The article title is "Depression Levels Are Associated with Reduced Capacity to Learn to Actively Avoid Aversive Events in Young Adults". Are we sure we want to turn that into "Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events"? I don't think there's good cause to go from correlation to this particular arrow of causation here. Reverse causation or a common third factor are also plausible.

If America wants to emulate China it should start with the good qualities, like actually learning math in school.

The American system often prioritizes creativity and critical thinking, whereas the Chinese system is known for discipline and high performance on standardized tests. Simply copying one system into the context of another would likely fail.

Edit: nevermind, I agree I misunderstood the parent comment.

It's a common response to any interest in the destiny of humanity: "what's so special about humanity? What about bacteria, huh?"

I don't know, I'm human and humans tend to be social and interested in their own species? Is that weird? Does that not apply to you? Do you consider it petty and parochial to be more interested in one's own species? Are you "above" that?

If any bacteria or humans are interested in projecting the future of bacteria and their probability of surviving humanity, they should absolutely go for it.

I don’t think that’s that delichon is saying. It’s absurd to compare the lifetime of ANY species with the lifetime of the universe. The heat death of the universe is like 10^80 years away or something insane. Humans have been around for like… 10^5 years?

Even if something from earth lived that long, it wouldn’t be human. It probably wouldn’t be remotely recognizable!

That's not what the parent comment is saying at all. There's a difference between being interested in your own species and thinking your own species is somehow above the risk of eventual destruction.

It's not hard to do data engineering to the standards of software engineering, and many people do it already, provided that

1. You use a real programming language that supports all the abstractions software engineers rely on, not (just) SQL.

2. The data is not too big, so the feedback cycle is not too horrendously slow.

#2 can't ever be fully solved, but testing a data pipeline on randomly subsampled data can help a lot in my experience.

In your experience, how are folks doing (1)? The post is talking about a framework to add e.g. type safety, schema-as-code, etc. over assets in data infra in a familiar way as to what is common with Postgres; I'm not familiar with much else out there for that?

Python, R, and Julia all have at least one package that defines a tabular data type. That means we can pass tables to functions, use them in classes, write tests for them, etc.

In all of these packages, the base tabular object you get is a local in-memory table. For manipulating remote SQL database tables, the best full-featured object API is provided by R's dbplyr package, IMHO.

I think Apache Spark, Apache Ibis, and some other big data packages can be configured to do this too, but IMHO their APIs are not nearly as helpful. For those who (understandably) don't want to use R and need an alternative to dbplyr, Apache Ibis is probably the best one to look at.

All math is just a system of ideas, specifically rules that people made up and follow because it's useful.

I'm so used to thinking this way that I don't understand what all the fuss is about, mathematical objects being "real". Ideas are real but they're not real in the way that rocks are.

Whenever there's a mysterious pattern in nature, people have felt the need to assert that some immaterial "thing" makes it so. But this just creates another mystery: what is the relationship between the material and the immaterial realm? What governs that? (Calling one or more of the immaterial entities "God" doesn't really make it any less mysterious.)

If we add entities to our model of reality to answer questions and all it does is create more and more esoteric questions, we should take some advice from Occam's Shovel: when you're in a hole, stop digging.

unless you're a mathematician

then maths is really THE absolute best description available of language and nature.

but non-mathematical minds will simply wonder and be amazed at how "maths explains the world", a clear indication that somebody is not thinking like a mathematician.

> Whenever there's a mysterious pattern in nature, people have felt the need to assert that some immaterial "thing" makes it so. But this just creates another mystery: what is the relationship between the material and the immaterial realm?

the relationship between the material and the immaterial pattern beholden by some mind can only be governed by the brain (hardware) wherein said mind stores its knowledge. is that conscious agency "God"? the answer depends on your personally held theological beliefs. I call that agent "me" and understand that "me" is variable, replaceable by "you" or "them" or whomever...

oh, and I love (this kind of figurative) digging. but I use my hands no shovels.

> unless you're a mathematician

As a young math researcher, my mentor definitely did not believe that Math was the absolute descriptor of the universe.

You can definitely imagine a scenario where the world does not operate perfectly mathematically correct though Math still exists - as an abstract separate entity.

You can do this such that everytime you recognize a new quirk in the world, then you can invent some new math/logical framework to match/approximate the current understanding. I don't know if this is the reality of this world, but when you look at things like complexity theory you have to wonder "okay... maybe we designed a useful system rather than discovering a true law of reality"

At one point, many people would have said that quantum field randomness is non-mathe

I am a published PhD in mathematics.

You're doing the exact thing that makes up what the fuss is about: arguing over what is "real" without defining what "real" means.

Let's all take a minute to ask ourselves what we mean by "real" every time we use that word. It may be that everyone's talking about a different thing.

Ideas are real in the way rocks are if we are concerned with their informational being. They are real informationally - ideas and math participate in forming the world. Nowadays, LLMs, Search and other apps probably affect the world even more than any common rock. Which is more real?

I don't know what is meant by the informational being of a rock.

one way to think about rock is to acknowledge it as an informational entity. an entity which is likely more passive then lets say a human or an app, yet by simply being part of the environment, it changes what can be done in the environment. if it wasn't there and if it didn't had a certain shape, the opportunities of other actors in the environment would surely be different. after all rock can be used as a tool and even as a computer. if its still not intuitive, think about Aeolian Harp which is a passive statue, yet a musical instrument, or think how you could encode a perceptron or a simple neural net into a stone (through which a water or air would flow for example). now, even if any ordinary rock doesn't exactly encode neural net, it should be more clear that it still affects information flow. does it help?

Praised be therefore William of Ockham.

entia non sunt muliplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Thou shalt not multiply entities beyond necessity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Ockham

The real question is whether 1 + 1 = 2 is true independent of us recognizing it. If the answer is no, then math really is just a system of ideas, and you’ve slipped into psychologism, where truth depends on minds.

But take one thing and then another: you have two things. That’s true whether or not anyone notices. Some mathematics is a human system of ideas, but some of it isn’t. Arithmetic reflects real patterns in the world. Logic, too, is not merely invention, it formalizes cause and effect. Numbers, in the Pythagorean sense, aren’t just marks on paper or symbols of order; they are the order inherent in reality, the ratios and structures through which the world exists at all.

At bottom, this debate is about the logos: what makes the universe intelligible at all, and why it isn’t simply chaos. When people say “math is real,” they mean it in the Platonic sense, not that numbers are rocks, but that they belong to the intelligible structure underlying reality.

God enters the picture not as a bolt-on explanation, but as the consequence of taking mathematical order seriously. If numbers and geometry are woven into reality itself, then the question isn’t whether math is real, it’s why the universe is structured so that it can be read mathematically at all. Call that intelligible ground the logos, or call it God; either way, it’s not an extra mystery but the recognition that reason and order are built into the world.

Calling math “just useful” misses the point. Why is the universe so cooperative with our inventions in the first place? The deeper issue is the logos: that the world is intelligible rather than chaos. That’s what people mean when they say math is real, not that numbers are physical things, but that the order they reveal is woven into reality itself.

> But take one thing and then another: you have two things. That’s true whether or not anyone notices.

You cannot justify this statement without equally justifying my position.

Say you conceive of a counterfactual world without any humans in it. You know that within this world there could be a rock and another rock, you understand that this would be two rocks, and so you are reassured that one and one is two, even though no one is watching within this counterfactual world.

All of this happened in your mind. All along, you were the observer of the supposedly unobserved world you conceived of.

You are the unavoidable human observer of any counterfactual world you conceive of. You intend the world to have no human observers, but your intention fails. It is impossible. The properties of a truly unobserved world are unknowable to you.

This is why the Enlightenment left Platonism behind centuries ago. We can't say what the world would be without us, because any attempt is not only constructed within the mind, but also contemplated and observed through the mind. You can't escape projecting your systems of ideas onto everything you think about.

Once this is taken into account, Platonism has no explanatory power and is nothing more than superfluous metaphysical mystification.

> But take one thing and then another: you have two things.

This isn't true in general, because for example you can take two equal volumes of a material and put them together, you will have less than two times the volume because of gravity. The mathematical statement that 1+1=2 follows by definition, and it's useful in applications only when the conditions are met that make it accurate, or accurate enough for the given purposes.

Mathematics is useful because the physical world exhibits regularities in its structure. Talking about logos or God adds an air of mystery to that but I don't know what more it adds

For anyone wanting to go deeper, Knuth's Concrete Mathematics covers the discrete calculus topics mentioned here (and much more).

This is also known as "The Fundamental Theorem of Stream Calculus" in stream calculus. Using coinduction for an (infinite) stream sigma, eg

    sigma(0)      = head(sigma)
    sigma'        = tail(sigma)
    (a ++ sigma)' = sigma

This guy thinks bus factors of zero started with ChatGPT. Hahahahahaha. Adorable.

How many of you have asked about a process and been told that nobody knows how it works because the person who developed it left the company?

There was a blog post at the top of HN about this, like, yesterday.

I hate the current AI hype hothouse and everything it seems to be doing to the industry... but I couldn't help but laugh.

The post is great. Bus factor of zero is a great coinage.

The difference is this isn't some legacy system that still exists a decade later. It's brand new with the tag still on. And it wasn't designed by a conscious being but by probability.

I've seen from beautiful to crazy legacy systems in various domains. But when I encounter something off, there appears to always be a story. Not so much with LLMs.

It got hit by a bus before it was born.

One thing LLMs have been good for is revealing how much of personality and style is essentially mechanical.

It's an irritable engagement sink. Who needs more of that? You can find millions of those on any social media site.

Agreed re the "successful" discussion, we're getting a much appreciated essential point here. I think it would be slightly better expressed by simply saying that we want a 0% error rate. Giving a correct answer and saying "I don't know" are both just ways of avoiding error.