Sorry, but the whole story just reads like a bad mystery novel; tales of Russian hackers, "suspicious" Github repos, somehow-nefarious (docker?) "containers", unspecified threats made (and I quote) in "meat space".
Also interesting to note that not only has Berulis' attorney lead multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration in the past, he was also an intern for both Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. Now that obviously doesn't prove anything, but it could nonetheless be considered a strong indicator this all might be politically-motivated.
Neat concept! Although I was a bit surprised at the AI stand-in's finding. I posed the silly argument that "My neighbor's dog refuses to speak French" with the options "Neighbor is culpable" and "I am clearly an idiot": The final decision was 7/5 in my favor! But seriously, this really is a great idea IMO. The jury-duty-while-you-wait feature also seems like a fair trade-off.
Relatively speaking, perhaps, but things really have progressed by several orders of magnitude. When I was young we had access to very little "technology". (Maybe that's why people tended to be somewhat more down-to-earth?) I could change a tire by the age of ten, not to mention being fairly well-versed in a number of subjects. And I was certainly not the exception. Any given person was bound to be proficient at *something*. Younger folks these days however (on average) don't seem to think very deeply about things (probably too many distractions?) and as a result they can be surprisingly ignorant across the spectrum. Not all of them, of course, just an alarmingly high percentage....
Compared to most websites these days HN is about as lightweight as it gets. I would say if you are experiencing laggy page loads, the issue is most likely something else. (Maybe disable extensions and restart?)
Iterating over some huge search space in an essentially sequential manner is generally not going to be nearly performant as simply selecting an odd number at random. You could try using a generating polynomial instead such as f(x) = x^2 + x + 41 but even that isn't going to help much in the long run. (There are Diophantine equations which one day may prove useful for generating random primes however AFAICT finding efficient solutions is still currently considered a hard problem.)
Blame it on bad culture. Good people know that orderly conduct is necessary to maintain a healthy and vibrant community. Just take a look at the Nordic countries where this used to be the absolute norm across the board. Now even there you see quite a bit of social turmoil. Many who have migrated to these countries over the years simply do not share the same values and the effects are sadly self-evident. People do not feel nearly as safe as they once did. It may not be as bad as the average American city, mind you, but there has nonetheless been a real change in the "atmosphere". (Which isn't to say "all migrants are bad". Unvetted immigration is the issue I am referring to here.) Point is, wealth-inequality has nothing to do with it.
I normally tend to attribute these kinds of things to a rise in socialism/marxism, but to be totally fair I do think at least to one degree or another social-media is perhaps simply amplifying something which has more or less been around since the very beginning. Much like the scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail where the peasant goes off on a tirade about "being repressed" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKIyVnoZDdQ]. Populism is really nothing new! Nonetheless it is very off-putting (not to mention incredibly discouraging) to see so many people cheering on someone's death like a hungry mob of vigilantes. Where on Earth has all the civility gone? We seem to be living in a very cynical era indeed....
This is pretty impressive. Given the following scenario,
"A bliirg is any non-wooden item, which is the opposite of a glaarg. In addition, there are neergs (non-existent things) and eeergs (things which actually exist). Now a glaarg which is also a neerg is called a bipk, whereas a glaarg which is a eeerg is known as a vokp. Also, a bliirg which is an eeerg is refererred to as a jokp, otherwise it is known as a fhup. So the question is, which of those could be used to make an actual fire: a jokp, bipk, fhup, or vokp? Explain your reasoning."
The results were absolutely spot on.
"(...) A vokp, being a real, existing wooden object, can serve as a fuel source. A jokp, being a real, existing non-wooden object, might serve as a fuel source if it is combustible. However, a bipk and a fhup, being non-existent things, cannot be used to make a fire. The ability to actually start a fire also depends on the presence of an ignition source, oxygen, and potentially tinder, which are not addressed by the definitions of these terms."
Any plan to make the project open source?
> But basically the entirety of physics works in a time-reversible fashion: if you could flip the direction of all the particles in a system, it would evolve back to its previous state
What does that even mean though? Certain systems may indeed time-reversible, but I would argue that most are not (practically speaking). Imagine for example a meteorite which has fallen to Earth. In order to "reverse the process", not only would it have to "reassemble itself" from the innumerable pieces embedded in the ground, it would also have to be flung back passed the escape velocity of our planet!
> But this seems to break down when it comes to black holes (it also breaks down in the various magical collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics, but the quantum wavefunction itself is also time-reversable)
I still don't understand the issue. Entropy is essentially just a measure of how close to a system is to the "average value". A high-entropy system being very close to it (and hence, "highly disordered"), while a low-entropy system might be two or three standard-deviations from the mean. A black hole with little angular momentum, charge, and/or mass would necessarily have a lower entropy than otherwise, but in any case we can calculate that without knowing a thing about what is going on inside of it. Moreover we can deduce that such a black hole would indeed be "easier to time-reverse" than one with a higher-entropy, but what does that even tell us? As far as I can tell, not a whole lot.
> While we don't yet have a good microscopic theory of what's going on, macroscopically we know that the information (entropy) doesn't just vanish into three numbers.
What information could one possibly extract from a "packet" of Hawking radiation? If the black hole was originally formed from a huge mass consisting of 80% iron and 20% xenon, for example, could such a thing be deduced by inspecting the radiation emitted by it? I would suspect that the answer would be "no". (Of course, I am just being an arm-chair physicist here.)
Somewhat tangentially, what really perplexes me about Hawking radiation (HR) is this: What happens to the individual particles within the black hole as it evaporates? Like say we start with X particles. The black hole emits HR and shrinks a bit. But how exactly does it "give up" the energy from the black hole without destroying something in return? Does one particle just disappear and now we are left with X-1 particles (or what)? I haven't found any good explanations for this.
From what I understand of it the singularity is analogous to what happens in the 2D Cartesian plane with functions such as f(x) = 1/x. When x equals 0, the function itself "breaks down" because the y-coordinate extends to infinity (ie f(0) is "undefined"). In the context of a black hole that means that neither time nor space (hence neither does matter) "exist" at this singularity. In other words upon arrival the falling object has essentially "reached the end of time".
They could also be descriptions of musical scales, or maybe weaving patterns, base-encoded numbers perhaps....who knows, really? Also Egyptian writing goes back perhaps 5000 years. That is a Semitic language so it stands to reason that it too would likely fall in the same category. Anyway I do love these kinds of archeological finds nonetheless. Interesting to see if Gobekli Tepe yields even older instances of written script? (If they ever get around to a proper excavation, that is! IIRC the site is currently not open to researchers.)
Really? Windows2000 (which was based on NT) hit the sweet spot for me. Anything earlier than that seemed too buggy, and from there onward just seemed to devolve into a bloated mess of unrequested "features". (The very reason why I have been using Linux for 20+ years now as a matter of fact.) But yeah to be completely fair I suppose not everything they have produced since has been crap. There have been some innovations here and there...
Also interesting to note that not only has Berulis' attorney lead multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration in the past, he was also an intern for both Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. Now that obviously doesn't prove anything, but it could nonetheless be considered a strong indicator this all might be politically-motivated.