Hacker News Reader

olewhalehunteron A New Twist on Neural Networks

at a first glance this looks like it's going back to old 80s research on neural representations, back then this kind of stuff was known as Parallel Distributed Processing

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-distributed-processi...

olewhalehunteron Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

They're collecting data on children without their informed consent, babies today have their information capital compromised from the moment they are born, via their parents shares, purchases, and activity, without their say.

olewhalehunteron Have smartphones destroyed a generation?

I don't have the luxury to pay attention to most media or opinions administered by anyone older than 45, neuroplasticity loss can be really blatant when paired with decades of alcohol use, and they're all going to be dead or vegetative by the time a crisis comes, where in the past wiser and less pampered elders could have led us.

olewhalehunteron Are Hunter-Gatherers The Happiest Humans To Inhabit Earth?

you're wearing a hunter gatherer genome, whats your point?

olewhalehunteron A Brief History of Lisp Machines (2008)

A reference from the late 80s, "Principles of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems Development" 1 Jan 1988, David W. Rolston

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51rCBcebCBL...

olewhalehunteron The Last Analog Motion Graphics Machine [video]

was going to say this equipment is still used quite a bit and there are many working survivors left

olewhalehunteron Leave your OS at home: the rise of library operating systems

Chuck and Terry's work prove that most kernels are just really terrible compiler systems

olewhalehunteron Searching a Million Lines of Lisp

>I'm not sure why you think they don't?

If they are they either aren't offering user/programmer access to that database, they aren't doing semantic/type binds, or aren't advertising those features well.

>I was happy to ditch the IDE he inflicted on us and go back to text editors. Structured code editing is a tricky UI problem

It's reconcilable with normal text editing, just update the structure once its valid. I agree that things like block/visual programming can be absurd.

olewhalehunteron Searching a Million Lines of Lisp

Tim Teitelbaum, one of the first researchers on IDEs summarized problems like this in a quote from one of his papers.

"Programs are not text; they are hierarchical compositions of computational structures and should be edited, executed, and debugged in an environment that consistently acknowledges and reinforces this viewpoint."

It is unfortunate that most major code editors and IDEs today do not store units of code (like Lisp SEXPs) as databases to be updated as you edit, which would make problems like this or other operations like metaprogramming, formal analysis, or documentation much easier to solve.

olewhalehunteron Killer robots: Experts warn of 'third revolution in warfare'

Or keep them alive and use their bodies to harvest organs and genetic/nanomaterial capital.

olewhalehunteron Lispers

What are some examples of open source Lisp projects and codebases whose features and elegance could have only been executed as well as they are in the language, or are just great codebases in general to study?

olewhalehunteron [dead]

The Inuit people, among similar cultures, are having a problem with diabetes because their bodies adapted to a hunter's diet of high protein and fat low in glucose prior to the introduction of agricultural products from colonialism. Darn, that's actually a biological difference too.

https://www.txbiomed.org/news-press/news-releases/inuit-diab...

olewhalehunteron Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

That archaic nobility distinction is useless to the conversation, especially when the most powerful men in the world we're discussing about have the background I'm talking about.

https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/taha-meli-arvas/2017/05/0...

olewhalehunteron Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 with $4.6B Pledge

Bill Gates was not upper "middle class", his household was solidly in the 1%, he had computer programming access at his private school (this is 1968), and his mother's friendship with the president of IBM at the time was the reason he got contracted to write DOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates#Career

olewhalehunteron An Intro to Compilers

There are alternatives to this mainstream style of computer architecture, such as dataflow or hybrid quantum-classical systems, which both require a very different kind of compiler.

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

olewhalehunteron An Intro to Compilers

The symbiotic relationship between compiler development and hardware architecture design has a defining role in CS problems, and while you don't need to understand that relationship to write CRUD apps for a living, I think ignorance of it robs those who really want to understand this stuff of truths both technical and profound.

olewhalehunteron Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

Fetanyl was a new drug at some point. Pharmaceuticals are over prescribed, healthcare businesses are a leech on the infrastructure, American lifestyles are inherently unhealthy, and no amount of new drug patents are going to fix those problems. Your oncologist friends might have new drugs to prescribe but that doesn't change the core problem of soaring cancer rates due to lifestyle and environmental issues.

olewhalehunteron Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

As a former medical tech developer, the problems in healthcare are almost entirely social/political and the healthcare tech business is making things worse in most respects.

olewhalehunteron A rising sentiment that IBM’s Watson can’t deliver on its promises

There's this trend of Expert Systems being commented on as a failure and starting some sort of AI winter, yet to my knowledge they were among the first commercially viable digital animation tools, the first high speed trading platforms, and are still being used successfully in military planning. Where's the evidence that they were a failure or that they were oversold?

olewhalehunteron Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

>People are suffering right this second around the world by those that advocate the same thoughts as you are

People suffer for other reasons too though, like societal inaction and economics. Do you hold yourself to the same standard, with your lifestyle choices affecting others as they do, in the same regard that you're holding others for their political ideas? Have you adopted dozens of children from third world countries instead of creating more mouths to feed? Do you ride a horse to work to reduce your climate impact? Have you optimized your entire life for the supremely calculated reduction of suffering? How would such a calculation even be verified correct? Where does that line get drawn in your world? Is it simply on people with philosophies that are convenient for you to criticize to make yourself the superior humanitarian?

olewhalehunteron Autism and gender imbalance in tech

The findings are beyond just diagnosis statistics and have been shown to correlate with other biologically male traits, like fetal testosterone.

https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2...

olewhalehunteron Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?

http://www.panarchy.org/engels/freetrade.html

"But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade."

olewhalehunteron Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth

>we have to invent something else, more fluid, secure, economical and less catastrophic in its essence.

like UFOs?

olewhalehunteron Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism

Products and their consumers don't climb out of empty voids, and a system with government enforced patents, NDAs, or any other IP law is, by definition, not a Free Market.

olewhalehunteron Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism

Linux's value stems from the fact that it works on a lot of (proprietary) hardware and from the scarcity of robust open source OS's among mostly proprietary ones preferred and taught to students or employees through education suppliers and government contracts, it is hardly the magical gift of a free market (one sans IP law and subsidies).

olewhalehunteron Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism

Much of that "value" is built on the fact that previous code, or dependencies, aren't available to the commons, either for reuse or for inspection (security experts "create value" from fixing flaws caused by proprietary hardware or software, software consultants "create value" when they fix the same types of issues across frameworks or systems): artificial scarcity and broken Windows (pun intended) fallacies abound.

olewhalehunteron Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism

Which is why all these Enterprise software companies are sharing code to build more robust systems right? Systems that never see public licensing are still written under NDAs.

olewhalehunteron Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism

The hard majority of industry hardware architectures are proprietary.

olewhalehunteron A Look into NASA’s Coding Philosophy

the ISS laptops run on commodity hardware and software, often undocumented, and from my interview with that team the notion that they have some fully deterministic system set up for their operations is horrendously false, and they've run into many issues because of it

olewhalehunteron P&G Cuts More Than $100M in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

Marketing folks do not actually have to market any product successfully other than their own utility to thrive.