Been removed from the Front Page despite the total number of points, which is pretty odd. That's manual manipulation to get that to happen, I would assume.
It's probably being heavily flagged but hasn't been marked [dead] which I suspect is manual protection. But it's also being downweighted by the flamewar filter, I bet.
It's historically important, unlike most stories on HN which seem recently to be about navel gazing outdated hardware. But HN does HN - y'all are millionaires and I understand many topics of actual revelence to the majority don't have much affect on the nouveau bourgeoisie here who are primarily white, male, and straight. I guess I answered my own question.
Good luck with being uncomfortable bald. Maybe it's not the baldness you're actually uncomfortable with.
I'm not bald, but I do enjoy exposing hypocrites whose empathy and concern for the disadvantaged is selective. Is it anything more than a rhetorical tactic to try to force your will on others?
The HN algorithm doesn't know whether a post is historically important or not. It knows the age and the votes (and some other stuff like flags and comments and the domain).
I agree, but I'd also like to defend Jackson on this one. He was brought in after Del Toro dropped out and the movies had been in production for years already. He had no prep time and seemed to exist on little sleep for years. You can see some of this in the behind the scenes recordings/interviews they did. I have a feeling they were only as good as they were because of him. Regardless, they were disappointing.
If I really need to remember something I use spaced repetition, Anki being one of the more well known tools for that. Spaced repetition is particularly useful if you need to retain information indefinitely; you can do so as long as you stick with the process. The downsides to it are the upfront cost of ingesting whatever information you're looking to memorize into what is usually a flash card like system.
As far as I understand, we do have the physical capability of housing that many people, but a significant number of the homeless are drug addicted, have mental illness, or both, and attempts to provide housing in mass like that leads to many of the houses becoming filthy and/or damaged. And who would want to give up a house for that? Homelessness can't just be solved with a housing band-aid, but needs to be addressed at the source with support for the drug addicted and mentally ill.
Having safe, stable shelter would seem to be a prerequisite to helping people deal with drug addiction and mental illness.
Baxter, A. J., Tweed, E. J., Katikireddi, S. V., & Thomson, H. (2019). Effects of Housing First approaches on health and well-being of adults who are homeless or at risk of homelessness: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. J Epidemiol Community Health, 73(5), 379-387.
We should build enough shelters for homeless, but separately for those who are addicted and those who are not. (Maybe more than two types of shelters.)
For a homeless person who is not addicted, sharing the shelter with the addicted ones means constant worry that even the little stuff they own gets stolen the moment they stop paying attention, and also lack of sleep because of the constant screaming and fighting during the night.
As someone with experience with severe mental illness (BP1) I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of a stable environment when dealing with an acute mental health crisis.
Unfortunately, if this is serious, it just makes me lose respect for him. The Enlightenment was the greatest period of human history ever with regards to philosophical and intellectual progress since ancient Greece.
I think it was serious. Norm was very well-read and his favourite literature was deeply religious and suspicious of modernity (Twain, Tolstoy, Proust).
Yes I know since I look askance at modernity too. But he was seldom serious (in a literal sense) about anything except sports. The seriousness was in the inferences, usually. This tweet (since deleted) if serious, was at least out of character.
I think the focus on sentience is misplaced. Rather, the value should be rationality, meaning here the ability use one's mind to survive and to live by reason alone. This is valuable to any other rational living creature because rationality allows one to eschew violence and live cooperatively, so it is in the best interest of every rational creature to, at least on a basic level, value and respect the life of any other rational creature. The reason we don't apply and respect rights to animals and plants is because they are incapable of doing the same to us, or even being aware of the concept of 'rights'. You should interact with other forms of life on the highest level it is capable of interacting with you.
But at the same time, I think it's doing a really good job of what it's trying to do. Google search is not trying to be a repository for all the world's information. It's just trying to get people to what they're
most likely looking for or show the most related things. Given the significance of the moon landing and the fact that no one has set foot on mars I find it unsurprising that it brings up info on the moon landing. It's seems better to assume what the user is likely looking for especially when (at least my) Google searches often take the form of "moon land neil year". I can just type things like that out, stream of consciousness, and the majority of the time I get what I'm looking for immediately.
The first is that Google has specifically chosen to call out an answer in some kind. If the query is reasonably framed as a question, there is a clear indication in the UI that the response is meant to be an answer to that question.
Now it's definitely the case that a lot of questions have some amount of semantic ambiguity that a listener would have to resolve. For example, a question about a "president" can reasonably be inferred to mean specifically a "US president" of some kind, at least if the query is from the US and is in English.
And sometimes people can ask questions where there's a confused detail. And responding with the question they probably meant to ask is not unreasonable.
However--and this is a big however--it is incumbent to emphasize that the answer is for a different question than the one that was literally asked. You see this when you do searches of misspelled terms: "did you mean this one instead?" Because occasionally, no, you did mean the term that has much fewer results.
And this kind of emphasize-the-answer can have poor results sometimes. Ask Google which president became supreme dictator. The answer makes it clear why it thinks that, but... that's a really different question from the one that was asked.
If someone asked you in-person "when did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?", would you just say "July 20, 1969"? Or would you say "nobody has been to Mars, but if you're talking about the moon..."
Google's response here only makes sense if Google said "Did you mean: When did Neil Armstrong land on the moon?"
This is going to come across as a nitpick on the title, the idea is taken farther in the article and I think it's an important distinction.
No, we should not build for wildlife. We should only build for people and what is good for people's lives. The only question then is, "what is good for people?". If not harming the biodiversity in a region and having more green spaces are good for people (which they likely are), then we should do it, but it is not the case that, as the article says, "whenever we build something...it's our responsibility to accommodate wildlife that would be displaced otherwise". Our only responsibility is to our own lives and the rights of others, animals do not have rights and cannot even conceive of them. If people want to help animals because it makes them happy, that's great, but we don't owe any moral responsibility to them.
This is called anthropocentrism. When you consider the amount of biodiversity loss and other land-use changes that've happened over the past 100 years, along with the civilizational collapses that've happened in prior history with that view, perhaps you'll change your mind.
Yes, but if biodiversity loss and changes in the land caused by some action we've taken leads to civilizational collapse, then obviously that's not good for our lives and we should stop doing it. If biodiversity has effects that are good for us, then we should build things with that in mind (I only say "if" here because I have not read much in depth on the effects of lessening biodiversity, although it's pretty obvious how it could be destructive). I support infrastructure that promotes biodiversity, but disagree that we should do it for the animals, we should do it for us.
The good news is that what is good for humans is to maintain biodiversity and what's good for biodiversity is good for animals. We are currently deficient in this area, so even if the world was full of big_curses we would still need to make some progress in protecting wildlife, if even for our own selfish reasons.
But you are wrong that animals don't have, or cannot conceive of, having rights and that we don't "owe" them anything. The truth is that we owe all living things the right to exist in the same way your rights are granted by the constitution. It may be a tough to shake off a barbaric mindset like the one expressed above, but if you don't want society to leave you behind, I suggest you try.
> The good news is that what is good for humans is to maintain biodiversity and what's good for biodiversity is good for animals.
Exactly, which is why I'm generally in support of building things in a way that maintains biodiversity. But we should be doing it for us as the principle driving this action, even if the outcome seems the same.
> But you are wrong that animals don't have, or cannot conceive of, having rights and that we don't "owe" them anything. The truth is that we owe all living things the right to exist in the same way your rights are granted by the constitution.
Which animal can grasp a philosophically grounded conception of rights? If they can't do that, they do not know of rights. Certain species of primates may react to what they perceive as fair and unfair, but this is founded in emotion and social habits, not reason, which is required for a conception of rights. You will never see an animal respecting your rights, they simply happen to act in a way that doesn't directly infringe on them, but only sometimes. Also, I should clarify, just because animals don't have rights doesn't mean it is good for us, as individuals, to do anything we want to them at any time. Unnecessary cruelty is not good for an individual psychologically, in addition to the fact that it does not add to your life in any way.
Why abolish patents rather than just fix their implementation? Patents are very important. Without them, incentive to bring things to market falls as all your hard work of designing and creating something can just immediately be taken and reused by others. This encourages everyone to sit around and wait for others to make something first, and then punishes the one who does. Why not instead rework patents so that they have to be used continuously to be upheld or increase the stringency of that aspect of them?
Is there any evidence that this argument is true? It sort of ignores the fact that people do invent, and frequently, almost as a byproduct of being alive. Plus the constant litigation around patents seems to add more friction to the process, preventing people who would materially contribute to the common good by tinkering and inventing.
I'll give a perspective, although my specific knowledge of math is not very deep at all, I've thought a lot about concepts and abstractions.
I think the difference here is that math is much more abstract than physics. The concepts backing math are built off of very low level abstractions about the world. For math, over a long period of time more and more relationships and rules were deduced from what had already been induced from reality. And if you CAN deduce, you should likely, as it provides a proof for some idea or concept that induction never could (but only if your previous inductions and deductions were accurate).
Physics on the other hand, cannot deduce as readily. It is primarily based in the realm of gathering more and more data from the world and observing physical relationships firsthand. This cannot be done in abstract math because abstract math does not exist in reality. There is nothing to observe, it is mostly abstractions based on lower level observations in reality. For example, you can measure the effects of gravity firsthand, but you cannot measure infinity, a mathematical abstraction. Infinity does not exist in reality. It is simply a useful abstraction for things that are too large or small for us to meaningfully measure.
