HN user
Fact is the recently elected City council made public drug use illegal: https://crosscut.com/politics/2023/09/seattle-city-council-p...
Murdoch and co. will have you believe Seattle is a fentanyl-ridden wastleland. Property values say otherwise.
That's not the same question though. I've answered those questions for myself, but I couldn't tell you what consciousness is or isn't, because that requires language, and language cannot suffice to communicate our personal experiences.
I actually wrote a paper comparing how Tractatus and Godel’s incompleteness theorems approach the concept of self-reference. (I believe it was the final for Philosophy of Mathematics with the brilliant Colin McLarty.)
I don’t have it hosted anywhere but iirc the tl;dr is that they’re more or less independently reaching different conclusions as the two models are fundamentally incompatible.
I found this piece revolting. The author feigns a conscience so that you too, conscientious engineer, can stomach working for the modern day equivalent of big tobacco. To be clear I don’t have a problem with anyone who works at Meta, but I do have a problem with taking the moral high ground in doing so. Admit it’s the wrong thing to do but too fun/lucrative to pass up, your life and that of the people around you will benefit.
The whole article is written like an ad. I wouldn’t take any of it at face value.
What makes you think YC companies have any different standards than the rest of the corporate world? If anything startups are deliberately held to a lower standard on the justification of “disruption”. YC is a way to make people money first and foremost. Don’t be shocked.
This comment itself kind of falls into that, isn't it? :p
"More readable code almost always means less efficient code."
Can you give examples? I'm not sold that the "low hanging fruit" of readability improvement (empty lines to break up "paragraphs", breaking up unintelligible one-liners into several lines, etc.) degrades performance. My intuition is that the compiler/interpreter ends up producing almost identical runtime code and therefore similar performance.
Unless you mean more along the lines of expressivity (i.e Python and Ruby can get a lot done with fewer statements compared to C), but to me this effect is in a different category than readability.
As a personal anecdote, I was a vegetarian for ~3 years from late in high school to junior year of college. It was definitely a valuable experience that afforded me much perspective into my diet, the diets of others, and food in general.
When I started eating meat again it was under a vague condition to eat "good" meat, that is, either cooked fresh by my mother, or from a higher-end restaurant. This eroded a bit and after a year or so I was back to eating meat relatively unabashedly again.
A few days ago I spent my entire Saturday vomiting bile from food poisoning ($CMG is the top suspect), and now I'm back to my post-vegetarianism habits of being careful about the meat I consume. I'm aware of probability and statistics, so this is somewhat irrational in that sense, but I suppose my point is that I'm grateful for the experience I had of being vegetarian and I think everyone should try it for as long as they can.
EDIT: Oh, perhaps the most shocking part of the experience was how few people knew what the difference between being pescetarian, vegetarian, and vegan is, as well as dealing with all manner of assholes who couldn't fathom why anyone would do such a thing to themselves.
EDIT2: As for health, it bears mentioning that I knew a couple people who are/were vegetarians and had much worse diets than many non-vegetarians. Naively substituting a chicken breast for a block of cheese is _not_ healthy!
EDIT3: I made a point of almost never asking my friends to pick somewhere more vegetarian friendly. Almost anywhere, I could deal with. Notable exceptions were seafood restaurants and anywhere in the South of the USA. There's only so many onion rings one can stand!
Does anyone have data on the departure of executives at other companies, past or present? Of course the reaction is that this is something like an exodus, but I would love to see data on exec-churn at similarly sized companies for comparison's sake.
But he's making the world more "open and connected!" (by bringing internet to third world countries and restricting them to his website...)
Of course. For example, many of the questions for technical interviews involve knowing which data structure to use in a given setting, and applying it to find a solution.
The interviewee is more than welcome to study data structures and interview questions about data structures. A poor student will just memorize questions and answers by rote without really understanding the data structure in question. The good student will actually learn and understand data structures in the context of the solution.
One would hope that interviewers are able to ask follow-up questions about the solution which distinguish between the two.
EDIT: During the best tech interview I have done, I had no idea how to solve the question asked (that is, I had not studied its solution despite this being a relatively common question). I was able to ask articulate questions and invoked understanding of data structures as I went along. Memorizing solutions is a game of luck, and not recommendable.
Facial unlocking programs have this problem too. Just search for "facial unlock racism" and there's pages of results from various sources and years.
Software is subject to the same effects institutions of racism, sexism, etc. and is a good example of just how pervasive these institutions are.
While this can easily be reduced to petty arguments and farm animal related epithets, I think this at least a reasonable enumeration of skills one can aspire to learn in their free time.
You're right, but I disagree with your argument that: "the 'laws of logic' are universal axioms that would not change." Axioms are not universal and have been modified or discarded throughout the progression of mathematics [0],[1],[2]. I suppose one could argue that their definition wouldn't change and whether or not one chooses to accept an axiom or not is left to the individual, though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(mathematics)
The issue with tricky algorithms questions is that they often become tests of how well you can keep your cool. I've (and I'm sure others have also) bombed relatively easy questions due to nervousness compounding. I've also done much better than expected on other interviews because I remained calm and kept the interview flowing smoothly. This is the real skill under test, IMO. Of course, your ability to solve problems is still important, and a subset of what's being tested. The issue is just that there's a lot of (possibly inherently random) factors that cloud that signal.
I think that a quick survey of the user would be helpful as well- specifically their experience with programming, and their experience with the language in question.
This is cool! Is similar data available for other legal states? Are you working on implementing similar services for those states?
My experience has been that my friends and I troll each other by submitting endorsements for irrelevant things like "Microsoft Office" or "Public Speaking." I usually spend a few minutes on LinkedIn when this happens, so this is consistent with your point.
Someone should spend the money to ask him if he thinks the service is worth it, or if he would have used a similar service at any point in his career.
Soy isn't part of the natural diet for chickens, so feeding it to them means also feeding them antibiotics.
Do you have any more info on this? I was under the impression that giving chickens antibiotics was illegal and so feckless that it isn't even worth breaking the law for. I could be wrong as well, honestly.
I would imagine it would help a lot with learning cultural idioms as well. Given that a large percentage of the mannerisms my friends and I use are copied from TV, it would be invaluable to be exposed to the language elements which speakers of that language actually use.
I believe the comment was in regards to time spent on either venture, not the legality of doing both.
So, like Brave New World?
It's interesting that the conclusion serves the opposite purpose of what one expects from a conclusion. Usually the conclusion serves to put the preceding argument or analysis in context, but in this case the conclusion does the opposite by invalidating the subject of the analysis.
Right, but isn't that rather useless? If we knew the actual probability of each individual being killed by guns or terrorists, we could find that neither of these averages would be represented by even a single person.
jihadists killed 94 people inside the United States between 2005 and 2015. During that same time period, 301,797 people in the US were shot dead
Americans are more afraid of terrorism than they are of guns, despite the fact that guns are 3,210 times more likely to kill them
Er, that's not really how probability works. Sure, it makes some sense but as was pointed out, most of those people shot themselves. Since I don't intend on shooting myself, the probability of me being shot is immediately a fraction of the number quoted in the article.
I'm not afraid of guns because I have the privilege of living in a safe area. I'm a lot more scared of the immediate threats to my well-being, which seem to be distracted drivers [0] and slipping on ice [1].
Admittedly I closed the article after this butchering of statistics, so I don't know if the rest of the article is as misguided.
[0] - There have been several instances where I walked out into a crosswalk but stopped because I could see a car approaching but not slowing down, with the driver staring at their lap.
[1] - I live in Ohio. It snows a lot, but people don't shovel their sidewalks. People walk on the snow and compress it into ice (combined with freezing temps at night) which can persist for a week.
EDIT: Stats folk: is there a term for this? It seems similar to a Bayesian Fallacy but I'm not sure that's exactly correct...
I agree, but there is a lot of value in approaching Philosophy from a mathematical context (both as a student and as a philosopher- c.f. Russel, Wittgenstein, et al had backgrounds in mathematics and left a huge mark on the subject).
I was a math major for much of my undergraduate career, but by my junior year I realized that I was actually only interested in the philosophy behind it. In fact, I had little interest in my freshman Philosophy 101 course, though after studying math, I realized that I would have loved to study philosophy more. As a freshman, I was enamored by math as it was this ivory tower of abstract truth.
I loved learning about what math could say and how the notation worked and the notion of formal proof etc. but slogging through proofs was abhorrent after awhile and I dropped the program. I had come to understand that math was actually just the same sort of discourse as "soft" philosophy, just formalized. Learning about counterexamples to math as a "closed system of reasoning"[0] (Godel's theorems, constructive mathematics, etc.) simultaneously ruined my perception of the nobility of math and spurred my interest in philosophy (specifically analytic philosophy and philosophy of language) and cognitive science. That's where the real "unsolvable" or "interesting" problems lay (e.g. the mind-body problem).
I would highly recommend anyone who is intellectually curious to learn and understand formal mathematics for the purposes of understand philosophy, but also to recognize when to quit (if ever!).
[0] - I may be butchering these terms, but I hope the meaning is clear
I believe it's vim vs. emacs :P
Freedom is an awful word (to use in rigorous discourse) because it simultaneously means two very different, if not in some way opposite things. Freedom can be used in the sense of having many options to execute your will, or it can be used in the sense of having nothing to lose by executing your will[0].
[0] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/kriskristofferson/meandbobbym...