Recent submissions

Comment · 3 hours ago
> So why does everyone love the AI Data, but hate the idea of working to make something like him possible?

Because there is exactly one Data. The federation has thousands of ships with millions of people on board, most of them are completely unaffected by/never coming into contact with that one slightly quirky officer on the flagship. In reality, we don't know what would (will) happen. Do we get one AI and is it happy staying the only one? And will it occupy a human sized body like Data or will it want to grow to be a Dyson sphere? Or will it replicate into a bunch of von-Neumann probes to spread itself throughout the universe?

He also typically doesn't use his super-human abilities much. He could easily plug himself into the Enterprise and fight better than having Worf at the tactical console, but he doesn't. He could also diagnose much faster than Dr. Crusher reads the tricorder, but he doesn't. In reality, as soon as there is something that can do whatever much better than a human, that human is going to lose his job.

Adding to the previous point, the road to getting to Data level AI is full with people losing their jobs (and soon probably also their lives) because the people in charge of developing such technology don't want us peasants around. You may not like it, but everyone defines themselves by being good at something. Doesn't matter if it's programming, swimming, cooking, being a mother, building houses, etc., everyone has _something_. Even if we don't have an exponentially exploding super intelligence that would be completely alien to us, what would happen on a global level if we have robots capable of doing any job better than humans? Sure, we could of course say humans prefer to work with other humans, but maybe not everyone wants to do that and you'd also just get outcompeted by someone working with robots.

And that's the thing that scares people. Nature is cruel and we are absolutely not ready to dealing with this completely new situation of the possibility of us no longer being the absolute top of the chain. The best outcome for us would be to merge into some sort of cybernetic lifeforms with the AI, but even that is going to take a while and in the meantime people still need to feed their families. As Picard said, one Data is a curiosity, a thousand Datas is a race.

Comment · 22 days ago
An abbreviation for "something"
Comment · 2 months ago
They were talking about what it costs the company, not just the salary. There are taxes, insurances, equipment costs, etc.

10k might be a bit too high, but it's far from "absolutely ridiculous" amounts of being too high. An employee with a 5k salary can easily cost the employer 7-8k

Comment · 3 months ago
Ruff is actually a formatter too
Comment · 3 months ago
It is more obvious with some and a bit more nuanced with others, but in general yes. Just like you can typically see the flat/wide nose in Africans and Asians but not Europeans. Again, there is no implication of one being "better" than the other here, but don't pretend it's impossible to categorize people like this.
Comment · 3 months ago
Skin color and (facial) bone structure for example. Like it or not, but humans have adapted to living in different climates and have different ancestral lines. Take a picture of an average black person and edit to white skin, it will still not look like a white person.

As the commenter above you already said, this is not a bad thing. People on _hacker_news should be able to understand that being able to define the ==/!= operators on something does not automatically mean that you can define < and >.

Comment · 6 months ago
The problem is what follows. They will make it mandatory to use the electronic ID to do anything, resulting in total surveillance. And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing.
Comment · 1 year ago
I would guess that Ada is simply more known. Keep in mind that tech exploded in the past ~3.5 decades whereas those languages are much older and lost the popularity contest. If you ask most people about older languages, the replies other than the obvious C and (kind of wrong but well) C++ are getting thin really quickly. COBOL, Ada, Fortran, and Lisp are probably what people are aware of the most, but other than that?
Comment · 1 year ago
If you have lots of pointers, you're writing C, not C++.
Comment · 1 year ago
> But my main gripe with tabs is that no one agrees on the width.

That's the entire point of tabs. One tab means one indentation level and you as the user can decide how that's displayed. Spaces forces everyone to see the code exactly as whoever decided on his favourite width and that is in the best case "only" annoying to people with different preferences and in the worst case actively hurtful to people with disabilities.

The only argument spaces people ever have is "some of my colleagues are too stupid to properly indent with tabs and align with spaces" and that is trivially fixed by either of those:

- don't use alignment, it's useless anyway

- get better coworkers

- educate your coworkers

- use commit hooks to check wrong usage

So basically there is no argument left on the spaces side at all^[1]. Meanwhile tabs semantically mean "one indentation level", take up less bytes, and most importantly allow everyone to have their own preferences without affecting other people. And honestly I am insanely baffled by how many people don't get the importance of that last part. Accessibility like that costs you nothing but means the world to other people, similarly how we have ramps at public buildings for the elder, wheelchair users, strollers, and so on. And not to mention the fact that there are a lot of autistic people in programming, which often have a harder time dealing with things not being as they want them to be. Is there any reason to choose an objectively inferior method and force that onto those demographics just because "muh alignment"?

[1] Okay fine, there is one: "Tools I don't own don't display tabs as I want them, for example GitHub with their retarded default of 8". But first of all you can change that if you're logged in and second you're supposed to use your IDE and not a web interface...

Comment · 1 year ago
Ah, I didn't know that. To me your sentence read like autists out themselves by wearing a smartwatch.

Fully agree with you on that, the less data they have, the better.

Comment · 1 year ago
> and wearing a fitbit or smart watch.

Since when is wearing smart watches only for autists?

Comment · 1 year ago
You should get your calculator checked. 9.11 is definitely less than 9.9
Comment · 2 years ago
There is a GitHub icon directly at the top right of the side so your first two steps can be combined into one shorter one. But yes, screenshots should absolutely be on the home page, and prominently so.
Comment · 2 years ago

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