alexjeffrey

you may be confusing feminism with the equal rights for women movement. While there's a large crossover and the former certainly tries to pretend to be the latter, there's also an element of male-targeted sexism within the feminist community that would always prevent me from identifying with them. I'm not saying at all that feminism = sexism, but I wouldn't want to back a community that doesn't seem to address these issues.

I'm not necessarily saying we _should_ create a simulation of the human brain - just asking whether it would be possible. There are other much more concrete concerns with creating strong AI too - avoiding accidentally creating a paperclip maximiser comes to mind: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

I'd love for a neuroscientist to weigh in on this - what is the possibility that something like this could be used to generate an artificial neural network which imitates, even crudely, the functions of the human brain?

being a public company, Google can't really justify altruistic endeavours to its shareholders unless they will also benefit from the project.

that sounds like a formula for a true intellectually elitist society. The people's opinions should be heard equally if at all.

what kind of a mad world do we live in where an app for sending pictures to your friends with a slight twist is worth $1B? That applies to both snapchat and instagram...

interestingly in my experience in the north of England this culture is much more applicable to designers - web development doesn't pay very many standard deviations above the average wage, where designers can command high freelancing rates and comfortable working conditions.

on a somewhat related topic, the author of this has some issues he/she needs to work out.

NSFW http://fucksheep.org/~sd/mspaint/

watching this really shows you what some of the lurkers on HN are like. I'm glad they tend to keep quiet on HN itself.

> A major win for TI (FWIW), considering that it has nonchalantly quit the mobile-SoC market citing a low RoI.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

here's some specific quotes I'm taking aim at here:

She was so relieved simply to know that she didn’t have a problem; or more specifically, she was relieved to know that her problem was real. For she had gone all these years thinking that she was just lazy.

For all of those of you out there suffering under the weight of your inability to wake up early each morning, consider this one giant pardon.

the post comes off as one giant "it's ok to put your hand up and say 'I have a named medical condition so can I be excused from class'". That could just be my biased interpretation though as I've come across such a mindset before and tend to react very angrily to it. If that's not the message at all then consider my rant misplaced.

I think the point here is that everything today is considered a "medical condition". While that makes sense from a medical perspective, all it does is give people excuses for not dealing with their problems. "I can't get to work on time, I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome". "I can't focus in class, I have Attention Deficit Disorder". These are genuine difficulties that afflicted people will have to face, but don't ask the whole world to change to fit your circumstances.

Note, I was in and out of specialist children's hospitals for a good year or two while doctors tried to diagnose the reason my brain works differently to theirs. I have a certain set of psychological challenges I have to overcome, but I don't sit around whining about it all day.

I love this idea but the idea of tying it to your locality seems a little exclusionary for no reason. Granted, I am biased as I am based in the UK, but I can't think of any major problems with organising this through teleconferences?

I think you might be barking up the wrong tree here - OP's plan is to create an investment fund that focusses on long-term investment in talented people, rather than the VC approach of investing in "whatever facebook/twitter/google might buy to acquihire the founders".

Technology is morally neutral. To use your own examples, a hammer could be used to build a house or commit a murder, and a drone could be used for aerial strikes or to monitor endangered animals for poaching activity (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/01/2013117135...). The initial use case for a technology to be developed will always be shaped by the morals and intent behind it, but other uses can always be found that are good or bad no matter what the technology is.

that's not a very compelling argument given traditional-currency savings accounts will at least grant you very small interest rates.

I'm a little disappointed that the interview didn't mention COLA/STEPS as I think this is by far the most interesting thing Kay has worked on of recent. Obviously he's been an innovator throughout the history of computing and it makes sense to interview him abotu the overall direction of the industry, but it'd be great to hear about COLA especially as there's very little written about it aimed at a non-academic audience.

http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/index.php/Main_Page is the primary resource about COLA at the moment, if you're curious.

Fair point; I assumed it was given it redirects to github.com.

this is quite cool, and it's good to see that github parks its own typos - I've seen far too many "What you need when you need it" landing pages from getting a letter wrong while typing a domain.

wow, that's a pretty shitty attitude you've got there. You don't need to be sarcastic and condescending to disagree with me.

the point that I was trying to make which you seem to have completely misunderstood is that it doesn't seems necessary to create an account to use this application; I sign up for new things all the time but I don't think it's necessary for me in this case and feels like a barrier to entry. The OP asked for feedback, and I provided it based on my opinion on how I personally would use the service.

13 actually - funnily enough it started with video games; we met on Runescape!

as someone who got married at 21, I can honestly say it's the decision I'm most happy about in my life so far.

However, we had been together for over 7 years by that point and I'd be very wary of advocating getting married young to everyone, as I know at least here in the UK there seem to be quite a few teenage/early-twenties couples who decide to get married after a few months to a year, and end up divorced 6 months later. The facts in this article could be also taken as very misleading, especially considering that the happiness survey they took made no mention of age.

read the second paragraph, I edited it in shortly after posting

would it not be possible to leave an email address without registering for an account? It's more the password side that's a pain really.

Also in response to your edit, I do trust that you guys are honest but I'm aware of a lot of sites which use Facebook Connect to get permissions to someone's wall and just start spamming them heavily. By emphasising Facebook Connect you may get tarred with the same brush.

I was enthralled until you asked me to create an account - I have so many accounts online that I really don't want to have to remember yet another password (or compromise my security by reusing one). Is forcing account creation key to the core functionality?

Also, I'd be wary of signing up with Facebook for a job-search app - while I'm not actually looking for a new job, if I were that'd put me off in case you posted a notification to my wall.

this is insane - the investors' plans are very unlikely to align with his personal wants and needs (unlike a business where the goal of making money is shared between the business and its shareholders).

some of the examples in the article make this abundantly clear:

* the sleep experiment, where he was obviously suffering by the end

* the gay relationship which, while the article doesn't mention whether Merrill is bisexual, certainly seems to imply that he isn't and went through with the relationship to appease his shareholders

That's a very naive viewpoint - if you present your boss with the reality of the situation, that you put off completing the project to rewrite code you've already written because you weren't happy with the results and have some vague idea that some future programmer might struggle to read it, s/he's going to look for someone who can deliver.

While you and I know that refactoring is the right thing to do, the customer/manager isn't going to say "by all means, delay completion of the project in pursuit of improvements to parts of the system that only you have to deal with". They don't see/understand the code so naturally they don't care about its state.

[note] Obviously this is a blanket statement but it's been applicable to me and I'm sure others have experienced similar.

This looks interesting, but I don't know how useful it would be for me given most of my cards have to be swiped or inserted into some kind of device.

agreed - management is a key problem here. That extra 20 minutes to make your class readable, multiplied by 20 for all of your classes, is going to be very difficult to explain when your boss walks over to talk about why your project is overdue. There's an argument in there for time estimates to include refactoring, but that's a whole 'nother problem.

I think your example also speaks to the argument I put forward to some extent - SpaceX initially chose to use a 3rd party turbopump as building an efficient turbopump isn't their objective. However, at a later stage when the 3rd party turbopumps became an issue (whether that be because they were faulty, not efficient enough or any number of reasons) SpaceX decided to build their own.

This seems like the correct way round to me for the majority of cases where subcomponents of your product could be externalised - a 3rd party should be the primary go-to choice unless a company cannot be found that fits the requirements. The issue I see in development (and have been guilty of in the past) is simply building everything when libraries could easily cover the use case - "not invented here" syndrome. That's the real problem.

[edit] Also I think it's clear that there'll always be cases where the default doesn't apply, for example when working with a new field/concept or where the 3rd party options are too far from the mark, but for the majority of development (especially web development) there's likely a library/service to match many of your requirements.