mdiesel

The difference in intelligence between an egg and a chicken aren't just reaction times. Basic cellular life might respond to stimuli in a way we can call "pain", but they'll never understand it the same way.

The difference is like us touching a hot stove and pulling away as an automatic response, versus the various forms of torture we've invented.

That doesn't mean it's right, just that there is a difference and we'll all draw a line somewhere. A bit like how people see eating cats and dogs as somehow different from chickens and cows.

I've been fascinated listening to a podcast on the History of Rome (highly recommend). Rome wasn't built in a day, but also the fall of the empire was a period of about 300 years during which Rome itself was still called the "eternal city".

Not saying this as proof that the world is definitely going to shit, the point is that it I don't think we've achieved some new level of eternal civilisation that couldn't possibly fail. Every civilisation believed that right up until the point it stopped being true, so we should be on the look out for threats and not assume it will all end up OK.

Borders are still disputed today, so any issues that are relevant would also exist in the OSM maps. I'd heard that Google shows differing borders depending on where you're viewing from, not sure if OSM do the same.

Of course there are plenty of borders in history that are always going to be debated. Those are academic disputes though.

For those interested in what the gp could be referring to: There is a Wikipedia article and other sources on the "not proven" verdict of Scottish juries which was/is in practice an acquittal. It's apparently still used in roughly 1/3rd of cases. There is a list of significant cases for which the verdict was used, though none seem to be related to political protest.

We'd much rather live in a world where gender/sexual/health identities are as significant as being left/right handed. Can't jump to that stage without first going through what we are now, which is recognising those identities exist as part of who we are. Other commenters like myself have the pleasure of being able to talk about the ideal future scenario, you've got the problem of dealing with the present.

Right now having a group with commonality and a sense of belonging is very important and a huge improvement on where we were before leaving people isolated and alone. But don't lose sight of the end goal, which is for those problems that having a group identity protects against not existing at all. Those two things aren't in conflict, other comments here really are trying to be helpful, but in a theoretical physics sort of way that isn't going to help anyone directly in the next decade and ignores some practical hurdles we need to get over first.

Setting up the Weimar Republic after WW1 didn't go so well, then the aftermath of WW2 there were decades of east+west Germany. I don't see that as a positive example of a foreign power setting up a government.

All natural systems are spring+damper. That means they're effected in the same way by a difference in potential (spring) and also resistance to rate (damper).

This isn't so much analogies, more that the physics of natural systems means they're governed by 2nd order differential equations, so really do behave the same.

More importantly, they're all forms of energy and transferable. Power=IV=Fv=TO=PQ.

Agree, but also the issue with discussing UBI is a lack of data that is objectively applicable. Any study that tests UBI on a small scale is flawed from the get go, you can't have a placebo group, everyone knows they're in a study, and participation is voluntary.

So then the debate becomes impossible, because the pro UBI side can only talk in theory and hypotheticals, which is never going to swing anyone even slightly inclined to conservatism.

Look at AutoIt. It's a more traditional basic language, and iirc AHK was a fork of a very early version a few decades ago.

Great way I had it explained to me was that if we imagine weather follows some kind of normal distribution called climate, then a shift of of the distribution makes those extreme weather events far more likely much quicker than it affects the mean weather.

And could inline, so that the preview image is loaded with the page itself.

At the moment, the incentives are all aligned with us keeping the 3rd world as it is for as long as possible.

IMO we need to recognise that the rhetoric of it being "our fault" doesn't sell well, right or wrong. We need to change to saying that it's in our interests to help the rest of the world change quickly. Better still would be to make it in everyone's financial interests to do so that incentives are back aligned with the best outcome for the planet.

We need to continue the R&D we're doing, and give away the research so that the nations currently industrialising can skip over that step. There are social issues as well, industrialisation of Britain was a major driver behind democratising the country and enabling social mobility, so it's hard to rush that as well.

The TV show was great because it really got me feeling that everything was random, then everything was connected in some ridiculously complex way, exactly how it should for a holistic story.

I'd recommend the TV show for anyone that has gotten a bit too good at predicting endings a few episodes before the end. This one doesn't follow the traditional story arcs.

+1 for OnePlus. I started years back on the 2, upgraded more recently to the 6T. Will take a lot of convincing for me to even think about anyone else.

Same experience though, people have either heard of it and rave about it, or ask who makes it.

"Was it X that meant you couldn't do Y?" is the best way to phrase it if possible. It demonstrates an attempt, even if it's just a simple one, to understand it, and implies you have faith the other party haven't missed something obvious. Thinking of an X often answers the question for you, stops you looking stupid.

Every now and then, the reply is "that would have been a good idea actually" in which case you still get to look smart. So it's a win+win really.

Text based programming is inherently 1d, so isn't well suited for the highly parallelised computing we have today. 2d programming would make much more sense.

The issues with graphical languages arethings like being much harder diff/merge and version control generally, being dependent on IDEs, and severely limited by mouse usage. I don't see any of those issues as being impossible to overcome, but instead graphical programming is held back by always being implemented as a DSL with no attempt to meet the requirements of a general purpose language.

No, but Wayland is not a bit of software you even think about until it goes wrong. That means the internet gets disproportionately filled with posts about Wayland not working, which presents the wrong image.

When reading up on what desktop environment to use, it's hard to get a balanced view unless there are commenters like this, saying that running Wayland works.

> If communism produces goods and services cheaper than the free market, we'd be awash in Soviet goods.

Which we aren't, because they're undercut by Chinese goods...

That works if people's only businesses are what is needed by the small community/tribe. We've reached a point where thanks to a millenia of technological advance, a fraction of the populace works in agriculture. Instead I work in a business that sells a niche enough product that we might have a customer ever other week from somewhere in Europe. In order for that to work, we can't only have customers in our town or its immediate neighbours.

So we can have more devolvement, an endless argument here in the UK, but centralised money structures, standards bodies, transport networks, etc are required for this to be feasible. Already we complain that the more niche ideas can be more successful in the US because there's a larger home market.

I know what you're saying, but for some reason it makes me uneasy. I guess because anything trying to categorise people as either X or Y is fundamentally tribal.

The HN readers are good at moderation overall, not perfect but definitely good. Maybe it would be enough to have an "agree/disagree" button as well as a "good/bad" button.

The key thing you've said though is "comments that provide value", a metric by which both up and down votes are important.

In the perfect world, I'd come to HN and the top 2 voted comments would be the most succinct and well argued sides to the discussion (assuming there's a traditional for+against), then the top voted comments the tier down would be the best refutations of those points. That way I can read both and get to my own balanced view quicker. If all the voting system tells me is "this is what the average HN reader agrees with" that's far less valuable.

"""I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.

But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt. It’s a very tough period of time.

There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened where they could take it away from all of us — from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election.

But we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated — that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel, but go home and go home in peace."""

I've only come across it as part of Pratchetts work, in the book Interesting Times, and had just assumed it was another of his witticisms.

"Oh, it's just a singleton" - me after half an hour of reading yet another implementation calling it something else.

Maybe, but just because it's impossible doesn't mean there shouldn't be an effort to try or that we shouldn't appreciate better journalism.

Biased isn't a boolean, it's a scale. Something that is a little bit biased is more useful for trying to understand all the issues at hand. Something that's very biased is still useful, but only for telling you what the author (and their readership) thinks.

"Designed for four professionals" with that many screens.

Yes, but do the patent holders or companies making that better technology see their side of the task: they need to give the developing countries that technology. The problem is that would mean giving a country that can manufacture more cheaply than they can the only thing left as a differentiator.

It's not up for them to try and learn from us, it's up to us to teach them.

Still in the UK, the moorlands you generally see were once woodlands - apparently that's why they have the distinctive terrain you now see. That's not in the era of written history mind and was for farming rather than iron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmoor#Pre-history

Again, "stated objective" isn't the original objective but the approximation we've had to use instead.

You say that it gets a "better" solution, so the against some indescribable original objective there's a difference.

But if the definition of "optimisation" is achieving the best solution for the problem, then regularization isn't constraining optimisation, it's part of getting to the best solution and so becomes a part of the better optimiser.

I agree, any sufficiently complex problem is beyond what we can define as a concrete objective function and any of the solutions we have. So instead the best we can hope for is that today is closer to being optimal than yesterday, and tomorrow will be better still.