skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article doesn't actually explain Dust Theory to someone who hasn't read the book. I haven't found a good standalone explanation of the theory that explains it in a compact manner so my recommendation to people is to read the book.

Permutation City is among my top 5 favorite books because I found Dust Theory so mind blowingly amazing from a philosophical standpoint. I haven't seen it discussed elsewhere outside the lesswrong.com forums (which are famous for creating Roko's Basilisk). It's only $3 on Amazon so it's worth picking up if you're a fan of hard sci-fi that gets into the philosophy of uploading: https://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B...

Dust Theory also provides an interesting option for people who want to achieve True Immortality. That is, immortality that can survive the heat death of the universe without violating the First or Second Laws of Thermodynamics. It also provides a hard sci-fi version of the concept of Subliming from Iain Banks' Culture novels where a civilization leaves this universe once they become sufficiently advanced. (Sublimation in the Culture books is similar to Ascension in the Stargate universe or Transcendence in Babylon 5.)
It is very easy to get long passwords, just double them
When I said 'no proof exists', I didn't mean 'no proof of authority'. I mean no document exists. Assuming Satoshi 'covered ones tracks' is a straw-man because then you open up the possibility to anyone being Satoshi, not an exclusive person.

Please understand that many people talked with Satoshi through email as well. Those emails are mostly private. When someone points to an authority, the entire argument is a straw-man, even with someone very relevant to the discussion.

> Satoshi seemed to be very good C++ programmer who had interests in electronic cash and cryptography but not a cryptographer.

What physical circumstantial evidence exists that is shows Kleiman was good at anything you've described or was even interested in these during 2008 or earlier (heck, I can't find anything prior to 2013)? What about any interest into any digital cash/gold attempts?

The argument you're giving is fairly persistent in the crypto community. I'm not entirely sure why, except intellectual laziness. The irony here is 'proof of authority' argument...is an absolute contradiction to what bitcoin's primary function is (trustless 3rd party system). Why are people lifting up a 3rd party and not the code/evidence? An opinion (no matter how relevant) isn't what we're looking for, we are looking for evidence. Did scientific reasoning leave everyone?

(edited for grammar)
Even the childless are benefited by the continuation of society that children manifest. Parents pay far more costs than the childless in capital, time, attention, freedom, happiness, et cetera. Having children is increasingly a choice but replacement reproduction is also a requirement (although I could imagine a world that would invalidate this, that is not our current state). However, because it is a choice the argument that parents should take responsibility for the consequences can seem sensible. At some point and scale it gets entangled in everyone's well-being. Everyone able to make these arguments has benefited from the sensible and self-interested arrangements having been a child themselves. While I understand and have had the objections myself, they represent a rejection of the deal we were all forced into: that society will support us to grow in value and we in turn pull up the following generations who will soon shoulder the load in their own middle lives when we become more dependent on them for our care.
Are you trying to say that I can’t have a successful career until I join a prestigious company?
One piece of counter-evidence is the repeated story of online communities.

In the early days of the Internet there was Usenet (OK, so it started separate, never mind), a global community, or collection of communities, using text-based message broadcast. It was a nice, self-policing community where obnoxious behaviour was frowned upon, and frowning was generally enough. Every September a new cohort of university students discovered this wonderful resource, and sometimes took a while to learn the social norms, but peer pressure generally worked.

Then in the 90s the Internet started to become popular. AOL started distributing free CDs that let you access Usenet. Lots more people arrived on Usenet, resulting in the "Eternal September" when the social norms broke down and everything became chaos. Spam and flame wars drowned out serious conversation. Some of the communities within Usenet were able to continue because they were small enough to maintain their own internal cohesion, but increasingly these became exceptions.

I stopped using Usenet for discussion some time around 2000. There simply wasn't any point. Even the cohesive communities were abandoning it for private email lists and web sites.
So how would your anarchist utopia deal with an army of thousands raiding your village?

> the rest of your post rather depends on that point of view.

The need to feel safe from raiders is fairly universal.
Not quite so simple: this is what "community policing" is all about. Many portland protesters were there because they wanted the national guard out. National guard soldiers who didn't live there, weren't members of the community... Who could act shitty to community members with no consequence.
He lost me right in the second paragraph:

> Because computation is sort of subjective, just a set of relations that can be usefully interpreted as representing a function, this seems to imply that the function you identify with can be interpreted as being simulated by any sufficiently complex set of relations.

Can anyone explain? I'm already struggling with the premise: Why should computation be subjective in the first place?
> what kind of freedom do you seek

I want spywares/adwares to be allowed without any restriction so I can install a adblock pro to block them.
I use macOS pretty much full time now, but my one linux box is still KDE Neon. It’s LTS Ubuntu-based but as far as i know doesn’t push snaps, and just maintains a clean KDE/Qt based environment (if that’s your fancy)
That's the opposite of anarchy. An-arch-y means a situation without fixed power structures.
> maybe because the society literally can't go forward without babies?

Technically true, but practically nonsense. We're at no danger of under-population. And if we were, it would be the government's job to subsidize having children, not Facebook's.

People who work in tech and choose to have babies are doing it as a luxury, not to push society forward.
I tend to agree. Psychopaths are an unsolvable problem. People like them is “why we can’t have nice things”.

If it weren’t for psychopaths we would not need passwords or encrypted passwords or security protocols, etc, etc., because everyone would behave in good fashion. But we don’t so we can’t.
Compare the murder rate per capita in tribal societies today versus modern society. It's orders of magnitude higher. Case closed.
Creative Mayhem: Life as a Founder with ADHD
Thanks - sounds like a good area to google around in, but not to take the blog too seriously yet.

Sounds about right to me.
> I debated calling it something else to avoid getting pulled into debates about semantics.

Sure, but the larger point would be that the companies call it that way, which would still be dumb even if we didn't get into that discussion right now.

(BTW, was "unlimited" the term that was actually used where you worked?)

> The problematic part of this equation is that “your work” isn’t a fixed quantity. When we allocate tasks and set weekly goals according to how much people can reasonably accomplish in a week, the “your work” variable becomes a proxy for how much that person is willing to work that week.

Yes, of course. What is puzzling to me is - how is this not completely obvious right from the start to everyone involved?

> It was the people gaming the system who played this game the most, obviously, and they tended to claim off hours and weekends as extra time spent working alone, assuming we couldn’t disprove it.

This part sounds more related to "work whenever you want policy" than "work as much as you want". It was obviously the case that people were expected to work 40-ish hours/week and take roughly the same amount of vacation as was the norm before unlimited/unspecified vacation policy.
The course teaches through computation in Julia, 4 seemingly random submodules that are both mathematical and computational. The course information including the instructors (who are MIT professors Alan Edelman, David Sanders, MIT researcher James Schloss, and Youtube educator Grant Sanderson) is on the title URL. To get a flavor, check out the first lecture (after the introductions and installations lecture) on convolutions here: https://mitmath.github.io/18S191/Fall20/lecture2/

The instructors are all prolific open-source contributors and the course is definitely worth looking at, if you are interested in hands-on computations of cool and useful mathematics. It's also open to everyone!
We used some of his essays in a freshmen writing class in college 7-ish years ago. I had no idea who he was at the time but the essays still made an impression.

This was a liberal-arts school and the professor had no particular technology or business background; I’m still not sure how she came across them.
Why do you feel lonely? Neuroscience answers the costs of social isolation
Ask HN: Why are calculators one of the only consumer devices with solar panels?
So, instead of 44-0, the USA is a mere 44-1 up on the aggression front. And as I said, since we're talking about China here, swap China for North Korea. How many countries have China invaded, bombed or staged coups in, since the end of the Korean war?
Get inspired by captions to create 10-second videos
Vadi is an IOS app that allows you to use captions written by other users to create 10-second videos. Captions can be any kind of text between 10-50 characters. Phrase, topic, question, song...
So tell us, how many months of mask wearing would be "reasonable"? We're up to about six in my locale. Would twelve be reasonable? Eighteen? Until the virus is gone? That would require, most likely, eternal mask wearing, even with a vaccine. Why don't you lecture us about "reasonable" behavior some more.
What is a low and what is a high frequency. It would be nice if there would be some kind of numbers in such texts.
AFAIK anarchy is not the abolition of the use of force, but rather the lack of a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

The federalist papers spend a bit of time debating inevitable rise of factions and pluralism without a dominant faction ordained by the people.
I’m absolutely aware that’s where my paycheck comes from.

I’m simultaneously and acutely aware that the exact rationalization above is also used to excuse poor decision making In some companies that has real human consequences that happen to exist parallel with ‘getting a paycheck’ and those consequences and the behavior behind them are no less worthy of critique just because ‘paycheck’.

These are my ethics. You don’t have to share them, I’m not here demanding that you do. I’d just rather dispense with the obviousness of “but that’s how you get paid”. Of course it is.
We're already there. The snap store is not open source and can only be run by canonical.
Oppo F17 vs. Oppo F17 Pro Full Comparison
Here is the thing... a reasonable choice for an individual is not the same as a reasonable choice for a group.

A classic example is something like fishing. As an individual, it is entirely reasonable for me to catch as many fish as possible. I won’t put a dent into the fish population, and the more fish I catch, the better it is for me.

However, if everyone fishes as much as they want, the fisheries will be depleted. It is reasonable for an individual to fish as much as they want, but not for a society.

So why doesn’t everyone just fish less, because that is the reasonable thing for the society to do? Well, in an anarchy, I can only choose for myself. If I fish less, but everyone else still fishes as much as they want, then I will have less fish AND the fishery will still be depleted. I am worse off for no gain; it is clearly reasonable for me to fish as much as I can, since the fishery is going to be depleted no matter what.

Even if by a miracle everyone else agreed to voluntarily fish less, it would STILL be in my interest to ‘defect’ and fish as much as I want. My individual choice isn’t going to cause an issue if everyone else is already fishing less, so now I get more fish AND the fishery is fine.

Bottom line, no matter what everyone else does, my rational choice is to fish as much as I want. If everyone is rational, the fishery will be depleted.

This is known as a collective action problem, and is a type of prisoner’s dilemma.

You can’t get out of it through individual rationality. You have to approach the problem collectively.
Trump bans 'anti-American' diversity training
That hierarchical structures became dominant after the invention of agriculture does not imply that agriculture necessitates hierarchical structures.

> And even if it was acceptable to most people, it would take only a small minority opting out to retain the power to subjugate everyone opting-in and ruin the whole effort.

Could you expand on this?
> With a lack of stimulus or even just in this economic system, bars and businesses in general are incentivized to stay open. They are being ‘coerced’ to stay open.

You could say this about any thief in any economic system, including the economy of survival (stealing food, shelter, etc). This is not a thing anarchy could solve.

> People started rejecting masks and shutdowns en masse after astroturfing and media convinced them to.

These aren't laws or government, and they would still exist in an anarchistic system.

> There are countries where orders were followed voluntarily and good results followed.

Yes, and there are no countries where no orders were required because people self-regulated.
The point of the wealth tax is not to secure funding for "good things" but to intentionally sabotage the accumulation of wealth.
The team reviewed 662 MIS-C cases reported worldwide between Jan. 1 and July 25

So does that mean there are only a total of 662 cases reported worldwide? Because if so, this doesn't seem to be a significant issue.

Edit: yes, it seems like there are only a few hundred cases in the US [0], not a significant risk. I've seen this article in a few places and everyone seems to interpret it as saying a significant portion of children have a damaged heart after COVID, which just isn't true. Not a problem with the article, just peoples critical thinking skills.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/infogra...
> Permutation City

I haven't read that book since the early 90's but it dealt with ideas that have really stuck in my mind.
The one ray of hope there is that they eventually gave up on Unity. Hopefully they will give up on snaps also...
> The claim was that inaccessible worlds are inherently incompatible with our ability to empirically investigate or falsify them

That's not what the claim was. The original claim was that MWI is "incompatible with our experience of reality." TheOtherHobbes then said that the incompatibility is that we experience only one reality, instead of many realities.

> MWI has a metaphysical parsimony to it. But to believe it's physics is religious faith not physical science- and that's fine, but it's still not science.

It's not religion to point out that QM explains the phenomenon of wavefunction collapse without any additional postulates (through decoherence). That's all that MWI says.
Patents being invalidated doesn't mean the work done was invalid.

A public disclosure, for example, that there was no practical way for an examiner to be aware of, could invalidate a patent. Unless omniscience is part of the job requirements you're going to be sorely disappointed.

Examiners don't make applications, applicants do. Very expensive lawyers do their best to get those patent applications granted. Sometimes the lawyers/applicant know that the final product is invalid but seek it anyway .. so someone harmed can seek restitution from the courts.

The PTO try to stop mess, they don't screw up applications, they tear down applications; they unfortunately can't practically be 100% effective in that.

I'm sure they could do better, buy you appear to require them to be perfect?

Again, these comments are my own. I work in IP, but not in USA and not with USPTO.
A major plot point and thematic element from a novel by Greg Egan called Permutation City.
I was annoyed that it presents as just part of installing the new patches. If you don't cancel out of it, you'll end up with Edge instead of Chrome/Chromium. And of course, the procedure neglects to tell you that. I can imagine a lot of people falling for it.
Wow, if Soviet Union wasn't communist, wonder why there is such a gigantic section about it here...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Soviet_Union
I have observed anarchists generally don't like being told what to do. That is not a judgement. Just observed behavior leading to an obvious conclusion.

To be fair here, I don't like being told what to do.

When the machinery of society is running well, lives are reasonable, etc... these people continue to advocate and agitate, but the masses will generally go with what is easy, reasonable.

It's all pretty harmless.

Now consider the case when said machinery is not running well, is unjust, and generally not reasonable.

Suddenly, that advocacy and agitation takes greater root. Screw being told what to do, essentially.

Society sees greater unrest and in general the basic social contracts come into question.

From whatever establishment happens to be in majority control point of view, anarchists and others willing to subvert are bad, harmful elements that should be avoided and or dealt with more formally.

Seems to me that is not harmful at all, may even be beneficial, a self correcting mechanism of sorts.

Anarchists are simply a necessary artifact of human nature.

The T-cells of society.

The remedy is not to condemn anarchists, or consider their ideas irrelevant.

It is to run society better. Make the basic deal sexy, compelling enough that people will accept being told what to do in return for a modest, reasonable, dignified life.

Edit: From discussions with an anarchist friend:

When the common man, labor, the basic, necessary classes are abused, overexploited, they are offended. It may be they are members of said class too. So there is clear self interest.

Agency really matters. Potential does too. Overly totalitarian society tends to labor to excess and snuff out being human.

Social democracy is largely comparable with anarchism. Rule by democracy, not by purse, or bloodline, army, or god.

This exchange seems to support my observations above.

Nice weekend lark! This discussion here, along with a couple I will have with others will prove interesting and informative.

If nothing else, I suspect many of us, if we are truly seeking info like this, will understand one another better.

Never a bad thing.
And why would "sort of" subjectivity be sufficient for simulation? The only interpretation is that the author uses the word subjective to mean "a set of relations". It doesn't sound like math, more like pseudo-philosophical sci-fi.

It also seems to assume that simulation of physical processes can be highly accurate and efficient, and that the function that represents "I" doesn't interact with the environment.
VOTEism for Belarus
Or at least a hard stop on migrations until the performance characteristics were hashed out.

Sadly I noticed a while ago that Windows began to outrun Ubuntu on my older machines; it doesn’t seem like Canonical really cares about performance anymore.
If you don't believe humans are capable of living reasonably without being forced, you're only living reasonably as you're being forced or you view yourself as "special."
It's certainly a spectrum from representative democracy to direct democracy to anarchy.
VOTEism is a political opinion poll app originally made for the 2020 USA Presidential Election. We launched VOTEism on HN about two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23584648

We now believe VOTEism is needed in every country that has a democracy. Accordingly, VOTEism now supports opinion polling for Belarus. If you are a Belarusian you can download the VOTEism apps for your country from the links below and vote for your preferred Presidential Candidate.

iOS: https://ios.voteism.org
Android: https://android.voteism.org
About VOTEism: https://docs.voteism.org

We hope Belarus rises up safer and stronger from this.
You'd probably like Neal Stephenson's Anathem. It's a Hemn Space argument.
Capitalism is fundamentally built on competition, it pits all participants against one another. It stratifies social bonds and breaks people apart because any cooperation represents unrealized exploitation.

Its why people are so miserable en masse, hostile, and chomping at the bit for targets to attack and hate. Its worse in America because theres almost no socialism at all to raise the floor of society - the country is buried in homeless and something like 1 in 5 persons is food insecure (probably higher now in the pandemic). If you fail in "winning" at capitalism to some degree you are supposed to feel fortunate shelters and soup kitchens exist. Sometimes. Society has broadly rejected them as the socialism they are and underfunds or destroys them where able.

Its also why drug addiction is totally out of control. Desperation and social isolation by our culture creates whole populations of people to be exploited by drug profiteers. Many other nations don't do this by catching people before they get that despondent or miserable and by helping (rehabilitation) rather than hurting (prosecution) those that get that bad.

The process is cyclic. The desperation feeds into the hate feeds into the predation feeds into the exploitation feeds into the desperation. But breaking out of it requires class consciousness that is opposed at every level - at the bottom by the animosity and inability to trust and at the top by the profits and power reaped through the harm done.
Are there any major disadvantages to a nuclear winter, besides that everyone would die and the environment would be destroyed?
That said, locking people in cages, treating them with inhumanity and violence, then releasing them into a world where they now have a harder time functioning in society and finding legitimate work doesn’t sound like a genius plan to solve psychopaths.
This is the second article by David Graeber (died recently) I've read today. About 15 years separate the two, but the style is similar.

Can someone explain it to me: What is the joke? Or, what context am I missing? Wikipedia isn't filling in the gaps here.
In a cross-domain context, when you are expecting the browser to make its XHR for JSON data via JavaScript to a third-party API. Think about making a call to the Flickr.com HTTP API from your own WordPress myblog.com domain. In that context, the XHRs didn't support POST/PUT. Remember, even the fetch() API is pretty recent. POST-based forms are irrelevant for API usage.

This MDN doc covers some of the complexity:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS

And here is when browsers added support for CORS:

https://caniuse.com/#feat=cors
Popular Design Patterns Revisited in JavaScript
If you need more control over versions, NixOS is by and far the best choice. You can mix and match versions of software from stable & unstable, depending on your needs.