another-one-off
another-one-off on Hacker News
I do prefer the ClojureScript because I don't know how to type "λ" and that seems like a usability handicap. Minor complaint I know.
This HN comment was the first time I've ever heard of anyone talking about 'healthy masculinity' in a context of the phrase 'toxic masculinity'. The entire thrust that I've heard is that having a unique or predominantly male role in society is what toxic masculinity means in practice.
The gender theorists will have their own internal world with a lot of nuance, but the stuff that is leaking out into law and corporate diversity initiatives looks a lot more like true gender blindness. The logical flip side of that, it is quite hard to construct a positive masculine role model. The raw physical differences suggest male strength, but any actual exercise of strength apart from showing off is probably either illegal, uneconomic or low status work (sporting excellence a glaring exception). Compare that to giving birth which is incentivised, an amazing long term economic investment into old age and quite high status (mothers occupy a special place in the world). It is simply a lot easier to construct a positive feminine image than a masculine one in a world where only physical realities make a difference and everything else is expected to be gender blind.
Obviously there are positive roles for males to fill, but the idea that they are masculine in some sense isn't really acceptable. Males can fill them in their capacities as humans, but they can't be distinguished from women. What can 'healthy masculinity' mean in such a world? Adding the word masculine in doesn't add anything. 'Healthy masculinity' is basically 'Healthy femininity'.
If the pro-liberty forces don't have the numbers to quell that sort of law when it is proposed; the question becomes where is the line that it starts to become an issue? Because the pro-safety, pro-conformance factions will keep pushing as far as they can. If they've got the power to start reducing liberty then they are going to keep at it until there is a well supported line that has been crossed. Not a line that an unusually intelligent, educated and thoughtful person would identify a concern but a line where ordinary people start to vote differently.
It is very hard to justify liberty to a disinterested observer until the authoritarians actually start taking power; and by then it doesn't really help. It becomes too hard to organise.
For example, traditionally the view that males should be providers for the family would have been considered a healthy aspect of masculinity. That doesn't go unchallenged any more; for example there is a real concern out there that men are too competitive and effective at securing high paid jobs.
It is an anecdote I suppose, but those involved in the gender activist communities don't seem to allow such a thing as 'healthy masculinity' because it supposes there is something positive can be exclusively/predominantly masculine and the girls don't get involved. Bit of a non-starter as ideas go.
The only effective (read: doesn't cost anything to execute) strategy employers have to calibrate how much workload can be achieved in a given time is to keep increasing the amount of work until people start quitting or jobs go undone, then scale back a little bit. There are other strategies that cost more to execute or require enlightened management; but they aren't the norm in my experience.
All a teacher can really do for a class is either 1:1 time with an individual or N:1 time with a group. All the details of exactly what gets done only obscures the fact that there is always going to be a good outcome for students if the teacher puts in another half-hour of unpaid work and that teachers shouldn't do that because it is unpaid.
That all just sounds a touch complicated compared to data in database, code somewhere else (like git). I'm circling back to the same point in a couple of different ways, but pgSQL specialises in the relational model of data. That isn't a great data model for code and there are already better ways to manage code than shoehorning it into the database. Its cool that it is possible, and I'm not saying that someone who does is making a mistake. But I also don't think they are gaining an advantage and there is a really easy opportunity to separate out where bugs can occur from where data lives.
> How often do you plan to migrate to another database? In my experience this almost never happens in reality, but the layers above come and go.
If you are using a database for its advanced general purpose programming capabilities? The chances probably start to get more likely.
Databases that are a store of data don't need to change because they already do their one job (disk <-> relational model translation) really well. If they are pressured to do 2 or 3 tasks like business logic then suddenly it is a lot more likely that there will be pressure to swap databases.
If I were using SQLite and someone wants to do fancy triggers then maybe I need to swap to PostgreSQL. Avoiding that sort of decision making is a great reason to seal the data completely away from the code.
Putting complex business logic in the database is opening up all sorts of interesting new ways for data to be unavailable, corrupted or complicated to access. It is easy to imagine it working out well for simple requirements where there just needs to be something that works.
PostgreSQL is a piece of software that takes data and enforces the relational data model on it. Great idea. But the relational model of data is really only tuned to relational algebra. Put complex logic in there and all that is really being accomplished is now you can't migrate away from PostgreSQL. Relational databases already have great integration with every other programming language in current use.
If the x86 and x86_64 instruction sets became an open standard so that anyone could implement them; that would be great for consumers. If Intel is in a position to halve prices in the face of competition there are obviously not enough players in the market.
That comment in particular suggests to me that you havn't spent a lot of time playing Go. The pieces' powers mutate quite spectacularly as the situation around them changes.
> Most interesting problems in the world don't mirror Go's orderly rules
This is true, but it isn't obvious this is going to slow deep learning down. For example, you cite players taking turns which is a significant handicap for a computer. If it comes down to reflexes, robots can win even with worse decision making algorithms than a human.
In the context of deep learning, if the situation mutates in ways that the training regime didn't then an AI will have trouble. However, people love to overestimate both how often exceptional circumstances come up (the correct answer is rarely) and how good humans are at responding to them (correct answer is badly).
My favorite part of learning the training system for artificial neural networks was that it incidentally explains a lot of human failure modes really well. It isn't at all obvious the humans have a sustainable advantage here.
However the American spy network is large, well provisioned, has no compunction about spying on Russians and was controlled by Democrats when the alleged conspiracy took place. If there is no conclusive evidence of collusion then it didn't happen.
The idea that the Russians are better at influencing the American people than the Democrat and Republican campaign machines is jaw dropping. It doesn't make any sense. Trump could have found more capable people to collude with if he wanted to.
Probably. Human intelligence is extremely fallible - based on the statistics the only reason we trust humans to do half the stuff they do is because there is literally no choice.
If we held humans to a high objective engineering standard We wouldn't:
* Let them drive
* Let them present their memories as evidence in a court case
* Entrust them with monitoring jobs
* Allow them to perform surgical operations
Humans are the best we have at those things, but from a "did we secure the best result with the information we had" perspective they are not very reliable. A testable and consistently performing AI with known failure modes might even be able to outperform a human with a higher failure rate (eg, we can reconfigure our road systems if there is just one scenario an AI driver can't handle).
Basically, you might be dead on the money that they are not 'trustworthy enough', but lets not lose sight of the fact that even being an order of magnitude from human performance might be enough after costs and engineering benefits get factored in. The weakest link is the stupidest human, and that is quite a low bar.
There are vanishingly few people stupid enough to subject themselves to stress and fear voluntarily just because. They either see themselves as having no choice (possibly correctly) or because they perceive a reward to be had (possibly one related to validating who they see themselves as). It basically follows (handwave) that courage is a combined ability to either not feel stress (or fear) in some situation - which does not run out - or to push or regardless of stresses in pursuit of some higher goal.
In the latter case, once someone decides that it isn't worth it they aren't going to come back again, acting a bit like a dam running out of water. But their ability to act courageously will change depending on the circumstance, and in some instances they may be significantly more courageous if they don't really see themselves as having a choice. Eg, a parent defending their child vs a parent defending random strangers would be completely different in terms of how much punishment they endure.
Humans have good reason to fear the future. The future is very scary. However, the future has always been very scary, and it isn't any scarier now than it has been since the invention of record keeping, where basically the same threats were present. The past is also very scary to anyone who sits down and realises that the people in the past are basically the same as the people in the present.
The future isn't going to be any bleaker than the past, it will be just as full of hope, success and vibrancy.
When he talks about customers and stakeholders, he is talking about people who have bought in to that design. It is very easy to support his position here. Rich knows exactly how he wants to program and the man is a visionary of data-driven programming and thinking. If you don't like that vision, maybe don't use Clojure and find a different lisp.
Great design is a very foreign idea to a lot of mainstream software developers - most of them, sooner or later, go for the "big rewrite" because they didn't get the design right to start with. Things like Python 2 -> 3 spring to mind (breaking changes to print! whoever thought that was a good idea didn't respect the language users). With that rational, he is promising not to do exactly what the Python people did.
If an employee thinks their job security is more important than the human rights of the population of China then I personally have no problem with that. This is because we have a lot of evidence about how much the average employee values human rights and anybody who expects great things from them is going to be disappointed, so I don't.
But to say the government must be responsible for the moral aspects is profoundly irresponsible. "Just following orders" got a lot of Nazis hanged at Nuremberg. If an employee does something they have a personal moral responsibility. Maybe don't bring the law in because it is happening in a foreign country, but claiming that moral responsibility doesn't factor in because people like money is not how we want to run our values system.
Every possible opinion is represented out there somewhere, and there will be someone who honestly believes, eg, that shutting down the electricity grid for 24 hours to make a point about Trump is justified. Or a point about immigration. Or a point about socialism, or what have you.
What is usually meant by 'politics' is that the people who are in charge of workspaces should be on the exact other end of the spectrum to these hypothetical activists. If anything even tangentially threatens the safe operation of the system, it should be a priority over political issues.
This isn't comparable to something like not being able to repair my phone, requiring me to buy a new phone.
The fact that 64 bit is a modern standard doesn't exclude the fact that R cannot under any circumstance handle the vast and overwhelming majority of known numbers.
I feel sorry for the poor souls who turn out to need it, though. R sucks like that.
I personally quite like the idea of a quota system for access to cheap, local power. It is interesting however to imagine what might happen if the power was sold into the market at market rate and the profits divided up amongst local businesses and residents instead of giving them cheap power.
That way, they in theory would be no worse off (they can buy power and the dividend cancels the loss of the subsidy), but they can also directly buy things that have higher utility than the direct energy would provide them.
That would also stamp out local bitcoin mining operations and divert the cheap energy to uses more productive than burning it for crypto creation.
Humans are different from animals - not in some intrinsic way, but because you and I are humans and our success is more important than some animal's success.
I'm saying that letting species go extinct is critically different from "we can't stop people from dying eventually, so it doesn't matter if I murder someone" because no humans are involved. That is the distinction that I am comfortable with.
If a human is inconveniencing progress, then they should be treated with respect and dignity. If an animal is inconveniencing progress, it's wellbeing isn't especially important.
I've talked to farmers on trains, I've lived in cities, I've worked in mines. This doesn't reflect my experiences, we have shredded the natural environment to our benefit in all those places. Farms are a long way from a natural environment, the modern farming process is awash with chemicals and such. Lab grown meat is an exciting possibility. Our success as a species have come through striving to transcend the limits of nature.
Nearly all humans are urbanised. Urban environments are as far from natural ones as we can reasonably make it. There is almost no fauna larger than a dog, flora is controlled. When given the choice, as a mass, we choose to be as far from nature as possible and visit it for short and very controlled periods of time.
The moral aspect I suppose we shall agree to disagree.
Are you sure the cadmium isn't going to be used for solar power? Or that the 'creative means' that you would like to see won't benefit from it when the science comes in?
These resources are for people to live their lives in comfort. I know a woman who doesn't turn her heating on in the winter because she can't afford to; there will be a lot more I don't know, and some of them are going to get very sick. Cheaper oil will help these people on the margins. Similar stories can be made for any commodity, these are literal building blocks of modern society.
Sure cheaper commodities aren't an infinite good, but the marginal utility of some creature that is so rare it is almost extinct isn't going to exist for anyone but the keenest nature goer. They are by definition rare. Cheaper commodities will probably be more good to more people than that.
Bar a bit of recycling, everything that is metal or stone and most of our energy comes from some sort of mining activity. The cheaper it is to extract, the better it is for rich & poor alike. If I have to choose between losing a species of beetle and people freezing in winter, the beetle is in trouble.
Technology is lovely, but at the end of the day the more natural resources we extract, the better the quality of life of people everywhere.
I don't have the foggiest idea why it is important to protect endangered species in and of itself, and I don't think there is a good reasons to.
Famously, pretty much every species that has ever existed has gone extinct. Every organisation, formation, species or what have you will, statistically, some day no longer be. The nature of time is to bring change. We can't preserve everything anyway, and there is nothing to be proud of in keeping a dying species in the world.
I can understand requiring extractive companies to restore land after they use it to something that isn't hostile to life, but I don't understand why the fact that the near-extinct colour-crested-hopping-possum is endangered should impede human progress. We need to face up to the fact that human endeavor is more important than animals and that being rare does not make a species somehow important. It certainly shouldn't be a cover for NIMBY types to shut down mining activity.
Now what is interesting about Broken Hill is I have it on reasonable authority that the area as a whole has had "20 years of remaining reserves" for the last 60 years, because the explorers only bother to go out and 'discover' new parts of the deposit when they get below 15-20 years of reserves.
This is an interesting anecdote to my main point - the cobalt price seems to have jumped like a salmon about 12 months ago, but bringing a new mine online can take about 5 years. Even assuming we don't make this 10 year time frame, who really knows what deposits might have become profitable to mine with even a doubling of the price.
High prices isn't a signal that we have run out, it is a signal that more mines are needed. It is likely the market will heed the signal.
No, they clearly damaged something important - the uniqueness of each issue number.
If the issue number identifying a specific issue is not important, why have an issue number? They may as well label all their editions '1', and save ink. They already have thousands of editions that bear the wrong number; they can't fix that.
Indeed, I am suspicious that someone surely noticed the misprint in the weeks or months following when it was first made, then chose not to fix it for that exact reason.
But if we don't know that the other army is in position, and if Eve burns every message, then the problem is clearly unsolvable.
nodnodnod
> Rejection of the influence of randomness means [...] people control everything and if their determination is all they need, then we do not need to help them.
Well, it is complicated and gets very subtle. For every person who is struck by catastrophe through sheer bad luck, there is at least one who is struck by catastrophe after a series of terrible personal choices.
Deciding which is which is not an easy choice. For example, imagine a bush-walker standing at the bottom of a cliff - a rock falls, and kills them. Looks a lot like bad luck. However, in the Australian mining industry, workers are essentially forbidden from standing near cliffs because that sort of thing is /actually quite likely/. Because they deal with the risk all the time, they see it as a choice to made.
Not mangling reality cuts two ways. Just because a choice isn't obvious doesn't mean that decisions don't play a role. In addition we can't attribute success solely to luck. Success strikes randomly in a small pool of people who have the capacity to be successful. That pool is small, and the people in it shouldn't be made responsible for the vagaries of the universe at large.