Hacker News Reader

adamgravitison Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality

This is a vitally important point. Many people still naively believe entanglement allows communication. Simultaneous randomness doesn't permit a signal.

adamgravitison Building Bigger Roads Makes Traffic Worse

Having done some grad work in this area, I'd say this is a fairly superficial take on the topic. This certainly describes one area on the supply/demand curve, and perhaps even a pervasive one given that we essentially stopped building highways 40 years ago, but it's not inherent to the problem.

I think it's very possible to jump ahead of this effect, but the capital outlay would be impressive, and as a society we apparently aren't permitted to accomplish Big Things anymore, so it's likely we stay in this weird bit of the function for a long while.

adamgravitison Sel4: We’re going open source

When people talk about proofs of correctness of software, they don't generally mean some bloke has gone and worked out on paper a formal proof. It means that they have used provably correct methods and then run the whole thing through an automated verifier.

It's not bull shit, it's just hard.

adamgravitison We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

With the exception of games, the items you mention aren't distracting much engineering talent from solving the big stuff. With $1.2m, Yo can directly compete for talent that might otherwise go to graduate school or make progress in a more serious venture.

adamgravitison For $10,000, your car can drive itself – Cruise (YC W14)

And in what way, exactly, is that a virus? Epidemic, at a stretch.

(I'm not typically this pedantic... I just think viruses have particularly interesting information dynamics and it's really weird to me when applied as a metaphor outside of where that would make sense.)

adamgravitison The Story Of Mel

“If a program can't rewrite its own code”, he asked, “what good is it?”

Amen.

adamgravitison Steve Wozniak is not boring

At least in this situation, you can see the entire affected control flow within four lines.

goto generally becomes a problem when suddenly everything is short-circuiting everywhere and you can't see where control's getting passed off to.

adamgravitison Camlistore – open-source personal storage system for life

Similar semantics to git... it's a super robust approach.

adamgravitison Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds

Methyl, not metham. Rather substantial difference.

adamgravitison Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer

This is a very good summary of a future, but I don't think any sort of coin system will be particularly effective at mitigating either the spam nor DDoS problem for the wide variety of cases: if a botnet captures a computer, I expect it would equally capture whatever coin-wallet is being used for default mail transfer and network access.

adamgravitison How to not get ripped off by High Frequency Traders

HFTs aren't really helping your situation at all. Other forms of liquidity generators might be, but HFTs are exploiting microsecond-level arbitrage opportunities. I've never heard of a small investor with sub-second execution requirements. In fact, I'd be curious why you needed to execute 50,000 shares in a few seconds at all. From my perspective, I'd be thrilled if I could sell a few shares over several minutes as long as I were confident I was getting a good price.

adamgravitison School ditches rules and loses bullies

Seems like there may be a correlation with: Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges (The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government)

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tacitus

adamgravitison Ask PG: Do you review rejected YC apps to find startups who then made it big?

It would be a difficult study... How many YC companies would have failed if they had not been accepted to YC? Certainly, a number of rejected companies who later failed may have thrived under YC.

adamgravitison Gmail was down

Urgh. If only there were a simple protocol to transport mail between distributed systems so the world didn't grind to a halt when the central router died.

adamgravitison What is the hardware revolution?

Looks like Zak's put a lot of effort into this one. Check out the "Hardware Ecosystem Overview" infographic in particular :-)

http://blog.upverter.com/static/images/hardware_ecosystem.jp...

[ disclosure: I'm an Upvertor ]

adamgravitison Journalist detained at US/Canadian Border

Misleading title; makes it sound like the Canadians were doing the holding.

adamgravitison The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume I

This is outstanding. Thank you for the effort.

Has there been any consideration of making a semantic version of the equations involved? The great thing about having this on the web, is I could easily see myself maintaining links in long calculations to various formulas as the authority.

(Also: what's the font in the SVG images? It's great!)

adamgravitison AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits

http://upverter.com

Not just for kids anymore.

adamgravitison Schema for Clojure(Script) Data Shape Declaration and Validation

Very cool. Also check out the implementation of encapsulation in John Shutt's Kernel Lisp: http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html

adamgravitison Linus: bool is dangerous in C if you don't understand it

I think it's fair to say just about anything is dangerous in C if you don't understand it...

adamgravitison Declassified: The US Government’s Quantum Internet

yep - and it's manifestly not the "internet". It is, however, a network that bears some hardware similarity to internet backbones.

adamgravitison Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong

IIRC, it's supposed to be set exactly equal to pi upon Knuth's death.

adamgravitison The Baltic Demographic Disaster

They're all Eurozone now, so EU citizens can move between those countries without issue. Part of the population decline can be attributed to youth moving to central Europe for work.

Additionally, other posters have been right about ethnic Russians leaving the Baltics, which is something governments have actually been trying to encourage anyhow. The Soviets had hugely increased the number of ethnic Russians in the Baltics, nearly to the point of overtaking the native populations.

Wikipedia has a partial graph for Latvia: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Ethnic_gr...

adamgravitison Canada's Start-up Visa

The big part is this: you get the equivalent of a green card - Permanent Residency. The Minister's office actually did a lot of research into this thing before launching it, and consciously didn't want to put talented people into the awkward position a lot of H1B holders have when their visas expire and are forced to pack everything up and head home.

adamgravitison Indescribable numbers: The theorem that made me fall in love with math

Anyone interested in this would immensely enjoy Meta Math! by Gregory Chaitin. Basically, he demonstrates that there are theorems which are randomly true: they're true for no particular reason. It's, of course, deeply connected with Gödel's work.

If anyone's working in this space, I'd love to chat with people familiar this stuff.

Edit: arXiv PDF preprint is at http://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0404335.pdf

adamgravitison The Unexotic Underclass

I think I've noticed a pattern with these kinds of systems: its not a software problem; it's a policy problem.

When designing (evolving, inventing) rules, regulations, policy, exceptions, limitations, audits, checks, balances, the bureaucracy's princes seem to ignore the bigger picture of what it's all become: a mess.

It's not just government systems either. There's a reason why people joke about their phone bills being difficult to understand. Same goes for most utilities.

Now, once you have an incoherent, contradictory, thousand page mishmash set of rules, every engineer worthy of the title is going to stay as far away as possible. So, the whole mess gets dumped on an army of coders from a big consultancy.

Perhaps instead of focusing on the useless software written to fit a pile of inane rules, people could focus on the economic and operational benefits of redoing the entire policy regime with a zen-shaped comb.

Software is an enabler. It's actually covered-up a lot of really awful decision-making. The US tax code could never have become what it is if developers hadn't been able to consistently keep up with crazy new patches to implement it: nobody could possibly manage it by hand.

adamgravitison The terrifying rise of the political entrepreneur

This is a crucially important point. The question becomes: to what extent does the accumulation of capital, expertise, equipment in a corporation render a software engineer able to produce more value than working on their own, or in a partnership, or other arrangement?

I would imagine this varies dramatically by industry. I know several of the biosciences, for example, do require a lot of specialized people, equipment and tons of cash... Many of the areas we're seeing disrupted by startups are areas where you'd hit diminishing returns (from, say, more equipment / capital) rather quickly.

adamgravitison Iron Ring

This depends on the university. At UofT, for example, "software engineering" is actually taught outside of the engineering faculty, and is not CEAB approved... and therefore doesn't qualify.

adamgravitison Iron Ring

It's actually not about having "earned" it; it's not meant to be a token of having completed the degree, or having been stupendously good at some technical piece of work.

It's meant as a reminder to the obligation you have to society not to cut corners on safety, and that your responsibilities to your employer do not outweigh those you have to Canadians generally.

adamgravitison Peter Thiel - You are Not a Lottery Ticket [video]

This organizes a lot of thoughts I've had regarding the economic history of the 20th century. It seemed that something really changed in patterns of invention and investment somewhere in the late 70s, whereby - as Peter notes - big ideas and making plans became considerably less fashionable.

I hadn't made the connection to the surge of effort in law and finance, but it's a convincing argument.

The real question, then, is: Can we return the western economies to an optimistic-deterministic point of view? It would require really reframing a lot of public debate - or perhaps taking discourse elsewhere from regulated airwaves where the established players seem to worship an utterly indeterminate world view, as evidenced by continuous coverage of uncontrollable events.