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It would probably be more apt to have an overly generic name that doesn't capture the phenomenon quite so well: IIWII (It Is What It Is).

> Countless people never smoked. Countless people stopped. Some people act like quitting smoking is some insufferable thing that others will never understand. Everyone has bad stuff they do that’s just as hard to quit.

While smoking is a choice, not all choices are the same. Not all choices are weighted by a chemical addiction, comparing quitting smoking to bad food or exercise choices trivialises it in an unnecessary way.

Breaking an addiction is difficult, but smoking is one of the hardest addictions to break. I would imagine that heroin is more difficult to quit, but I can't think of any other addictions that are as difficult to break as nicotine.

If you have no experience of this (and it seems that you do not so apologies if you do) then a simple way to understand how difficult it is quit is not to think of it as a single choice to make. Imagine making the most difficult choice of your life, against everything that your body and brain is telling you - something that requires an extraordinary act of will and self-faith. The reward for making the correct choice is not an end to the matter - it will push it to one side for about 15-20 seconds. Then another wave of chemical addiction will wash over you, everything in your life will pale into insignificance and you will be faced with exactly the same choice again. This will repeat without end, asleep or awake, until you break the first part of the addiction. It will only take two or three weeks of these constant life changing choices, and you must make the correct choice every single time, but it will feel like an eternity.

If you make it through that initial period then it gets easier, but that sequence of life-changing choices won't really end for about six months, although you will gain more confidence that you are making the right choice through that time.

Several years later you will reach a point where you no longer have to choose and you have genuinely become a non-smoker. It is a long difficult road, but it is possible and many people do it. Believing that is almost impossible while you are still addicted, and find that believe that you personally are mentally strong enough to endure that cycle of choice and longing is the most difficult step of all.

So, yes it is a choice - but that does not make it the same as other things that are a choice. Some choices are more difficult than others, and to put all choices into a single category and assume they are the same is to under-estimate the range of difficulty that exists across different choices.

Those kids would be really upset if they could read.

The satire came through loud and strong. Perhaps consider that feedback from hn is somewhat biased on the spectrum? I thought the style was a refreshing change.

One of the main discussions in the paper is about the difference between arithmetic means and geometric means, and how people have different perceptions of annualized returns. Perhaps you should read it (again)?

Bernie Madoff promised high returns while obfuscating his business model as well. It went well until it no longer did.

Interesting site, thanks for the link.

Nice effect, but it looks more like smoke than a fluid. A constant pressure source instant of an instant splat would probably give more of a fluid effect.

No, because the other regions of the world also use metric. America is an outlier.

Reading material quickly remains more comfortable than watching a sped-up video. There are many cases in which written material is a better way to transfer information than video.

A case in point would be this article, as it is clearly written, balanced and very digestible.

In addition the early reward for mining a block was 50 bitcoins, there was no way to "mint" a smaller number.

Shuffle is very broken as it does nit perform a shuffle. Instead it performs random selection with replacement. It is much worse but the devs do not care and insist their way is "right".

Without any background in general relativity at all I can see that it got the basic arithmetic wrong in the last paragraph. Presumably the answer is about 69 years if the math in the precedence paragraphs is correct.

Well, they would need to know something about the topic. The easiest way for them to do this would be to read about it. When picking what to read they would need to be able to estimate if it contained valid information. The meta-skills that would be developed would be:

* Understanding the quality of sources

* Understanding the different between primary and secondary sources.

* Establishing chains of evidence and tracing them through large datasets.

* Integrating information from different sources and using correlation to establish validity.

Basically, it would be a crash course in how to do research, and the best possible preparation for living in a world where we drown in uncertain information and still have to make the best choices that we can.

For bonus points, at the end of the process they would have a better understanding of the subject matter than somebody who had only read about it.

Some other names that I've encountered for these kinds of programming constructs:

* simulation variables (presumably because the separation into x/x' is similar to the now/next calculation of state in a lot of simulations).

* SSA (although there is a subtle difference as x' becoming x in the next period isn't really SSA without some extra edges in the graph).

I wonder how phi nodes would fit into the author's scheme?

There is a strong "thought leadership" vibe.

The downside of how they did it is a complete lack of memory protection. So not only can processes corrupt one another, but all of the coprocessors that are used to offload tasks have access to the entire memory space. The result is certainly responsive, but also quite unstable.

fraud: wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.

If you sign a full-time contract and claim that you are only working a single job, while holding down multiple jobs then you are lying for financial gain.

Go handles this very cleanly with channels and goroutines.

> That’s not how typical users work, and I don’t think it’s how they want to work.

This hits the nail on the head: most users are not programmers. While the unix philosophy works well for programmers it is not suitable for non-programming users. A small collection of single-use tools that can be orchestrated is a programming interface.

He expanded the idea into a book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer

Panik!! Kalm. Panik!!

Until the box was opened the cat was neither alive nor dead.

> In order to enforce copyright, every computer will have to be locked down so that they only execute "compliant" software.

This is not true. While it is one possible approach to enforcing copyright, it is not the only possible approach. Network surveillance of distribution is another possibility that has been against p2p networks.

Copyright has never been completely enforcable. It has always been a partial solution aimed at preventing organized / profitable distribution, i.e. it is a legal fallback rather than a prevention. But a partially working solution is better than nothing.

They don't seem like a very good answer.

Allowing creative output to be freely used, while forcing creators to subsist on the crumbs thrown back is a two-class system. It seems unfair to those doing the work in such a system.

Copyright is far from perfect (far far...) but it is still an improvement on patronage. At least a creator has control over the use of their work.

If this was to happen, and we created a world where there was no form of copyright: why would somebody spend their life in a creative industry making new things?

I don't think there is any work on that yet, but if the model is known it should be possible to derive the probability that a particular image is the output from it.

It feels like you a word.

Both the vision systems at Tesla and the bot-detection at Twitter are classifiers. Both would have trained on large datasets. Both would have domain specific feature detection sitting below a more general algorithm. Both would have a similar basis for evaluation. Both have real-time constraints on the classification problem. An engineer (who is probably an ML specialist) familiar with one would not be starting from scratch in understanding and evaluating the other system.

All recovered now actually. The extra framing and escaping was what allowed me to reconstruct the broken unicode encoding.