way? Why are functionally-declarative system configs good? What does the increased workload gain me over my usual list-of-packages-to-apt-get?
Any time something "magically lines up", it means that those molecules randomly float around until the right ones bump into each other.

Once they are in close enough proximity to bump into each other, intermolecular forces can come into play to get the "docking process" done.

For something like transcription, once they are "docked", think of it like a molecular machine - the process by which the polymerase moves down the strands is non-random.

There are also several ways to move things around in a more coordinated fashion. Often you have gradients of ion concentration, and molecules that want to move a certain direction within that gradient. You also have microtubules and molecular machinery that moves along them to ferry things to where they need to be. You can also just ensure a high concentration of some molecule in a specific place by building it there.
I highly recommend puzzling through some of these on your own first (it's
a great way to build intuition for SQL's craziness), but here's a few explanations if you're stuck.

jamie=# select a+1 from nums group by a+1;
?column?
----------
2
4
1
3
(4 rows)

jamie=# select a+1 from nums group by 1+a;
ERROR: column "nums.a" must appear in the GROUP BY clause or be used in an aggregate function
LINE 1: select a+1 from nums group by 1+a;

In general, a query like `SELECT a FROM t GROUP BY a` is valid, while a query
`SELECT b FROM t GROUP BY a` is not valid. Because you didn't group by column
b, there are multiple values of b within each group, and it's not clear how to
combine them. What you usually meant is something like

SELECT a, sum(b) FROM t GROUP BY a

where you can see the sum of all b's for each distinct value of a.

The error message explains it really nicely: if there is a GROUP BY clause,
every column in a SELECT list must either be used in the GROUP BY clause or
appear in an aggregate function. This is kind of annoying, though; what if
you want to group by a value derived from a column, like `a + 1`? (More
realistically, maybe you want to trim whitespace or something.) I think the
SQL standard would have you write

SELECT a1 FROM (SELECT a + 1 AS a1 FROM t) _ GROUP BY a1

but that's annoying. PostgreSQL (and maybe other SQL implementations; not sure!)
has some smarts about detecting when an expression is used verbatim in a SQL
query, so you can just write

SELECT a+1 FROM t GROUP BY a+1

and it will notice that the "a+1" in the SELECT list is literally the same as
the "a+1" in the GROUP BY clause. But it's not that smart, because it doesn'that
realize that "a+1" and "1+a" are semantically equivalent, and so this is an
error:

SELECT a+1 FROM t GROUP BY 1+a

----

jamie=# select b from nums group by a;
b
---
(0 rows)

jamie=# select a from nums group by b;
ERROR: column "nums.a" must appear in the GROUP BY clause or be used in an aggregate function
LINE 1: select a from nums group by b;

An extension of the previous example, where PostgreSQL can infer that when
grouping by a all b's are unique. It can't infer the converse. The reason is
that a is the primary key and so guaranteed to be unique, and therefore
`GROUP BY a` is meaningless and can be elided.

(This one really confused me for a while. I only learned this recently.)

----

jamie=# select a, b from nums order by 2;
a | b
---+-----
3 | bar
0 | foo
1 | foo
2 | foo
(4 rows)

jamie=# select a, b from nums order by 1+1;
a | b
---+-----
0 | foo
1 | foo
2 | foo
3 | bar
(4 rows)

`ORDER BY <n>` means "order by the Nth column", but `ORDER BY <expr>` means
"order by the value of <expr>`. So you get the goofy behavior that `ORDER BY 2`
in the above query means order by column b, but `ORDER BY 1 + 1` means order
by the literal value "2", i.e., don't order by anything useful at all. (It just
so happens that you get primary key order in the example above, but that's not
guaranteed by any means.)

----

Most of the others have a similar feel. Let me know if you're particularly
puzzled by any others.
I had a professor describe a FT as a "dot product of a function against the real signal space". Thus a FT is valued higher at frequencies where the input signal is more "similar" or "in line" with that frequency. Conversely, the FT is zero where there are none of those frequencies in the input signal.

If this helps, then it can also help with understanding other projections such as the Laplace transform (a dot project against the complex signal space).

While this analogy has helped me, I still have no clue why real valued signals result in an even FT.

edit: grammar
Today's static site generators are simply not fit for mass consumption. Even Jekyll—among the most polished and popular—immediately presents anyone stumbling onto its landing page with a facsimile of a terminal window with 3 inscrutable commands. And the kicker is that even if a prospective "customer" who was previously unacquainted with the command line managed to find their system's terminal emulator to open it up and enter the first command, it will almost certainly fail! What the jekyllrb.com folks gloss over is that there's an "implicit step zero"[1], and if you selected a random, college-educated writer, artist, etc, from a crowd, they are simply on average not actually in the audience for Jekyll or any other contemporary static site generator, despite how slick jekyllrb.com might look (and despite what delusions the "just learn how GitHub Pages works" crowd may hold).

1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-java...
sancho panza in don quixote took this to a ludicrous extreme. they're known today as "sanchismos".
Show HN: Docker container style random names generator
The author of this seems to be surprised that the DB doesn't just sort things (which could be billions of rows) automatically. SQL deals with "sets", which are unordered, and the user needs to specify the order by if they need sorted output. I think this is an excellent design.
No, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity
Comparing SQL to JavaScript or Ruby is like comparing apples to oranges. They have completely different purposes and applications. Rather, it would make more sense to compare SQL to MySQL (or any other derivative). It's like comparing BASIC to QBASIC.

I would argue that SQL itself isn't very crufty. Rather, it's fairly simple and well thought out since it's based on many years of thought and consideration from the creators of the relational database model. E.F. Codd, for one, wrote at length about how these models can work for years before SQL appeared, refining the concept for maybe a decade afterwards. His goal was to make a system that made it easy for developers to store and request information with as little redundancy as needed.

Vendors and developers of database systems have implemented various functions and features that expand on or alter SQL, but those are reflections more on those particular systems rather than on SQL. For example, MySQL's GROUP BY does not verify if the extra columns in the selectlist are dependent on the group by columns, which is against SQL's definition. It wouldn't make sense to count that as an issue with SQL itself.
Pardon the transgression.

The full quote reads "Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes. There is an essential unity of mathematics and computer science" and is disputatively attributed to Mike Fellows and Dijkstra although Fellows also indicates Dijkstra said it in a '93 publication.
> is that similar in Australia or is this app primarily driven by the government itself?

I'm an Australian - and from my perspective the answer is "no".

They are doing the best job they can. In this case, the mandarins running the place (we have a West Minister system) look to be very unfamiliar with open sources development practices, and the positive impacts it has software reliability, productivity and the trust you can place in it. But to answer your question - no one selfishly perusing personal agendas or trying to enrich themselves here.

That's not a good excuse for getting it wrong as they have done in this instance of course. But it is just a question of them coming to grips with something they've never bothered to familiarise themselves with. Up until now when they needed a large IT project done, they've just hired IBM at an exorbitant fee. Amazingly, failures brought on by this waterfall style approach of the order of $4B in one instance (and there are many), the collapse of the census and a few weeks ago the collapse of a keystone of their infrastructure never made them consider alternatives. The fact that most successful companies on the planet, the FANG's, main infrastructure is based on open source and it's development model seems to have pass them by unnoticed. So this alternative style of IT development being shoved down their throats is a huge bridge for them to cross.

Here's hoping they make it to the other side :D
Quantum Computers. Not like I'm five, but like I'm a software engineer who has a pretty decent understanding of how a classical turing machine works. I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say "qubits are like bits except they don't have to be just 1 or 0" without providing any coherent explanation of how that's useful. I've also heard that they can try every possible solution to a problem. What I don't understand is how a programmer is supposed to determine the correct solution when their computer is out in some crazy multiverse. I guess what I want is some pseudo code for quantum software.
Creating this was on my to-do list this week. Ya beat me to it!
>With a single file, you describe the desired state of your system.

I can already do that with Kickstart for rpm distros, though.