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Sorry, but the whole story just reads like a bad mystery novel; tales of Russian hackers, "suspicious" Github repos, somehow-nefarious (docker?) "containers", unspecified threats made (and I quote) in "meat space".

Also interesting to note that not only has Berulis' attorney lead multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration in the past, he was also an intern for both Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. Now that obviously doesn't prove anything, but it could nonetheless be considered a strong indicator this all might be politically-motivated.

Neat concept! Although I was a bit surprised at the AI stand-in's finding. I posed the silly argument that "My neighbor's dog refuses to speak French" with the options "Neighbor is culpable" and "I am clearly an idiot": The final decision was 7/5 in my favor! But seriously, this really is a great idea IMO. The jury-duty-while-you-wait feature also seems like a fair trade-off.

Relatively speaking, perhaps, but things really have progressed by several orders of magnitude. When I was young we had access to very little "technology". (Maybe that's why people tended to be somewhat more down-to-earth?) I could change a tire by the age of ten, not to mention being fairly well-versed in a number of subjects. And I was certainly not the exception. Any given person was bound to be proficient at *something*. Younger folks these days however (on average) don't seem to think very deeply about things (probably too many distractions?) and as a result they can be surprisingly ignorant across the spectrum. Not all of them, of course, just an alarmingly high percentage....

Of course it does. The National Post article I linked to is about Mahmoud Khalil, who is indeed mentioned in the Zeteo article.

Compared to most websites these days HN is about as lightweight as it gets. I would say if you are experiencing laggy page loads, the issue is most likely something else. (Maybe disable extensions and restart?)

Iterating over some huge search space in an essentially sequential manner is generally not going to be nearly performant as simply selecting an odd number at random. You could try using a generating polynomial instead such as f(x) = x^2 + x + 41 but even that isn't going to help much in the long run. (There are Diophantine equations which one day may prove useful for generating random primes however AFAICT finding efficient solutions is still currently considered a hard problem.)

Blame it on bad culture. Good people know that orderly conduct is necessary to maintain a healthy and vibrant community. Just take a look at the Nordic countries where this used to be the absolute norm across the board. Now even there you see quite a bit of social turmoil. Many who have migrated to these countries over the years simply do not share the same values and the effects are sadly self-evident. People do not feel nearly as safe as they once did. It may not be as bad as the average American city, mind you, but there has nonetheless been a real change in the "atmosphere". (Which isn't to say "all migrants are bad". Unvetted immigration is the issue I am referring to here.) Point is, wealth-inequality has nothing to do with it.

This is pretty impressive. Given the following scenario, "A bliirg is any non-wooden item, which is the opposite of a glaarg. In addition, there are neergs (non-existent things) and eeergs (things which actually exist). Now a glaarg which is also a neerg is called a bipk, whereas a glaarg which is a eeerg is known as a vokp. Also, a bliirg which is an eeerg is refererred to as a jokp, otherwise it is known as a fhup. So the question is, which of those could be used to make an actual fire: a jokp, bipk, fhup, or vokp? Explain your reasoning." The results were absolutely spot on. "(...) A vokp, being a real, existing wooden object, can serve as a fuel source. A jokp, being a real, existing non-wooden object, might serve as a fuel source if it is combustible. However, a bipk and a fhup, being non-existent things, cannot be used to make a fire. The ability to actually start a fire also depends on the presence of an ignition source, oxygen, and potentially tinder, which are not addressed by the definitions of these terms." Any plan to make the project open source?

> But basically the entirety of physics works in a time-reversible fashion: if you could flip the direction of all the particles in a system, it would evolve back to its previous state

What does that even mean though? Certain systems may indeed time-reversible, but I would argue that most are not (practically speaking). Imagine for example a meteorite which has fallen to Earth. In order to "reverse the process", not only would it have to "reassemble itself" from the innumerable pieces embedded in the ground, it would also have to be flung back passed the escape velocity of our planet!

> But this seems to break down when it comes to black holes (it also breaks down in the various magical collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics, but the quantum wavefunction itself is also time-reversable)

I still don't understand the issue. Entropy is essentially just a measure of how close to a system is to the "average value". A high-entropy system being very close to it (and hence, "highly disordered"), while a low-entropy system might be two or three standard-deviations from the mean. A black hole with little angular momentum, charge, and/or mass would necessarily have a lower entropy than otherwise, but in any case we can calculate that without knowing a thing about what is going on inside of it. Moreover we can deduce that such a black hole would indeed be "easier to time-reverse" than one with a higher-entropy, but what does that even tell us? As far as I can tell, not a whole lot.

> While we don't yet have a good microscopic theory of what's going on, macroscopically we know that the information (entropy) doesn't just vanish into three numbers.

What information could one possibly extract from a "packet" of Hawking radiation? If the black hole was originally formed from a huge mass consisting of 80% iron and 20% xenon, for example, could such a thing be deduced by inspecting the radiation emitted by it? I would suspect that the answer would be "no". (Of course, I am just being an arm-chair physicist here.)

Somewhat tangentially, what really perplexes me about Hawking radiation (HR) is this: What happens to the individual particles within the black hole as it evaporates? Like say we start with X particles. The black hole emits HR and shrinks a bit. But how exactly does it "give up" the energy from the black hole without destroying something in return? Does one particle just disappear and now we are left with X-1 particles (or what)? I haven't found any good explanations for this.