Frankly I think you could call a mathematician a fictionalist or meta-fictionalist since a proof can be construed as a narrative in the ZFC canon. I'd be willing to call a mathematician "someone who investigates the laws of fiction" for a while. In a sense, a contradiction means that a fiction can't be sustained, and mathematicians must be constantly on the lookout for contradictions.
I didn't say "just use amdefine" because I want you to agree with me. I don't care if you agree with me. I said it because it appears to solve the same problem the author has, and it is tiny.
User tokenadult, I'm asking you to explain why you think this is appropriate content for the hacker news community. Try submitting this to Reddit under /r/economics.
Content that humanizes billionaires is not appropriate for hacker news. This is like advocating for empathizing with a treacherous, deceitful bully who becomes a psychopath when provoked. A real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation. I think it is called "bipolar disorder" today. Billionaires should be contained, sealed off from the rest of humanity, and put under observation. Empathizing with them is inappropriate and stupid because billionaires are a threat to civilized society; the hacker news community should develop the intention to design technologies that protect civilized society from their depravities.
The plan: quarantine first, then incentivize dull behavior. Punish behavior that stimulates and develops the brain. Use operant conditioning to make their brains useless. Design "billionaireland" with access to all of the depravities billionaires are susceptible to such as sex with children and torturing defenseless animals. Make sure their brains aren't developing! If their brains are developing, make sure it is fetishization of degenerate activity. Don't let them develop capacities for mental activity outside what is necessary for their survival.
Punish them when they try to empathize. Empathy is the key to insight. We want to make it impossible for billionaires to get insight into anything other than how delightful, easy, and carefree their lives will be.
If the CIA refuses to turn the billionaires into mindless slaves to their own pleasure principle, the American people need to find new ways to motivate the CIA.
> we're just waiting for the CIA to get their act together and control the mental life of billionaires to the point where they are no longer a threat to civilized society
Perhaps all that is needed is a clear signal. Engineering the USA tax code to turn the lives of billionaires into a psychological hellhole is a positive first step, and this is a journey the American people will have to make with the politicians they elect.
The CIA can turn billionaires into harmless pussycats who do no more than involve you in their personal drama. How can the gears of this machine be greased? How quickly will the CIA carry this out?
Now, a story about covert, clandestine efforts to mentally cripple billionaires that explains to the American people how effective our intelligence organizations are at (A) working together and (B) protecting civilized society---this I would accept. This is progress.
And if the American people can signal to their intelligence organizations that they are receptive to the acceleration of this process...I wouldn't be opposed to that.
Social engineering is a topic that is appropriate for the Hacker News community, "social hacking". The formula is: the American people have the power to destroy the brains (and therefore the lives) of billionaires, period. Billionaires are artificially prevented from developing their brains by programs maintained by intelligence organizations that target their social network.
Crippling billionaires with mental illness: this is the first step on the road to American renewal. America can show the world
> hey, remember when we let these guys run things?
> now they're like little wind-up toys
> who cannot perform activities outside what they are capable of, mechanically
When the voices of Americans are silenced by the actions of billionaires, Americans turn to their intelligence organizations to break the will of the billionaires.
You see, this is just like picking a piece of trash off the street and putting it into a trash can.
The trash, in this case, is the thought that billionaires are not a threat to civilized society. They are. Pick up that piece of trash and put it in the trash can.
What you actually want in this context is some code that generates random deviates of probability distributions chosen randomly and a "guesser agent" that tries to guess which distribution was chosen. Then you can ask questions like,
> given some condition on a distribution of distributions, when do we feel that a guesser is taking too long to make a choice?
This is like a person who is taking to long to identify a color or a baby making a decision about what kind of food it wants and waiting for it to do so. For a certain interval, it makes sense, but after a point it becomes pathological.
So for example if we have two distributions,
> uniform distribution on the unit interval [0,1]; uniform distribution on the interval [1,2]
then we get impatient with a guesser who takes longer than a single guess, since we know (with probability 1) that a single guess will do.
Now, if we have two distributions that overlap, say the uniform distribution on [1,3] and [0,2], then we can quantify how long it will take before we know the choice with probability 1, but we can't say for sure how many observations will be required before any agent capable of processing positive feedback in a neural network can say for certain which one it is. As soon as an observation leaves the interval (1,2) the guesser can state the answer.
Now, things can get more interesting when the distributions are arranged in a hierarchy, say the uniform distribution on finite disjoint unions of disjoint intervals (a,b) where a < b are two dyadic rationals with the same denominator when written in lowest terms.
If a guesser is forced to guess early, before becoming certain of the result, then we can compare ways to guess by computing how often they get the right answer.
Observations now give two types of information: certain distributions can be eliminated with complete confidence (because there exists a positive epsilon such that the probability of obtaining an observation in the epsilon ball is zero) while for the others, Bayes theorem can be used to update a distribution of distributions or several distributions of distributions that are used to drive a guessing algorithm. A guess is a statement of the form "all observations are taken from the uniform distribution on subset ___ of the unit interval".
Example: take the distributions on the unit interval given by the probability density functions 2x and 2-2x. Given a sequence of observations, we can ask: what is the probability that the first distribution was chosen?
The answers to these questions can be found in a book like Probability : Theory and Examples.
How do people feel about a Zuckerberg presidency? As president, is Zuckerberg going to "fight the hate" in America? Is Bloomberg asking Zuckerberg to outline such an agenda?
> During a daylong brainstorming session, the group came up with a meme that subtly mocks people who blame minorities for the mundane frustrations of daily life, such as packed subway cars.
It seems that Bloomberg approves of hate speech in the form of mockery when it is directed at "people who blame minorities". It sounds like Bloomberg wants Zuckerberg to channel hate speech, not stamp it out.
What do you think? Is Zuckerberg going to take action against Baldauf for launching a hate campaign?
I doubt it.
Mockery is clearly a form of hatred, and Bloomberg wants Zuckerberg to permit this form of hatred while claiming to advocate a policy of retaliation against hate speech.
This is very misleading.
> Their mission was to come up with a social media campaign that might make Germans less susceptible to the wave of fake news and right-wing propaganda scapegoating Europe’s growing population of immigrants and refugees.
It appears that this is little more than an attempt to subvert German nationalism and German ethnic identity.
> you can hate people as long as you hate people I hate
Is it any wonder that two - Bloomberg and Zuckerberg - find common cause in directing hatred toward ethnic Germans?
Can you think of any reason why this might be?
Well I can: the holocaust. I think these two want to create a culture of hatred directed at ethnic Germans, all while claiming to be against hatred in principle.
What do you think? Is this kind of misrepresentation acceptable? Or do you find it as repugnant as I do?
> reproducibility is difficult in science generally but can be insanely difficult for machine learning
it is a computer algorithm, so by definition it is trivial to reproduce results, you just run the program again.
> I ran into this recently by accident when writing a simple RL example. With two weight matrices to learn, the first weight matrix was given correct gradients, the last weight matrix was only supplied with partial information. Surprise, still works, and I only discovered the bug _after_ submitting to OpenAI's Gym with quite reasonable results.
so you want to say that you coded a bug, but you don't have a method of testing whether you have a bug. So you didn't code a bug. And if you didn't code a bug, you can't reproduce a bug.
So yes, reproducing a bug is difficult when you have no means of determining whether or not you have a bug...
...maybe you should look into choosing a means of determining whether or not you have a bug.
This actually isn't true; you can invent organizations of the imagination and mirror those. This "imagination driven programming" is actually quite dangerous and tends to devolve into state secrets and so on since you are solving the problems created by people who "don't exist" but may in fact have lives that are SURPRISINGLY SIMILAR to the lives of people who are doing jobs that are better kept secret.
So you can get around the law...but only by risking the integration of something that should be kept secret into the organizational structure...which makes its way into your system. Most people aren't willing to cross that threshold.
So Conway's law is true for most people, just not all.
If you want to think about it from the adversarial point of view, you can say that all programs are designed to transform or destroy organizations; programs mirror organizational structures because people want to determine the "resonant frequency" of an organization and understand its "social vulnerabilities" in much the same way a physical structure has structural vulnerabilities.
You have to say which set of programs you will run, and then you have to pick how you will describe a set of programs (since the name of a set of programs is just data).
Wikipedia lets malicious editors enter lies...these lies can be very difficult to detect so you need smart people to see them. The hope is that because it is text, people know how to read and can use critical thinking...computers on the other hand do not do this with code; they apply a set of rules that governs what can and cannot be executed; in other words, the input is either in the set of programs it will run (or not).
Now, you could allow each article to name a way of translating between...and all of a sudden we are kicking a hornet's nest of code-breakers :D :D :D
So, the short answer is...YOU COULD DO IT...but why would you want to attract the attention of people whose JOB it is to do figure out breakthroughs in code-breaking?
This gets into ZFC set theory and Tower of Babel and intelligence collection stuff. Essentially the problem is that if we want to define the boundary of what we will execute, we wind up getting marginally closer to state secrets.
And then, before you know it, somebody posted the code to crack the data-link to a drone in (redacted foreign country) and this caused the deaths of ___ soldiers.
So, you have to spend some time defining the territory before you let people wander aimlessly into danger.
And the activity looks very similar to a neuron firing! This is, in a sense, THE BASIC LEARNING UNIT a.k.a. neuron. If you think about the way water flows through a river (the water KEEPS ERODING THE RIVER! How can this possibly work ?!?!!?) or the way a neuron counts the "votes" from other neurons like an automatic electronic computer, you can see similarities in scale!
identity-fixing monotone (in the prefix relation, a partial preorder) maps of cancellative monoids. It is possible to use them as a model of abstract sequential computation, so they can be used for applications such as mathematical models of compilers, parsers, ...
I would like to propose wikipedia edit history and comment deletion milestones for the hn comment system, and in addition, a comment redaction facility that works like redaction of classified documents.