Hacker News: 0815test

New comment by 0815test in "The Future of Mathematics? [pdf]"

0815test — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:25:12 +0000

Power, perhaps. But I'm a bit skeptical about usability. Lean doesn't even use one of the most obvious things that make interactive proof systems far more usable - a declarative mode instead of the usual tactics-based scripts. (Yes, you can kinda sorta fake the former with "structuring" tactics, except not really - declarative proofs are really their own kind of thing.) There even used to be systems that automatically rendered inputed definitions and declarative proofs in natural language (given that the basic terms and symbols were previously defined of course) which does enable even an average mathematician to easily figure out what the system is up to. You just can't do this properly if all you have is a list of "tactics" fiddling with the prover state.

New comment by 0815test in "Our journey to type checking 4M lines of Python"

0815test — Sun, 08 Sep 2019 09:28:08 +0000

How so? Rust is much, much less complicated than C++, a language that's routinely taught to beginners. Python is far more complex than either of those, especially once you account for the incidental complexity in whatever "packages" you're interfacing with - Rust simplifies a lot of that stuff without giving up on performance.

New comment by 0815test in "Universal Basic Income Is a Bad Idea"

0815test — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 17:04:47 +0000

Indeed, the "at a mere fraction of a UBI’s cost" claim is outright ignoring the economic cost associated with very high marginal tax rates. But Acemoglu also mentions the NIT, which would work a lot better than either. And, to be fair, the best-known economic models of non-linear income taxation imply that marginal tax rates on a NIT should actually be fairly substantial (60% or so would not be out of the question!), so as to keep the break-even point from getting too high; the rates just shouldn't be as high as 100% or more!

New comment by 0815test in "Universal Basic Income Is a Bad Idea"

0815test — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 16:57:51 +0000

A bit of a clickbait title. Acemoglu does say that a 'UBI' is a bad idea, but then advocates for the NIT (Negative Income Tax), which actually works in much the same way. What he actually seems to be saying is that way too much UBI advocacy makes unrealistic claims about what a UBI-ish system might look like - and it's hard to disagree about that!

New comment by 0815test in "Debian 10 Buster: First impressions on a 2017 laptop with an M.2 NVMe SSD"

0815test — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 08:37:17 +0000

Debian's current, supported version is the stable version. The reason why it's only released every two years and why it feels so 'old', is because it takes Debian Developers many months to "further harden" it before release. It wouldn't make sense to release it under a quicker schedule. Debian does offer "rolling" channels with prompt updates (testing, unstable) but those are officially not meant for real, production use.

New comment by 0815test in "Debian 10 Buster: First impressions on a 2017 laptop with an M.2 NVMe SSD"

0815test — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 06:20:05 +0000

I wouldn't be so sure. Linux still makes very good use of spinning rust media, and on a modern system with 2GB+ RAM (and a reasonably light distro like Debian) much of it ends up being used as disk cache so drive speeds aren't even that relevant. SSD's do speed up the boot process though, I'll give you that.

New comment by 0815test in "A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary"

0815test — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 10:25:15 +0000

This, so much. I for one find the vast majority of so-called "high art" and "high culture" to be frankly depressing and off-putting, rather than "grand" or "transcendent" in any way. In the best of cases this is somewhat offset by the HNish intellectual interest and curiosity one can take in the stuff (and some variant of this is an often-cited point that's supposed to demonstrate the superiority of "high" culture) but all things considered, I'd rather explore the hidden intellectual interest of things that are usually dismissed as mundane, "middlebrow" or even "lowbrow".

New comment by 0815test in "Building a Raspberry Pi 3B+ full keyboard handheld"

0815test — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 09:30:33 +0000

IME, touch screens are simply way too error-prone for any sort of serious work. You can make them work, but only by adding a "swipe to confirm this input" step for any potentially-destructive activity. (AOSP "recovery" environments do have this, for a reason!) Current command-line environments are not well setup for this, but you could make this work in combination with a "web"-like interface (especially if designed around REST principles).

New comment by 0815test in "Linux kernel drivers in Rust might become an option in the future"

0815test — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 09:13:57 +0000

There's nothing wrong with Go, in its proper domain! Heck, maybe the typical program written in a GC'd "scripting"-like language should be rewritten in Go. Rust is nice, but sometimes you really can't do without a GC.

New comment by 0815test in "Why Are So Many Developers Hating on Object-Oriented Programming?"

0815test — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 21:51:57 +0000

Implementation inheritance does more than break encapsulation. It creates inherent fragility because of how it makes code defined in a base class dependent on behavior that may be overridden willy-nilly in a derived class; the possibility of overriding means that the whole bundle of public and protected methods/fields is essentially part of an object's external interface, due to its open extensibility - with method implementations typically calling through that same interface. This is far worse than what you would get with a plain old non-OOP program, even one that doesn't use encapsulation at all! In most cases, implementation inheritance can be treated as simply a bad idea that should be avoided altogether - composition is clearly the better approach.

New comment by 0815test in "Why doesn't mathematics collapse, though humans often make mistakes in proofs?"

0815test — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 15:19:50 +0000

> I am sure within 10 years every professional mathematician will use formal proofs.

They said the exact same thing 10 years ago - see e.g. https://www.vdash.org and the AMS Notices special issue on formal proof from around the same timeframe. Formal proofs are hard, sometimes tedious and not always very intuitive. They're slowly spreading out from the most "synthetic" subfields of math (the ones where you're basically working with unfamiliar "rules", but not with a huge library of proven results), but progress is really slow - definitely slower than many people would expect!

New comment by 0815test in "Jeffrey Epstein: Financier 'found dead in cell' in New York"

0815test — Sat, 10 Aug 2019 14:36:54 +0000

I don't think we can know this for sure. He was definitely a sex predator, quite possibly a sociopath, but to call him a psychopath with a 'Reptilian' emotional structure seems like a step too far

New comment by 0815test in "What Hokusai’s Great Wave tells us about museums, copyright, online collections"

0815test — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 15:25:50 +0000

Fubding may be a big deal for museums in the abstract, but how much funding do these museums raise from selling "licenses" to reproduction of these public domain works? It can't be that big of a deal, and museums can still request payment for endorsed reproductions (basically a quasi-sponsorship arrangement targeted at high-profile reusers of these works, driven by signaling goals - "we pay for the museum's endorsement, this shows we're serious!" and broadly-aligned incentives - "the more reproductions the better, for both the museum and the reuser") without any need for quasi-copyright claims.

New comment by 0815test in "A Pixel Is Not A Little Square (1995) [pdf]"

0815test — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 20:03:21 +0000

Lanczos interpolation seems to beat a gauss filter for me. It has some overshooting/ringing effects of course, but the improved sharpness is a great tradeoff compared to the blurriness of gauss filtering. Of course, gauss filtering might still play a residual role in analog systems, such as the one that physically displays stuff via a CRT screen.

New comment by 0815test in "Senescent cells stop producing nucleotides: new research"

0815test — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 16:41:35 +0000

A "new cause of cell aging" might cause trouble for the somewhat-speculative programme of SENS, the pursuit of long-term "negligible" senescence via regenerative medicine. In this case, if it turns out that telomerase is needed to prevent cellular senescence, it seems you can't use whole-body inhibition of telomerase as a cure for cancer, which is the approach SENS is proposing. It doesn't make all regenerative medicine useless, but it might be a challenge.

New comment by 0815test in "How Weight Training Might Change the Brain"

0815test — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 07:25:41 +0000

The difference shows up as you lengthen the session. Aerobic exercise is efficient for long exercise sessions where the goal is to build up general endurance, because it's not inherently time-constrained like anaerobic exercise is.

New comment by 0815test in "How Weight Training Might Change the Brain"

0815test — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 05:39:08 +0000

> An in-shape, muscular person looks like they have dedicated a non-trivial amount of time to not software.

Hitting the gym can actually be pretty complementary to writing software or doing other sorts of engineering in the best possible way. For example, many people are psychologically messed up due to some sort of mental "baggage" that basically shows up as a somatic fight-or-flight response, albeit generally in an in-set, chronicized form rather than a literal stress reaction. This can place a significant cap on both your executive function and your self-perceived mental acuity. Hitting the gym is an excellent, time- and cost-effective way to work that stress out of your body and mind!

New comment by 0815test in "Ask HN: Recommendations for AI generated music software?"

0815test — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 05:28:59 +0000

> Drop the Ai, it's overkill.

Well, if you do want to use AI, this project is totally open source, "real" AI and pretty damned easy to use,[0] and generates something that's pretty darn close to SOTA as far as actual "musical" interest goes! Unfortunately, it seems to need Python 2. It would be really nice if someone forked the project (it's pretty researchy/proof-of-concept right now!) and committed to maintaining it for the foreseeable future, to run on whatever supplants Python 2 as the "standard" platform for Theano, when that version of Python goes EOL.

[0] https://github.com/hexahedria/biaxial-rnn-music-composition

New comment by 0815test in "What If Consciousness Comes First?"

0815test — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 17:25:39 +0000

To the extent that "the what it's like to be conscious" is part of physics - that is, to the extent that it enters into causal relations with the rest of the universe, it can of course be described as such. However, the way by which such casual relations occur is itself of interest, since it opens up other means of description that are not dependent on the inherent limits of an "outside" observer, acting through known physical mechanisms to make her observations.

New comment by 0815test in "The Rise and Fall of Object Oriented Programming"

0815test — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 19:59:52 +0000

Implementation inheritance may have its uses, but it's not for the faint of heart. Its defining feature is _open recursion_; that is, defining an object's external interface (its bundle of public and protected methods) in terms of itself (in that any method may be defined as calling any other method of the same external interface) and then leaving the whole thing open for arbitrary overriding in "derived" classes, via a "tying the knot" trick. Most treatments of OOP brush over this feature, but it creates a huge amount of complexity. It is even proper to say that something like this should be avoided at all costs, IMHO.