What I don’t understand is why C programmers use the built in strings. It’s like rolling your own sorting algorithm every time you need it. Surely someone could write a better string library in C that hides the complexity. The real problem is that C programmers are apparently allergic to using other people’s code.
The fact that you go to the word “hypocritical” makes me think we’re already in agreement on the basic point. I’m not trying to make a value judgement here.
Go look at these arguments about confederate statues. Liberals condemn the moral faults of the person. Conservatives excuse it as values of the time; moreover they appeal to the virtue the society has chosen for the statue to represent. There’s nothing more post modern than that.
From your post, it seems your view is that conservatives adopted these tools because they are the tools of an oppressed minority, which conservatives now perceive themselves to be. I think that very well might be the right explanation. But I also wonder if this shift is more of a demographics thing. Post modernism can’t be the young, hip mindset for the rest of human history. I wonder if young people today are carving out some new view of the world, which is far more interesting to me than arguments over celebrity Twitter accounts.
I also find this topic far more interesting than the fairly cliche discussion over “cancel culture”. It seems like conservatives have caught up to post modernism, whereas liberals are now passionate about objective truth and morality being black and white. I really wonder how tenable these positions are going forward.
I think some of the comments here are seeing the word contrarian and dead seas scrolls and assuming he must have had some church forgery grand conspiracy theory instead of the more insider debate he was involved in. For anyone who is interested in the scrolls, I really recommend the great courses class on them which is pretty affordable via audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Dead-Sea-Scrolls-Audiobook/B0...
I owned a GP32 back in the day. The killer app was of course Super Nintendo emulation, but it was also amazing to have a media machine at that time, and something you could easily develop for. I wonder if the mindset is different these days though. The title linked machine seems overkill for 16 but nostalgia. I wonder if people really want a portable machine that they can stick steam on and play indie games?
Amazon is basically my last resort these days. Unfortunately, the ongoing pandemic means there are times where I can’t justifying going out to buy something. But I wonder if they’ll be taking a bigger than expected hit once things clear up.
Why is the development “this can’t fail” but the distribution isn’t? If we cut corners on distribution (and compound that with the real world flaws in the process) and you screw up, it would be a huge disaster. You would complete undermine the public’s faith in vaccines and lockdowns.
I wonder if this is just making it clear that the words we use for describing red and white wines are fixed, and not that the students really couldn’t tell the difference in flavor between red and white wine. Does the visual information change our taste, or merely our vocabulary?
We’re just not following a good process of discerning truth here. We started with a blatant, baseless conspiracy theory “this is a weapon China created”. Then we white wash the theory to “China created it, but maybe it was an accident”. Then suddenly the burden of truth is on China to disprove this claim. It’s just not a sensible process, rooted in the fallacy of the middle ground; as you said we need to start from the evidence and not from what you want to be true.
There’s a certain irony to NPR doing a “we talk too much about politics, his something else” story, and all the comments here being about how npr is too liberal. Deep down, everyone wants a politics story
I wonder though if the really good trial data of the MRNA ones mean they’ll be able to do just safety trials (nothing on effectiveness) in the future, while the Oxford collaboration will be closer scrutinized.
> Well … OK I guess? But, pretty much exactly as pointed out last time, not only is the proof only one line, but the nature of the proof makes clear exactly how unoriginal this is to mathematics
This is what I was wondering about while reading the article. If the AI only generates formula for which proofs involve only a few trivial steps back to something that is known, then it doesn’t feel useful. But I feel like the question “what makes a good conjecture?” in its own right makes for a very interesting discussion.
> It has to feel like the two of you cracked something open and are scamming the system, and yes, you’re technically getting married, but clearly this is something grander and deeper than the law ever scratched.
This was the part that really resonated for me enough to share the article. We live in societies that simultaneously make love and marriage the end point of every movie, while also all being insanely cynical of the whole institution. So I think there is some kind of rationalization going on in our heads trying to handle the fact that we don’t believe in marriage, yet we’re getting married!
I think your analysis is right, but if cars and houses are things that people buy with borrowed money, it does seem like interest rates being low would drive prices up. And it might increase the price of inflation proof assets like crypto. Is there a framework we should be describing this with besides the broad “inflation” term?
I read retraction watch every day, so I’m used to seeing stories like this. But I’m always surprised the effort people go through over articles published in garbage journals. You’re never going to even make a dent.
My experience is that a lot of these projects are bluffing when they use autotools. Autotools will work very hard to make sure stdlib is there. But as soon as you compile on a more exotic system, none of the checks are of any use, and you fail in the make stage.
Maybe we should make any easy to use version of autotools which does nothing but accept the standard prefix, flags, etc options. You wouldn’t be able to do sophisticated configuration, but let’s face it most codes only pretend to do that.
Everyone always argues “the universe is so big there must be aliens”. But as soon as you ask why aliens don’t act like us, it becomes “the universe is too small to have that kind”! I think the heuristic is just fine.
I would also like to add that Fermi’s paradox doesn’t assume humans are interesting, it just assumed probes are cheap. If probes can easily and cheaply be made to cover the galaxy (and we know that this is possible even without major breakthroughs), aliens don’t need to be excited about us to visit the neighborhood.
It was super frustrating to see the author dismiss Dykstra’s argument as an appeal to authority. No it isn’t, it just means that we find the arguments he outlined compelling. As someone who switches between C and FORTRAN daily, it’s incredibly clear that zero based indexing is easier.
I need to get a check list for the ever so popular criticisms of academia article. This one surely would hit plenty of boxes: scientists don’t pay attention to industry, researchers only care about grants, etc. It’s a lot of words just to say “they need bigger datasets”, which is also a check box.
The article ends by suggesting using GitHub. When I was a PhD student I recall open source projects being a standard data source for people who did software engineering research. But it’s not my field, so I’m not sure if effort estimation really has missed this.
I agree. Many political topics are very complex, and it is hard to independently form opinions on them. Humans rely on fallacious shortcuts all the time when making decisions, otherwise we’d be paralyzed. We would see people switching their views even without social pressures.
Well farewell to any hacker news readers in Poland. That is, unless the administrators are willing to restore any comment here at the whim of a foreign court.