skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I find interesting is how many respondents name worries that are in or related to their own profession or field of study. Note that the question is "What should we be worried about?" So now I am worried that nobody can see past the edges of their own little world anymore.
Google Voice recognition isn't anywhere near that bad. There are two times I have seen Glass fail to understand badly. The first was a woman wearing it over long hair, the hair might have been interfering with the mic. The second and more important case is with Indian accents.
I'd hope that most people could see through this. My issue is that the Ford myth is often postulated this way. People fear going through the simple arithmetic demonstrating the impossibility of the proposition.

It's easier to spread a rumor than it is to correct it... :(
Did a little Googling about issue #1, found this great response taking it apart: http://eastasiastudent.net/china/edge-org-chinese-eugenics-r...
> Figure out how to convince people to work for you for next to nothing (in exchange for equity and deferred salary).

This is listed under how to avoid funding, but it's really just borrowing from other founders, without the promise to repay.

Assuming I make $80/year as a developer, a few co-founders like me are covering the $250k mentioned.
Saturday Night Live talking about Google Glass
Show HN: Find the cheapest Amazon for your books
You've just made a story my brother told me click.

He spent years living in Taiwan. He came back to North America for college. He was taking an international law course, and Mandarin (he spoke, but didn't read/write as well as he wanted to) at the same time.

To improve his Mandarin he translated his law notes into Mandarin and distributed them to the Chinese students for feedback. As a result he aced Mandarin, and they all aced the law course.

I always thought that was very nice and clever of him, but until you described that cultural difference I didn't realize how much he was simply continuing to live within cultural norms for the culture he had been in.
"Are MUDs sports? Like huntin', shootin', fishin'?"

What a peculiar list.
Used to play Gemstone from Simutronics in the late 90s, great game and a very large user base at its height: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GemStone_IV

It's still around. :)
why would the ai be millions of generations smarter?

what if it only means we can run existing human algorithms on faster and faster hardware?

maybe the future belongs to recognisably human cognitive processes, which experience the universe unfolding at a snails pace because they are running millions of times faster than we are
That was my first thought. But why ask people from different fields if you want a generic answer? I believe the implied question is "tell us something worrisome you know that the average person doesn't know".
The future isn't something in the future anymore. We are living in the middle of it. I'm 33 and can easily see the effects of rapid technological change since the time I was a boy. Things are just getting faster. Betting against change has been a losing bet for decades, if not arguably centuries.

As a practical example: solar power. It's been commercially a available for at least 30 years. It's often been derided and dismissed because even now, it's less than 1% of energy production in the US. 30 years of no significant traction, so an obvious loser right?

Here's an Economist article from Dec. http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-c...

The price per watt has been falling logarithmically. This corresponds to a rise in efficiency.

If you look at the last 5 years or so, you can see that solar panels are starting to hit the up slope of a hockey stick. Within a very few number of years, be prepared to see an incredible impact on the energy industry. It's not going to make oil and gas obsolete, but we'll see cheap energy being used in lots and lots of places.

My personal opinion, not really supported by hard data, is that we'll see an African renaissance in the next 10-20 years. Contrary to Western belief, Africa is not entirely desert and full of starving black kids who's parents are never around for some reason. It's also not entirely in some state of civil war. There's problems, but only in spots.

What many African countries are doing is leap frogging into modern times. They are bypassing the massive infrastructures that Western nations have and using modern tech to fix their problems. With the spread of inexpensive solar power, you'll see the darkest night time parts of the continent lighting up.
>Anti-bootkit security does not imply UEFI Secure Boot where Microsoft controls the only key on every x86 PC of consequence.

So then, Microsoft releases Windows 9. It's signed with Microsoft's key. You go out and buy a Windows 9 laptop. But wait, they didn't pre-enroll the Microsoft SecureBoot key, now you're screwed and you can't even boot your brand new computer.

That's the scenario if you don't pre-enroll the key. I'd love it if we could somehow guarantee they'll never change their mind and remove that requirement. In that absence of that, smarter solutions are needed- it's not as simple as people make it out to be.
A murderer has murdered once, should we be wary about giving him the means and the ability to pull the trigger once again?
> Living in a suburb/rural area that is more than a half-hour drive from your place of work (in no traffic).

That this situation is so common is a symptom of the fact that our cities and towns have been designed around driving. The geography of the US is a comparatively small factor, since (as you mention) most people here live in cities or suburbs.

> When that happens, a car is typically the most sensible form of transportation.

For these sorts of occasional needs, car sharing services work well.

> I also find your enthusiasm for passing laws to legislate your cost/benefit analysis on everyone else to be deeply disturbing, but I'll leave that one be.

This assumes that the status quo doesn't already constitute legislating one group's cost/benefit analysis on everyone else.
You're thinking about this the wrong way. It's not supposed to buy you security. It's supposed to protect the user. (Yes, in the narrow case where an attacker has access only to your accounts table, and you want to prevent them from being able to log in as a user, hashing helps, but that can be separate from the stretching--a normal hash function will do just fine to prevent someone from simply presenting a digest to your login mechanism.)

As you just said, there is no difference between using a password or a hash digest, since the server just needs to verify either of them. So, using a hash digest from the client (generated by a strong password hash function) is superior since an attacker, whether a MITM or somebody who has compromised your servers, will have to spend a lot of time and money extracting the original password if they get a hold of the digest. The reason we currently generate these on the server side is not that it is more secure--in fact it is terribly insecure if somebody compromises the communications channel or the server itself, since they will be able to read the original, plain-text password--but rather that it is cumbersome, for now, to do it on the client side.
"Dude" works for women. How else are you going to call a female person in her late twenties? "Woman" is way too formal for many settings, "girl" can imply that you think she's not mature, and "gal" is just... no.

If anyone has a better alternative, do tell. I'm not too pleased with "dude" either.
But...congress said so? Why would you ever doubt anything a group of highly functioning psychopaths say?
And as most people hopefully know, despite the random FUD here and on reddit, SecureBoot is simply not an issue for x86 computers. The only issues so far with Linux + SecureBoot were actually due to OEM bugs in the UEFI implementation. Ubuntu and Fedora both handle SecureBoot seamlessly. Other distros will follow, especially with the Linux Foundation finally releasing their shim loader late last year.
Native apps should always be faster except in the case where the native app isn't architected properly or web services are poorly implemented. Unfortunately, I've seen that both are often the case.

For CRUD apps like Facebook, it's often easier to do them right as web apps, but a good native app developer with a good backend team should almost always be able to beat them.
Bringing it back around to the basic income...

One of the biggest advantages of the basic income is that it does not run afoul of all the information and computational issues that central planning does.

You have no issues trying to balance linear systems with billions of variables, for basic income uses the huge distributed calculation embodied in the market to get to its optimal allocations.

You have no issues of deciding what exactly is the objective function to maximize in the linear system: instead of trying to figure out globally what the correct ratio of vacations to medical care to private tutors to gardeners (ad... billionum) is, you let individuals decide that. The only quantity where that comes into play is the ratio of the basic income to overall value of production. And even when that's set either too high or too low, the allocation errors propagated by it do not cascade into disaster the same way underproduction of iron by 3% would be.
What is your point/alternative/suggestion? I mean, what do you want to see happen? I don't think anyone loves the influence Microsoft has on OEMs but what can be done from a market or legal standpoint? Or even as I mentioned in my other post, what can even be done from a technical standpoint to properly mitigate this further?
Interesting read, but if anyone is interested in more personal anecdotes like this, I suggest:

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Char...

[2]http://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/039332...
So it is mandatory for residents of 49 states.
Good point. I missed that way of interpreting the question, but it is probably how it was really meant.
Also plan on doing this more than once, and analyze your performance to ensure you get better.

One thing that programmers forget is that, at some point, you weren't good at programming, but over time, you learned and now you are pretty good.

Your business/social skills may be at that same starting level, and this isn't something you read about on the internets and are immediately good at.

Start now, plan on doing this over time, and learn to get better at it. It takes effort, but it will be worth it.
A random note.

I first really understood special relativity from reading Feynman's lectures. A concept that he explained in there is that E = MC^2 really means that energy and mass are the same thing. A moving object weighs more because in addition to its own weight, it has the weight of its kinetic energy.

This is a very nice way to think about the issue. Unfortunately I discovered years later that nobody else thinks of it this way. Instead they think about mass as being rest mass, and that you turn from having energy to having mass and vice versa. Linguistically slightly different, but logically equivalent.

It still makes me sad that physics doesn't think about things in the simpler way that Feynman presented.
> yours is not the first time I've heard a European utter the notion as if it's the most natural conclusion in the world.

Perhaps you remember our little debate about Somalis in Finland? Do you remember losing it?

You still don't get it. Europe has no problem with immigrants who come here and support themselves and adapt to our societies, but Europe does very much have a problem with Muslim immigrants.

They come here because they know they can just waltz in and start living on welfare. But they don't want to adapt to their host countries. Instead, they want the West to adapt to them. Here's a bunch of Muslims in Sweden, being shown a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHsTIDekFGM .. Can you guess why it started with police officers present in the room? -Why that's precisely because the organizers knew the video would make Muslims go apeshit.

And go apeshit they did. Right away. Listen to them frantically shouting "allahu akbar" and think about what's going on. What's going through their minds? Is this kind of behaviour suitable for a civilized society? What would your reaction to that video have been? Do you think it warranted raging and attacking people?

This is not about racism. It's about facing reality and seeing it for what it is, even despite our governments' efforts to hide it. Again, we have no problem with immigrants who support themselves and behave in a civilized way. It's just that we have way too many who don't.
Right, it can still be a useful design lens to think in terms of these basic types of interactions players will have in a shared world.
There's no question that vocational training is more effective for a "job." But is vocational training adequate for a "career" that spans 40 or 50 years? And what are the options for un-degreed vocationally-trained people in their 30s or 40s who realize that the track they chose at 18 was the wrong choice for them?

I don't know what the answers are. But let's at least ask the right questions.

(I realize that Germany and some other European countries do an excellent job of vocational training.)
Bitcoin transactions are visible/traceable, but doesn't mean you can match txn to identities.

If there is one address in the middle of you paying somebody, and that address was generated either offline or through Tor, there's no way to prove you own that address unless somebody can extract the private keys from your seized hardware and match it up to the public address.

Transactions don't prove anything, anyways. If you sell on localbitcoins or IRC, you have no idea that the anon guy who showed up to buy them with untraceable cash isn't directly 3rd party funding his Silk Rd account. If you look at the blockchain it would appear I paid into SR directly however I sold coins to some random guy I'll never see again, who's contact info I also don't have. Since I sell under my countries $10k cash transaction limit I don't need to take ID or retain contact info. Tracing that transaction proves nothing.

I also can't recall any of the major bitcoin heists being recovered. Only one exchange (mtgox) has a history of holding transactions for ID if they appear to be stolen coins, and they've only done it twice: first time was cleared up with ID, second time they're still holding the coins (bitcoinica/linode theft). Every other bitcoin heist you've heard of through the years the trace leads to nowhere.
It's great going for low hanging fruit, but you need to be realistic about things as well. Bigger market means more sales, but potentially only at a lower cost. Markets are a funny old beast.
About rewarding grunt work more, that's also the idea on which the work is distributed in the utopian community described in Skinner's Walden Two:

"About four labor credits are required per day, which translates to anywhere from two to six hours of work depending on the number of credits that are awarded per hour for a given job. Unpleasant jobs, like cleaning sewers, are given higher credit values than easy ones. Members are free to choose their jobs each day, except those that require special training, like medicine."

I recommend that book. (I read it when I was a teenager, more than twenty years ago.)
That's my point. Learning the language just to use some platform specific non portable technology like Cocoa? No thanks. Better to stick with what's reusable, like C++ and Qt.
The site appears to be having some issues: here is the Google Cache version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NHUs-7...
First problem: doesn't scale. This whole "college is obsolete" meme falls flat when we start to talk about scaling. Not everyone who's in college belongs there, but for at least 200-500 thousand people each year, it's the best thing for them. How are you going to scale up the Thiel Fellowship or "be Hilary Mason's protegee" to the number of people attending college?

Also, tuition is going up because admissions (at top universities) are becoming an insoluble problem. They're now (by their own admission) turning away 3-5 fully qualified applicants for every acceptance. There really is no good way to sort through the applications at this point; you pick away the obvious "yes" (1%) pile and the unqualified 25% or so, and then it's guesswork over the remaining 74. Tuition is just part of the selection process. It's horrible that many people, through no fault of their own, can't compete; but there it is. It's not that colleges are evil or "greedy" more than anyone else. It's just that they can charge ridiculous prices without a measurable decline in academic quality (because 17-year-olds just aren't that different, no matter what they're told). Not by intention, they ended up running a protection racket over the entire middle-class job market.

As much as these gold-plated apprenticeship programs might be a good idea-- I like the concept of getting people in the real world before they're 22-- I see them as political disasters, especially given how fucked the people born 1985-1992 have been. At some point, the 19-year-old protegee becomes a 20-year-old employee. How, exactly, is one going to make that work? If the Benefactor (e.g. Mason, not to pick on her but because the OP mentioned her) continues the relationship then (a) s/he's going to get overextended after a few years of that, and (b) the team will be sabotaged by resentful people who didn't get the "CxO's protege" track. If the Benefactor doesn't continue the relationship, then the jilted protege fails in the same way that jilted proteges always go down. Either they melt down (upset that the favoritism doesn't continue and they become "just another employee") or they are torn down in their time of weakness.

I'm glad I had a liberal arts, general education because there is so much instability in the world. College is expensive and inefficient, but I don't see a solution to that problem here. Sure, it might seem like a good move for an individual to drop college for a "CTO protege" program, but careers are long...
You're conflating a lot of things -- I'd hesitate before noting correlations to causation.

I'd consider viewing things under governmental structure, incentives, and the checks and balances in play than attributing any one culture or nation state to be some kind of paragon of virtue. Efficient governance is a luxury of first world countries, where enough people are capable and incentivized to play by the rules for it to work.

I do personally subscribe to freedom and the desire of the population for equitable governance and a level playing field for a better society, but that's a discussion for another time.
Or with /etc/hosts

EDIT: Oops. Didn't notice the port number part.
You barely beat me to mentioning Egan. I find it interesting that he's able to write engaging stories using AIs as the principal characters, as if to say that most of the attributes we normally attribute to being "human" are actually general properties of sentient minds in general, and we just conflate the two because we happen to be the only sentient minds we know about.
The performance of MBTileParser is fantastic. I've profiled map loading to take under 300 milliseconds. I wouldn't necessarily use this for an action game, but for RPGs, this is more than sufficient.

With a UIKit engine, you don't have to deal with OpenGL and UIKit fighting for performance.
He was being very careful to not overstate his claims, or even to appear to be overstating his claims. Considering how people in forums typically respond, I understand why.
That's clearly one of the reasons she gives, but I wouldn't call it a clear reason. It doesn't make the point she cares about, as she herself says. Her claim (approximately) is "Costco's way may work for Costco but it wouldn't work here, because numbers and business". But people used to argue the same about how it would never work for Costco either.
> Like for example manually copy/pasting stuff from your managers Excel sheet into phpmyadmin. This can take you days, and it is really boring. You cannot always quit your job when you got a boring task.

As valuable as accepting inevitable boring tasks is, that seems to leave you not much room to want to automate the task. Does anyone have something deep to say about simultaneously being accepting of your circumstances and seeking ways to improve them?
I just bought your app. Really well done. I love the idea of gestures for movement in a MUD.
Cocos2d (at least when I was using it) engendered some really bad anti-patterns in regards to memory management and architecture. MBTileParser doesn't just offer a way to show graphics onscreen, but it considers the MVC architecture in a way that cocos2d doesn't. (When I started, cocos2d was somewhere between 0.9 and 1.1. The state of the engine has very likely improved since, but that's why I wrote this.) Cocos2d didn't even support ARC back then.
What does "efficient" mean? If it means the distance your fingers have to travel, Dvorak is way more efficient.

Typing full time on Dvorak for the last 12 years has, I'm convinced, saved me some wrist and finger pain.

Every time I'm forced to jump back onto qwerty for a co-worker or my wife's laptop, I hate it with a passion. It feels like I'm doing finger gymnastics the whole time, rather than actually typing.
> So I'm left with <canvas>, and <canvas> is slow.

I consider this a bit of a frustrating pseudo-myth. It's true canvas is slow compared to lots of native drawing, but its usually presented as a false equivalency issue. Canvas didn't set out to replace native drawing of hand-crafted OpenCL. It's an alternative to cross-platform graphics on the web, where you get Canvas or you get Flash (Or SVG or hobbling together colored DOM elements to animate while crying and eating ice-cream out of a gallon tub. We've been there. Don't lie.).

What's worse, looking at the videos demoing his Mac app[1], they don't even look like they'd need canvas levels of performance. They look like they'd work just fine in SVG. What's wrong in this case with the very good performance across many platforms (even tablets) of the SVG-backed RaphaelJS?[2]

Unless his app can do things he'd rather not demo, I'm guessing this post is moreso post-hoc rationalization of picking Mac as his preferred development platform. At the risk of being a bit rude, it's worth noting that he doesn't bother with all Desktops, just Mac, which causes further suspicion that this is really just a rationalization piece and not about performance.

(Unrelated to the post at hand, this canvas pseudo-myth also upsets me because I spend big chunks of free time helping people with their canvas work, and its almost always an issue on the programmer's part. This is fine, I've never fault a programmer for writing less-than-optimal code, but often programmers tend to contribute their voices to the chorus of "Canvas is slow", regardless of looking for fault prior to their declaration.)

[1] http://magicmaps.evanmiller.org/gallery.html

[2] http://raphaeljs.com/world/
> http://sivers.org/1pct

GP is not an exemplar of the 1% fallacy. GGP asserted that their product would have a 20% install base, so GP used that number.