Nutmog

Wow, the contrast in sentiment between SpaceX vs ULA and Jabil vs Makerbot's Brooklyn factory (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11574215) is striking. With SpaceX undercutting the incumbent, people are cheering free market competition but with Jabil undercutting the incumbents, people are complaining about work being done in buildings attached to the wrong pieces of Earth (China) even though in both cases, they cut costs by using genuinely more efficient processes.

You wouldn't just be running away from the president. You'd be running away from a whole country full of hysterical people afraid of an imminent communist invasion and blaming it on you.

You might think the technology sucked, but all the competition sucked worse, much worse. Nobody else could be bothered maintaining so much backward compatibility. Apple kept changing their CPU architecture and resetting the clock on developing apps. Other platforms like Amiga also pursued their own platform blind to the fact that their products couldn't interoperate with the most popular and cheap software and hardware. There was OS/2 Warp which for some reason failed in the market. Probably more of the same incompatibility problems.

It's hard to see that the world would have been better without MS. It could very well have been more fractured with people having to buy two computers because they would never know which one would run the software or hardware they might want to use. Or it could have been like the disaster we have today with native mobile development - you have to program everything twice, for two different platforms! What a waste of developer time.

The gist of what you say about MS now applies to Apple today. It keeps a similar grip over iPhones, and people love them for it. It's that grip that makes Apple successful, just as Microsoft's grip over PCs made them successful. The smartphone world would surely be worse off today without Apple too.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that their cold wallet was untouched and all they lost was on the order of a hour's worth of turnover. That's more than can be said for a lot of the other bitcoin hacks.

This surprises me about America. Other countries have national criminal record databases. Is it that America hasn't spent the money to build one, or that counties/states/police stations don't want to share information, or that they're not allowed to share information?

I'd say it's fair for candidates to break promises. If voters keep voting for them and their party despite seeing that happen, then it means voters don't mind broken promises. This is what's nice about democracy - you don't have to argue about too many rules, the rules evolve naturally. For some reason it turned out that keeping promises wasn't a natural rule that voters wanted. The same goes for resigning. If they don't resign and are still re-elected or their party is still re-elected then that reflects what their constituents want, not some artificial rules that some unelected rule-maker (who would that be?) decided on.

The US system seems to be doing quite well. The majority of the population doesn't care at all, and their votes don't count. Those are people who either always vote for the same party or don't vote at all. The important decision then comes down to the minority of people who are most interested in the policies - the swing voters. Isn't that quite an efficient division of labor?

That won't happen unless American voters want it. They don't want it, as evidenced by their not voting for it, so they won't get it.

If it wasn't the US, it would be classified as a human rights violation. This is worse than imprisoning or torturing political prisoners because of the scale of it. At least political prisoners knew they were breaking the law. They're also usually fewer in number except during revolutions/etc.

Nor do eyewitness stories. Nor does recognizing someone from a single photo instead of a proper lineup. These are cases where there's already no reliable evidence in the first place. Really, they should go to court and it would be clear they're not guilty but the polygraph just helps shortcut it. Even better would be no polygraph and just release people when they find they don't have any reliable evidence.

Why not let it download fully and run the virus scanner on it? You won't get a virus just downloading a file in up-to-date Chrome.

Taking more trips to get to places they want to be. Traffic is a good thing, not a bad thing.

No middleman and no competition? No business is really altruistic, despite their public image of being the good guys.

Excellent, except it's half missing as the article mentioned. This turned out to be a dramatic demonstration of how difficult it is to preserve data even when you're trying and you're as big as the BBC.

"You may remember collecting data for the 'National Disc' which, unfortunately, we have not been able to re-publish at this time."

How do you explain all the single people who've been on many dates and are still single? There's a lot of them who'd rather not be. They evidently don't have this skill that you claim to.

Some protectionism helps poorly developed industries grow locally until they're competitive enough to compete globally (eg postwar Japan). However, other protectionism maintains inefficient industries at the expense of poor people in other countries who could do the same job cheaper (eg US agriculture)

Could find a way or should find a way? I don't think anybody has found such a way. We might not be able to.

Physical property rights aren't natural either. We depend on the government to prevent theft. Without that, anybody strong enough could just break into our house and take what they wanted.

What may be natural, is the human feeling of ownership. But that isn't always aligned with the legal definition. For example poor people feeling that their gentrifying neighborhood is being taken away from them, even when they didn't "own" any land in it. Plagiarism too - we don't like to see others take credit for our work or ideas (which aren't copyright).

For-pay copyright sounds like a good idea. I wonder though if it would prevent many lucky great work getting off the ground. You'd have to predict in advance that it might be successful before paying the fee. Poor creators of work would lose their right to copyright because they didn't want to take that gamble on everything they produced.

I disagree with the date comment "it’s easier to expose a raw date than a properly formatted date for the user’s locale". I'm constantly fighting software that tries to localize dates. Paypal thinks I live in country A and uses that format. My web host is in country B and uses their own format. I actually live in country C which has yet another format. It's no fun reconciling this in a spreadsheet which I have to keep changing the date formats in. Just use YYYY-MM-DD everywhere. Everyone knows what it means.

Although this is a lot of data on each person. Each individual field doesn't seem too sensitive on its own.

Electoral enrollment status and place you live is usually public information. It should be to prevent vote fraud.

Without other ID, you give your passport details to every company that uses it for ID, every airline, even the bouncer at a bar. When you're travelling and don't have the local ID, you use it to get a sim card, bus pass, just about everything. It's not really secret.

As for the biometric data, what use would a malicious actor make of that? They can't impersonate you because authentication shouldn't be done with only reproducible biometric data. They could identify you if you're physically touching them, but then they can already see you in person.

Mother's middle name according to the article can usually be predicted by her parents names. Family history and names is also public data. Just ask the Mormon church which hoards it.

Were they ever? Cellphones have been shown to heat the side of you brain. No evidence that it alters its functioning though. Going out in the sun also heats the side of you brain.

What's wrong with a small tilt of the axis? It has to point somewhere. Certainly a fast and large change might take time for ecology to catch up, but this is spectacular in how tiny it is! What observable effect could it possibly have on our lives or lifestyles ever?

Agreed. If they ever spend it, it'll trickle down. If they don't spend it, it'll be increasing the value of all the dollars that everybody else has - they've basically lending money to the rest of the world until such time as they decide to spend what they have, then it'll cause some inflation and the poor people will effectively be paying back that loan.

If they never spend it, then everyone else wins. Setting fire to money or burying it in a hole is like donating it to everyone else who also has money.

I don't understand what the problem is with a small number of people having a lot of money. What harm are they doing? Or is it simply plain old-fashioned jealousy?

Futility? It looks like an improvement on the original:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

"free thoughts and doings" sounds clearer that "liberty", which could mean almost anything - did it have no prisons? I guess they really meant freedom from England's control, which isn't quite free thoughts and doings - that goes to show how poorly worded the original was.

How can they glorify war so much without making a clear distinction of which side is right and which side is wrong? If you're on the wrong side of a war, then stealing a horse, invading someone else's territory or killing soldiers are absolutely wrong things to do and having a tradition of violence and crime doesn't somehow make it OK. We don't give ISIS soldiers that same kind of respect because we feel they're on the wrong side. How can we expect to be capable of judging every ancient Indian war and knowing that the Crow family was always on the right side? Even in WWII it wasn't clear at the time.

You could make the same warning about writing open source software. Nobody calls that evil. As soon as you release anything under the GPL or MIT license, you're also giving Oculus a worldwide, ... perpetual, .. right to use, ... and distribute it.

Isn't the data gathering an improvement on efficiency, not a reduction of it? If you define efficiency as something like a ratio of useful informing to viewer attention. More personalized ads should be providing more useful information with less noise from irrelevant information. Your example of TV is a good one to show the value of targeted ads. TV ads are even more wasteful of people's attention.

Warning, another early stage trail drug!

Phase I <-- They are here

Phase II 18% proceed to phase III [1]

Phase III 50% succeed. 25% for first-in-class agents, which it sounds like this one is. [2]

So if this phage passes its current phase I trials, it would then have a 5% chance of eventually getting to market. The current probability of success would be even lower because it hasn't yet completed phase I.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidgrainger/2015/01/29/why-too...

That's not obvious at all. Their share price has now recovered half way to where it was, so you should call that a 20% drop when comparing to what people remember today (not the few days after news broke). Not only that, it was already in an even bigger decline during the year leading up to the emissions scandal, and that decline instantly stopped. Compared to the pre-scandal trend, you could almost argue that their share price has improved since the scandal.

Look at the graph. http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=VOW.DE+Interactive#{"allo...

What baffles me about OOP is that massive aspects of how to use it have changed, and that change happened after it gained popularity as a good technique. How could it have become popular when people were doing it wrong? The article mentions inheritance, but there's also heavy vs light classes. When I was taught OOP, an object knew how to do all the things to itself. It could draw itself on the screen, modify itself, save itself to a file, etc. Now that's turned on its head and is bad practice.

So if OOP was great with inheritance and heavy classes, how can it now be bad with inheritance and heavy classes? Were the original OOP evangelists doing it wrong and promoting something they hadn't actually tried enough to discover its problems (ie hype)? Was it just misunderstood and inheritance has always been known to be something to avoid and light (single public method) classes always been a good idea but computer science professors didn't understand it?

I understand wanting to keep the police out of your private things. But we already let them in when they have a warrant. Are you saying DNA is more private than your house, computer, phone converations, etc? Or that all those things should be off limits to police with a warrant?

Of course this is not the same as giving them free access to whatever they want. Then I could understand people's worries. Individual policemen could use it to harass people they don't like, or other abuses.