Generally an "undisputed champion" title would require a level of effort that the AlphaZero team apparently isn't interested in. They like to run matches between AlphaZero and Stockfish in private under their own controlled conditions, and publish the results. The rest of the computer chess world likes to run tournaments in full public view, and there are several entities which run tournaments between engines that way which can be used to gauge the relative strength of the engines.
What will be interesting is to see the effect on Leela (https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lczero), which is public and open-source, takes part in public tournaments, and is built -- as much as possible, based on what's been disclosed in the papers -- to use the same approach as AlphaZero.
I like to stand up on it and yell out my views. Sometimes I let my friends use it that way, too.
Some guy comes along and would like to use my soapbox to yell out his views. But I don't like him and I don't agree with his views.
Would you like the government to come force me at gunpoint to let him use my soapbox?
What you're arguing, basically, is that once my soapbox gets popular enough that lots of people want to use it, you do want the government to force me, at gunpoint, to let them use it even when I find their views repugnant.
Or, basically, what this person said, and they said it better and in fewer words:
> Would you like the government to come force me at gunpoint to let him use my soapbox?
That's easy, are you the only one with that soapbox? Do you own all the soapboxes? Are you a Corporation who is taking advantage of it's market dominance and near monopoly on modern free association to control public discourse?
So yes if your soapbox networks are now an integral part of public debate then the government should either regulate you or nationalize your assets for the public good. It's no different from why ISPs should be kept neutral, why power companys should be kept neutral and why public highways should be kept neutral.
> to prevent an angry mob from taking away someone's platform
What? My reply had nothing to do with defending platforms from angry mobs. To reiterate in case you are misunderstanding something, if a company fits the criteria I stated in my previous reply (aka companies like Google/Alphabet) then it should be either regulated or nationalized.
So no, nothing about preventing angry mobs from taking over someone's platform. Unless you consider the government regulating businesses who are abusing their monopoly on public discourse to be an angry mob.
Honestly can't tell if you are trying to make a weird gotcha here or flat out replied to the wrong post.
As the kids say these days: you accidentally said the quiet part out loud :)
When it was Margaret Sanger being prosecuted for distributing information about contraception, well, there's a perfectly reasonable justification for that law! Women can't just go around having sex without consequences! When it was theaters refusing to book touring companies of South Pacific, well, it's Communist to say that interracial marriage is OK! And we're at war with Communism! When it was movie studio associations and comic book publisher associations enforcing "codes" to avoid having formal censorship imposed on them by law, well, topics like sex and drugs are objectionable, and people shouldn't be encouraged to question authority figures!
The people complaining today about being "silenced" tend to hold the same types of views as their predecessors who used to do the silencing. And their predecessors didn't stop at just boycotting or otherwise exercising their right of free association (and disassociation). Even if it's not, in the end, held to be fair play, turnabout is a nice source of schadenfreude.
The problem with the, "ha! now you're getting yours!" attitude is that the situation will inevitably flip, and "your" side will be on the receiving end. Again. Rinse, repeat.
Meanwhile, the power of the tools keeps growing until one day, it will be absolute. Whoever is on the wrong side of the ideological coin flipping when that happens will be in big trouble.
>The problem with the, "ha! now you're getting yours!" attitude is that the situation will inevitably flip, and "your" side will be on the receiving end. Again. Rinse, repeat.
Yep. Believe it or not, it’s possible for what’s seen as right today to be considered wrong tomorrow and this can be a sign of progress in society.
See slavery, bloodletting, alchemy. Although with Bitcoin’s popularity, it seems as though alchemy is back in again.
> Believe it or not, it’s possible for what’s seen as right today to be considered wrong tomorrow and this can be a sign of progress in society.
Of course I believe that.
I also believe that the tools the world uses to communicate are controlled by a small number of people who may not always share in whatever the prevailing tolerant attitude of the day is.
It could just as easily be argued that, instead of "flipping", or swinging back and forth like a pendulum, the consistent trend of the past 400 years or so is toward increased tolerance of everything except intolerance.
There are people trying to reverse that trend, of course, but the volume at which they're currently screaming that they've been silenced is, I think, a pretty good indicator of the trouble they're having trying to pull it off.
Breaking the site guidelines like this is not ok, regardless of how wrong you think someone is. We've had to warn you about this more than once before. If you keep doing it, we will ban you.
Their "punishment" is that they have to build their own platform because the owners of other platforms are exercising their freedom of (dis)association. Nobody's made it illegal for them to build their own platform, and in fact the folks on the extreme right have been building and promoting their own platforms for years and years.
And let's be honest: we're not talking about people who are "being punished because of the horrible behavior done by other people years ago". We're talking about people who are being shunned in the present day precisely because they want to revive all those horrible things and start doing them again. They don't just want a platform where they can lob slurs at Jewish people all day long; they want to re-build the concentration camps and finish what Hitler started. They don't just want a platform where they can use the n-word at will; they want a return to at the very least Jim Crow and the lynching era, if not all the way back to full-on chattel slavery of dark-skinned people.
I'm OK with them being told "go build your own forum to talk about how much you want to do that". To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?
> sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?
Would you please stop posting to Hacker News in the flamewar style? I'm sure you can make your substantive points without aggressive snark and internet shaming à la Twitter. Please do.
Really what you're saying is "start your own credit card."
Hatreon launched as an alternative to Patreon. Know why Hatreon closed down? Visa shut it down. [1]
If Visa bans you, no payment processor will work with you. Not PayPal. Not Stripe. Not Braintree. Not Authorize.net. You are cut off.
So yes, of course Conte says he "welcomes competition" in the article. Any legitimate competition, that caters to the voices booted by Patreon, gets squashed by Visa. There cannot be any competition.
So all anyone actually has to do if he wants to share views the American elites find distasteful is go start his own bank (takes $12 to $20 million and jumping through a load of regulatory hurdles, according to Wikihow [2]), roll out his own credit card, get mass market adoption of that card, create his own payment processor to process the card, found registrars and hosting companies that use that processor, and start a platform.
We need a digital Bill of Rights set up before there's nothing left online but the most sanitized, P.C.-friendly content. A place where everyone has to act fake-nice and pay lip service to beliefs he doesn't really hold so no one will think he's guilty of bad-think. That might sound like a utopia to some, but to many of us it sounds like the opposite.
> To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?
A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die."
People with views like these were behind the French Reign of Terror, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, and the Nazi concentration camps. In the end, in all cases, the instigators ended up on the receiving end of the same kinds of punishments they put in place for those who disagreed with them.
History is filled with examples of policies boomerang'ing back on those responsible for them. Just another way of saying, be careful what you wish for, because few wishes come without a catch.
This comment goes very bad when you start accusing the other person of reeducation camps, reign of terror, mass murder, and all the rest of it. Please review the site guidelines and keep this vicious, tedious slop far away from HN, if you want to keep commenting here.
Among many other rules that your comment broke, there's this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." You're required to follow that rule, and all the others, whether the other person does or not.
Edit: it looks like this account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed, as the guidelines explain, and we ban accounts that do it. I've banned this one. If you keep creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with, we will ban your main account as well.
Let me be clear: I do not see it as an inherently bad thing if Nazis have to put in more effort than other people to find or build a platform on which they can spew their thoughts. I do not see it as the first step on a slippery slope to a "sanitized, P.C.-friendly" world. I do not accept the dilemma you pose, in which either we must allow Nazis to run around threatening mass murder or else nobody can say anything.
I think a world without Nazis in it would be a better world than the one we have, and I think the fact that several countries already have laws in place to restrict the speech of Nazis, and they haven't led to your dystopian outcome, is a strong empirical counterargument to what you suggest.
A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die."
You accidentally mixed up your scripts -- you're in favor of the people who argue for rounding up their enemies into death camps, remember? You think those people are great, and need special support and protection. So if I were to argue for rounding you up and throwing you in a death camp, you would suddenly be on my side and offering every resource you have to help me further my glorious cause. Right?
Posting like this is unacceptable on HN. Nazi evil doesn't entitle you to pour acid all over the container here. Regardless of how right you are, venting bile and taunting others helps nothing and is destructive of everything we're trying to achieve here, such as hopefully have a place for discussion that isn't flaming shit. We need experienced users like you to help build that, instead of breaking the site guidelines blatantly. This whole subthread has been hellish, and it's extremely disappointing.
Please review the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
Your key flaw, and HN's key flaw -- and to be fair, one shared by a lot of other people! -- is the pursuit of civility as an end in itself. Horrendously evil people can accomplish their goals while publicly conducting themselves with perfect civility, as history has taught us again and again. And HN's stance is that that's OK, because all that really matters is they're civil about it.
This isn't the first time you've been told this. It's not going to be the last time you'll be told this. And I know telling you this isn't going to change anything, but I have to try anyway. We know now beyond any doubt (and a legion of Cassandras were telling us long ago) just how easily social-media sites (and yes, HN is one) can turn into instruments and enablers of radicalization despite openly enforcing "civility".
You know what the solution is. You know, on some level, that civility isn't an end in itself; you know that the actual ends to which people use civility as a means matter. You know some of those ends are very, very bad. And you know how to recognize the people doing it. You also hold in your hand the power to do something about it.
Abandon the civility-at-any-cost policy. Stop being an enabler for the stuff I've been responding to in this thread. Take it from an "experienced user" who's had to learn this the hard way when moderating elsewhere. Or, in keeping with the season, treat this as a visitation by a spirit who warns you of the chain you're winding about yourself, link by link, and change it while you still can.
I'm always a bit surprised by people who want to bring up historical analogies without admitting that the US has a long history of censorship; if anything, the type of hard-line free-speech stance assumed by many internet forum posters is an incredibly recent development in American law. And both public (enforced by law) and private (enforced by industry associations or the like) censorship regimes continue to exist in the US today.
From the perspective of Unicode, no. What you're looking for here is what Unicode calls "equivalence", and it comes in two variations: canonical equivalence and compatibility equivalence.
For example, "é" can be written as either U+00E9 LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE, or as the sequence U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E followed by U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT. These two options have canonical equivalence; what this means is that Unicode treats them as two ways of specifying exactly the same thing.
Now, consider "½". That's U+00BD VULGAR FRACTION ONE HALF. Generally you can replace that with the sequence U+0031 DIGIT ONE, U+002F SOLIDUS, U+0032 DIGIT TWO ("1/2"). This is not quite the same thing; most places where someone writes "½" can safely be replaced by "1/2", but not necessarily all, and it definitely doesn't work in reverse. This is compatibility equivalence, and under compatibility equivalence "½" maps to "1/2".
So to get to your actual question: U+017F LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S has compatibility equivalence with U+0073 LATIN SMALL LETTER S. But U+03C2 GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA does not have any type of equivalence with U+03C3 GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA.
If you follow the general recommendations for things like comparing Unicode identifiers, you'll apply normalization to form NFKC (which decomposes by canonical equivalence, then recomposes by compatibility equivalence); this will turn a "ſ" into a "s". It will never turn a "ς" into a "σ".
If you're just comparing strings then just do character-at-a-time comparison, which allows you to decompose (no need to recompose) and only one character at a time (look ma', no allocation needed), compare the two decomposed characters' codepoints, then fail or move on to the next character. I call this form-insensitive string comparison.
There's nothing pseudo about it. To normalize both inputs first then compare, or normalize one character at a time and compare that is equivalent. There is a maximum number of codepoints in a canonical decomposition (or at least there used to be).
This is actually implemented in ZFS. (And also character-at-a-time normalization for hashing.)
I don't see how homoglyphs enter the picture. Can you explain?
A lot of languages take their date/time formatting from C strftime (and quite a few simply use light wrappers around actual strftime), where the format code for ISO year is %G.
And FWIW, Python's (strftime-based) datetime library won't let you mix ISO and non-ISO format codes. Trying to use %G with %m, for example, raises an exception, as does trying to use %Y with %V (%V is the ISO week number format code).
And just to clarify a bit: the specific restriction Python imposes is that if a strptime() format string contains one of %G (ISO year) or %V (ISO week number), it must also contain the other one, and must contain a day-of-week format code (%A, %a, %u, or %w).
Examples:
'%G/%m' is illegal; it contains %G without %V, and does not contain a weekday format code. Attempting to call strptime() with this format raises ValueError.
'%V/%u' is illegal; it contains a weekday format, but has %V without %G. Raises ValueError.
'%G/%V' is illegal; it contains both %G and %V, but does not contain a weekday format code. Raises ValueError.
'%G/%V/%u' is legal; it contains both %G and %V, and contains a weekday format code.
'%G/%V/%w' is legal; it contains %G and %V and a weekday format code. It's a bad idea, though, because %w numbers days 0-6 starting Sunday, while ISO (%u) numbers them 1-7 starting Monday.
If you need to work with ISO week date formats for some reason, you should stick to one of these two format strings:
'%G-W%V-%u'
or
%GW%V%u
The date of this comment (December 26, 2018) comes out as either '2018-W52-3' or '2018W523' using those format strings.
What is the rationale for forcing the presence of the day of week? It seems plausible that a weekly report, generated every Sunday for the previous week, would have %GW%V as the title. Seems more correct than using %V together with %w at least.
I don't know for certain, but what I would guess is that strptime() without a day-of-week indicator is ambiguous.
strptime() produces a datetime object, which consists of year, month, day, hour, minute, second, microsecond, time zone, fold. If you do something like "2008-12" with format "%Y-%m", strptime() will fill in the remaining arguments with day=1 and all time components set to zero, so what you get is datetime(year=2018, month=12, day=1, hour=0, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0).
That works because it's unambiguous -- there aren't multiple possible numbering schemes for the day of the month in the strptime() formatting options.
But there are multiple possible numbering schemes for the day of the week, which means a year + week with no day-of-week format code is ambiguous. Worse, the two options don't even share a start: one of them begins numbering at 0 (Sunday) and the other at 1 (Monday).
So I'd guess the insistence on a day-of-week format code is to force you to indicate which day-numbering scheme you want, in order to avoid the possible ambiguity.
(and you might think it's reasonable to assume if someone uses ISO year + ISO week number, they'd also want ISO day-of-week number, but we're talking about dates and times here, and "reasonable" left the building a long time ago)
Only if you churn -- signing up for a card, redeeming the signup bonus, then signing up for another, and so on.
And card issuers know about churning. The highest-value cards also have limits to how often you can churn. Chase's "5/24" rule (if you've opened 5 or more new credit cards in the past 24 months, anywhere, Chase will automatically decline you on any application for one of their cards) is one of the more well-known anti-churning tactics, but not the only one. You have to immerse yourself in the churning/manufactured spending world to really get much more than one or two free tickets from card signup bonuses.
On the other hand, if you already travel enough to reach at least mid-tier status with one airline, it's often worth it to do so; that's when you start getting into large RDM bonus territory. Combine with the airline's branded card and you can easily generate enough mileage to take a nice vacation every year.
Mostly agree — except you don't have to manufacture spend or know anything about that for it still to be well worth it vs points cards. And at the level of spend where you only get "one or two free tickets from card signup bonuses," you aren't getting even a single flight on a points card, so I'm not sure why that's relevant.
Yeah, the value is mostly there if you can redeem for travel annually. Cash redemptions usually require taking a haircut of some kind (to incentivize consumers keeping points in the inherently depreciative system).
What the parent was talking about is usually called "same-day change" (abbreviated "SDC"), and is in fact only available free of charge to passengers who have a minimum status level within the frequent-flyer program.
Another related perk is the "guaranteed seat" -- the ability to purchase a ticket within 24 hours of the flight, and receive a guarantee that you will have a seat and will not be "bumped" due to overbooking (they'll bump someone else off the flight instead, if it comes to that). Which tends to kick in at the higher status tiers; back in my days of flying too much, I only used that perk once, and the last-minute ticket was expensive, but it was worth it to know I would get where I was going.
The value of loyalty programs, for the customer, tends to inversely correlate to the state of the economy.
In very broad terms: tourism is a larger part of the travel market than business travel. When the economy is bad, fewer people travel for pleasure, and those who do don't fly as much. So loyalty programs ramp up the rewards for the people who are still flying, in order to hang onto them. Then when the economy recovers and tourism picks up again, there's less need to desperately keep customers by any means available, so loyalty programs start getting slashed.
On top of that, at all times the big US airlines tend to hand out redeemable-only miles like candy (elite-qualifying miles are the ones that are hard to accumulate¹), which makes them a heavily inflationary currency and requires jacking up the redemption rates every so often to soften the blow of all those outstanding miles.
--
¹ Airlines in the US issue two types of miles. Redeemable miles, usually abbreviated "RDM" in the frequent-flyer forums, do what the name implies: you can redeem them instead of using cash to purchase a ticket. They offer no other perks. The other type is the "elite-qualifying mile" ("EQM"), which can be redeemed for a ticket but also contributes toward qualifying for some level of "elite" frequent-flyer status with the airline. Elite status is what gets you free upgrades and free checked bags and all the other perks.
Elite-qualifying miles, with very few exceptions, can only be earned by actually purchasing a ticket, getting on the plane and flying (sometimes this process is also referred to as "BIS" -- "Butt-In-Seat" -- miles). All the "50,000 miles for signing up!" type offers you see with credit cards are denominated in redeemable miles, for example. If you know your way around the loyalty programs, you can generate hundreds of thousands of redeemable miles per year without too much effort. Achieving 100k elite-qualifying miles in a year, however, is a significant feat and typically qualifies you to the highest public status tier (the big three US airlines each have at least one unpublished tier above that, offered by invitation only to customers perceived as extremely high-value).
Some of his short stories are particularly interesting. "The Roads Must Roll", for example, though written before Ayn Rand started churning out books, anticipates and attempts to brutally tear apart the ideas of "Atlas Shrugged".
What will be interesting is to see the effect on Leela (https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lczero), which is public and open-source, takes part in public tournaments, and is built -- as much as possible, based on what's been disclosed in the papers -- to use the same approach as AlphaZero.