stromgo

Maybe it helps to consider all 4 possibilities for the sign of the gravitational mass of antimatter, and the sign of the inertial mass of antimatter?

(-,-): antimatter would fall down, but we could break conservation laws with a mechanism.

(+,-): antimatter would fall up, but we could break conservation laws with a mechanism using electrically charged particles.

(-,+): antimatter would fall up, but ruled out by the experiment.

So what remains is (+,+)?

We do know that the real world is richer than the simulated world, since it holds a computer that runs the simulated world. Therefore if you exist, then it's more likely that you're the result of evolution in the real world than the result of evolution in the simulated world.

Imagine the warehouse-size computer that is needed to simulate a bacterium here on Earth. Computers are dusty, and dust contains bacteria, so if you're a bacterium, then it's more likely that you're one of the billions of bacteria in the dust on the computer, than the bacterium being simulated by the computer. The same reasoning should hold for other worlds.

I'll answer the energetic question. Splitting water produces oxygen and hydrogen, so with our oxygen we have the choice between burning hydrogen or burning Titan's hydrocarbons. Burning the hydrogen would bring us back to square one, so the question is whether burning hydrocarbons yields more energy than burning hydrogen. It appears to not be the case. Some numbers I found online:

  burning 1 mole of O2 with hydrogen yields 572 kJ
  burning 1 mole of O2 with methane yields 444 kJ
  burning 1 mole of O2 with butane yields 443 kJ
  burning 1 mole of O2 with octane yields 437 kJ
  burning 1 mole of O2 with glucose yields 467 kJ

https://www.ausetute.com.au/fuelenergy.html

When you said

With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block.

...it sounded like there were no plausible candidates. If computation is a candidate, then it's certainly something they can point at (with the caveat that it's only a candidate and not currently testable). I think if instead you had written something along those lines and avoided the words "not capable of", then hoseja and I wouldn't have reacted.

Consciousness is a computation, and neurons are certainly capable of elementary computation.

So the building block has been pointed at (neurons), and its property given (computation). Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?

Sorry, I reformulated the findings for easy consumption. Why is it confusing and not an improvement? Ask 10 people what speed is 89% slower than 100 mph. See how many give the article's intended answer (53 mph).

The paper Mind the Gap: Analyzing the Performance of WebAssembly vs. Native Code reports that, on average, WebAssembly is running at 67% of native speed in Firefox and 53% of native speed in Chrome (called 50% slower and 89% slower in the paper). Whether 67% can be called "near" 100% or not is subjective.

I'm not sure what you computed. The interesting question is to pick a recessive trait from one of the parents and ask for the chance of it being passed on. The probability that it's being passed on from the parent who has it is 1/2. The probability that it's being passed on from the other parent is (1/2)*(1/128). The combined probability is 1/512, not 1/65,536.

Indeed. Subway cars move forward without any horse pulling them, how is this miracle possible? What turned out to work was the steam engine, and now electromagnetism, explained by science. What didn't turn out to work was an elite team of people praying for the train to move.

The qualifier "dwarf" doesn't mean that the celestial body is too small to be considered a planet, it means that it hasn't cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. (Blame the IAU if you find this counterintuitive). This means that your conclusion is wrong: the asteroid belt actually has enough mass to be a planet.

Faster WebAssembly isn't listed on the roadmap, so you are disappointed, right?

Wasm is currently considered "around half as fast as native"[0]. The Wasm design, Emscripten compiler, and browser compilers all have a part of responsibility in this, but I suspect that browser compilers have the largest share. Mozilla created The WebAssembly Explorer[1] which shows good-looking ".wat", but bloated "Firefox x86 Assembly" compared to "LLVM x86 Assembly". I hope they intend to use this tool to improve Firefox x86 Assembly.

[0] https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen/issues/1070

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/03/previewing-the-webassembly...

Did you interpret the table backwards? Swiss French is considered simpler:

  1. (most complex)
  19. French
  33. Swiss French
  69. (simplest)

Your easy proof is completely wrong. There's discrimination against white men if the hiring bar is higher for them. To check this using workforce statistics you'd need to compare the fraction of white men in the workforce to what it would be with the same hiring bar for everyone. Comparing the fraction to the magic number 50% is irrelevant.

Those of you who tried WebAssembly, what kind of performance are you getting compared to native? In my application, execution time is about 200% of native, which is quite bad compared to the few benchmarks I could find: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/10/webassembly-browser-previe... https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/09/18/bringing-the-web-up-to-s...

It's a head-scratcher as my code is nothing special and I don't see what I could be doing wrong. Then it occurred to me that these benchmarks look suspicious, with many scores below 100%. Are there fair benchmark results somewhere, measured by someone not trying to promote WebAssembly? What performance ratios are HN readers getting currently, and what performance ratios should we expect in the long term?

I'm sorry I still don't see it. Your linked article says at the very top "There is as yet no unambiguous detection of an IMBH". Concerning gravitational waves, reference [7] says "We show that space based detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna are likely to detect several of these sources". Reference [8] says "gravitational-wave observations could be used to accurately measure masses of black holes in merging binaries and probe the existence of intermediate-mass black holes". So no discovery yet, just theoretical work on what the signal would look like.

I mean, where did you get this 1000x figure as what "we're finding a lot of"?

Where did you get this 1000x stellar mass figure from? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_obs... so far the observed merger components were between 7.5 and 35.4 solar masses.

The sample of stars in the night sky is biased by luminosity and longevity. I'd be curious to see a distribution of stellar masses that compensates for these two biases. On such a chart, extrapolating the trend in the high-mass range just before the error bars become too large would tell us whether 30-solar-mass stellar remnants are expected or unexpected by observation data.

YouTube is partly to blame for this. Since YouTube reported the average stars, if you saw a 4-star video and thought that it should be 3-star, then the optimal strategy was to vote 1-star to pull it down as fast as possible. If instead YouTube had reported the majority option (and publicized that fact) then it would have incentivized people to vote what they truly think.

I don't see why you call it "operator tweaking" even if the computations were determined in advance. You're asking for the poker bot to be scripted to log into the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre on its own and run overnight jobs there. That idea sounds extremely brittle and the challenge of making that script reliable has nothing to do with poker.

Subjective experience is an emergent property of fundamental physics. It is not fundamental in itself and it doesn't seem to require any new fundamental physics. If you think that some new fundamental physical law is needed, then maybe you can explain what it does by describing what would happen if we removed it from the universe? Would people stop dead? Would people behave completely normally except they would answer "no" when asked "are you conscious?"

All I meant by "special case" was that "mod 30" isn't the whole story -- more like the most significant correction on top of what the OP said, with other smaller corrections possible, and the entire set of corrections being described by the k-tuple conjecture.

It's amazing how people can be picky and negative on HN. Someone positive would instead congratulate me for making the gist of what the prime k-tuple conjecture says about the biases easily understandable. Oh well.

Are you contesting it, or just curious? You already know that my observation explains the "3 followed by 9" bias. You already know that the mathematicians call the conjecture "a much more refined model of randomness in primes" which is similar to how I described what I was doing. In addition, MathWorld's article on the k-Tuple Conjecture talks about residues mod q, which is similar to what I'm doing when I look at primes mod 10*3. All these elements point at some connection between the k-tuple conjecture and my observation.

Why the downmods? Everyone can easily verify that there are similar biases if you replace "isPrime(n)" with "random() < 0.1" in the various code snippets floating in the thread. The article even admits that the biases are explained by the prime k-tuples conjecture, which is a model of randomness in primes from 1923. So primes are not less random than we thought -- they are still exactly as random as we thought.

No I don't. The article continues:

The primes' preferences about the final digits of the primes that follow them can be explained, Soundararajan and Lemke Oliver found, using a much more refined model of randomness in primes, something called the prime k-tuples conjecture.

So I guess that my observation is just a special case of this "prime k-tuples conjecture".

Ok so the random model "1,3,7,9 mod 10" doesn't fully work, but let's look at what happens mod 30. Large primes have the following possible remainders mod 30: 1, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29. We see that when a prime ends with a 3 then p + 6 (ending in 9) is always an option, but p + 4 (ending in 7) is an option only half of the time. I think that this fully explains why a prime ending with 3 is more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 9. So basically the OP is on the right track, and his random model just needed to be refined a bit.

You have it backwards. Their result holds for any set of numbers that behave randomly, so it holds for primes because primes behave somewhat randomly.

Quite sure. 17k players still make many huge mistakes, and at the other extreme, God (say 13d) would win 100% of the time against a 12d player. Given that the win ratio for a one rank difference starts at 50% for extreme beginners and ends at 100% for God, maybe you should be the one explaining why you'd expect a significant plateau at 2/3 instead of a smooth increase.

In go, beating someone 2/3 of the time corresponds to being about one kyu/dan rank stronger

This isn't true. One kyu/dan rank stronger means being 1 stone stronger (so winning 50% of the time when playing White with reverse komi). In practice this may correspond to winning 2/3 of the time with normal komi for high dan players, but that doesn't hold for low kyu players. A 29k has maybe a 51% chance of winning against a 30k because both will make huge mistakes. So although the 29k can score on average 13-15 more points than the 30k in a given game, this advantage is swamped by the large standard deviation of scores in beginner games, turning the win/loss outcome into essentially a coin flip.

You have to consider the prior probability of having your account hijacked. In my case it is very low because I'm careful, but unfortunately authentication systems are one-size-fits-all and are designed for the average careless user. All I get from these systems is weakened security, disruption, and no benefits. I wish I could tell an authentication system that I will not forget my password and to not set up a recovery path using my mother's maiden name. I wish I could tell it that I'm willing to accept the risk of a hijack and to never unexpectedly lock my account because some machine learning algorithm thinks that my activity is suspicious. If anyone here works on an authentication system, then please add these settings.

The casts are needed for "dirty pointer math". Without the casts, &A[1] - &A[0] returns 1, not 4, for an int *A.