TheUndead96

I see many comments saying that Git is still the best SCM system, which I agree with. Git can simultaneously be bad, and better than any other option available. To me Git has always seemed a little bit awkward. It works well when it works well. I think it it solving a hard problem. I don't think Git is the final solution though.

While it might be true that nuclear war will not end the human genome, it could set may communities back to the bronze age in a relatively short amount of time.

This is compounded by the fact that consumer electronics are becoming less useful as general computing devices. Increasingly people "rent" their primary devices. You pay a monthly plan, or a fee upfront, to use a gated smartphone that does very little in comparison to its ability on paper. So in summary:

- You do not own media (music, movies, books to some extent).

- You do not own the device (in the sense that you can readily program it).

- You may not repair the devices you use.

- They are all listening to you.

groove shark, now theres a name I have not heard for a long time...

Given the financial incentives, I see Mozilla's stance as an extension of Google's.

The value proposition of Spotify doesn't seem all that enticing any more:

- Does not have many famous artists, due to licensing, and the catalog is continually decreasing.

- Actively anti-competitor behaviour.

- For a little more than a monthly subscription, you can purchase a full DRM-free album, which you can play for the rest of time.

I cancelled my subscription months ago.

I watched this a while ago, and it did not fill me with confidence for the Slack backend at the time:

https://youtu.be/WE9c9AZe-DY

In my mind it is now QTPy until the end of time

Not sure why this was downvoted. Everyone is in a perpetual state of "we should start worrying about this". People knew about this problem in the 70s. Many of us would not have been born when actions should have been first taken.

From here onwards it is damage control. It is not the end of the world, we just require intellectual honesty about the situation.

It's possible the origins of this reside in the first Industrial Revolution.

That's a good point, I had not thought of it in those terms. Snowden was much more "I saw something wrong and I did something about it".

I feel the same way. The amount of times I slide into the dumb side of YouTube after a day's worth of work is a bit embarrassing. Some reading is sometimes possible, but I feel finished at the end of a day.

Either they are planning to kill him and frame it as a suicide, or his life has been made so miserable that suicide appears to be an escape. Both are awful to consider.

I'm not informed enough to know whether any of the leaks he facilitated lead to the unnecessary harm of innocent people, but I deeply respect his dedication to the truth. As far as I know he has not outed his sources. We should aspire to be as brave as the likes of Assange and Snowden.

I've worked in these Agile teams for my entire career so far. I have begun to believe that standups, in the way that most companies conduct them, are against the interest of most developers. It feels like I need to justify my position every day, and that I am only as good as my last feature. Sprints are basically scientifically optimised crunch. It is like the last stretch of a project every 2 weeks. Just put in the extra energy "for the sake of the sprint". Pull all-nighters, just so that you can be told in your planning meeting that we are "agile", and the requirements are changing again.

Disclaimer: These are subjective opinions, and I recognise that some developers thrive in this environment. Also, this is a comment on Agile in the wild, rather than in principle.

This is a good point. I think this can (partly) be explained by the significance of language in the evolution human communities. We can imagine how speech impediments might have a negative correlation with survivability, on both the individual and group levels. I imagine groups with good communication would hunt better, and form deeper relationships. And individuals with exceptionally good communication would rise as leaders and coordinators.

This might be why we do not see many problems with speech (in comparison to its complexity). Evolution thinks this one ability is extremely important for passing on genes.

Just responding to conversation above. I think this is important. What makes the HN interesting is sharing ideas. This is otherwise a boring corporate announcement.

Yes, I agree. My point (and that of one of the comments earlier) is that censorship does not actually do anything to reduce extremism in the real world, and can actually increase it, as you say. So these echo-chambers are bad, which we can agree on.

There are already protocols to control search results and the behaviors of employees. This is very different. This is controlling the discourse of everyday people. Just because the technology is not currently deployed to restrict topics that effect you does not mean that it never will. The post above is right. Extremism does not fester in “safe spaces”. One day you may not be able to even talk about <redacted>

Coming soon: Facebook gets exclusive deal to open source.

I’m being facetious, but this announcement really does go against what feels like the core value of the OpenAI project.

I agree. The anti-book sentiment has felt quite strong lately, and this article is another example.

I think people feel subconsciously guilty that they do not read more. It is thus easier to dismiss books than to acknowledge the fact that most attention spans have been reduced the the granularity of a comment thread. We are all victims to this. Reading a book takes more effort than it used to.

I fear that most people have already read the last book they will complete in their lifetime (not that completing a book is necessary in deriving value from it).

This is really awesome, I love it.

I wonder whether we could procedurally generate novel writing systems that are maximally information-dense while still being legible.

Are the customers demanding work in Lisp creating new systems, or maintaining mature systems? I had assumed that the use of Lisp for symbolic reasoning and AI had largely disappeared. Is it making a resurgence?

I'm surprised that GraalVM is not mentioned. I have strong suspicions that Oracle is lining up Graal to become the next default JVM, after watching some talks from core developers describing how fragile the Hotspot codebase has become. Graal would be a good way to encourage ML, given it has language support for Python. Perhaps Graal is just not ready for Oracle to show all of their cards at this point. Or perhaps my theory is incorrect.

Thanks for the clarification.

Well imagine if there is only $55 worth of currency in circulation. Or better yet only $52. The lender ends up with all the currency in the end (and maybe some that does not exist yet). The response is that currency is printed. If the production of society increases at the same rate as interest, then there is no problem, but that is rarely the case. This is why there is more debt than money in the world. Currencies are then deliberately debased in order to pay back debt quicker.

https://www.cato.org/policy-report/julyaugust-2011/deficits-...

(I realise limiting the money in circulation to $52 is an absurd formulation, but using these crazy limits helps understand the larger system)

The difference between real growth and the amount of currency is the "metabolism" I referred to earlier.

Inflation is like the metabolism of an economy. Money represents work done in the past. Inflation means that work done further in the past is worth less than more recently. So $10 today is worth less tomorrow. Some economies have a faster metabolism than others.

If I loan you $50, and ask for 10% interest, you must pay be $55. That $5 comes from somewhere. In a physical money economy, that literally means it comes out of someone's pocket in some way (starting a business etc.). You can imagine that if we have many many loans overlapping, over long periods, we might begin to have a money deficit.

To be honest, I don't have the proper expertise to explain it perfectly. But I hope that it gives an intuition.

Just to be clear I was not making a value judgement, just an observation. I find it compelling that many traditional societies have come to this principle. I personally think that removing interest from a money system could go a long way to stabilise it.

I am curious about the events that have lead to the development of Sharia banking. It seems to be partly a shield against runaway interest/inflation. This has a parallel to the idea of usury in Christianity. Perhaps societies that avoid becoming too financialised have a better chance of survival?

Has anyone here seen it? Worth a watch?

The "big production" example that kept being referred to in university was a (Belgian?) metro system. I think it was well suited to formal verification because it had a finite number of valid states, and the cost of failure was sufficient to justify the investment.

EDIT: I now think it was French, source https://www.prover.com/portfolio-items/ratp-paris/

The phrase "imperfect automation still has absurd economy of scale" is more insightful than many full-length books.