Kednicma

You are slightly improving as a person. I did not expect that. To respect your personal growth, I'll retire this account.

In the case example that you linked, I find it disappointing that you still do not read entire threads. The original article is a Wikipedia article with many authors. The original comment, which critiques either Wikipedia or Baumol & Bowen's original study, includes the summary:

> So - this is simply a bad, ignorant example. It's not just wrong, it's flagrantly, wildly, outrageously misinformed, and is based on an almost total lack of insight into an industry that is worth $146 million a year - of which around $90 million is income from streaming.

My comment concludes with the line:

> This is a bad, ignorant example. Not just wrong, but flagrantly, wildly, outrageously misinformed.

I understand that you object to when we (those who know of the Prime Directive) hold a mirror up to HN. It is embarrassing to imagine how other people must see us, knowing how we see other people. However, that does not mean that we should stop looking at ourselves in the mirror.

Oh, and finally, have a happy Halloween.

I wonder whether maths really can be self-taught for more than about two generations. It has been known since the beginning of maths that it must be taught by teachers who understand the ideas to students who challenge the descriptions.

Hi, to be gentle and brief: Lengthening telomeres can provoke cancerous behavior. Therefore we cannot simply lengthen telomeres by giving people more telomerase; we need a more holistic approach which understands the cancer/senescence tradeoff.

It is not a problem for a creature to live for a long time; the inevitability of cancer seems to itself be genetic and part of the human experience but not for all life. You mention whales, but lobsters are even more interesting: They do manufacture telomerase throughout their lives, and they are not killed by cancer in old age, but by being unable to molt and continue growing. Trees are interesting too; they must always grow in order to keep living, but past a certain size, the physics of water limits their ability to grow.

Indeed, if we want to understand trees and whales, my first guideline would be that, because they are so large, the rules for cellular homeostasis are different at that scale. The things which allow us or lobsters to live for long times are not the things which allow whales or trees to live for long times.

Do your analysis per-capita, please; as a former gigging musician, I assure you that it doesn't matter how much money is being given to the Big Four by streaming services, it only matters how many gigging hours there are per week. And the number of gigging hours per week is limited, and the amount of music produced per gigging hour has not changed in centuries.

This is a bad, ignorant example. Not just wrong, but flagrantly, wildly, outrageously misinformed.

There's evidence against strong Sapir-Whorf in the logical-language subculture. They originally wanted people to learn logic by learning Loglan, but today the speakers of Lojban and Toaq are usually either fluent or logical but not both.

The weakest forms of Sapir-Whorf are obviously true, via Zipf's law; being able to shorten long phrases into short nonce words allows for faster communication, which allows for normalization of concepts, in a positive feedback loop. In English, for example, it's no accident that the shortest two words are "a" and "I" and that they are also the most two common ways to refer to things; "u" is on the way there, too!

Two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24766148

Unsure how Aeon is doing this; some sort of URL trickery?

It is essential when we look at deep time, or any sufficiently high-dimensional and detailed time series, to remember that we are only looking at a tiny slice. We always like to talk of "the tree of life", which might mislead folks into thinking that we get a clean cross-section of every branch of some high-dimensional tree. But, in truth, what we get is more like a tiny wedge cut out from a beanstalk with many central vines; we have only small leaves and cuttings from a mighty thick overgrowth of life.

Relax already. Count your karma; I'm pretty sure that you're positive in this thread. Please, instead, reflect upon why you've felt the need to post multiple times in this thread without actually talking about the original article's content.

It's all a matter of how wrong you want to be, and what information you want to use for deduction. If you see a humanoid approaching you, do you start with "that is a human (99.99% certainty)" or "that is a man or woman (98% certainty)"? I can see the use in the latter, but only here when quantified and compared to more generic alternatives.

I assume that you know about the facts that some humans have fewer than two arms, and some humans have not just fewer than five, but also sometimes more than five fingers [0]. In what way, then, do you hope to show that the facile versions aren't wrong? I think that what you're saying is that it is quite common for human genetics to plan for people to have two arms and five fingers. But it's not universal. We must distinguish between the two, because every time we make a universal claim about humans, we implicitly exclude the humans who aren't covered by the claim. Indeed, intersex folk, polydactyls, amputees, and folks with Down syndrome are all marginalized in our society, and all via this same mechanism of minimization and normalization.

On personal attacks: I've only lost karma in this thread and I'm going to continue losing it; I'm not sure by what means you could imagine that I'm effectively winning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydactyly

I'm not going to argue Python politics with you, but suffice it to say that only a few communities have had such a bad major version upgrade experience. Here are some off the top of my head for comparison, from roughest to smoothest:

* Perl 5 to Perl 6: So disastrous that they rolled back and Perl 6 is now known as Raku

* PHP5 to PHP7: Burn my eyes out, please! But of course PHP has unique user pressures, and a monoculture helps a lot

* Python 2.4 to Python 2.7: Done in several stages, including deprecation of syntax, rolling out of new keywords, introduction of backwards-compatible objects and classes, and improvements to various semantic corner cases

* Haskell 98 to Haskell 2010: GHC dominated the ecosystem and now Haskell 98 is only known for being associated with Hugs, which knows nothing newer

* C++03 and earlier to C++11: Failed to deprecate enough stuff, but did successfully establish a permanent 3yr release cadence

* C99 to C11: Aside from the whole Microsoft deal, this was perfect; unfortunately Microsoft's platforms are common in the wild

Now consider how many Python 3 features ended up backported to Python 2 [0] and how divisive the upgrade needed to be in the end.

On readability, you'll just have to trust me that when Python gets to millions of lines of code per application, the organization of modules into packages becomes obligatory; the module-to-module barrier isn't expressive enough to support all of the readable syntax that people want to use for composing objects. If you want a FORTRAN example, look at Cephes [1], a C library partially ported from FORTRAN. The readability is terrible, the factoring is terrible, and it cannot be improved because FORTRAN lacked the abstractive power necessary for higher-order factoring, and so does C. Compare and contrast with Numpy [2], a popular numeric library for Python which is implemented in (punchline!) FORTRAN and C.

[0] https://docs.python.org/2/whatsnew/2.7.html#python-3-1-featu...

[1] https://github.com/jeremybarnes/cephes

[2] https://github.com/numpy/numpy

No, the entire point of critiquing the author's qualifications is to break apart the idea that, because the author is well-spoken, they are therefore correct or even reasonable. If the author had declined to publish a miniature biography beside the article, then I would not have said anything. I haven't, for example, examined the rest of his body of work; I don't have any predictions to make about what else he may have written.

> stating that the biological sex exists and in human case there are two sexes is sexist.

You got it! Sort of. It's not a problem to use the concept of biological sex, but it's completely wrong to say that humans have two biological sexes. The main problem is in the assignment of chromosomal configurations to sexual configurations; humans have a dozen or so intersex [0] configurations which don't fit neatly into binary gender theory.

And this has real-world consequences. There are many countries which have canonicalized various sorts of human-rights abuses based on the binary theory, mostly by establishing some sort of concentration camps for homosexuals. The author's writing forms a small but real brick in the wall of these camps.

> If that's so then the most biologists I've met are jest sexists and I should probably call the police and denounce them as petty criminals.

This is the error. It doesn't make sense to criminalize sexism, and indeed it's not criminalized in any jurisdiction that I know of. Instead, what's criminalized are specific deleterious pragmatic aspects of sexism: Sexual harassment, genital mutilation, conversion therapy, forced emancipation of trans children, human trafficking. When biologists are sexists, they are usually being reductionist as the author is doing, by minimizing and ignoring the diversity of the real world's biosphere; they are not directly advocating for the harm that is done by other, more hateful people, based on their reasoning.

Also, yes, my priors are that people are 99% racist, 80% sexist, 85% delusionally religious, and 20% fascist; this gives me a weak but steady belief that the typical person I talk to is, in some way, a sincere believer in deeply harmful and falsifiable cultural beliefs. I'm in the USA, for what it's worth; hopefully it's not like this everywhere.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

I've written Python for over a decade. There are two problems with Python.

First, the excellent readability leads directly into hard-to-read code structures. This might seem paradoxical but Dijkstra insisted that the same thing happened in FORTRAN, and I'm willing to defer to his instinct that there's something about the "shut up and calculate" approach that physicists have which causes a predilection for both FORTRAN and Python.

Second, Python 2 to Python 3 was horrible, and created political problems which hadn't existed before. Now, at the end of the transition, we can see how badly it was managed; Python 2 could have been retrofitted with nearly every breaking change and it would have been lower-friction. Instead, there's now millions of lines of rotting Python 2 code which will never be updated again. Curiously, this happened in the FORTRAN world too; I wasn't around for it, but FORTRAN 77 was so popular compared to future revisions and standardizations that it fractured the FORTRAN community.

Please pay attention. I did not say "cancer or whatever". I said cancer [0], a specific family of diseases characterized by normal cells becoming cancerous [1], a state marked by unbounded growth and self-reinforcing DNA damage. Cancer and aging are intimately linked via telomeres [2], part of the structure of cellular DNA. Indeed, quoting the first sentence of [3]:

> Telomeres, the caps on the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, play critical roles in cellular aging and cancer.

On war, we lose millions of people regularly [4]. We lose about a million people to genocide every year [5]. These are people that, in Bostrom's parlance, we have put on the train to go see the dragon; we sacrificed them for nothing at all. Nothing in Bostrom's tale suggests that, having defeated the dragon, we will stop killing millions of people.

On nuclear war or other disastrous climate change, something you only allude to, the Doomsday Clock [6] is currently at less than two minutes to midnight, and has never been closer. It is widely agreed that we are on the very edge of self-annihilation and that we expend a tremendous amount of political effort simply not destroying ourselves.

I can see that you're a relatively young and inexperienced account; I hope that you do some reading and improve your understanding of biology and history, rather than continuing to lean on mystic or mythic influences for your worldview.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomeres_in_the_cell_cycle

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

I'll put to you what I put to Bostrom in my analysis further downthread: What, exactly, do you think we should be doing which we aren't currently doing? Everything he implies that we should be working on, we are working on.

Yes: http://extremelearning.com.au/unreasonable-effectiveness-of-...

Sibling comments are completely correct. Graphics simulations often require quasirandom sequences; the particular sequence is not important, but any correlations in the sequence will be visible in the output as artifacts, so we want a decorrelated sequence.

If this is not enough of a real-world example for you, then Monte Carlo methods also show up in weather modeling, financial planning, and election forecasting. In those predictive systems, there is extreme uncertainty and dependence on initial conditions, which we model with quasirandom sequences and seed numbers respectively. By running many simulations with different random sequences and then examining all of the results statistically, we can get good estimates of future behavior.

Edit: Oh, you're not in good faith. Okay, cool story. Best of luck with whatever imaginary idea of "unpredictability" you're trying to define, but you might want to return to actual maths at some point.

We aren't completely starved yet of the bottom-up approach, but I agree that it's somewhat limited. We can explain choice and free will in bottom-up terms, which complements the article's explanations of memory and signaling.

In the classic video game "Link's Awakening" (chosen to fit the article's theme), there is a maze of signs. Each sign points towards another sign. Reading the signs in the order that they point to each other, following the chain of arrows, leads to a prize. The player is local and does not know where the prize is, but the signs encode global information about the maze. The player's memory is limited and can only remember one sign at a time, but that is sufficient. It seems to me that cells communicate and act using similar local/global distinctions.

> We reject a simplistic essentialism where humans have ‘real’ goals, and everything else has only metaphorical ‘as if’ goals.

This is the philosophical meat of the article, and the tough takeaway for the reader. The reader must admit that their own goals, since they are human, are not quite "real" in a way which somehow transcends the accidental success of blindly-evolving low-level components. Rather, humans do the same sort of predictive modeling, blind guessing, and lucky incidence that we see in "simpler" life forms.

...Are you suggesting sacrificing the old in order to save the old?

This is a very difficult question. We know somewhat his preferences, because he worked on implementing ALGOL 60 [0][1], but unfortunately we are blocked by a bit of incommensurability; in that time, garbage collection was not something that could be taken for granted. As a result, what he might have built in our era is hard to imagine.

That said, he did have relatively nice things to say about Haskell [2] and preferred Haskell to Java:

> Finally, in the specific comparison of Haskell versus Java, Haskell, though not perfect, is of a quality that is several orders of magnitude higher than Java, which is a mess (and needed an extensive advertizing campaign and aggressive salesmanship for its commercial acceptance).

I imagine that he would have liked something structured, equational, declarative, and modular; he would have wanted to treat programs as mathematical objects, as he says in [2]. Beyond that, though, we'll never know. He left some predictions like [3] but they are vague.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/MCReps/MR35.PDF

[2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs...

[3] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/E...

Ha, hilariously naïve. I still have the "Black Dragon Fallacy" written down as something that deserves a full writeup, but in short: What's the missile made of, and how does Bostrom propose that we build it?

Bostrom brings us "fine phrases and hollow rhetoric," mostly. Sure, we should do something about aging, but what, exactly, are we failing to do as a society here? He seems to think that the problem is that we're treating aging and death as inevitable, but science already has marched past that position; instead, we now know that aging is part of a tradeoff involving cancer and is closely tied to maintenance of DNA as cells reproduce in multicellular organisms.

Further, the notion of agency is hopelessly confused by the design of the fable. Humans are deliberately sending other humans to the dragon while the missile is ready to go, in the story, and Bostrom insists that we are supposed to regret this. However, when we move back through the analogy to the real world, then the way that humans send other humans to the dragon is via war. Will ending aging end war? How?

Anthropomorphizing psychopomps may have been a mistake, since it has led to Bostrom imagining that if we just collect all of the psychopomps into one really big mean dragon, and then kill the dragon, that we'll have defeated death. Easy peasy!

We shouldn't be charitable to racism, sexism, delusional religious beliefs, or fascism; they are too harmful to the world. In this case, you're asking me to be charitable to a sexist article whose author does not justify their credentials beyond being a professor of philosophy; perhaps they are only accidentally sexist here?

Seriously, do some close-reading. The very first sentence:

> It’s uncontroversial among biologists that many species have two, distinct biological sexes.

Note the word "many" here; not all species, but just some. In other words, many species do not have two distinct biological sexes. They then continue:

> It does so despite the fact that there are no more than two biological sexes in any species you’re likely to have heard of.

Ah, so while many species do not have two sexes, we're not likely to have heard of them. Okay, that's a fair cultural idea, I suppose... And then, suddenly, a one-two punch:

> Not all species have biological sexes, and biology seeks to explain why some do and others don’t.

Wait, okay, so some species have more than two sexes, and some don't have sex at all? This is a confusion tactic, because the very next sentence is:

> The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle.

We've done it. We went all the way from some species, to no species that we've heard of, to no species at all having more than two sexes. This is a famous rhetorical technique known as Iago's whispers [0]. By carefully restating the original thesis over and over, but gently changing it each time, the meaning of the entire article is shifted.

Now with this discrediting in hand, the author can continue safely down their binary-gender-theory path, writing slapstick like:

> Now imagine if there was a whole species like this, where three different kinds of gametes combined to make a new individual – a sperm, an egg and a third, mitochondrial gamete. This species would have three biological sexes. Something like this has actually been observed in slime moulds, an amoeba that can, but need not, get its mitochondria from a third ‘parent’.

You see, the idea of more than two sexes is now imaginary, relegated to thought experiments. And we see species that are like having more than two sexes, as a simile. But the author's carefully removed the actual physical reality from consideration.

HN rules forbid me from accusing folks of not having read the original article.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iago

Some of these have aged so perfectly that I only need substitute a few letters:

> Python —"the infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 30 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

> It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to JS: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

> The use of Java cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

The quotes about languages were always controversial, weren't they? But it's clear now in retrospect what Dijkstra was complaining about. He found FORTRAN to trick people into thinking that programming was merely about specifying arithmetic operations in a certain order, considered BASIC to require mental models which rendered folks memetically blind to actual machine behaviors, and thought COBOL tried to be legible to management but ended up being confusing to everybody.

> Many companies that have made themselves dependent on AWS-equipment (and in doing so have sold their soul to the devil) will collapse under the sheer weight of the unmastered complexity of their data processing systems.

Yep.

> In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to Python, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

Reproducibility is a real problem, and sharing code is just the first step. It's an embarrassment to physics and mathematics that we don't have a single holistic repository of algorithms, but have to rebuild everything from scratch every time. (Perlis would tell Dijkstra that this is an inevitable facet of computing, and Dijkstra would reply that Perlis is too accepting of humanity's tendency to avoid effort.)

> You would rather that I had not disturbed you by sending you this.

Heh, yeah, let's see what the comment section is like.

I'm not exactly being Gettier over here; if y'all have reasons why my counterexamples are wrong, then speak up. Otherwise maybe sit back and consider exactly why it's interesting that a professor of philosophy rattles off all of these biology facts in an attempt to back up the hilariously-bullshit utterances:

> The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle. It would be quite straightforward to engineer a species that has three, but none has evolved naturally.

This is straight-up wrong, and he attempts to use the nomenclature of "mating types" to dismiss the obvious counterexamples. He's attempting to be some sort of deep thinker about genetics, but he's reaffirming the idea that somehow there's only ever two sexes, which is literally binary gender theory and has already been debunked.

Biological sex has more than two configurations of sex chromosomes possible, in humans. This isn't rocket science, although it is biology.

Also, on your other points: Objective truths can exist, but not all measurements are objective. Not everything is a social construct, but the things that humans believe without empirical evidence are all social constructs.

Postmodernism isn't hard. Y'all're just extremely convinced that reality is locally real, just because you can sense it so vividly, and you're blind to your biases as a result.

The author seems to be some sort of ill-read hack. There are fungi [0] with thousands of biological sexes. Additionally, within humanity, there are more than two configurations of sex chromosomes [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophyllum_commune

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

Stop posting marketing bullshit to HN, thanks.

Well, yes, I don't know if you've read the rest of the thread, but it's quite apologetic. For example, the parent claims that nobody outside of academic research should actually want/need/desire to write code for the T2, but this is clearly bullshit meant to apologize for Apple's sealing off of the T2 from user access.

Maybe we should stop paying a fashion company to sell us chips that we aren't allowed to touch.

You would do well to read the rest of the Pirsig quote you used.

> This eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle sounds right to us because we're used to it. But it's not right. It's always been an artificial interpretation superimposed on reality. It's never been reality itself.

Pirsig continues:

> When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided relationship between the mechanic and the motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for the world, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world up into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck it's Quality, not subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go.

Pirsig concludes:

> By returning our attention to Quality it is hoped that we can get technological work out of the noncaring subject-object dualism and back into craftsmanlike self-involved reality again, which will reveal to us the facts we need when we are stuck.

What Pirsig is saying, in this case, is that trying to have good ideas isn't helpful because you're still stuck in a mindset where you are distinct from your ideas. Instead, you need to embody your ideas somehow; you need to remove the barrier between you and what you're thinking about.

Who do you think writes code for the T2, if not programmers? You're imagining that people who are employed for Apple are special, but they of course are just ordinary programmers.

Your point about SSD controllers is embarrassingly incorrect; there exist many hackers of SSD controllers, including OpenSSD [0], an entire open-source community of folks working on the problem.

Please stop apologizing for Apple's walled gardens. They intentionally limit access to hardware, even after it's legally sold and belongs to the new owner.

Edit: Downvoters, provide evidence or knock it off. Nobody's interested in Apple apologia this morning.

[0] http://openssd-project.org/wiki/The_OpenSSD_Project

Thanks for turning community-driven social sites into advertising-laden shitholes.