Hacker News Reader

gorton Inside Twitter’s Long, Slow Struggle to Police Bad Actors

Then adjust parent's argument to be about how tweets from Team Red and Team Blue are treated.

gorton How NASA’s Mission to Pluto Was Nearly Lost

Somewhat hastily compiled, here are (I think) all direct quotes from the article:

https://pastebin.com/raw/5rhv1KjE

I don't understand your complaint.

gorton The Very First Animal Appeared Amid an Explosion of DNA

Sure, but this is only possible if the original (shared) gene was really quite close to being able to transport oxygen.

gorton The Very First Animal Appeared Amid an Explosion of DNA

> Um. If this gene was the result of a mutation, isn't it possible, at least in theory, that mutation happened more than once? At two different times? At two different branches on the species tree?

Genes are long sequences of information. You could easily have quite different genes doing similar things, but if you have the very same gene (sans minor differences) it's just too unlikely to have originated completely independently twice.

The closest thing I can imagine to your scenario is where, because of shared ancestry, 2 species have a certain gene, and then some minor mutation hits both of them, and now they both have some other gene. I suppose that's possible. But they already shared the original gene to start with.

gorton Clarify Me, Please, God of the Galaxies

Magazines have traditionally had this thing where the new issue is dated as next month; maybe it's related to that.

https://ask.metafilter.com/127200/How-do-magazine-publicatio...

gorton The Real Issue with Facebook

While I like this idea a lot, I doubt you'd get them to agree to it. They probably think (rightly or wrongly) they'd lose too many people if the extent of their data collection was well known.

gorton Rising Anxiety Among American Whites

> people of color I know are worried about being in the wrong town after dark

Is it really more dangerous to be black and in the wrong place than to be white and in the wrong place? I'm not from your country but this is certainly not the impression one gets; I do know a white guy from Baltimore who would disagree, anyway...

gorton Why the Tiny Weight of Empty Space Is Such a Mystery

"I can only write this comment because I live in a universe that allows life."

Sure; but my point is, it's really quite unlikely that the one and only unplanned universe would have life, at all. Life then seems like evidence for something...

"It's like marveling about how come that those two [...] people are my parents"

By contrast, I'm not sure what that would be evidence about.

gorton Why the Tiny Weight of Empty Space Is Such a Mystery

"But our universe isn’t well suited for life, our planet is."

I suggest that most possible universes would have zero regions containing life.

gorton Why the Tiny Weight of Empty Space Is Such a Mystery

Given how well-suited our universe seems to be for life, I feel like we should admit that one of 2 things is true...

(1) There is a God who decides how things are.

(2) Many universes exist.

Actually I usually feel that the second is simpler than the first, despite my prejudices as a near-Catholic. But I'm increasingly skeptical about efforts to maintain that there's only one, unplanned, universe.

gorton Elementary Knightship found in Conway's Game of Life

Wow. I briefly played with searching for these, but was skeptical if there was such a thing. This is one of the greatest discoveries in Life ever. (Though perhaps of little "practical" importance in building other things?)

gorton Google Shopping now returns no results for searches containing “gun”

Actually - do we know if this is new? I found this from 2012, for example:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/07/05/google-...

Edit: The Telegraph picked this up just now, saying Google are "looking into" it...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/27/wine-lovers-cann...

gorton Google Shopping now returns no results for searches containing “gun”

I notice this has been pushed down the rankings on the frontpage (it was near the top a few minutes ago). Surely this sort of incompetent implementation of a politically-motivated decision by a major tech company is worthy of our attention?

(Exactly how submissions end up at a position other than their natural ranking has always been a bit mysterious to me - should I blame some algorithm thing or malicious actors?)

gorton Google Shopping now returns no results for searches containing “gun”

And "rifle", I think. You can't even do searches like "shogun" (famous novel) or "begun".

gorton Upwork banned my account for 'being dishonest'

Because of the site/system/admins, or the people who use it?

gorton Minigo: An open-source implementation of the AlphaGo Zero algorithm

Various people have tried to incorporate AG-like techniques into their Go programs. One you might wish to play with is Leela Zero, which is low to mid dan (amateur) now.

To get this working:

* Acquire a GTP-capable GUI, such as Sabaki

* Acquire the latest Leela Zero release

* Acquire a recent Leela Zero neural net

* Set up Sabaki to use LZ with the net passed as an argument, e.g. "-t 1 -p 1600 --noponder --gtp -w d16fa4c3801e55ec21e0df7ead67980fe8d4ee49188a3516818207ad28b017a6"

It's a bit of work but nothing too hard. I should mention that this may require a semi-decent GPU (my old GTX 750 works fine).

gorton LAPD arrests man on suspicion of making deadly swatting call to Wichita police

Since we're mostly debating the police action here, there's a short video available now of the fatal moment:

http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article192244734.html

The victim really does make a fairly unfortunate movement right before he's shot. Still I'm hardly in a position to say how far this mitigates the shooter.

gorton Lightning aircraft crash at Hatfield (2013)

Article from 2013, the crash was in 1962.

gorton Fractal Related to the Mandelbrot Set

Looks to me like it's trying to generate some sort of Buddhabrot, or possibly the anti-Buddhabrot from this page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot

Actually now that I look at it I think it's the combination of the two. Basically, take a grid of points and iterate them through the Mandelbrot function, plotting where they land at each iteration.

(The Buddhabrot discards all trajectories that don't escape. I don't think this one does.)

gorton Gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger observed by LIGO and Virgo

If the universe isn't infinite, isn't the idea that things sort of "wrap around"?

gorton In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

> Why is 'being ruled by white Europeans' the draw to migrants over, say, the relative wealth of the west in the aggregate?

It isn't of course.

But suppose there's a country, Foobaria, and "everyone" (hyperbolically speaking) wants to migrate there. But it has notoriously bad weather. In one sense it's true to say that "everyone wants to migrate to a country with bad weather" and in another sense it isn't.

(This is the extension/intension distinction.)

She can still be wrong. And of course it's hard to see inside people's heads and know what they really meant. One can certainly wonder why she phrased it like that -- but then, I don't know what she was asked. I'm having trouble finding this interview; is there a link somewhere?

gorton Raddit: An open source alternative to Reddit

On your 2nd point: fair enough. I apologise for the implication.

gorton Raddit: An open source alternative to Reddit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...

(Incidentally, since apparently I need to say this, I'll note that Reddit and Twitter users "gort" are not me.)

gorton Raddit: An open source alternative to Reddit

This article makes a good case:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/a-beating-in-berkeley/article/...

gorton The Turbulent Life of One of America’s Last Snake-Handling Preachers

The part of the Gospel of Mark that says one can handle snakes is widely regarded as a later addition. Modern Bibles tend to indicate its dubious status by enclosing it in [[brackets]].

gorton Google’s AlphaGo Defeats Chinese Go Master in Win for A.I

> that was essentially just a bug

I'm not sure that's right, everything was working correctly, it just didn't read out a low-probability move very deep.

gorton Google’s AlphaGo Defeats Chinese Go Master in Win for A.I

There was a lot of talk in the Go world that the time controls for that game were too short; not enough time for discussion, etc.

gorton The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo

There are other strong AIs out there now, Zen and Fine Art. Both are active on internet Go servers. They're still losing sometimes.

But if you mean the last victory against the very strongest, you're probably right.

gorton Exploring the mysteries of Go with AlphaGo and China’s top players

Fine Art's played a lot the on Fox server. It actually hadn't been seen since March 11 (at which time it was still losing sometimes), but is playing again today...

gorton Hacking DNA: CRISPR, Ken Thompson, and the Gene Drive

> Even an embryo is multicellular, is it not?

I've not read the article yet, but an answer to this question is, "not at the very start".