normalhuman

Come on now, don't be disingenuous. Of course they are mutually exclusive, because you mean "not being reddit" as in "we are better than reddit" -- an elitist stance.

When I see comments criticizing others' comments I am always reminded of reddit. I think this is exactly what you're hoping to avoid when you come to HN.

I don't think HN is going to become a better place by becoming more elitist.

err...

This seems extremely pedantic. "Use case" as it's used today basically just means "case" or "situation" for a particular project or task or goal. It's not business jargon or a buzzword term, even if perhaps it started off that way many decades ago.

Notice that you are already in contradiction with the first criticism that I received in this thread, where a subtle difference in meaning was proposed.

it means "in the future", which is ambiguous, but it's no more ambiguous than saying "in the future",

The main point is that it is totally unnecessary, we already have the future tense to talk about what will happen in the future.

The same applies here. Remove the phrase with "use case" and you get exactly the same meaning, with less words and less cringe.

You're picking much too fine a nit here.

I think you feel that way because of the HN/tech echo chamber. Nobody says or feels the need to say "use case" outside of such circles.

But if if this is a hard-stop item for you at this juncture, then we should circle back... I'm sure we can align on this going forward. ;)

Hehe ;)

HN has a history of comments like this that criticize other comments and add nothing to the discussion

I disagree. HN is a place that seems to pride itself on the quality of its discussions, and on a higher intellectual caliber when compared to other Internet discussion venues. Surely a good command of language is part of that?

Corparate-speak that makes its way into common language is frequently justified post-hoc by subtle differences in meaning like the ones you allude to. The problem is that these differences are personal and subjective. Ask someone else, they might have a different answer. I have had the same discussion multiple times over the equally meaningless and inelegant "going forward".

"Use case" comes from 90s software engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_case

Corporate-speak and cliché idioms makes one sound less clever, not more. It might temporarily signal belonging to some crowd (for example, the HN tech crowd), but in the long term it hampers one's ability to communicate in an effective and elegant way.

This is what happens when incentives are not aligned with regulations.

No, this is what happens when one leaves the fox guarding the hen house.

If incentives were aligned with regulations, there would be no need for regulations to begin with.

Why are you so bitter?

I don't know, it's just how I am.

I doubt PhD+ people do that type of research "just for fun"

Well you'd be surprised. All the professional mathematicians I know do math for its own sake. Some amateurs also do it "just for fun", as you say.

Someone answered elaborately, and I'm glad they did. Thanks anyway.

A bigger person than me, especially considering the tone of your question.

Yeah but now, what?

"now, what?", what?

What was learned from this?

That 42 is the sum of three cubes.

Why did we look for a solution in the first place?

They did. I do not believe that you were involved.

How is it important that a number can be a sum of three cubes?

People like things for their own sake. How is it important to have sex or drink a beer? Same thing. Also math has this uncanny tendency to turn out to be useful where you least expect it. Consider the primes. For a long time people might have asked the same question you are asking here, and yet now they are central in encryption and thus the digital finance market. Could not find a more capitalistic and materialistic use if you tried.

The very idea of a "scientific theory" is a philosophical concept, and your implicit assertion that empiricism trumps abstract reasoning (which I am here neither agreeing with nor opposing) is in itself a philosophical position.

Pseudoscience refers to activities that superficially have the aesthetics of science but do not follow its constraints. For example, homeopathy is pseudoscience. They dress in white coats and use chemistry lab equipment, but they do not test their ideas with experiments that could falsify them. This has nothing to do with reasoning with the current scientific theories. What do you think theoretical physicists do?

I say this because more and more I notice people using "pseudoscience" in a sense similar to "heresy", and treating philosophy as some sort of inferior system of knowledge that is bound to be replaced by science. These people misunderstand both science and philosophy, and would benefit from a bit more of reading and thinking outside of their comfort zone.

How can it be a state machine if you aren't mutating it?

You are confusing a state machine (which is an abstract model of computation) with the behavior of a program implementing it. The set of possible states and the conditions of transition from one state to the next never change.

These conditions can depend on mutable state, as is the case described by the author (in this case, mutable state is kept in the current and previous node pointers).

Maybe they do disagree with me. It is impossible to know, because they are not free to say what they really think -- which is another fundamental problem with not-democracy.

Russia is a democracy. The US was a democracy when it genocided the native Americans. askmike is right. Democracy alone won't help Hong Kong. China will not stop. Pacifist Hong Kong will be crushed, regardless the form of government.

I am not claiming that democracy will save Hong Kong from China. What I am saying is that democracy is better than no democracy, and no amount of doublespeak or whatabbautism is going to change that reality. "Eat this poison, it's good for you", it's what the Chinese autocrats are saying. Well, people might indeed have to eat it, but they don't have to believe that it is good for them.

You've never heard of James Dresnok. Why?

Yes I did, and I'm sure you can probably find a similar case that is actually related to my example. The simple point is that, when you have a wall between a democracy (not a "democracy", like contemporary Russia) and an autocratic regime, the ratio of people making the jump in the direction of the dictatorship against people making the jump in the direction of the democracy is < .00001. It is probably not zero because of people with psychiatric issues, people who are in love with someone on the other side, who left family there... But it is pretty damn close to zero, and this is something you have to explain if you want to insist that democracy or no democracy is the same for people.

Nothing is perfect, but dictatorship is worse. I live close what remains of the Berlin wall. People risked their lives to jump it and escape to the democratic side. Nobody ever wanted to escape the democratic side and jump in the other direction. Why?

I love China and I have a lot of empathy for the Chinese people. You have an amazing and ancient culture and I hope that you can release yourselves from oppression, gain control of your own government as a people, prosper and be happy. We are all human beings, fuck the dictators.

I don't see where OP is implying that individuals suffering from unfortunate accidents outside of their control are driving up health care costs

No, OP is just proposing that help is denied to everyone who needs it and can't afford it, because it is deemed more important to prevent free-riders than to be humane. It's a nasty ideology, that is only embraced by the US among all developed countries.

It means that your life is only valuable to society if you have (or had) some economic value. It doesn't matter, by the way, if this economic value comes from actually contributing, or by inheritance, or by winning big at a casino. The important thing is that you have money, otherwise go (literally) die in a corner.

This whole discussion seems to be centered on lifestyle choices, eating large quantities of sugar, that have a significant effect on the health care costs of the population as a whole.

So why not tax the big corps that make all of this junk for the costs to society that they externalize? Sure, it would be great if people had the level of education necessary to make the right choices. It is pretty hard to get that level of education in the US if you are born into an unprivileged situation, because the education system for the poor is shit, because said companies avoid paying taxes as much as possible, and the more well-off are selfish and shortsighted, and vote for politicians that do not spend public money on what can improve society as a whole.

Childhood cancer or other unfortunate illnesses are statistically too infrequent to be driving up health care costs alone.

You are very young, I imagine. Perhaps you haven't yet started to understand that things go to shit as you age, and it is not "infrequent", it is part of the human condition. A part that is hidden out of the public eye because it is inconvenient to talk about it. All Americans are immortal and about to be millionaires!

Have you read any of them?

my answer to that is that the government should not be paying for people's health care. It enables bad behaviors and it forces people who make good choices to subsidize people who make bad choices. Which is legitimately bullshit.

Bullshit. The government is not "paying for people's health care". In most of the civilized world, you pay a percentage of your income to the national health care system, and then the national health care system takes care of you if you need something.

Why? Because you can be suddenly diagnosed with all sorts of diseases that could not be prevented by having "good behavior". That is puritanical bullshit to blame those who need help and compassion the most. People have life-threatening diseases because of genetic factors, environmental factors that are out of their control, receiving a cosmic radiation at the wrong moment, etc etc.

Also: people get old. The older you get, the more shit starts to happen.

Not having a national health care system leads to a nasty and cruel society.

The whole debate about nutrition confuses me.

It is only confusing if one spends too much time paying attention to those who want to sell you something, or develop some sort of guru personal-brand (I vomit in my mouth a little bit when I write things like "personal brand").

Here's what most people need to know: Eat unprocessed food, mostly from vegetable sources.

This means no refined-anything (no added sugar, no white flour, no hydrogenated-fats, etc.)

The less ingredients the better. The more you recognize the ingredients as something you could grow in nature, the better.

I imagine I will be bombarded with paleo-something, keto-whatever, broscience, etc etc. You don't need any of that. Eat unprocessed food, mostly from vegetable sources and you will be way ahead of the vast majority of western people in terms of having a healthy nutrition.

It's boring, unsexy and it works.

You are right, and it is also the case that totalitarian policy can be implemented in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. It can be a last resort measure to save a society (e.g., when the UK canceled elections to deal with the Nazi threat).

More importantly: it is perfectly possible to implement totalitarian policy while maintaining the aesthetics of freedom. There is a famous book about this, 1984 something... Sorry for the cliché, but here we are.

Let's say, for example, that you convince the population of the most powerful economy on earth that they are the most free, most amazing society ever, while the rest of the developed world actually enjoys affordable health care and vacation time. Meanwhile, most of your citizens not only spend the vast amount of their time in an endless rat race that only benefits economically the top .001%, send their sons and daughters to stupid wars, while aggressively demanding the continuation of this state of affairs.

Another important trick to maintaining this state of affairs is to create very violent political debate about a very narrow and irrelevant set of topics (e.g. bullshit topics such as "cultural marxism", "red pill", "cucks and soyboys", "cultural appropriation", the corrupt blue guy vs the corrupt red gal... you get the picture).

The idea of "embodied AI" has been around for some decades. It is reasonable that, from a practical engineering perspective, creating "human-like" intelligence becomes more feasible if this intelligence is embodied in the same physical possibilities and constraints as a typical human.

What I find somewhat ironic is this: the author mentions working with Stephen Hawking, an amazing man who produced incredible intellectual work and enriched our understanding of reality while being almost incapable of any physicality.

If we apply current scientific theories (physics, chemistry, biology, etc) to this cell network and physical machinery, we quickly find our way back to symbolic manipulation. What are cells if not computational nodes that exchange messages?

A much more reasonable hypothesis for what is missing is contained in the text:

"A human cell is a remarkable piece of networked machinery that has about the same number of components as a modern jumbo jet[...]"

Maybe we just haven't reached the level of complexity needed for human-level AI. A hint that this might be the case is that the current excitement with ML seems to be fueled by algorithms that were mostly known by the 80s (sure, with lots of recent incremental improvements, but no new big idea). What made a difference was the computational power and datasets that became available in the 2010s. I suspect the next leap will be of a similar nature. "More is different".

Please avoid ad hominem and explain your problem with the idea.

Sure, that is why I mention the tragedy of the commons. People (me included, I'm not claiming to be a saint) very easily rationalize exchanging short-term personal comfort for the long term social good, and the adtech people know this very well.

The average user certainly doesn't worry about any of this, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't.

The worst, of course, is the tragedy of the commons dynamics. A lot of harm that comes from surveillance capitalism does not affect someone in particular, but it amounts to great damage to society as a whole. For example, by degrading public discourse, addicting people to screen time while robbing them of living their actual lives, and assisting authoritarian regimes in oppressing their own people (project dragonfly).

If you accidentally purchased a bag of M&Ms from Amazon for 500 dollars instead of 5, they will let you undo it.

Of course, and they do it out of self-interest. On one hand, 495 dollars are not worth losing a client for life. More importantly, it is not in their interest to scare people away from using their service. The story could spread and cause significant damage to their reputation.

On the other hand, if the matter is reversed, Amazon is expected to be a good sport and take the loss

Yes, because the situation is asymmetrical. Amazon is afraid of losing customers, but customers are not afraid of losing Amazon.

I just think it’s amazing how frail people’s morality is, how it goes out the window when certain conditions are met.

I don't think that the majority of people nowadays believes that "the system" is fair. Most people perceive the game as rigged in favor of the rich and powerful, so they feel no moral obligation towards them.

But you are right, human beings are depressingly flawed. Many people will steal or take an unfair advantage if they know they won't be caught. The customer taking advantage of a mistake to receive an unfair deal and Amazon not paying taxes are more or less the same behavior.

Open Source failed. It remains as something that is useful to build software, but its political aims were defeated.

The political goal was to give users absolute control over their computational environments. In reality, we have less and less control, because computations moved to the cloud (corporation-controlled servers) and the most used devices regressed to a non-hackable state (mobile gadgets).

Even if you use a Linux desktop with 100% open source software, you will still probably do a good part (and the most sensitive part) of your computations on someone else's computer, that you do not control. Open Source ended up making it easier for companies to build this new world, because it provided them with perhaps billions of man-hours of free effort.

The strategy of Open Source as a political movements made sense in the 1990s, but we need something new for 2019...

I've been reading so much about the death of symbolic AI and the complete victory of statistical approaches lately, that I suspect that a new symbolic hype-cycle is about to start.

I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but if you've been following such trends for a while, you might agree with me.

I am not a designer nor a software engineer, nor a business person. I am just a (heavy) user of all sorts of software for a very long time. I am a competent coder, and I code for research and pleasure. I don't have a dog in this, let's say, professional race.

Every time I spot "UX" in relation to something I use, I cringe. Not because I have anything against the idea of design, or good interfaces, or designing good interfaces. That is all great. The problem is that 99% of the time that the term "UX" shows up in connection with something I use, two things are going to happen:

1) I will have to relearn how to do something that I already was used to doing without even thinking;

2) Some feature or option is going to be removed.

The human brain is incredibly plastic and adaptable. Unless the interface is truly absurd, most people can get used to it and never give it a second thought again.

My number one (by far) request as a user:

DON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE

Unless there is a very good reason, and I bet there isn't.

I bought my first MacBook in 2007. Thankfully, Apple is one of the best behaved companies when it comes to not changing things for the sake of it, and part of the reason why I stick with them. I don't mention this out of some sort of fanboy-ism (I have no loyalty to corporations, I just buy shit I like). I mention it to make a more important point:

The UX of 2007 was absolutely fine, and if they would have made zero changes since then I would be perfectly happy. UX for laptops/desktops was solved in the early 2000. Everything else since then is just irrelevant bullshit.

The authors only claim to have strong results for the studied demographics, make further remarks about other possible biases, and argue these results provide some insight and encourage further research.

This is perfectly fine. Not all fields have the luxury of perfectly controlled lab experiments. If we applied the methodological discipline of experimental physics to social sciences, we might as well give up now.

In the abstract they say:

"Despite this being a well-known and widespread social phenomenon, relatively few large-scale empirical studies have been conducted into this issue. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining teenagers’ propensity to claim expertise in three mathematics constructs that do not really exist."

"we find substantial differences in young people’s tendency to bullshit across countries, genders and socio-economic groups"

"Together this provides important new insight into who bullshitters are and the type of survey responses that they provide."

In the conclusions they say:

"There are of course limitations to this study, and many issues on the topic of bullshitting that remain unexplored. First, the PISA data analysed are cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. We therefore do not know whether bullshitting is a stable trait that can be consistently observed for an individual over time, or if it is something that changes with age (and the factors associated with such change)."

Their strongest claim appears to be: "Despite these limitations, we believe this paper has started to open an important new area of social science research"

I'm pretty sure that the executive that decided to break Firefox had that covered. They looked into the future, and realized that the extra money in their bank account would make their long term more pleasant, more than enough to offset any annoyances created by browser incompatibilities.

cases where sacrificing immediate personal gains leads to bigger personal gains in the future

As Kaynes once said: "in the long run, we are all dead".

To go beyond this shallow level of morality requires an expansion of the concept of "self". Beware though: this sort of perspective shift might make you unemployable.

My favorite anti-productivity introspections:

- Remember that you are going to die. Time flies, have you noticed? Is that status symbol that you are pursuing really that important? Is it ever going to make you happy?

- There is more wisdom in one of your cells than in all self-help and management books combined. Maybe you can't focus for a good reason? What could that reason be?

- Remember the last time you felt glad to be alive? Was it related to being productive?

No need to thank me.