cactusface

Here's my sealion of a question. What parts of climate change research are actually backed up by the scientific method (experiments with falsifiable hypotheses and all that) and what parts are more akin to natural history or something else? To clarify, I believe humans caused the problem (it appears that stating this makes people like you more, which is weird, but ok) but I cringe every time I hear the word science attached to the debate. Is it like a social science? I think someone told me that we know for sure that greenhouse gas emissions cause ozone depletion but I can't remember anymore. What is the actual hard science here?

Why doesn't a bike save you a lot of money on fuel? Keeping a car on the road is expensive, you can save on insurance too. Also you can take the bus. I know, it's a pain.

They're selling real products that everyone needs (not wants)

Sikhs?

If you can simulate matter, certainly you can simulate a brain. Qualia appear not to derive from pixie dust but accumulated experience in the world. You might need to train a brain for a long time to develop qualia. You might not be able to copy qualia from one brain to another. I think these are the main objections, but I'm not sure.

Personally, I'm not convinced that simulating matter is feasible, never mind a living organism, never mind an intelligent living organism, which is what the brain is, when you account for all of it.

We know how far away Andromeda is. We know how to build a spaceship. Therefore, it is possible to go to Andromeda. Is it though? What if the Earth doesn't have enough resources? How big is your brain simulator allowed to be?

It's actually reasonable. Step 1, translate key push. Step 2, broadcast key message. What you're missing is that there's an alternate Step 1, translate joystick hat push (or mouse drag, or whatever). So Step 2 should be broadcast generic up/down/left/right input message. Step 3, translate message into movement. But what you're missing is that dependent on context, there's going to be other things besides movement that those keys do. Step 4, pan the map with N/S/E/W. Again here, you have the flexibility to work with a rotated map. Your code was probably overdesigned for the use case, but I've seen your solution many times, in books and in real life.

However, I've also solved this problem by passing around polar coordinates, it's elegant and very flexible but you have to munge some data at the beginning. You can also pass around a simple vector [{-1, 0, 1}, {-1, 0, 1}], which is basically what you describe.

On reflection, I concede that AirBnB is largely landlords renting their space or tenants subletting for substantial profit without their landlord's permission. However, I think subletting is fine, as long as you aren't making a substantial profit without your landlord's permission. I've sublet many times with my landlord's permission, it's regulated by tenancy laws, etc.

Japan > England >> USA. Just being able to take the TGV from London to Paris is mindblowing.

I define great as it being generally possible to get where I want to go on the train (this is the most important factor) and then as a bonus it's usually competitive with driving, busing, flying, cycling, or walking in terms of comfort, cost, and convenience.

It is if you live there. You share space and cost.

I think population density is a factor. China and the US have the same area, but China has 4x the population. Consider also England and Japan, densely populated islands with great train service.

When you take a roommate, aren't you sharing the cost of rent? Sharing can mean mutual contribution as much as it means mutual partaking. Also, what? Amazon is not a retailer? They have giant warehouses, they ship physical product with Amazon logos on the boxes, and they accept returns. They allow for 3rd party vendors, but they are still very much their own retailer. eBay perhaps, but not Amazon.

Oh, it was a suggestion to the guy, but thanks for elaborating.

Is a statement of disbelief a belief? I believe that all beliefs are false, except this one? I disbelieve all beliefs, except this disbelief? I disbelieve everything except I believe in the goodness of science? I disbelieve all hypotheses except for falsifiable ones with empirical evidence? I'm not clever enough for this.

I believe that all beliefs (in non-falsifiable existence) stem from imagined experiences.

This was a neat summary. I'd add that often, you can use a length of string to measure something, without actually needing to know the numerical length. But then from that perspective, a tape measure is just ~2000 pieces of string neatly rolled up.

NaCl?

I think programs written in dynamic languages are generally harder to optimize because they're more likely to take advantage of complex features. Since these languages often compile to C, you can obviously write the same program in C, but you aren't as likely to.

Also consider that fixed point optimization algorithms can only ever approach the optimal solution. Languages that are closer to the hardware generally have simpler (tighter) optimization constraints, and compilers for them will generally get closer to the optimal solution.

Yeah, but nothing says you can't specialize your C code.

This was actually a really entertaining telling of a boring old story about capitalist competition. Act I: We tried A, then we outgrew it. Someone said B was better. Act II: We tried B, then we outgrew it. Act III: By this time A had caught up to our needs, so we went back to A. End Credits

Has the pursuit of strong AI been a waste of time?

I don't know, he has a point. Science and engineering can go hand in hand. We built the bomb. We broke Enigma. We landed on the moon. We didn't have all the science when we started.

Well, I disagree, but it's subjective so you're entitled to your opinion. That said, the decision about whether or not to use metrics in the first place is also a subjective assessment by your manager.

Why are fake IDs criminal when the business is not legally required to check for identity? Is it because it's a government document? I'm just curious.

What if all your time is spent cleaning up after the cowboys? Or talking to the other team members about the problems they are stuck working on? A mission critical 2-line bugfix can take months. There aren't objective measures of performance. Any metric you come up with, employees will find a way to thwart it. Shipping a product on time? Easy. Just don't mention the bugs. Surely you don't believe it's possible to create bug-free software, do you? When all the team members have their performance tied to them, they'll all collude to game metrics. Don't even get me started on SLOC. Speaking from experience here, sorry if it's too cynical / bitter.

You can poll your friends. It can work. I have a couple friends without Facebook accounts, they are not anti-social. Perhaps introverted. Sometimes we have to remember to tell them about events. Personally though, the invites and private messaging are what I like most. I think it's just great not having to know somebody's phone number or email address.

It's not the only way, it's just really convenient. Just about everyone has mail / email / text / phone. The ones that don't have those, aren't going to have Facebook.

Well said. Also, there would be no interpersonal relationships.

I don't really think "the left" and "the right" are useful categories, unless you want to talk about people who don't think for themselves, which granted is a lot of people. I think it's perfectly acceptable to demand that some kinds of speech be allowed on Facebook and the rest prohibited - Hacker News functions well enough with restrictions on speech - but it's a total misunderstanding of the legal system in the US to demand it under the first amendment. And to say that the first amendment applies in one case but not the other is hypocritical, yes.

I don't think most people have even one Facebook account.

If I understand what you're saying, that's an interesting point. With a smaller government and less regulation, corporations tend to have more influence over your day to day freedoms. When there isn't much choice or variety when it comes to picking corporations - such as your choice of online social network - then sometimes it doesn't mean very much that in theory the governments grant you much more freedom.