skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm not convinced that simulating an infinitesimal portion of the universe is sufficient.

Being not convinced is not an unreasonable position to hold, but it hardly counts as an argument that renders the premise a nonstarter.

I am pretty sure that one can estimate approximately how much information would be needed to simulate a minimal universe consistent with everthing that humanity currently thinks it has been able to verify - in fact, I have a vague memory that Scott Aaronson presented something like that in one of his blog posts.

Then there are the uncomfortable gaps in our physical knowledge - the incomaptibility of relativity and QM, our inability to test, and choose between, string theories: suppose they cannot be resolved? I am not proposing that this is likely, but if it were, it would not mean that the universe could not continue, whether simulated or not.

I have read a bunch of "this is obviously wrong" claims, and one frequently-occurring aspect is that of begging the question somewhere, by assuming that something or other in what we seem to know about the universe is necessarily so. To be fair, proponents of the simulation belief sometimes also do this.

Personally, I don't have an opinion as to whether I am in a simulation; I put Bostrom's paper away in the file containing metaphysical solipsism, p-zombie arguments, and ontological proofs of the existence of God, as evidence for the futility of trying to reason oneself to ultimate truths.
Damn there sure are a lot of people blaming the victim in those replies.
I think you're about two years too late for that, cap'n.
What is the difference between the behavior of a company which holds all the market share and a company, which thanks to VCs, holds all the cash?

Both exhibit the same behaviors with the same explicit goal.

You are debating semantics when the intent in both cases is the same.

In new markets we tolerate monopolies because we want to reward entrepreneurs.

The question to ask is whether the cost of rewarding Amazon with monopolies is beginning to outweigh the benefits.
It's easy to make that assumption if you haven't lived in those worlds yourself and only consume social media to give you an impression of what those communities are like.

You might be surprised, but the vast majority of law enforcement officers and soldiers are not, at all, racist.
Almost looks like a bank. They do exactly the same shit
Paper by mail voting should be our standard in the US. There is absolutely no need for real-time efficiency when it comes to potentially changing political office seats. There usually is a month or two before the successor takes office so we don't need to know that night, it could be a week later.

Sometimes technology introduces more potential problems.
So what you're really trying to say is 0 = 0
It must be hard to get an MVP. It's been 10 years and they only have renderings?
That is cool! I've been thinking about building a site that lets you explore a big graph of math proofs for a long time, since doing my pure math degree. Glad to see someone else has done something like it.
The subhead for that article is literally "In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong."

It's stunning to me to see China held up as a model for how speech in the US should be properly controlled and censored.

It matters little whether the censorship is being carried out by the state or by private actors. What matters is how effective the censorship is and the degree to which we come to accept it as "normal".
Right; it’s a continuity of government measure, which is generally important. The concern is that it only enables voting in such a scenario, and ignores all the other essential parts of a functioning legislature. As such, it’s either half-baked or nefarious, and neither option sits well.
This is the key:
...where the latter has the legal means which enable it to identify the data subject with additional data which the internet service provider has about that person
The whole world besides Anglo countries is using photo ID to vote. The article basically says people don't have a way to get it in 10 mile radius which is ridiculous. You really think you get ID in Germany everywhere in 10 mile radius? No, you take a bus to nearest city that offers these services.
I wonder if this particular example does the opposite. It's too rigorous for a normal human. It seems humorously rigorous to state things like 10 is not equal to 0, and 10 is a real number and 1 is less than 10, not to mention the number of seemingly redundant repetitions showing how each of the numbers discussed is a complex number, separately an individually. Does defining 1+9=10 make the proof more believable?

Rigorous proofs like this are for mathematicians and computers, I doubt they help anyone believe who doesn't believe.

I'm not sure how best to help someone who doesn't believe, but it could take arguments with stronger intuition, or just allowing the person to demonstrate with their own proof. It probably depends on the person, and why they don't believe it.
(This comment was posted when the URL was https://store.google.com/product/pixel_buds. Since changed.)
both your comment and the parent comment needs a /s
> Some western people just think that they are strictly superior everywhere to the developing countries.

The so-called western people, I'd argue, have the right mindset. I agree governments capable of draconian measures tend to do well when such behaviour control is desirable at a nationwide scale. That doesn't mean it is the only solution or even the best one.

I personally would pretty much prefer prevention, absent which, a measured, well thought-out, least disruptive policy around epidemics (I am looking at you South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam). Curtailing liberties, harsher restrictions, oppressive policing, regressive policies don't really fill me up with any sort of confidence. In fact, I worry that the citizens that are not just in acceptance of such a response, but in appraisal of it, are in for a grim reality-check when another unrest, epidemic or otherwise, rears its ugly head.
we all make our own paths

but in quarantine my days are sliding into a featureless wash of playing online games, reading HN and articles about Covid, watching Netflix. ostensibly there is development work I should be doing, but I just can't seem to get engaged.

really finding that if I spend an hour or two directly upon waking doing things like cleaning and sewing and food prep...maybe a little computerless whiteboard work..I'm feeling quite a bit more engaged and human. I'm a lot less prone to just faffing about on the internet.
In a number of countries, yellow journalism was a feature of the evening newspapers, not the morning ones which represented more reasoned, respectable journalism. So, people at least didn’t start their day with yellow journalism.
Even worse, GeoIP doesn't even have high enough resolution.

I'm currently in Switzerland. Different regions speak German, French and Italian (among others).

If you just use "this IP is in Switzerland" to try and guess the best language, you will definitely get it wrong. 25% of .ch pages I have never visited before start out in French, most others in German.

No rhyme or reason.
> If people don't accept the former, they can take out a pencil and paper to compute it themselves. After a few digits it will become obvious.

How can they compute 1-0.999… when they clearly have no idea what 0.999… is?
Amazon is the new Paypal.
Free beer has lots of power.
The Fed is lending money to prevent a financial crisis, not simply giving it away. Look back at the 2008 crisis and see that the government actually profited significantly from issuing those debts in the long term.

UBI is a giveaway not a loan.
Unfair comparison: Turbo Pascal 7 is more like C++20.
This is probably a case of survivor bias. As in, the ones who have tried it have not survived.

Designs like this persist for a simple reason - it’s that people who like spending a lot of money on high end tech products like them.
>This is why Amazon is winning, they are customer obsessed, they are there to help, even if they lose money.

They are so customer obsessed that I can't trust the brand name AC adapter I purchase from them is made with quality materials from a trusted brand, or if it's a counterfeit sent to their warehouses and commingled with all of the other inventory.

And they're so customer focused that they removed the option to restrict product searches to only show "shipped and sold by Amazon.com".

The only thing their actions show me is that they're obsessed with higher profit margins, which can't be obtained by providing traditional retail services. They can achieve higher profit margins by simply being a platform and collecting a commission of all the transactions.
AFAIK Supreme Court has said that funding carrots have to be related to what you're trying to get them to do. Speed limits obviously translate to transit funding, I'm not sure you're going to find funding related to voting that is significant enough to convince states that don't have vote-by-mail.

Oh, and it can't be too significant, because the Supreme Court shut down the Medicaid expansion requirement (expand Medicaid or lose all related funding) in the ACA because the funding was too much of states' budgets.

It's a fine line to walk.
Personally, I have found that engaging in political conversation with people in a framing they find comfortable and familiar makes it possible to change minds. Doing so makes it possible to address the position at hand without also trying to reorganize a person's worldview. Your experience may differ, but I've generally found that task a daunting prospect. Perhaps you are simply far more skilled than I at getting people to reorganize their worldviews - certainly not a high bar here.

Unfortunately, the results of this sometime goes over poorly with people outside the target audience. Such people are often reacting negatively to a framing they find problematic or otherwise objectionable. At times they prefer challenging the framing to advancing a particular position.

This is a very valuable thing to do! It's critically important to a functioning liberal democracy. It's just perhaps not always the most impactful thing to do in a given moment to advance the goal of swaying someone's position.
That's not what happens with Amazon though. You're buying a widget at 10% less than it sells retail at the nearest big box, and what you receive is either a genuine but returned and obviously used item, or a knock off that someone sent in and that was co-mingled with the real SKUs others sent in. Yes, even if you buy "shipped and sold by Amazon".

If you've never seen the original, some knockoffs are very hard to tell apart from the genuine item. They won't perform as well or be as high quality, but if it's your first ever experience with the brand/item, you'll just assume that's what a widget from ACME inc feels like.

In that case, there is no way to tell and it is a lottery whether you get what you pay for or something subpar. It's not as obvious as the 1500$ Gucci bag for 45$ from the back of a pickup on the parking lot.
What's the difference between having sex and rape?
Ok, we'll change to that from https://store.google.com/product/pixel_buds.

Most of this thread is complaining about the original site, but let's give it a try.
There isn't much more than the salacious bits is there?
That's not a definition. Neither 10^∞ nor 1/∞ is defined in any standard system, so you'll have to define those too if you want to use them to define 0.000…1.
All: just so you know, we changed the URL from https://store.google.com/product/pixel_buds to a more readable article. Some of the comments are about the original site.
Did you read what @jl2718 posted? Namely:

> the supremum of an increasing sequence is equal to the limit

-- this is not misinformation (and to anyone familiar with some introductory analysis, correct[1]). Of course, calling it "dogma" is a bit inflammatory, but not technically wrong. It's kind of of a made-up rule to help us work with infinities (particularly in ℝ -- but it happens all the time in set theory, as well).

But to agree with GP, touting it as "intuitive" or "mind-blowing" is indeed silly.

[1] http://www.math.toronto.edu/ilia/Teaching/MAT378.2010/Limits...
Eh, the situation that I've been in, if I recall correctly, is that one has read/write access to all data for reporting, but not the ability to create views (or stored procedures etc) to share.

Where I am now, (as far as Oracle goes) you can't even create your own tables under your own schema. A view requires a meeting with a DBA and their manager and really special, compelling arguments.
They have had their lockdown going for that long. It's disingenuous to present germany like they had school open the whole time. They only just partially reopened. It hasn't been long enough to say whether its been a good idea yet or not.

California has a plan for reopening. Newsom has shared it, its reasonable
This is the definition of Predatory Pricing, is it not?
It was a rather excellent presentation by these doctors. Honest and courageous. Simply cannot argue with the data and reasoning.
Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier: Open hybrid cloud will be key part of strategy
Wait... so you expect people to walk around with a giant billboard on their chest reading "I used to be in the KKK"?

It's one thing for a person to atone for their mistakes. ...it's another more sinister thing to demand that they apologize to everyone perpetually.

I find these demands for public apologies disgusting in their own right. All these social media types demanding that they deserve an apology for someone else's historic transgression.

If you think about it - it's really just a power rush you get forcing people to cow to you.
Not at all, as the spectrum of this phenomenon matters.

While I can definitely see a lot of people trying to show off how smart they are on HN, they are doing it through demonstrating things and making solid arguments. On Reddit, that is usually done through personal attacks and demonstrating themselves.

So many times I went on reddit and saw someone making a solid argument, only to be derailed by someone going through their comment history and bringing it up as a "aha, gotcha" point in an argument. Even in cases where it shouldn't matter, something like seeing a poster getting downvoted to hell just because one of their comments wasn't critical enough of Trump in an argument that had nothing to do with politics and was purely technical.
My favorite type-centric designer portfolio sites
Perhaps because they appear to be an analytics company.
I took some pictures of some distant mountains with my iPhone 5 and I CRANKED the zoom to frame the mountains the way I wanted them. All the the resulting effects, plus the twilight of Alaskan summer, made intriguing pictures, like those shots in movies of the mountain the group is striving to reach. I'd say painterly but I'd flatter myself. I had a nicer camera available but not in hand.
There is a nice characterization of decimal expansions in terms of paths on a graph:

Let C be the countable product of the set with ten elements, i.e. {0, 1, 2, ..., 9}. The space C naturally has the topology of a Cantor set (compact, totally disconnected, etc). Furthermore, for example, in this space the tuples (1, 9, 9, 9, ...) and (2, 0, 0, 0, ...) are distinct elements.

The space C can also be described in terms of a directed graph, where there is a single root with ten outward directed edges, and each child node then has ten outward directed edges, etc. C can be thought of as the space of infinite paths on this graph.

A continuous and surjective map from C to the unit interval [0, 1] can be constructed from a measure on these paths. For any suitable measure, this map is finite-to-one, meaning at most finitely many elements of C are mapped to a single element in the interval. For example there is a map which sends (1, 9, 9, ...) and (2, 0, 0,....) to the element "0.2".

The point is that all decimal expansions of elements of [0, 1] can be described like this, and we can instead think of the unit interval not as being composed of numbers _instrinsically_, but more like some kind of mathematical object that _admits_ decimal expansions. The unit interval itself can be described in other ways mathematically, and is not necessarily tied to being represented as real numbers. Hope this helps someone!
Simplifying, "The author has no intention of being insincere."

Or perhaps even, "The author is not insincere."

Or alternatively, "The author is sincere."
Agreed, engineering teams are effectively stable startups. You make your own decisions & get compete for funding (recs), while delivering products for other teams. If your team is unable to deliver for a customer team, they might make the solution themselves, and then end of with more recs (growing startup), at which point their team may break up into 2 teams if it gets to large. On the flip side, if you see a need within your greater org or company, you can get buy-in and build a great product for the teams around you.
> But I simply could not proceed with my code as is, a very frustrating experience to say the least. How is this even possible?

As a team lead, I'm sure you know...bugs happen. What sort of internal error was it causing? Something specific and spelled out, or a generic uncaught exception?
If inflationary pressures get to high, the Fed will raise the Fed Funds rate, affecting the market interest rates, incentivizing saving, decreasing inflationary pressures.
Sure, the voltage divider works ... if the load impedance is high. Not a good idea for a 50 Ω load.

Op amp needs a dual-rail power supply, so it needs some auxiliary power, then power electronics to get both rails. Stuff starts to get complicated, and now that $1500 Keysight box starts to looks worth its price...
I don't really think it's unfair. It's obviously not "very misleading" on purpose, but it's a little silly to look at the title "Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting" during a time when there is a lot of worry and argument about the ability of citizens to vote remotely and not assume most people will think they're talking about citizen votes. Hell, even if it weren't a currently relevant topic, I'm confident most people would still assume "voting" refers to the thing people do at the ballot boxes. That's just the default meaning of the word when the topic is US politics.
What I keep thinking about all of this is that an open, functioning, well regulated, free market economy (not defending crony-capitalism like we have had) with targeted generous welfare programs is a far better solution than UBI and other massive fiscal interventions/bailouts/helicopter money. Here is my concern and would love to hear any reasoned arguments as to why it is not a problem.

It is a lot of money, and eventually the money comes out of something, be it the increased prices from increased buying power in the market or the loss of buying power due to slippage against inflation driven by government spending debasing the currency. (they are two sids of the same coin i guess)

It wont happen immediately, this is a massive deflationary shock right now, but surely helicopter money will do what is intended and drive inflation eventually undermining the intended effect of UBI in the first place. The economy is dynamic and reflexive, if everyone knows that everyone is getting x amount of money increased demand and information in the market will drive prices quickly higher.

Government planners will eventually seek ways to mitigate this outcome, perhaps by pegging UBI payments to inflation or enacting price controls on say rents or taxes to take money out of circulation perhaps through a VAT. Either way this is the long-run nightmare of more directly managing an economy from the top down. And I fear that it is a road that leads to a far less dynamic, creative and self sustaining economy.

The intended economic foundation for everyone that UBI seeks to provide may prove to be a short term benefit and eventually become a complex game of trying to control a very complex system.
How do you figure? A 10% VAT would bring in $2.1T on the $21T GDP. There are about 200M adults in the US. 200M * $12K is $2.4T, which is certainly in the right ballpark.
I am pretty sure they have LOC. I am also pretty sure that said LOC can be easily exceeded in a situations as the one originally described.
Faint memories of MUMPS...
Well if you have enough personal data about who speaks to you in what tone and at what context, you can tell.

Definitely not impossible
The Rise of Type Theory
And then there are city level containment zones for tiny colonies (say 3-4 km^2 Radius) when even a single case is detected, where nothing is allowed, groceries are delivered by authorities.

Then there are sub - total city wide lockdowns in certain states where absolutely no travel is allowed.

Lockdown limits can be increased by the states, but limits imposed by the center can't be diluted.

Overall, the reason is very clear as the parent says - Most extreme lockdown of any country (or) at-least compared to other countries where death rates are high; subsequently the cost being paid is extraordinarily high[1].

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22676312
Never say never, but when I say crowded small street, I definitely mean it, nothing larger than a tote bag moves without gossip spreading, unless maybe at 3 am. So, perhaps? But I wouldn't bet much money on it personally! We will know in a few weeks though, if people are dying in our street, given the absolute lack of any distancing measures inside the streets (lockdown is only at a block level), more people should get very sick very soon.. hope not.
I don't think random people in the public deserve an apology.

The people he hurt do. Since when does the general social media community deserve to be apologized to. People are getting an emotional power rush by forcing apologies from people who never transgressed against them.

This is poisonous behavior.
This version contains an important piece at the end, additional 3 minutes:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cmjYRJXKixY
Not the person you replied to, I don't hate Python, it's not my favorite but it's my most used language.

Python is unprincipled in its design. It's a kitchen sink language. It has principles (PEP 20) but they explicitly eschew purity of design in favor of practicality, readability, and simplicity of implementation.

Python's type system is very flexible. You may see that as a plus, to me it feels all over the place. It has classes which you can turn into half-baked nominal typing with type annotations. You can mix-and-match interface inheritance and implementation inheritance with multiple inheritance.

You can do unholy things to the class system with metaclasses and the issubclass hook. I have seen it, in a half-million LOC project.

It has protocols, which are duck typing, which you can turn into half-baked structural typing with type annotations.

It is multi-paradigm and it's acceptable at all but not the best at any. If you want strictly OOP or functional you're better served elsewhere.

You can mix-and-match type systems and paradigms in a single codebase, which can be useful, but it's up to dev discipline to not turn the codebase into a horrible mishmash.

In comparison, I don't like writing Java, but I have to admit it limits the amount of damage undisciplined devs can do to a project.
The pandemic has messed up global supply chains
Lol! That's why social shaming works. Ignoring quiet people scales. Ignoring loud people doesn't scale. So learn your lesson and complain everywhere you can when you have an issue.
We've changed the link now to an article that should be readable.
The OP explains in the thread that their lawyer is already involved. I would guess that very few businesses in retail can float 100% of their costs with no income for weeks/months.
Do you live in Noida?
They were on a trip to a religious conference.