Possible a result of being hacked or just a cynical straightforward fraud.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774850

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

This is especially beautiful insight giving that it has a parallel with molecular biology - proteins and other molecular structures dominate. Enzymes are made of "standard" proteins to transform particular molecular structures.

This, BTW, is also related to usually overlooked the "code is data" principle.

To be a good programmer one has to know molecular biology 101. It seems like good guy (John McCarthy, MIT Wizards, Bell labs and Erlang guys) did.

More than one zero, more than one infinity, why not? More than on nothingness, more than one everything..

The problem is Java, not Open Source.

I hope they would avoid the Second System syndrome..

Otherwise algorithms will learn nonsense and random correlations made from datasets of random noise.

Look at finance to see how it "works".

   (x=1, y=2)

The problem with a "pure democracy" is that majority cannot be smarter than the top 5% individuals, so really good ideas almost never getting thorough the bulk of a bell curve.

I will try one more time.

The rules of logic require precise definitions (as best as we currently able to produce) and to follow the rule of substituting equal for equal only. The socially constructed memes cannot be substituted for definitions, no matter what hipsters would write in blog posts.

Thinking, as in "I think" or "I am" or how Descartes put it "I think therefore I am", is based on a language. Language is required for thinking and abstract thinking and reasoning. Language comes before the notion of "I". Before any abstractions.

Argumentation is quite straightforward. Human languages has been evolved together with related brain centers and this process took alot of time. There is a fundamental gap between association of sounds or cries with some sensory patterns and ability to say "I am". How long it took? Some primates are capable of learning very rudimentary sign language after years of rigorous training, but they are incapable of developing of (or even grasping) the notion of "I" on their own. Now you might see the gap.

I would argue that language comes prior to abstract reasoning and abstract thinking, and that they have been evolved together in a mutually recursive relationship. Think of the mutual recursion of #'eval and #"apply as the best example of mutual recursion I know.

Thinking, I would say, started with a primitive, rudimentary language and then related brain circuitry has been selected by evolution. Social evolution and biological evolution together.

One could see the very process of emergence of self-awareness and self-consciousness in babies as a gradual process parallel (or rather based on) language acquisition. The fundamental difference is, of course, that all necessary brain centers are already developed and encoded in DNA (but they are still has to be trained).

This line of arguments is for justifying and supporting the postulates of Descartes about fundamental difference between a human and an animal (creationist nonsense aside). To put it another way - there is not a single scientifically proven contradictions with his definitions.

I would spare you from a lecture on basic linguistics - there are much better figures in the field. The only reference I would like to make is to the postulate of Chomsky, that language acquisition is a process, similar to growing of an organ. So, the story about Evolution is applicable to a capacity as it is applicable to any organ or a subsystem.

So, thinking in its classic definition is the capacity based on a language. It is implemented in corresponding brain centers and related circuitry and is impossible as ability without underlying lower level machinery which takes long and unique path to evolve.

As far as we know, no species went to the same evolutionary pathway which humans did to evolve even a rudimentary natural language in linguistic sense (uniform, rule-governed, arbitrary composition).

So, animals cannot think the way humans do.

BTW, in this chain of reasoning I have demonstrated the kind of thinking no animal is capable of and, hopefully, why it is so.

Otherwise it loses all meaning - cells are thinking, tissues are thinking, computers are thinking, bacterias, etc.

People seem to forget that "thinking machines" is still a metaphor which cannot be interpreted literally.

To ask "what animals are thinking" is exactly the same as to ask "what a self-driving car or a smartphone are thinking".

Thinking implies language. Without language it is feeling. Period.

Learning from experience, map making and even planning, as one might see in case of machine learning and other branches of AI, does not require thinking. It is a lower level of activity, relative to abstract reasoning, like pattern recognition.

Signaling systems and elaborate warning cries do not account for a language.

Animals only feel. They have emotions, environmental clues and heuristics, everything but a language and hence no thinking by definition. That is exactly what some call non-verbal,'animal' mind. Emotional states and behavioral patterns and learning from experience only. Look at toddlers to grasp what it means.

A crowd is a major hardwired social heuristic. When someone sees a crowd of protestors or supporters almost automatic mental processes of estimating it's size and more importantly of taking a side wether one is with it or against it are triggered. It also forms a emotionally charged long lasting memory - a hostile crowd is a major life threat. Crowd of supporters is associated with protection and change. This is freshman's social psychology 101.

Number of likes, BTW, and numbers related to social events in general works in the same way. Social heuristics are hardwired and hence easily exploited by media or sales departments. The best strategy is to convince a potential buyer that there is a presumed crowd of enthusiastic buyers behind him. Tesla is the obviously example.

Crowd of protesters is a major concern even for Trump.

Symbolics Common Lisp - Language Concepts (volume 2A)

It also covers parts of Zetalisp.

I am also big fan of pg's On Lisp and ANSI Common Lisp.

I think that carefully designed dialects with emphasis on right principles and attention to details leading by people like David Moon would be aesthetically better than a good kitchen sink. It is no coincidence that Common Lisp took most of stuff from Zetalisp, according to CLtL2.

I think it is a general heuristic that a small group of disciplined devoties would produce better artifact than an vast assembly of... general public or passionate and productive but ignorant individual. Think of Python3 vs Ruby, Go vs early C++ or Scheme vs CL. Attention to details and perfectionism works - look at Haskell syntax and prelude. (All this just to illustrate validity of my heuristic).

Car and cdr are small miracles because they give us of caddr or caadr and friends. It is beautiful accident which should be appreciated and preserved.