gatlin

> We have no idea how to do that.

I agree. However, my response if I intentionally don't over-think it, is "well she learns from a single example because that experience was painful and she wants to minimize pain."

Granted that's true as much as it is facile, but I do wonder if it hints at what the next frontier will consist of. A thermometer will happily keep reading out the temperature of a room heater until its physical form is damaged. A human child has a concept of pain to dissuade behaviors that lead to harm (in theory) (this is obviously simplified).

In what ways is it a good place to be?

Seconding this for anyone reading!

Comet showers wouldn't explain things like orogeny, vulcanism, and the slow processes which also precede mass extinctions. If the super continent cycle is linked to Planet X, or merely correlated rather unfortunately in time, that would be quite astonishing but I suppose possible.

In UTeach this was mentioned by several of my professors on the first day, as a kind of anthem we should keep in mind: that we were at that university because we succeeded in a broken system and that we should be mindful not to lean too heavily on what we were familiar with lest we simply perpetuate the system's failures to another generation.

Mathematics is the study of quantity and structure. Reasoning about how to mutate some state, defined as a set of values, according to some domain-specific logic, constrained by the execution environment and invariants, is most assuredly mathematics.

I only know of him what I read on the Internet, but Wikipedia says he is Finnish. Your original point stands though.

All of the commercial licenses I've dealt with have prohibited distributing the software, hypothetical modifications thereof, and any and all hypothetical source code.

The GPL speaks for itself. You are free to modify GPL-licensed software and distribute your modified version with the caveat that you make the source code available. Thus you are in fact free to do whatever you want to the software. The restriction is on the distribution of the software, not the modification you make.

Why does that one restriction cause so much distress?

I realized why I want App.net or something like it (tent.io?). Maybe my answer can help someone else wrap their head around why they want it.

I have been kicking around this idea for a utility to help people communicate in cooperatives and other small organizations. (Yes, I'm planning groupware. Forgive me.) These organizations tend to need much less immediate communication, and much more broadcasting. They also tend to be susceptible to stress because house business is personal sometimes.

People broadcast policy proposals, ask for rides, ask questions about specific topics like kitchen maintenance, etc. One thing that people seem to prefer, also, is the ability to organize, sort, filter on their end.

I was a junior in HS with dialup when Twitter debuted at SXSW, so I didn't get it then; now, though, I see that just about all asynchronous communication is tantamount to merging, filtering, accumulating, and transforming lists / streams. Thanks to optional metadata, you can use the same transport to allow applications to communicate. Or let applications read the human data. Etc.

And App.net is that from what I gather. Maybe it was obvious to everyone but infrastructure like this is potentially a valuable commodity. It's not just about micro-blogging. There will, hopefully, be many awesome applications of sending data and queries out into the ether and things getting to where they need to be.

Based on my limited interactions with people diagnosed on the spectrum, I agree that any notion that such individuals are inherently "more logical" is incorrect and unrepresentative.

Whether a person is logical or not is orthogonal to their position on the autism spectrum. It is useful to delineate between "logic" and "reason" here: reason is arriving at appropriate conclusions given the state of the world, and logic is the means by which we accomplish this. Using logic relies entirely on the premises chosen and assumptions made, which is where the "human element" comes into play. Many people, regardless of psychiatric diagnosis, are quite adept at cherry-picking premises such that, through careful selective ignorance, they arrive at pre-determined conclusions.

So if I had to make a very politically incorrect and anecdotal hypothetical assertion, I'd say that in my experience people on the autism spectrum indeed are more rigorously "logical" but they can also be correspondingly irrational; where someone not on the spectrum might be fine with a few measures of cognitive dissonance, someone on the spectrum might construct a labyrinthine fortress of logic to prevent any sort of uncomfortable or distasteful conclusions, and to reassure themselves that the world conforms to their notions of justice.

This is neither good nor bad, or any kind of judgment. Just supporting the parent comment with anecdata.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I can think of one reason to do things like this. If I can use a minimal subset of language features and verify their correctness, and also verify the correctness of the ways in which I combine them, then it would follow that my entire program is much, much easier to prove correct.

This is perhaps more useful in lisps or Haskell but it's still cool to think about. And, hell, maybe someone implementing a language in C could do something like this for the debugging properties.

And while yes you could take this to the extreme and implement everything on top of SKI combinators, perhaps one wants to start a touch higher up than that. Anyway, maybe that's a useful answer?

No, you became more certain that an asteroid hit a certain place to within a 11,000 year range. Title is false. From the actual paper's abstract:

> The Chicxulub impact likely triggered a state shift of ecosystems already under near-critical stress.

So this confirms that one thing (likely) happened while other things were happening. I can think of other things that were happening that would put the ecosystem into near-critical stress:

- For one thing, the Deccan traps were spewing crazy huge volumes of noxious material into the atmosphere for about 30,000 years.

- For another, the supercontinent cycle was in a period of orogeny and likely caused an icehouse climate. There would be lower diversity in "bottom rung" niches, which combined with the hazardous effect of global volcanic eruptions for 30,000 years could very likely destabilize the food chain. This bodes poorly for large megafauna which reproduce relatively infrequently and require large amounts of specific foods to meet their nutrition requirements.[1]

There was a large confluence of factors and it makes intuitive sense that, just as the abstract says, a large impact could be the proverbial straw on the proverbial camel's back. I have no doubt the asteroid was important.

But this Roland Emmerich disaster movie interpretation of geology isn't nearly the whole picture. My best guess as to why we latch onto this hypothesis, aside from how admittedly awesome it sounds, is because it's hard for us to accept that this kind of change is gradual and can sneak up on us. It takes the matter out of our hands and alleviates us from certain responsibilities. Clearly something sudden must happen because otherwise we totally have this under control, right? But that sort of waxing is not terribly useful.

[1] (Update). Note how avian dinosaurs survived, but plesiosaurs did not. The air was apparently survivable enough, but the near-shore ecosystem - which would be adversely affected by the reduction in coastlines from a supercontinent aggregation - lost its large lumbering members sitting atop the precarious food chain. None of this constitutes evidence, but I think my wild-ass guess is at least as valid as any other wild-ass guess, consensus or not.

As another commenter said, this sounds like the basis of math (or CS) itself. Understanding is emergent. Inference and learning are, to me, the pillars of it and we can do those. Understanding is the ability to internalize some idea and make correct inferences about it. But then what is an idea? And down the rabbit hole I go ...

I'd emphasize a little more that mutexes are special cases of semaphores. You know, for the skimmers.

Is this satire? This person is mad that some volunteers helping to rebuild houses after a devastating wildfire used sacrosanct Star Wars imagery to lighten the mood and make the victims happy? Outrage? This article is disgusting and why is it on HN?

I'm curious about what HN thinks of answer set programming - the de facto language is a Prolog variant but in most implementations solutions are found by reducing programs to SAT instances. Upshot is you can reason about belief in an open world.

I sincerely hope every practical developer knows the complexity and costs of their algorithms, can write a simple parser, and reason about finite state machines (ie, the non-trivial systems people build). I do get what you mean: CS is different than practical skills. Pure theory is interesting and less practical but all the things you mentioned have lots of uses in practice. You don't write a formal proof for every little thing but you use the conceptual tools.

One anecdotal data point here. I really, really enjoy not typing whenever possible. Sometimes when I'm driving I have my headphones in so I can treat Siri exactly like a personal assistant. It's useful and only a button-hold away.

I made it to the front page one time by doing something neat and hacker-y. It wasn't business oriented but I had fun.

This was informative if only because I was previously running the Arch image and Haskell is a nightmarish carnival of terror on there at the moment unless you cross-compile. Primarily my interest in Haskell has been in using reactive-banana so I wanted recent a recent version of the platform. Anyway, this made me try out Raspbian and everything's working out great.

I did a poor job of explaining myself despite my over-sized rhetoric. It's one thing to point to specific provisions of a policy and say "In the following case, Provision A had Effect B" and show the specifics. It's another to espouse platitudes with to backing data about a hypothetical scenario and claim ideological superiority.

So, no, criticisms of the Patriot Act backed by data are not stupid, especially if the criticism is up front and says "we believe this to be true."

Without a hint of sarcasm, I genuinely admire your resolve to be open minded no matter how patently stupid an idea is. I'm not as open minded as you; some day I'd like to be.

The moment someone can supply an objective, verifiable, scientifically valid proof that formal discrimination would have ended on its own, then I'll consider it. Otherwise, it sounds like after-the-fact rationalizing from people who were part of the problem and ashamed of themselves (as they should be). Ideology and academic hand-waving about the principles of some Invisible Hand moving society forward simply did nothing. The hands that broke the shackles were very visible, covered in dirt sweat and blood, and very pragmatic.

In general, I steer clear of ideological decisions with hand-wave philosophies which hold their conclusions to be self-evident. I see a lot of this in economic discussions, too. My challenge is for these ridiculous vapid ideologies to come with formal justification that doesn't involve circular reasoning or false premises.

You're absolutely correct. My original point still stands, though.

I don't understand why people capitalize Mac like that. What do they think it's an acronym for?

Environment. Working to contribute to human knowledge in a place focused on research first, commercialization second sounds very rewarding and effective.

Yes. It has the choice not to (ab)use the law in this fashion and yet it does. Assuming free will - which is the only sane assumption to keep this conversation focused and tractable - then yes. I can blame them for their own actions.

While I suspected as much, I figure it's worth asking in case there is a nobler reason that I'm simply unaware of. I don't want to presume too much.

It's not about spite. It's about preserving the motivation to continue developing free software. It's nice thinking that the fruits of my labor will benefit everyone and that derivative efforts will as well.

The GPL gets an awful lot of flack from a community that owes it so much and I truly don't understand why.

I actually despise Moose as much as I despise blindly over-doing OO. To me Modern Perl meant tackling problems in a much more Lisp-inspired way (via lexical scoping, anonymous functions, closures, lists, etc) ... but in Perl. Kind of like "Higher Order Perl."

I had the impression it was more a cultural shift, a renewed interest in Perl and people wielding it much differently. There's a different CPAN web interface[1], a lighter cli client[2], and everyone is on GitHub and writing hundreds of tests. I guess Moose is part of that shift but I'm torn a lot of the time - I support modern Perl but I hesitate to support blindly copying the warts from other languages just to appear modern.

This[3] is a result of searching for common::sense ... yikes.

[1]: http://metacpan.org [2]: https://metacpan.org/module/App::cpanminus [3]: https://metacpan.org/module/Real::Handy

I just saw a demonstration a few days a go by the UT Austin Radio Navigation lab where they spoofed L1 GPS and caused a radio controlled helicopter to somewhat precisely veer off course. I'm interested in the impact of this on aviation as well.