ajna91

The real world is often far more low-key than Hollywood would have you think.

good advice

I guess I'm more interested in him growing as a person. I do understand where you are coming from.

You question the sincerity of his apology, then tell him to hire a PR firm.

Here's the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27231978

Whatsapp is worried the Indian market. They've gone as far as taking out full page ads in Indian newspapers to try to convince people "nothing to see here!"

Can you elaborate?

"every" being the operative word.

The "feel" for good code that comes with experience is not reducible in practice to a set of black-and-white rules.

This is circular reasoning.

It was possible to game them because the contracts were not priced correctly.

We know the contracts were not priced correctly because it was possible to game them.

Why not compare it to the post office, or NASA?

Couldn't the truth be somewhere in the middle?

Clearly both are different ways of looking at the same phenomenon. Emphasizing different parts of the whole truth.

The seed analogy may be onto something.

Some viruses don't directly cause the host to create new viruses. Instead they direct the creation of virus creating factories, which create the virus.

Then you get virophages which are even tinier than normal viruses, which infect the virus factories of other viruses.

The is-ought problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

The 3 schools against skepticism all argue against each other's points, so in a sense they strengthen the skeptical position.

Appears there is no clear consensus on exactly why skepticism is false.

People have a tendency to justify the status quo, does that automatically make the status quo suspect as well?

He's at least a baby

This is the Thomistic view, not the official Catholic view, no?

Also, what about this verse?

"For the word of God is living and operative and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit and of joints and marrow, and able to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart."

In that very narrow sense that computers are more intelligent than humans (like Chess-playing), abacuses were also more intelligent than humans thousands of years ago (mental math).

I think many insects are far smarter than we have assumed.

Bumblebees can learn to pull a string to receive a reward [1]. But maybe that's just blind conditioning? Well if another bumblebee watches it happen from behind a glass wall, it can perform the task without being trained at all [2].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSCr5OxXN1A 2: https://faunalytics.org/bumblebee-school-learning-and-teachi...

And of course Portia spiders show remarkable memory, planning, and on-the-spot flexibility in hunting strategies. Also they can do the same kind of counting that many human cultures do: 1, 2, and many.

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-spiders.html

The real problem is everyone else who pattern-matches confidence with competence and upvotes.

To put a face on the problem, this video of an orangutan fighting to remain in its home while the forest is logged out from under it is powerful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihPfB30YT_c

A thread by an epidemiologist on the new results:

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1223305946723704832

This comment and the replies to it really give a glimpse into the psyche of the more pedantry-prone members of HN.

For me, if someone says X, and a literal interpretation of X would be impossible/ridiculous, I naturally assume the more generous interpretation Y. I would find it bizarre to believe that X was intended.

Some people however cannot escape the interpretation X, and find the statement bizarre fullstop.

From wikipedia, it seems that her translation became the standard in France which helped drive the scientific revolution in mainland Europe.

Furthermore:

"Her commentary includes a profound contribution to Newtonian mechanics—the postulate of an additional conservation law for total energy, of which kinetic energy of motion is one element. This led to her conceptualization of energy as such, and to derive its quantitative relationships to the mass and velocity of an object."

"We" and "empathy" are doing a lot of work in that definition.

I think the idea is that comments on this site are meant to be more thoughtful than witty quips, generally speaking.

"If we substitute the word indifference for the word liberty, we shall come much closer to the real intention that lies behind the classic argument. Liberty is to be permitted where differences are of no great moment. It is this definition which has generally guided practice. In times when men feel themselves secure, heresy is cultivated as the spice of life. During a war liberty disappears as the as the community feels itself menaced. When revolution seems to be contagious, heresy-hunting is a respectable occupation. In other words, when men are not afraid, they are not afraid of ideas; when they are much afraid, they are afraid of anything that seems, or can even be made to appear, seditious. That is why nine tenths of the effort to live and let live consists in proving that the thing we wish to have tolerated is really a matter of indifference."

EDIT: Wow, the entire article is full of gems like this. Most lucid writing I've ever read in the Atlantic.

"But in public affairs the stake is infinitely greater. It involves the lives of millions, and the fortune of everybody. The jury is the whole community, not even the qualified voters alone. The jury is everybody who creates public sentiment—chattering gossips, unscrupulous liars, congenital liars, feeble-minded people, prostitute minds, corrupting agents... If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my neighbor’s cow, I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and, if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible."

I think in the near future we'll have empirical evidence that most ads are malicious exploits of flaws in human psychology.

Ideally, all ads should be plain text listing of facts. Pictures only allowed for demonstrative purposes. And they should be listed in "Ad sections", like a phone book.

Why was draw_down's comment killed? A quick glance at his profile indicates he is a 4 year old account with more than a 1500 karma, yet every recent comment by him is flagged/killed [1]. Yes, some of them appear trollish, but not all of them.

Does someone here have a grudge against him?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=draw_down

Aren't the values praised in America: self-respect, lack of deference to authority, and "telling it like it is".

How did that become replaced by obsequiousness?