skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I dont think the "systems reply" actually deals with this point

To be clear, the point of the systems reply isn't to demonstrate how a computational system can understand language, it is to point out a loophole such that computationalism avoids the main thrust of the Chinese room.

>If using a language isnt equivalent to a finite computable function -- what is it?

In the Chinese room, the man isn't an embodiment of the computable function (algorithm). The man is simply the computational engine of the algorithm. The embodied algorithm includes the state of the "tape", the unbounded stack of paper as "scratch space" used by the man in carrying out the instructions of the algorithm. So it remains an open question whether the finite computable function that implements the language function must "use language" in the relevant sense.

What reason is there to think that it does use language in the relevant sense? For one, a semantic view of the dynamics of the algorithm as it processes the symbols has predictive power for the output of the system. Such predictive power must be explained. If we assume that the room can in principle respond meaningfully and substantively to any meaningful Chinese input, we can go as far as to say the room is computing over the semantic space of the Chinese language embedded in some environment context encoded in its dictionary. This is because, in the limit of substantive Chinese output for all input, there is no way to duplicate the output without duplicating the structure, in this case semantic structure. The algorithm, in a very straightforward sense, is using language to determine appropriate responses.
The United States Is Organizing a Color Revolution in Cuba for November 15
It's undefined whether "clearing the neighborhood" involves the spheroid at that distance or just the plane. It hasn't come up, since all eight known major planets do satisfy the three-dimensional criterion. We'd probably revise or clarify the definition if we discovered an object that cleared its plane but not its volume.
Completely agree. Measurable results go hand in hand with quick reports and pretty graphs, but they fail to capture so many things. I think this is replaced by vision, trust and transparency: if competent people (or at least competent leaders) share a vision, they will make it happen.

The next iPod or iPhone won't happen due to an OKR.
No, the biggest issue is that the aid "developing" (exploited) countries receive is orders of magnitude less than the wealth that is extracted from the continent. How is that wealth extracted?

Debt. Haiti is still paying France for daring to secure their independence.

Industrialization. African slave labor and raw colonial resources paved the way for the European industrial revolution while relegating developing countries to a captive market status. You still don't see industrialization for the most part in these former colonies.

Destabilization. Maintaining the petrodollar and regional interests is more important to the US than stable, autonomous, multicultural democracies. We could have an entire course on how Americans and Europeans play foreign ethnic groups against one another and destabilize democracies in the process.

If you want to know why all these countries are so corrupt, maybe look at how those ruling classes came to power. More often than not we played a part in installing them and shielding them from consequences.
As far as I understood it, at first people used the Tru64 emulated Open Genera under Alpha emulation running on some older Ubuntu running on X86-64. That was years ago. Maybe that got some refinements. Is the portable Genera directly retargeted to X86-64 now? And does it matter if it's practically unavailable?

edit: OFC i know Interlisp-D/Medley is also an emulation. But directly retargeted, and legally open source. And not 'production ready', for now. But seems to be only a matter of time.
> You could design HTML website in the same way, to be printable (although getting pixel perfect A4 format is tricky with HTML)

But you can also get away with not doing it, so it will not be done.
How do we even mitigate against these types of supply-chain attacks

Don’t import thousands of modules from third parties just to write a simple web app. If you have 10 stable dependencies it’s no problem to vendor them and vet changes. If you have 10k you’ve entirely given up on any pretence of security.
There's always something weird beyond Uranus.
If tomatoes come in a plastic box, can I eat the box?
I'm a bit confused with the "branching" [0] and "non-blocking schema changes" [1] features. I'm confused as they sound like "the next big thing" and I don't see anything special here. Not saying are bad concepts or ideas, the contrary. But not really useful either. Surely I'm missing something, so I would love to hear from the PlanetScale team here if possible.

I have a strong and long Postgres operational background, so I may be also here with assumptions that might be different in MySQL/Vitess/PlanetScale. My main concerns/questions are:

* I can't imagine testing DDL changes without data. Having data there is so important to understand the change and its impact, that I won't do them without data. And unless I'm mistaken, these branches only contain DDL, no data at all ("data from the main database is not copied to development branches").

* While it sounds neat, has a web UI and a CLI, managing branches of a schema and using CI and approval lifecycle... is something that sounds like I could do, and possibly better (as it is more integrated with tooling and workflows) from Git platforms themselves, isn't it? I could do branches, merges, CI, comments on MRs, approval... I could even easily build a deploy queue ("promote") with a CI. Doesn't sound like too hard.

* I don't understand how the "safeness" and the non-blocking nature of changes are ensured. Many DDL changes will take different amount of locks on rows or tables, which may cause some queuing and even lock storms in the presence of incoming traffic. Without incoming traffic, they may run fine. In other words: the impact of a migration can only be determined in combination with the traffic hitting production. How does PlanetScale do this? How for example is handled the case where a DDL changes the type of a column to another type which causes a table rewrite, which essentially locks the table and prevents concurrent writes?

Again, not saying both concepts are bad. Terminology and methodology may be already an innovation. And surely I'm missing a lot. But other than this, I don't see myself using this (testing migrations without data is a showstopper, and not the only one) and I don't see much of an innovation from a safeness perspective here.

Why this system isn't one where thin clones of the database are created as the branches (e.g. like in Database Lab Engine [2]), where you can play with data too, and then some data synchronization is performed to switch over to the branch once done (is not easy at all, but doable with many precautions)? That would be a significant improvement in the process, IMHO.

[0]: https://docs.planetscale.com/concepts/branching

[1]: https://docs.planetscale.com/concepts/nonblocking-schema-cha...

[2]: https://postgres.ai/products/realistic-test-environments
I think it is instructive to compare this case to disability. There are perfectly rational reasons, from a cold economic perspective, that an employer would not want to hire any disabled employees, or that a business would not want to build amenities to accommodate them as customers. But we've decided that it is not to society's benefit to have a system wherein the disabled are routinely discriminated against, so we don't allow you to do those things. Why is this case different?
I used to live in rural America. I don't any more. There are reasons for that.

Cities usually kill people by ignoring them until they die. Exceptions are so rare that they become the stuff of history books.

The big upside of cities is that nobody cares enough about you to actually hate you. If you're running away from something, that can be pretty inviting.
> supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the liberal arts.

Would you say there is absolutely no kernel of truth to this? Check out, say, the abstract to this paper [1]. Is there nothing obscurantist about it? If you acknowledge that it's obscurantist to some degree, would you say that it's rare and I just cherry-picked a bad one?

I'm a STEM person, and I have trouble understanding why some people find this stuff to be just reasonable academic work with nothing dysfunctional, pedantic or sophistic about the writing style.

It just seems so extremely obvious to me, that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently, and I'm falling prey to the typical mind fallacy. It's hard to believe that if I studied this stuff deeply enough and with an open mind, it would no longer seem obscure.

[1] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/
I approached people in the Phil Dept where I work, and they expressed only polite interest (i.e., disinterest). So from my (very limited) survey, there may be folks willing to write entries, but, that I can tell, there is not broad interest.
The reason the situation is the way it is now is precisely because the code being made easy for non-coders increased the popularity and reach of the products. Probably because non-coders also found it easy to pick up and start working with it.
How is everyone dealing with this? I have no idea how to begin auditing our dependencies for an issue like this.

GitHub really comes across looking like total garbage here with this blog post. Security issues shouldn’t be hidden like this. This is dishonest and irresponsible.
One system which works really well for this (for me) is slides.com

Paid accounts can sync to Dropbox, and the files in Dropbox are enough for me to view my presentations -- I wouldn't necessarily want to edit them (although I could, it's HTML), but I know even if slides.com shut down tomorrow I'd have the files.
Hide it in the open isn't any better
Any smart contract could also be implemented as a regular program dealing with numbers instead of cryptocoins. And transparency isn't a real benefit either, assuming the centralized server makes all transactions public.

The issues crypto can solve are 1) the government/bank can't steal your money, 2) the government/bank can't hide corrupt transfers, and 3) you don't need permission from the government/bank to exchange cryptocoins. If the government/bank wasn't a bureaucratic mess it could solve all of these issues centrally. Decentralization is good because it's hard to create a central agency without it turning into a bureaucratic mess.
That depends on the premise of this new thought experiment. Are the program-books allowed to include side effects of writing down records of interactions, and take those records as input? If not, it's not a fair comparison with a computer. If so, then yes I think the room could be able to answer.

Why did I have to add something, if the room already understood Chinese before? Because we're essentially adding a second program now and trying to share understanding between them. The room did understand Chinese, but that understanding will not be accessible to a new component unless we design with that in mind. An analogy would be asking a person "which muscles did you use to digest that food?" Clearly some part of the human-system knows this, because it activated the right muscles and successfully digested the food, but the part of the system that hears and responds to English doesn't have access to that knowledge. We would need to redesign the system and programs in order to share understanding between these different parts of the system.

I realize we were using the term "hash-table" in this thread and what I'm talking about wouldn't be possible with just tables, but such a simple program is not a requirement for the thought experiment. The idea is we just have some black box function that takes inputs and produces outputs and we don't know how it works.
> There you go, giving a fuck when it wasn't your turn to give a fuck.

>

> - Bunk
> OTOH, if they're looking at opening up 127/8, why not also open up 0/8 (other than 0/24) and the class E 240/4 (other than 255.255.255.0/24)? There's some use of class E addresses, but I don't think it's that much more of a disruption than 127/8.

That's exactly what we're proposing! This draft is just one of four drafts. The other three are

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...
I'm sure DEC back in the day would have had a valid claim against another chip maker using "Alpha", or Delta against another airline, or Omega against another watchmaker.

Companies have trademarks that are single Greek letters. I guess the question is: did Lambda School's line of business overlap Lambda Labs'? At first blush I don't think so. One is a school and the other is in hardware. But I'm also no lawyer so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Stephen Wolfram interview on life, language design, physics and much more
I think one can learn quite a bit from Thiel even if one is not ideologically aligned with him.

Here is a much more lengthy discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s
GameStop Revisited
Letter from the Editor
My first spin has bingo already: https://outage.bingo/?month=1&seed=81405
Fortunately this is the default in JavaScript world with both Yarn and NPM supporting lockfiles which have hashes and pinned versions. The problem is the sheer volume of dependencies and transient dependencies which makes it hard to reliably audit those, as updating one thing can cause a lot of work.
O problemo. I have Einstein's famous equation

"work + heat = sh*t^2"
Why couldn't you simulate the body too?
GitHub is certainly gameable, but reaching out to 10 people a week for networking is ridiculous. Also, the requirement that you follow up with each job app by email/phone/text, which is almost never what employers want.
Well, that was quite a story. Have you considered water-washing? Not that it seemed possible to draw an analogy with hw tokens, but still.

Another way to handle these rare events is to have an emergency-only 12-pack and then go with your regular a couple of rolls mode.
Um, November 15 of what year? Because not much happened this year...
IBM clears the 100-qubit mark with its new processor
If you’re DevOps you’re not an ex-sysadmin, you’ve just adopted a new label for the same thing that was invented to sound cooler.
I have a picture of a cray been serviced as an A2 framed print on my living room wall, it predates the missus which is why it was on the living room wall ;)
Typically it's snowpack that relieves drought. All torrential rain does is remove topsoil and blow out bridges
This actually looks like fun. At some point I wonder where we blend the edges of 'game' and 'collaboration tool'.

On one side you got audio chat like any business application, on the other side you got some kind of animal crossing sandbox.

If you added file sharing and whiteboard thingie, where does it stop?
In practice people do not use random words. Instead they use a song lyric or sentence from a popular book.

Many users used this strategy to secure their cryptocurrency 'brain' wallets only to have the funds quickly stolen.
Right okay makes sense...guess I am just too used to NISQ and having to run many thousands of shots for high enough fidelity..if all you wanted was one output, then yeah one classical string is easy enough, thanks
Or we could, you know, build mining and manufacturing facilities on a planet that's, say a couple of AU away, instead of a couple of hundred AU. There's reasons we've done neither.
I think the "week or two" was just referring to updating their tool chain to also include support for TypeScript - not actually converting any code.
Well...how did it go?
Generated types are much better than manually-updated types when you've got a source of truth that lives in a different codebase, but I can't help feel like we could do better. I wish there were a "lingua franca" for type declarations that could be understood directly by different languages. Not only would you avoid the mess that is generated source code, but it could be a n^2 -> 2n situation, like LLVM and LSP, where you only have to translate to and from this common ground instead of to and from every combination of leaves.

Unfortunately it might be pretty challenging given how different type systems can be. But maybe if you started with a subset of popular languages that have similar-enough type concepts?
If I look at the adoption curves of cell phones or computer networking, I see a steady increase.

If I look at the adoption curve of Bitcoin as means for payment, the peak was multiple years ago when many companies in my area experimented with accepting it as payment - I could order a pizza with Bitcoin, I could buy an airline ticket, etc; but now those companies have stopped accepting them. There are multiple niches of business which do accept Bitcoin, but overall there has been a significant decrease at least in practical use - there has been some upsurge in digital asset related transactions, but in any case the adoption is certainly not growing exponentially like for other growing technologies, if we look at transaction rates at e.g. https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/transactions-per-secon... then we're at the same level as of 2017, and below the peak.
Would have commented this same thing. It should be a matter of translating the coordinates into a search pattern to look at with JWST.
Whoa, that is so cool! I thought the Eischer esque machine in Devs was mostly Hollywood fluff but it absolutely looked almost just like that.
If you won't ever see them... keep in mind you're posting in a thread titled "Briar 1.4 - Offline sharing". It's meant to be used offline and you're broadcasting your MAC address where-ever you go anyway. Doesn't mean others should track it (I had some interesting experiences with my WiFi MAC ending up in some tracking database), but it's not for a lack of ability.
> Since my liking you is caused by my immediate environment, it isn't reducible to a weighted average of my history.

It is not clear to me that this cannot be the case of a weighted average very heavily weighted to the immediate past.

> The historical positions of all the molecules in some water aren't sufficient to determine its present state. It's state depends on its container (ie., the pressure & temp of its environment).

AFAIK, given that you could determine the momenta of the molecules from a history of their positions, this would be sufficient to determine its state (maybe you need their angular momenta independently?) The relevant information about the container has been impressed on the motion of the molecules.

Similarly, we can suppose that the history of your environment becomes manifest in your mental states (and a predisposition towards certain state transitions) - though, on account of the complexity of that environment, in a compressed form.

> We are more like water than a computer. A computer is a deterministic machine which is a deterministic function of its deterministic inputs. Water is a chatoic system whose state "isnt up to it". Water's state is /in/ its container, and water itself is a non-determinsitic chatoic soup.

And yet we can usefully model fluid dynamics on a computer, even though the mathematical representation of the problem is analytically intractable. This line of argument does not appear to be leading in the direction you think it does.

> We don't have "neural networks", we have cells. That some form "networks" has nothing to do with what we are. A complete misdirection.

I am generally distrustful of these ontological arguments - quite often, it seems, things that were once thought of as being completely different turned out to be similar in some relevant way.
I would not completely blame it on culture. There are practical upsides to having a large number of packages - using a dependency instead of duplicating code means the resulting code is smaller, and splitting large packages up allows you to only include specific functions you need. This is important for the web, which is a lot more size sensitive.

Nowadays tree shaking means that having a large package with lots of smaller function should work better, especially since adding an import incurs its own overhead, but a lot of older packages are stuck on the small packages model.
Nonsense. Venture capital, as an asset class, performs far worse than regular stock indices anybody can buy with a smartphone (Some funds do very well indeed, but others actually lose their LPs money). That's venture capital as practised by professionals that get warm introductions to the highest performing startups, have teams of people to do due diligence for them, involve themselves in hiring and firing the C-suite, can award themselves ridiculously favourable terms like liquidation preferences if the company's struggling and have connections at Valley companies awash with cash when they need to get a startup that'll never be profitable an exit.

Joe Public needs to do better than the people who already have more education and tools and influence than the average person can ever expect, just to break even on their startup portfolio. And let's face it, Joe Public wants to "invest" whilst being so wilfully ignorant of basics like liquidity and adverse selection they think there's nothing to actually be protected from...
The technology and infrastructure needed to reach Planet 9, build a mining outpost, then transport everything back at a profitable cost is likely decades if not centuries away. That’s not counting the fact that Planet 9 is so far away that getting there with current technology is a lengthy affair in itself (the New Horizons probe wouldn’t even be halfway to a theoretical Planet 9, and it’s been flying for over 15 years!)

Not saying I don’t want this to happen - I would love nothing more than to have humanity push out into the solar system, but recycling or scavenging is infinitely more of an realistic option.
You have missed the point of the anecdote.

It is that one tends to underestimate the complexity involved in a particular job which has evolved well beyond its initial "trivial" requirements. Hence the need to guard consciously against such tendencies particularly in domains where you may not be competent.
Hey, I'm the lead author of this draft!

As I mentioned below, this is just one of four proposals that we're making at IETF about reclaiming unused IPv4 address space. The other three proposals are

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...

In each case, the address space in question was reserved a long time ago (during the 1980s) for reasons that have not proven necessary or that are no longer applicable.

It is indeed a big undertaking to change this behavior everywhere, but we propose that it will be a gradual process. It turns out that 240/4 is already widely supported (implementers liked the idea when it was previously proposed at IETF in 2008), while we've also gotten patches into Linux for the 0/8 and lowest address behavior, and now in FreeBSD for the lowest address behavior as well. (The lowest address was originally reserved for an "alternative broadcast address" because 4.2BSD chose it as the segment-directed broadcast address in 1983, before there was a standard to say which address to use for this purpose.)

There are lots of other complexities and history that I'm happy to talk about if people are interested.

The amount of IPv4 space still "reserved for future use" in 240/4 is 2²⁸ addresses, or 1/16 of all of IPv4!

Edit: people who are especially interested in this topic can also watch me presenting on this for 15 minutes at IETF112 last week.

https://youtu.be/cqPVdBvgiXI?t=409