Why would some point of existence or meaning lead specifically to Christianity?
It doesn't. But trying to convince them to abandon Christian literalism would require an alternative that satisfies this need for purpose.
Readit Newsisaachier commented on Notes from a Flat Earth Conference willpatrick.co.uk/article... · Posted by u/willpatrick
isaachier commented on Highlights from Git 2.28 github.blog/2020-07-27-hi... · Posted by u/programeris
There's a ton of work getting the data into the correct format for this API. I, too, would love to have Greek and Hebrew available, but I'm glad that we have at least as much as this.
For Hebrew, you can try using some of the data here: https://github.com/Sefaria/Sefaria-Export.
isaachier commented on Is This a Turing Machine? lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaw... · Posted by u/martyalain
From the article:
> It's not so amazing, the λ calculus is equivalent to a Turing machine.
It seems meta3 is a very basic implementation of the lambda calculus. But I believe the equivalence of Turing machines and the lambda calculus is proven. The church Turing thesis is a bit more. My understanding is that it conjectures that there is nothing that can be computed that can't be computed by a Turing machine or the lambda calculus. So nothing more powerful than the lambda calculus exists. I'm not sure this article shows that.
Usually the combination of names for the theory means that researchers recognize both versions as largely equivalent (e.g. Newton-Leibnitz axiom).
The contention that the combined theories must be the definition of computability should be true about each theory in isolation. If a Turing machine cannot calculate any computable problem, then why bother defining a Turing machine? What is the purpose of the definition if not to prove that any computable problem can be solved using the device? The same goes for lambda calculus.
isaachier commented on Electrons May Well Be Conscious nautil.us//blog/electrons... · Posted by u/lxm
I've been trying to formulate thoughts I have on consciousness that make sense in my head, but I haven't been able to communicate it effectively.
Basically, why is consciousness always attached to the same physical body? Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness? How does "my" consciousness know to come back into "my" brain whenever I lose it (through sleep or injury, etc).
The answer that I lean toward is that there is no such thing as you or me. There is only one consciousness and it is merely being filtered through each living (or perhaps nonliving) being in containerized modules.
So, to "me", it feels like I'm experiencing my own consciousness but in reality everyone is the same "me". You are me, I am you, etc, we are simply filtering consciousness through different atomic arrangements.
For example, let's say you read about a criminal who does a terrible thing and you can't imagine yourself ever doing that. But in reality, it is the same "you", only that your consciousness has been filtered through a different arragement of atoms that has caused that "module" to act that way. It is the same YOU who committed that crime, all it took was a different filtering device to make you act that way.
Anyway, that's kind of what I'm thinking. I'm sure it's not an original thought, but I don't know what kind of philosophy this is called other than "one consciosness".
Sounds like monopsychism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsychism).
isaachier commented on How to trigger races reliably in the Linux kernel people.kernel.org/metan/h... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
I think you might possibly be overstating how complex a race condition needs to be.
For example two consumers pushing results to a single result queue is a race condition, because the order in which they arrive depends on timing and is non-deterministic. That's a pretty normal thing to have.
Many languages people think of as being safe and high level are extremely racey - Erlang is my go-to example - two processes sending messages to a third is a race. Which message do you get first? It's non-deterministic. But it doesn't have to be a problem.
What you are describing sounds like non-deterministic behavior of a thread-safe primitive, e.g. non-deterministic ordering in a synchronized queue. On the other hand, a true race condition in the queue could mean messages overwriting each other.
isaachier commented on The governor of NJ went live on TV to request COBOL programmers · Posted by u/saadalem
How hard would it be to automatically convert that COBOL to e.g. C++ or Rust? I suspect not that hard, since COBOL does not even have a heap afaik.
From what I gather, it's an issue of floating point precision. See more here: https://medium.com/@bellmar/is-cobol-holding-you-hostage-wit....
On the most superficial level:
It's easier to talk about snow or numbers in languages that have more words for these concepts than in languages that have less.
Having recently listened to John McWhorter's lectures on the history of human language, I was surprised to find out that there is no reliable evidence for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language affects thought). The Wikipedia article on linguistic relativism states:
> The strongest form of the theory is linguistic determinism, which holds that language entirely determines the range of cognitive processes. The hypothesis of linguistic determinism is now generally agreed to be false.
The first thing I did when I read this was come to the HN comments and search for people complaining about DRY:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022599
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022842
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022896
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022836
The author of this piece was not engaging in a DRY activity even if he thought he was. He (perhaps unwittingly) admits to it himself:
> My code traded the ability to change requirements for reduced duplication, and it was not a good trade.
The acronym DRY was coined in The Pragmatic Programmer, and the author of that book makes it clear that DRY is about not repeating requirements in code. You definitely don't want to deduplicate similar code if it involves multiple requirements because then you entangle yourself, which is what the author of this piece did.
The Pragmatic Programmer is pretty zealous about DRY. For instance, the authors describe how they inserted sample code snippets into the book using specialized scripts developed for that purpose. A simple copy paste wasn't good enough (see p. 100-101). Granted, they had wanted to make sure the code snippets were tested and updated as needed, but repeating code anywhere seems to be a bad practice according this definition.
isaachier commented on The Bloomberg Terminal, Explained vox.com/2020-presidential... · Posted by u/yarapavan
Can anybody get one as long as they can afford the subscription?
Having worked there, I believe the answer is yes, assuming you aren't living in a country that has an economic sanction against it, etc.