stiff

40 ms·

361.
by stiff 13y ago
Not all things have to have a reason for existing, in fact not all things can have such reason - the very concept of something having a reason is just a product of our utilitarian view of the world and one that can not be applied infinitely
362.
by stiff 13y ago
Well, why exactly would you think that a simple to state problem should have a simple solution? It is of course false, as demonstrated for example by the insolvability of equations of degree higher than 5 [1] and by countless other examples
363.
by stiff 13y ago
I would love to read a review of this article by the good old Djikstra...
364.
by stiff 13y ago
The fanboyism in the article is just ridiculous, but I think new chasis deserves more credit than just being a "funny shape", I think it is genuinely innovative in a space that hasn't seen much innovation for a long time. Jus
365.
by stiff 13y ago
The problem is that the answers you are looking for are of philosophical nature and not of scientific one (you talk about "demystifying" consciousness, "elucidating it"). The neural correlates might not clarify what cons
366.
by stiff 13y ago
Just to put such claims in perspective, people are currently struggling a lot to build reasonably accurate models of single neurons. We are at least decades away from simulations of any value even of rats. People who claim otherwise are the
367.
by stiff 13y ago
I think we are fairly close to achieving consciousness in silicon. It would be nice if you presented at least one reason for believing this.
368.
by stiff 13y ago
The problem is that multiple times in the history of science the search for somehow philosophically sound underpinnings led to stagnation and not to progress, that was in fact what Aristotle did to a large extent and was the main obstacle t
369.
by stiff 13y ago
Machine learning might be a useful model of what happens in the brain but just like the map isn't the territory this doesn't make us robots, what would that even mean? Everything aside, biological systems are completely different
370.
by stiff 13y ago
There is no philosophical definition of consciousness, but there is none of gravity either, in the sense of "what gravity really is". Science doesn't examine what things "really are", but tries to make useful pred
371.
by stiff 13y ago
What has this to do with anything? They issued the declaration to put to attention conclusions exactly from "repeatable experiments testing falsifiable hypothesis in a peer reviewed journal".
372.
by stiff 13y ago
Looks like he became a plain old hater instead, for one the bits on sexism in XKCD are completely ridiculous...
373.
by stiff 13y ago
Are you bothering to read these things, or just searching for the term "direct access" and calling it a day? Are you bothering to understand what the OP was trying to say or just trolling and calling it a day? I didn't expr
374.
by stiff 13y ago
Wow, whatever happened to reading comprehension? Did I say Apple sends database dumps to the government? All I am doing is explaining using an example why people might consider the wording shady especially it is so gladly used by different
375.
by stiff 13y ago
Ad. 1 I think you are missing the point - "not providing direct access" is a bit like Bill Clinton saying he did not have sex with Monica Levinsky, if some company sends some institution a complete database dump of all customer pe
376.
by stiff 13y ago
There is a somewhat similar book by nobody else but Niklaus Wirth: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Circuit-Computer-Science-Stude...
377.
by stiff 13y ago
Tl;dr algorithms are representations of processes occurring in reality. That's really all I could understand from this. I would love to hear what would "algorithms being woven into the fabric of the physical world" even mean?
378.
by stiff 13y ago
I have written a configuration plug-in that I think is slightly better (for example allows local overwriting of the settings, not just per-environment): https://github.com/jaroslawr/dynamic_configuration
379.
by stiff 13y ago
It's a pity for most people this will be the only Orwell's book they will read, personally I find it one of his weaker ones, I liked "Animal farm", "Down and out in Paris and London" and his essays much more, a
380.
by stiff 13y ago
What is interesting from a scientific point of view, and this is one subject we know a lot more about than actual nutrition, is why people who are otherwise scientific minded skeptics are superstitious when it comes to nutrition (if you be
381.
by stiff 13y ago
Scheme doesn't have data abstraction in the sense Liskov's CLU had it for example, you can try to roll it yourself like SICP does, but it is not the same as having it as a language feature. Also interfaces can still be useful in a
382.
by stiff 13y ago
Be careful with criticizing an obviously smart person like this based on a side comment you didn't had a chance to ask her to elaborate upon. I think with Python she meant things like Python not having real private variables or methods
383.
by stiff 13y ago
Most criticism of Stallman boils down to the fact that people are reluctant to resign from even the slightest bit of what is convenient or pleasurable, even if ethically this would be the right thing to do or even if it is likely to cause h
384.
by stiff 13y ago
What you really want to say is not "learn C", but "learn computer architecture, algorithms and programming language semantics", C just happened to be the most convenient medium for this for a long time, but today there are perhaps better ch
385.
by stiff 13y ago
This thread reflects how little HN has to do with hacker culture those days. I read the article and enjoyed very much his description of the process by which he learns foreign languages and how he tries to make maximum use of every bit of f
386.
by stiff 13y ago
If you are not able to enjoy the present moment in your present place you can travel around the whole world and you will not find enjoyment anywhere, that's what sages have been repeating for centuries.
387.
by stiff 13y ago
The attempts to develop those techniques mostly showed how big is the extent to which creativity is unconscious (almost completely) and how little control we have over it. I can't think of a single case where a person we admire for their cr
388.
by stiff 13y ago
OK, but I would love for those heuristics to focus on assessing the content of the paper, not the reputation of the author, his peers and quotations etc. You can get some vague impression of what's going on in this paper in some 30 minutes,
389.
by stiff 13y ago
Yes, I think the intention is for E(v) to be one of the inputs of the algorithm (I contemplated E(v) for half an hour to guess this is what he means). I thought maybe the following is possible: I create a new graph with the same vertices as
390.
by stiff 13y ago
I spent some forty minutes on this, I think his "multistage graph simple path problem" is a very obfuscated version of a simpler problem where there is no need for this complicated labelling of vertices, with the information being instead r

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