Hacker News: yters

New comment by yters in "Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server"

yters — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 23:05:18 +0000

Aren't most discussions on HN an ideological debate of one form or another? I think my error is being on the wrong side of the popular view here. Oh well, you cannot please everyone all the time :). In parting I thank you for the great, and not appreciated enough, work you do as HN mod. My best to you, sir.

New comment by yters in "Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, 150 Years Later"

yters — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 01:44:16 +0000

I would agree with that. There is often a practical question motivating comp sci and mathematical discoveries. The difference from Darwin's case is the mathematical conclusions are never wrong, regardless of the underlying motivation. That is what I mean by culture free. Change in culture cannot change the validity of mathematical deductions. On the other hand, Darwin's conclusions in Descent of Man are wrong, and he appears to have drawn these conclusions due to his cultural bias.

New comment by yters in "Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, 150 Years Later"

yters — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:36:31 +0000

Yes of course there are cultural influences. But it seems some branches of STEM are fairly immune to the opinions of the surrounding culture. E.g. what can we say is victorian about any mathematical conclusion? Yet Darwin's supposedly scientific conclusions in this work appear to be very culture bound.

New comment by yters in "Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, 150 Years Later"

yters — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 23:51:17 +0000

Well, for instance in computer science all the theorems are completely culture free, so it is not impossible. But it is indeed difficult, and to be expected for the most part.

New comment by yters in "Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, 150 Years Later"

yters — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 22:28:06 +0000

Strange that Darwin's theory of human evolution was so culture bound. One would think looking to the science would transcend culture to a greater degree.

New comment by yters in "Scientists break through the wall of sleep to the untapped world of dreams"

yters — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 21:24:41 +0000

These really intense dreams, are you in control of the imagery, or is it something you are experiencing beyond your control? When I have intense dreams and try to control them the fidelity breaks down and I usually wake up.

New comment by yters in "Letters from House members to cable providers [pdf]"

yters — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 21:08:52 +0000

When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some of them. When they are governed by a common passion, their opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.

- Madison, Federalist No. 50

New comment by yters in "Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer"

yters — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 18:56:59 +0000

One of the neatest aspects of git that I never see used is delta debugging, where git automatically finds the code that introduced a bug through binary searching the commit history. This requires many small commits, which is tedious.

New comment by yters in "Complexity No Bar to AI"

yters — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 21:53:02 +0000

I would like to see a good treatment of Lucas like arguments. Most take the form of humans having their own halting problem. But, that objection is completely irrelevant, and it concerns me that objectors do not realize this. Makes me think they are missing something.

New comment by yters in "Complexity No Bar to AI"

yters — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 22:24:15 +0000

There are no mathematical theories of runaway intelligence growth. On the other hand there are many theorems of fundamental limits to maechanical processes. E.g. NP completeness codiscoverer Leonid Levin also proved what he calls independence conservation that states no stochastic process is expected to increase net mutual information. Then there are the more well known theorems with similar implications: no free lunch theorems, halting problem, Kolmogorov complexity's uncomputability, data processing inequality, and so on. There is absolutely nothing that looks like runaway intelligence explosion in theoretical computer science. The closest attempt I have seen in Kauffman's analysis of NK problems, but there he finds similar limitations, except with low K terrains, but that analysis is a bit questionable in mind. To make arguments like gwern and Kurzweil they are essentially appealing to mysticism; assuming there is a yet to be discovered mathematical law utterly unlike anything we have ever discovered. They are engaging in promissory computer science, writing a whole bunch of theory checks they hope will be cashed in the future.

New comment by yters in "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"

yters — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 20:56:25 +0000

Good point. Pathos is not with the boring old tech approach :)

New comment by yters in "Researchers looking for mRNA were ridiculed by colleagues"

yters — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 20:55:31 +0000

I read a similar article by Scott Alexander, about the fact some psi researchers could generate a reliable signal with their studies, but since he a priori ruled out the possibility of psi, he is convinced there is something wrong with the scientific process.

New comment by yters in "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"

yters — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 20:53:29 +0000

He is handling the integration. The maintenance of the products falls on the ops team. He is doing a great job. I just don't think he will stick around to maintain things once he is done, and we will have two stacks to migrate and maintain.

New comment by yters in "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"

yters — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 11:15:22 +0000

My internal devops group has this issue. We had a working system on teamcity and the hashicorp stack and linkerd. Now we are working on a brand new system using gitlab and openshift and istio. Highly redundant with, from my perspective, only incremental advantage. At the beginning I spoke out against this, but failed to convince anyone. Progress has been alright because of our new 10x hire who hated the old tech and loves the new stuff. But once he is out of the picture, we will be maintaining two highly redundant stacks both requiring deep technical knowledge to maintain effectively. I guess bailing is always an option, but I would prefer to be a force for good somehow. Any suggestions?

New comment by yters in "Researchers looking for mRNA were ridiculed by colleagues"

yters — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 03:41:43 +0000

The SRI at Stanford claims psi is very prevalent in the human population, but operates at low levels that require a large number of sensitive experiments to detect. Not saying they are right, but that could explain why these people were persuaded of paranormal activity, but it never popped out at you as a really obvious capability.

New comment by yters in "The Alien-Haunted World"

yters — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 03:38:55 +0000

What do you think about intelligent design sort arguments? It is hard to understand how random variation and natural selection can produce the equivalent of a biological operating system. I have also a fair amount of experience with evolutionary algorithms, and they add to my perplexity as to how random variation and natural selection are sufficient mechanisms to produce the genome, let alone how the whole system would get started in the first place. This does seem to be a pretty good piece of scientific evidence for the intrusion of something entirely unlike any physical process we know of, and capable of feats only analogous to what human intelligence can produce. This seems to me a quite persuasive scientific argument for something deity-ish.

New comment by yters in "Researchers looking for mRNA were ridiculed by colleagues"

yters — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 15:04:52 +0000

Did you ever find some genuine inexplicable phenomena?

New comment by yters in "I built ByteDance's censorship machine"

yters — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 17:12:09 +0000

My main problem with dictatorships is mass concentration camps, mass executions, torture, human experimentation, etc.

Granted, democracies have done all the above, but diligent activists corrected the system, and the scale never reached that in dictatorships.

But yes, for your average citizen, dictatorship is probably not too bad.

New comment by yters in "California State Legislator Introduces Bill to Decriminalize Psychedelics"

yters — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 01:02:56 +0000

What if psychedelics makes people more susceptible to demon possession?

New comment by yters in "Jane Austen's concept of information (Not Claude Shannon's) (2013)"

yters — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 01:00:57 +0000

I spend long periods of time without ingesting sources of information without getting bored and literally dying. Conversely, if I was constantly bombarded with useful information, I would still go crazy, and that could very well lead to literal death. I think staying alive is one piece of meaningful information out of a very large set of meaningful information, most of which has nothing to do with staying alive.

In other words, meaningfulness is orthogonal to staying alive.