amptorn

> You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law.

The only reason to have a lawyer is because you broke the law, got it.

If holding people responsible for their actions, whether carried out via an algorithm or not, stifles innovation, I don't care. I mean, yeah, fomenting genocide through algorithms is genuinely innovative. Protecting people is more important.

"...please."

> hiring [...] without consideration for anything but merits

I would only be concerned about this if I lacked merits.

I heard of a story where Walmart did an experiment in one of their stores where they rearranged all of the displays, made the aisles wider, all sorts of things which made the shopping experience more pleasant and less stressful. Customer feedback was almost unanimously positive; people loved shopping at Walmart now, when previously it had been a hostile and Kafkaesque experience.

But they spent less money.

So Walmart put everything back the way it was.

> How can you make the most number of groups happy with their seats?

You mean, make the most money? Nobody cares about making customers happy.

I don't believe the Avogadro constant needs to be an SI unit. It's like having 12 as an SI unit, or a million, or 1. Sure, it's a useful constant scaling factor, but it doesn't need to be canonized at the heart of the SI system. It doesn't actually express anything fundamental about how we measure our universe.

And if nothing else, it can be derived: a mole is the number of atoms in a kilogram of carbon-12. Done.

> I asked her to "cut the bullshit."

Yikes.

Consider donating it to a school?

> unsavvy customers [...] should expect to pay a premium

No, they shouldn't.

This is a terribly muddled metaphor.

So in the metaphor of the story's title, Atlas, whose shrugging caused the collapse of society, is the looters? Not the successful entrepeneurial giants, Galt et al., who in their collective departure from the world leave it, figuratively speaking, unsupported?

We should routinely red-team elections. It would literally be amazing if I were kidding.

Well, Google would tell you something more like "business hours are 23:00 to 24:00 and 00:00 to 03:00 Monday to Thursday, 00:00 to 03:00 Friday, closed Saturday and 23:00 to 24:00 Sunday".

In many parts of the world it will e.g. turn from 23:59 Friday 17th to 00:00 Saturday 18th in the middle of lunch.

This means a simple term like "lunchtime on Saturday" is suddenly ambiguous/useless, since it could mean around 00:30 Saturday (shortly after local solar noon) or it could equally mean around 23:30 Saturday (shortly before local solar noon the following solar day).

He's just a stay-at-home parent. It's a completely conventional thing. Let me go ask my Mom how she "retired" at 25 and lived off her savings (and also Dad's wages).

Step 1: make about $110,000 a year, apparently. Then, save a lot of it up. Amazing.

Also, his wife is still working?

A killer in what way? More popular? Better community? Actually make money?

The Nazis were not socialists. Sure, it was in the name, but are you seriously going to take a Nazi's word for it? They were fascists.

How? Being self-driving doesn't make a car take up less space.

What's the solution?

There's also the fact that Hofstadter persistently equates strong AI with grandmaster-level chess-playing, and the entire chapter of nothing but totally unscientific, unfounded, incredibly wrong, biology-free speculation about how the human brain works.

I've been saying Watson is a red herring for years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11262397

You just leave the axiom of infinity out.

To make sure you covered those edge cases correctly!

This kind of thing becomes a lot of fun when you're trying to schedule a regular international call between e.g. the US and the UK, where the offset in hours changes four times per year because their daylight saving adjustments are not simultaneous.

When I say "becomes a lot of fun" what I actually mean is that this observation lets us understand very quickly that the problem is not generally solvable. One way or another, somebody's 9 o'clock meeting is going to suddenly take place at 10. Having accepted that, we can push through the idealism and start working actual solutions like the one you described - have the user attach the regularly scheduled meeting time specifically to the UK or to the US.

I enjoy the section of the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide which explains how Bash has sparse arrays which "are useful in spreadsheet-processing software".[0] Because someone out there is apparently writing spreadsheet-processing software in Bash?

[0] http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/arrays.html

    # Not this:
    if [[ "${my_var}X" = "some_stringX" ]]; then
      do_something
    fi

Why would anybody write this?

This is definitely the reason IBM invented Plex -- they have designers aplenty after the IBM Design initiative a few years back and they discovered that unfortunately Helvetica Neue costs money.

> The other was companies who had tricked people into learning a new kind of handwriting [...] It's interesting parallels with spoken word interfaces. I don't know what the answer is.

Well, here's a possibility: we'll meet in the middle. Companies will train humans into learning a new kind of speech which is more easily machine-recognisable. These dialects will be very similar to English but more constrained in syntax and vocabulary; they will verge on being spoken programming languages. They'll bear a resemblence to, and be constructed in similar ways to, jargon and phrasing used in aviation, optimised for clarity and unambiguity over low-quality connections. Throw in optional macros and optimisations which increase expressive power but make it sound like gibberish to the uninitiated. And then kids who grow up with these dialects will be able to voice-activate their devices with an unreal degree of fluency, almost like musical instruments.