SocksCanClose

It's a lovely video. Thanks for posting. It seems as though what unites these two isn't that they both work in the gastronomic arts, but rather, that they are both driven to achieve perfection, and that they both share a certain sadness and also mania knowing that they want to achieve something that is impossible, and yet are so close. I also think it is what makes it so prescient for this forum -- many of us are the same way. We seek out new challenges. Refine old art forms. Think about things slightly askew. For me, seeing this conversation was almost like seeing three men discussing a topic across time. Jiro-san relays to Rene what his experience has been like as someone pursuing perfection, and says something along the lines of "When you are my age, you won't think about quitting... I know you... because you are me... and we can never quit. We just keep striving for the next thing." And Rene has (and this may be my American interpretation of his Nordic facial reaction) a sort of moment where he realizes that Jiro-san is correct. That he is both blessed and trapped with this relentless drive. Jiro-san then says something along the lines of "I won't live this long... but if I lived until you were the age I am now, I would want to be there to say 'I told you so' because I know you will never stop. You will always look for the next thing." And you can see his son, the third participant in the conversation, observing, and contemplating his father's mortality, his father's legacy, and his father's drive.

I thought it was quite beautiful.

Does anybody know the company they're talking about? Does the top piece use some sort of gyro-stabilized magnetic control system?

... bring on the down-votes!

Worth referencing: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machin...

Didn't answer they question everybody really wants to know: what is up with Enoch Root??

Dalrymple fails to mention that the Mughal Empire wasn't exactly the most sound of economic masters over the subcontinent.

For decades Mughal princes had been controlling monetary flows by printing new currencies every year or so, causing rapid inflation in old currencies. The Mughal Empire allowed Clive to set up a free trade zone with a land grant of a swamp that eventually became Calcutta, and the East India Company built a wall, and started trading on the pound (£). It's amazing what happens once you stop trading with unstable currencies. Growth and prosperity. The Mughal empire, which was on the verge, essentially collapsed over the next few years (post '57 -- mostly through the 60s and 70s) as the merchant classes just shifted to doing business in Calcutta.

--> I wrote my undergraduate thesis about this topic, and spent a year at the British Library reading first-hand accounts from both sides, focusing on the resulting Anglo-Indian legal system set in place by Sir Robert Chambers. Dalrymple is right about a lot, but this piece most certainly omits the fact that a number of sectors of Mughal society gained a great deal from dealing with the British (never mind overlooked Mughal brutalities that go unmentioned in the piece).

Ahhh... Well that makes me feel marginally better. But Hays Valley has a nice ring to it -- why couldn't they have gone with that? :-)

How old is the satellite view? Has anybody been by there recently? I'll admit I looked at the brochure and it (Quay Valley) looks like [vaporware].

Plus I'm just a bit perturbed with these must-be-generated-by-an-algorithm locational names. A quay is a wharf (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wharf). And the only water around is coming out of a pipe. And a "Quay Valley" is some sort of malapropism, especially in geographic context.

perhaps this is what they are actually talking about -- creating their own cryptocurrency. how would they prevent people from across the world from creating Greek Bitcoin? perhaps this would crete (I almost corrected that typo, but I'll leave it there haha) a strange secondary market whereby people not in greece mine bitcoin, and then sell it to ordinary Greeks for some fractional rate?

hmmm... seems to me your reasoning rests on the reasoning of Keynes?

what if Keynes is wrong?

i actually think this is a good idea -- wouldn't it encourage people to save money, if the government can't deflate it away, as many do, today?

ugh: "THE UPGRADED SYSTEM WILL GO ONLINE THIS SPRING, FIVE YEARS LATE AND AT LEAST $500M OVER BUDGET." #

it's on HN because Philz is basically a math problem: mint mojito = worldwide domination. QED.

Very interesting article...a second corollary might be that we have become encumbered to the point where our enemies are running circles around us: http://www.projectwhitehorse.com/pdfs/boyd/patterns%20of%20c...

Jason, great article, thanks for sharing!

This is the definitive presentation (transferred into PowerPoint by Colonel Boyd's acolytes) that quite literally changed the United States Military. Concepts like Energy-Maneuverability in air combat, and the OODA-loop came through and out of this presentation. It is very long, and very technical in terms of military context, but well worth it at the macro-strategic level. HUGE implications for the future of war and society.

There's an interesting debate in the comments about Mr. Musk's personal goals -- gives some good insight to the rest of the piece. TL;DR -- cares more about Mars+mass EV adoption (see: open sourcing Tesla patents) than about the cash; money-as-means to get to Mars and get humanity "off" carbon. With the read I say.

Check out Morozov's amazing work on the philosophical underpinnings of one of the web's most powerful figures: http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler

as for claim #2 -- it is worth nothing (see here for reference: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2007/01/iran_and_alqa...) that iran (whom some allege to have supported the shi'a insurgency) has been known to also support sunni insurgents (often 'al qaeda' or some variant thereof)...

philosophical point here: note the bb ceo's use of language. i hate to get pedantic, but this all goes back to the greek word γινώσκω (gnoscio), which means "to think" or "to know". from this word we get, in the english, words like "decide", "discern" and even "discriminate".

i'll quote mr. chen here, piece by piece: "...policymakers should demand..." --> children demand. policymakers (and i assume he means congress, which is the constitutionally-empowered entity that is able to make law in the united states) make laws. and laws are supported with the power of the state to do two things: tax, and kill (in fact, they are the same power). so what this means is "congress should use its power to use lethal force..."

"... openness not just at the traffic/transport layer, but also at the content/applications layer of the ecosystem..." --> net neutrality is about agnosticism. there goes that word again, 'to think'. here, it's about not thinking -- particularly not thinking about whose data is traveling along your pipes. but once you move from the traffic/transport layer down to the content/applications layer (or heck -- in a chaostheoryesque way, once you move up to the operating systems layer) the medium is the message! this is the equivalent of a declining myspace begging congress to force facebook to allow myspace users to interact with the facebook users. the medium is the message here: facebook exists because it is not myspace. trulia is not redfin. people started companies because they disliked the platforms available and they sought to build better ones.

"...Banning carriers from discriminating but allowing content and applications providers to continue doing so will solve nothing."

there is zero comparability in this last statement. content and application providers are built atop an architecture that is by its nature exclusive and discriminatory. service providers are defined not by what is within them, but what moves through them. which is to say: teraflops (&c.) per second of data moving from various points to another. applications on the other hand are defined by what resides within them. music (spotify: beats needs to allow us to stream music to its listeners!). videos (vimeo: youtube needs to let us share their videos!). games (counterstrike: why can't people play our missions as the master chief?! ¡¡¡net neutrality!!!). the list goes on.

make no mistake: this is one more step down a road that leads nowhere good.

agree -- the asymmetry offered by drones is ripe for exploitation. already happening: http://www.cnet.com/news/drone-crashes-trying-to-deliver-dru... and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2670560/Drug-deliver.... more importantly, i'm guessing malicious actors may be testing out defenses in these articles: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/08/jet-drone-near-miss... (and the like). why put someone on the plane to take it down when you can just throw up a drone to fly into the turbine on approach?

Great article and topic. But just FYI, I don't think building a Maginot Line actually qualifies as "fighting the last war". As the author explains, the ML actually worked -- the Germans had to invade through Belgium! And had they built the ML all the way to the sea, the blitzkrieg would have failed. Perhaps a better historical military analogy would be that of Billy Mitchell and the rise of Naval Aviation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_aviation#Interwar_period). Anyway great lessons here -- thanks for posting.

augmented reality's first home run will be in the mundane industrial sector where it can be used for training, inventory management, logistics, and any number of other things.

i take this as a cautionary tale of product-market fit. as mark andreessen says, where a market exists and a competent but not visionary startup finds itself, the market will often "pull the product out of the startup."

that obviously didn't happen here. i think it is because glass was both narrative AND product. narrative meaning that glass was supposed to be a transformational product, meant to elevate google from a search company to a product company.

they weren't going to let the product find its market (my thesis: industrial). instead, pushed it to the market they wanted it pushed to (consumer), because it fit a narrative they _wanted_ to be true.

What happens when you replace "Capitalist" with "Free Marketer's"?

> http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=capitalist

I think this is a pretty aggressive timeline.

These technologies are certainly nascent -- but they have been, and will continue to be. I doubt that we will see widespread adoption of ALL (or even 25% of them) over the next 350 days.

More likely -- using Diamandis' own descriptive memes -- I believe many of these technologies are likely to hit an inflection point (i.e. where their exponential growth becomes an observable phenomenon) in the next five years.

> VR - obviously FB is making a huge play here, but Magic Leap is the real (pun intended, if you've seen the promos) elephant in the room. And I have a hunch that their technology won't be ready for at least another 18 months. And it's not even VR, it's AR (which I think is going to be easier to swallow for most consumers).

> Mass Market Robots. Roomba is already around. The question is robots for what. I don't see the killer app quite yet. Perhaps as industrial assistants? Amazon already uses them to great effect in their warehouses. But that is well out of the public eye.

> Autonomous vehicles. Sure, I'm planning to buy a car with autonomous capability in the next 18 months, but full explosion of this technology is going to require governmental concurrence, and lots of work by the insurance industry. And neither of those work very fast. If only for this reason, I see 10% market saturation as at least 4-5 years away.

> Drones "everywhere". They're still toys with remarkably short battery life.

> Wireless power. My personal sense is that Apple is the market-leader in expectations management for mainstream adoption of this sort of tech. And until it's integrated, I don't think it will see widespread adoption.

> Data + Genomics. No idea. But I do have some up-close experience with a non-public project in this area, and I have to admit I'm shocked by what they're able to do, putting large datasets to work. Here I agree with Diamandis that we might see something spectacular happen over the next year. But what -- I don't know.

> Sensor explosion. It is certainly coming. Not confident in the next year.

> Voice Control. Very much agree here, but because of the Apple Watch. All of a sudden an entire generation that saw Siri as a nice-to-have will now see it as a need-to-use -- and this will cascade downmarket to the Google and Microsoft ecosystems as well.

> 3D Printing. Upcoming patent lapses and adoption by large-scale corporations will likely drive this -- not consumer leadership. The biggest news I saw in this was Local Motors' initiative to build a 3D car manufacturing facility in Washington, DC. Once that happens, all bets are off because both corporate and consumer sectors will start to understand the true implications for the technology.

> Bitcoin. Agree in principal. But just as important is the underlying blockchain technology which could revolutionize many more things than simply currency. But yes -- here too, adoption via Apple is the leading indicator. And I believe that ApplePay (and potentially even an Apple currency) is the future.

have been meaning to tackle that, actually -- thanks for the nudge. i read The Bed of Procrustes a few years ago...

Lately I have been wondering if macro-behaviors themselves aren't something like streets in an old world city -- laid out thousands of years ago for long-forgotten purposes. I was in a meeting with a senior (in both age and position) technical advisor, asking about an HR issues in our organization. "Why haven't we tried [optimizing]?" I asked. Sparing HN the details, my organization conducts HR to minimize risks, not to maximize gains. "We tried once, but failed. The system now works. There's no need to change it." This system, originally programmed in DOS (yes, that DOS), was ported years ago over into an emulator that runs atop HTML (that's right -- to use this system our operators boot up an old version of IE that pretends it's DOS). And nobody has ever thought that perhaps there's a better way to do business. Solidified pathways. Cognitive arteries caked over in plaque over years of use. Like paved-over cobblestone.

seriously -- what's up with Enoch Root? http://www.ibiblio.org/java/cryptonomicon.html

The introduction is superb:

" One day in November, Ferran Adrià, the Spanish chef who turned foods into foams and pioneered a new era in gastronomic innovation while running one of the world’s most popular restaurants, bounced through a loft space in Barcelona. He peered at pencil-sketched mind maps tacked to plastic foam bulletin boards and examined books jammed on narrow shelves — until he reached the end of a display table featuring a variety of Asian soup spoons. Then he stopped.

“I have a question,” he said in Catalan to the small group of visitors and staff members trailing him. “What is wine?”

There was silence. Four seconds, five seconds, 10 seconds. Finally, cautiously, someone offered, “A drink?” Mr. Adrià's eyes widened. “Maybe it is a drink if I put it in a cup. But what if I make it into a sauce and cook with it?” His voice was sharp. More silence. Mr. Adrià spun away and began walking again. “Now,” he said over his shoulder as the crowd shuffled in his wake, “what if I turn the wine into ice cream? What is it then?”