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Sorry, but the whole story just reads like a bad mystery novel; tales of Russian hackers, "suspicious" Github repos, somehow-nefarious (docker?) "containers", unspecified threats made (and I quote) in "meat space".

Also interesting to note that not only has Berulis' attorney lead multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration in the past, he was also an intern for both Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. Now that obviously doesn't prove anything, but it could nonetheless be considered a strong indicator this all might be politically-motivated.

Neat concept! Although I was a bit surprised at the AI stand-in's finding. I posed the silly argument that "My neighbor's dog refuses to speak French" with the options "Neighbor is culpable" and "I am clearly an idiot": The final decision was 7/5 in my favor! But seriously, this really is a great idea IMO. The jury-duty-while-you-wait feature also seems like a fair trade-off.

Relatively speaking, perhaps, but things really have progressed by several orders of magnitude. When I was young we had access to very little "technology". (Maybe that's why people tended to be somewhat more down-to-earth?) I could change a tire by the age of ten, not to mention being fairly well-versed in a number of subjects. And I was certainly not the exception. Any given person was bound to be proficient at *something*. Younger folks these days however (on average) don't seem to think very deeply about things (probably too many distractions?) and as a result they can be surprisingly ignorant across the spectrum. Not all of them, of course, just an alarmingly high percentage....

Of course it does. The National Post article I linked to is about Mahmoud Khalil, who is indeed mentioned in the Zeteo article.

Compared to most websites these days HN is about as lightweight as it gets. I would say if you are experiencing laggy page loads, the issue is most likely something else. (Maybe disable extensions and restart?)

Iterating over some huge search space in an essentially sequential manner is generally not going to be nearly performant as simply selecting an odd number at random. You could try using a generating polynomial instead such as f(x) = x^2 + x + 41 but even that isn't going to help much in the long run. (There are Diophantine equations which one day may prove useful for generating random primes however AFAICT finding efficient solutions is still currently considered a hard problem.)

Blame it on bad culture. Good people know that orderly conduct is necessary to maintain a healthy and vibrant community. Just take a look at the Nordic countries where this used to be the absolute norm across the board. Now even there you see quite a bit of social turmoil. Many who have migrated to these countries over the years simply do not share the same values and the effects are sadly self-evident. People do not feel nearly as safe as they once did. It may not be as bad as the average American city, mind you, but there has nonetheless been a real change in the "atmosphere". (Which isn't to say "all migrants are bad". Unvetted immigration is the issue I am referring to here.) Point is, wealth-inequality has nothing to do with it.

I normally tend to attribute these kinds of things to a rise in socialism/marxism, but to be totally fair I do think at least to one degree or another social-media is perhaps simply amplifying something which has more or less been around since the very beginning. Much like the scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail where the peasant goes off on a tirade about "being repressed" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKIyVnoZDdQ]. Populism is really nothing new! Nonetheless it is very off-putting (not to mention incredibly discouraging) to see so many people cheering on someone's death like a hungry mob of vigilantes. Where on Earth has all the civility gone? We seem to be living in a very cynical era indeed....

This is pretty impressive. Given the following scenario, "A bliirg is any non-wooden item, which is the opposite of a glaarg. In addition, there are neergs (non-existent things) and eeergs (things which actually exist). Now a glaarg which is also a neerg is called a bipk, whereas a glaarg which is a eeerg is known as a vokp. Also, a bliirg which is an eeerg is refererred to as a jokp, otherwise it is known as a fhup. So the question is, which of those could be used to make an actual fire: a jokp, bipk, fhup, or vokp? Explain your reasoning." The results were absolutely spot on. "(...) A vokp, being a real, existing wooden object, can serve as a fuel source. A jokp, being a real, existing non-wooden object, might serve as a fuel source if it is combustible. However, a bipk and a fhup, being non-existent things, cannot be used to make a fire. The ability to actually start a fire also depends on the presence of an ignition source, oxygen, and potentially tinder, which are not addressed by the definitions of these terms." Any plan to make the project open source?

But basically the entirety of physics works in a time-reversible fashion: if you could flip the direction of all the particles in a system, it would evolve back to its previous state

What does that even mean though? Certain systems may indeed time-reversible, but I would argue that most are not (practically speaking). Imagine for example a meteorite which has fallen to Earth. In order to "reverse the process", not only would it have to "reassemble itself" from the innumerable pieces embedded in the ground, it would also have to be flung back passed the escape velocity of our planet!

But this seems to break down when it comes to black holes (it also breaks down in the various magical collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics, but the quantum wavefunction itself is also time-reversable)

I still don't understand the issue. Entropy is essentially just a measure of how close to a system is to the "average value". A high-entropy system being very close to it (and hence, "highly disordered"), while a low-entropy system might be two or three standard-deviations from the mean. A black hole with little angular momentum, charge, and/or mass would necessarily have a lower entropy than otherwise, but in any case we can calculate that without knowing a thing about what is going on inside of it. Moreover we can deduce that such a black hole would indeed be "easier to time-reverse" than one with a higher-entropy, but what does that even tell us? As far as I can tell, not a whole lot.

While we don't yet have a good microscopic theory of what's going on, macroscopically we know that the information (entropy) doesn't just vanish into three numbers.

What information could one possibly extract from a "packet" of Hawking radiation? If the black hole was originally formed from a huge mass consisting of 80% iron and 20% xenon, for example, could such a thing be deduced by inspecting the radiation emitted by it? I would suspect that the answer would be "no". (Of course, I am just being an arm-chair physicist here.)

Somewhat tangentially, what really perplexes me about Hawking radiation (HR) is this: What happens to the individual particles within the black hole as it evaporates? Like say we start with X particles. The black hole emits HR and shrinks a bit. But how exactly does it "give up" the energy from the black hole without destroying something in return? Does one particle just disappear and now we are left with X-1 particles (or what)? I haven't found any good explanations for this.

From what I understand of it the singularity is analogous to what happens in the 2D Cartesian plane with functions such as f(x) = 1/x. When x equals 0, the function itself "breaks down" because the y-coordinate extends to infinity (ie f(0) is "undefined"). In the context of a black hole that means that neither time nor space (hence neither does matter) "exist" at this singularity. In other words upon arrival the falling object has essentially "reached the end of time".

The link to the documentation seems to be dead. Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20221203043431/https://embed.cs....

Yes kind of a hybrid, isn't it?

They could also be descriptions of musical scales, or maybe weaving patterns, base-encoded numbers perhaps....who knows, really? Also Egyptian writing goes back perhaps 5000 years. That is a Semitic language so it stands to reason that it too would likely fall in the same category. Anyway I do love these kinds of archeological finds nonetheless. Interesting to see if Gobekli Tepe yields even older instances of written script? (If they ever get around to a proper excavation, that is! IIRC the site is currently not open to researchers.)

Really? Windows2000 (which was based on NT) hit the sweet spot for me. Anything earlier than that seemed too buggy, and from there onward just seemed to devolve into a bloated mess of unrequested "features". (The very reason why I have been using Linux for 20+ years now as a matter of fact.) But yeah to be completely fair I suppose not everything they have produced since has been crap. There have been some innovations here and there...

For reference, this is the story in question:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170204091511/https://thoughtca...

Looks like it was deleted by the editors as it violated hate-speech laws?

The ability to instantiate multiple types by redefining the defines (as it were) is a pretty clever approach. I also love the idea of using small, self-contained "no bloat" libraries such as this one to build software. I was able to get a test program up and running in less than two minutes. Nice!

I don't know. People will always believe all kinds of crazy things. The way I have always dealt with that is to just state the facts as I know them and then simply move on. That seems to work pretty well, actually. Because eventually that "flat-earther" friend of yours or "the-moon-landing-was-faked" uncle is most likely going to come around (as they almost always do). Point is, there is no need for the "misinformation" label to begin with. It only gets abused by the people who use it anyhow....

Again, what I am saying is that many of these outlets are spreading outright lies and then turning around and labeling anything which contradicts it as "misinformation" and hence the label itself is meaningless. If that seems like circular logic to you then you obviously aren't thinking hard enough....

Perhaps a more important question is, who decides what constitutes misinformation in the first place? Many news outlets these days use the term when referring to anything which contradicts their narrative (which quite often turns out to be false). If we cannot trust the "fact-checkers" then neither can we define "misinformation" in any meaningful way.

Sadly, censorship is becoming a norm these days. Politicians such as Jugnauth are increasingly aligning themselves with well-heeled socialist-leaning benefactors and then covering it all up by basically censoring everything that makes them look bad. Same thing starting to happen here in the US. For example there is ample evidence to show that some newly arrived Haitian migrants in Ohio had been engaging in the act of hunting neighborhood animals. Mind you this is all corroborated by video evidence and witness statements. But what did they do? They said it was a complete lie and then pressured media outlets and "the fact-checkers" to suppress the story. And that is just the very tip of the iceburg. The issue has become so ubiquitous that more than 70% of Americans polled say they have absolutely NO trust in the media. Freedom to speak the truth should be a fundamental right, simple as that.....

Kind of sad to see that the library "custodian" as it were seemingly uninterested in fixing the software in question. This may not effect most commercial scanners but the fact that it is even out there in wild is a bit disconcerting to say the least. Just another "brick in the wall" insofar as supply-chain (in)security goes....

Can you really blame the computer tho? That sounds more like a case a PEBCAC, if you ask me...

Or perhaps it is in hopes that some unwitting fee-dodger mails back a flyer with "Bugger all is what you'll be gettin' for license fees, ya bloody parasites!" scrawled across it. As long as the faintly-printed address information below the line is intact, de-anonymization is possible. Note how they kept asking him to send it back REGARDLESS.

It's called the "Lucas–Lehmer primality test". Without it, GIMPS probably wouldn't have found a single one of them in an acceptable amount of time. The one that was just discovered is HUGE. I had to write a program just to slow down the output enough to be able to appreciate its shear magnitude (it is still printing as I write this!).

Yes, the Mersenne primes do indeed extend to infinity. That is due to the simple fact that perfect numbers (for which they are intimately connected to) are also known to be infinite in number.

I always fancied that they might be debating philosophical points or maybe even offering up "tweets" of wisdom. Owl: "In order to understand the very nature of the mind itself, one must earnestly seek to find the answer to this riddle: WHOoooooooo?!"

Unfortunately, timestamps are not immutable. The system clock can be miscalibrated or even deliberately manipulated. It is however something of an open question. CAP is still a bit lacking in terms of rigorous mathematical proof (albeit the arguments are pretty convincing).