sctb

It's a great title/article pair for HN because it's unexpected/good, as opposed to clickbait which is unexpected/bad. The guidelines permit changing the original title in the case of clickbait anyways.

No way that's true. Indeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38864375. It would be good if there was less Black Bar Bikeshedding.

These are easily one of my favourite types of posts (and this one was particularly gratifying). I wish I could go down these rabbit holes every day!

> [...] and why heterogeneous platforms are important

This prompts me to wonder vaguely whether there's any untapped juice in fuzzing approaches that might be relevant here. As in, how much of the platform (including configuration and heuristics, and so on) could be fuzzed as program input?

> I wish I could borrow someone's mind for a minute and understand more.

When you say "understand", I want to say "with what?" The mind you're borrowing?

Doping as table stakes is understandable. Money too, after a while. But I genuinely wonder how an athlete who put a motor in their bike and then accepted the resulting victory would feel about themselves as a competitor and a person. If they were stoked then by all means go for it, but in that case they must have a different psyche than I do.

I find it surprising that athletes would choose to make a drastic departure from their prior intentions of fair competition in order to attempt to avoid the inevitability of retirement. I don’t find it nearly as surprising that someone would make a bite-sized compromise in order to preserve their livelihood, even though it seems unwise to me.

Sport qua job has a different feel than sport qua sport, as a sibling commenter illuminated.

> When faced with the decision of ending a career or cheating, it is not too surprising that people could choose the latter.

I do find it a bit surprising, myself.

> If your competition is cheating you are going to lose if you don't cheat.

I put that in category #1, which isn't exactly cheating because it doesn't buy you an advantage. Cheating at school or at work is an interesting example. Perhaps by the time cyclists are considering motorizing it's just like... a job? And you have to win to eat?

And when does Mephistopheles chime in? I’m fascinated by the idea of doping in general, and there seems to be two distinct kinds: 1) something that everyone is doing (e.g. EPO at the Tour de France or AAS in bodybuilding) and 2) something that will give you an actual edge. “Motor doping” seems to be an example of the latter.

It really boggles my mind that there are people who are capable enough to be in the competition and still decide to cheat in order to win. Not because it’s immoral or dishonourable or anything like that, but just because it’s so fucking lame.

As a youngster, the first time I managed to get Slackware installed via floppies, I was having a great time chatting with ircII and browsing with lynx. Someone on IRC told me I needed X Windows and I was like, that sounds cool, so I learned as much as I could to try to get a working config with my video card. Many hours later I got startx to take over the screen and now I'm staring at the stipple and X cursor.

It looked broken, and I assumed it was broken, so I gave up. It took me a long time to get the concept of window managers, but eventually I understood and realized that I had actually gotten X working that time years ago. Gosh.

Similarly, some Lisps (like Scheme48 IIRC) use a comma to begin REPL commands (as distinct from Lisp forms) because commas outside of quasiquotation forms are otherwise syntax errors.

> "We're showing that older individuals' state of mind is linked to the biology of their brain mitochondria, which is the first time that subjective psychosocial experiences have been related to brain biology,"

> Though the current study cannot determine if the participant's psychosocial experiences altered their brain mitochondria or if innate or acquired mitochondrial states contributed to those experiences, other studies suggest that the relationship between mitochondria and mood works both ways.

It seems as though they've established a "link" between subjective experience and objective biology, but still consider these two separate things in a causal relationship. For some reason that seems wonky to me, and it makes more sense to think of mood and biology as the same thing viewed from the subjective and objective perspective, respectively. In that sense there is no relationship, as there isn't independence, and then there's no weird/hard question of subjective/objective causality.

> He was fond of the Nietzsche quote: “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how”, and he supplements this idea with his experiences in surviving Auschwitz and helping others in his clinical work.

It seems to me as though this "why to live" must transcend one's own life in order to have this effect. From this perspective, your epidemic of meaning might reflect a consensus world-view which is overly individualized.

> [...] everyone has problems

They certainly do. And I don't think we can make meaningful comparisons between individuals in terms of their problems, how they struggle or suffer, etc. For me personally, I don't assume to have it any worse than anyone else, and I always assume that others have deep challenges that I won't ever know about.

> Is anyone truly normal or neurotypical?

Again, these concepts become strained when applied to individuals. It's like the family who has 1.5 children: they don't exist. These are ever-changing labels that we make use of within an extremely nebulous social process. I try to apply them only in well-defined contexts and then throw up my hands in the general case.

> Why do some people's problems get the validation of the medical system and others don't?

I have no idea; in my mind this question is trying to peer closely into the nebula.

Being married and gainfully employed and able to build and maintain relationships as well as hold conversations with strangers when necessary can come at an exceptionally high cost for neurodivergent people in the form of masking (like a kind of mental tech debt). Instead of overt social difficulty, this might present itself as anxiety, depression, and suicidality—those conditions are worthy of medicalization IMO.

This presentation is surely intended to convey a sense of spatiality related to the idea of "A shrinking life". I enjoyed the graphics and photos, and I definitely got a feeling of constriction and isolation that added depth to my reading experience—YMMV.

(The HN guidelines discourage complaints about these sorts of "tangential annoyances", by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

In case anyone else is curious about some U.S. data on per-capital alcohol consumption: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/surveillance-reports/...

I remember watching a Channel 9 video about a decade or so ago where they visited Bell and co at the MSR office in San Francisco. That's where Gordon wanted to be and so Microsoft opened an office for him. In the video he was wearing a video camera around his neck and speaking a bit about the MyLifeBits project, IIRC. Now that I'm middle-aged and my relationship to technology has been changing, I'm struck by the passion, curiosity, and engagement he continued to exhibit. Remarkable lifelong attitude.

HN doesn't shadowban established accounts: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... And there is a simple way of telling if you're shadow banned: open your comments in a logged-out browser window.

The "language" part. In context it seems to refer to the implementation, not the specification. I take it that pg does intend to specify a useful programming language, but not implement it.

Perhaps to make it a real programming language that you could use to do stuff?

I wouldn't diss those functions on the basis of modern filesystems. I would diss them because you could write a shorter bel.bel with rdc/wrc instead and, IMHO, without making the language less self-specified (since 'chars contains opaque character values from the host system).

That's exactly what benzodiazepines are for, but only for short-term taper protocols as the dependence/withdrawal profile over the long term is worse than alcohol. Medium-term can be covered by gabapentin.

This is about as bog standard as it gets for academic language in the humanities. For example:

> But neither reading nor lurking are ever passive acts.

These acts are indeed passive, relative to the active counterpart of writing or speaking. A basic academic move is to reframe a concept in a more abstract, generalized, and artificial context, within which you can argue pretty much anything. The more insane and counterintuitive the argument sounds, the more stylish and impactful it's perceived to be. "Understudied" means that no-one has yet marketed this particular flavour combination of intellectual schlock.

They're not actually talking about your lurking practices.

It's not hyperfixation exactly, but a requirement for an ASD diagnosis is some forms of "Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities" (from the DSM-V).

> They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds.

The notion of "without stimulus" seems related to the use of "silence" in what Cage is saying here. Personally I would say that it's not that there's no such thing as silence, just that it's relative, and in this case "without stimulus" is relative to the audience's (reasonable) expectation at a concert hall.

I really enjoy Klein's visual works, especially the IKB series which are quite striking and impactful in person. When listening to the original Symphonie Monotone-Silence embedded at the end of the article, what comes to mind is "the sound of magnetic tape" which is, to my ear, the dominant sonic feature. Also, this version seems to lack the major 3rd.

This is how Joy and Factor work as well, so I'd say this is standard fare for concatenative languages.

The tests themselves are what bring precision to the notion of consciousness. Think of a medical example in which doctors are meant to determine whether or not a patient receives anaesthesia—surely a more effective empirical toolkit would be valuable in that situation, no?

There seems to be a tendency with the discourse around consciousness to slip into vague philosophizing and thus run into the hard problem. I feel like if it doesn't make sense to think of it that way then don't think of it that way.

If that's true then I would put even less stock into these just-so stories.