arglebarnacle

Honestly the idea that capitalism itself systematically causes inequality is not a crazy thing to believe. You obviously don't agree and that's fine, but it's not the case that every smart person believes the "negative outcomes found in capitalist societies" can be resolved without a fundamental change in the underlying system.

You might be surprised at how dangerous it is to be trans. Wikipedia maintains a list of unlawfully killed trans people at this page[1]

I guess there are more trans people than informants so maybe there's some statistical point to be made there, but frankly I'm not sure why you picked this nit to begin with. I think it's important to recognize, rather than downplay the risks faced by marginalized groups in the US and elsewhere.

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

Sure, in the way that peeing all over the walls is a bodily function. It's a bodily function that's allowed at home (if you must), but not allowed in the office.

It's an interesting comparison to be sure, but I'm not sure Street-Fighting Math has a lot to offer graduate-level pure math texts (the subject of that post).

I own and love the book, and did a lot of pure math in my math undergrad degree. But SFM is closer to the tradition of Martin Gardner's long-running "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American than real higher pure math education.

I think that's because it hinges on giving you tools to "hack" problems in physics, geometry and calculus that leverage intuition about quantities and space. There are branches of pure math where this matters a lot, but frankly it's not going to help you learn about Lie groups or category theory. It's not clear to me that the style and approach of SFM is helpful in this kind of very abstract context where a detailed understanding of unfamiliar sorts of concepts and mechanics is crucial.

The idea that fickle consumers are to blame for unethical and often unlawful exploitation of employees is propaganda with only the thinnest veneer of economics painted on it.

I suppose I understand why the very rich and business interests make arguments like this, but usually it's just ordinary people. Who benefits? It's about time we held companies like Amazon accountable for the way they harm and exploit their employees instead of helping shift the blame to their customers.

I'm sure this horde exists because kickstarter creators market themselves as if they're selling pre-orders of finished products.

In some cases they have no choice, because some kickstarters are really expensive. It might make sense to pre-order Ubuntu's $700 smartphone for example, but nobody would ever throw Canonical $700 for some "goofy schwag" and just hope they might or might not get a phone later.

>...if extreme techniques were viewed as likely to result in useful information

Right, he wouldn't use it because he doesn't believe it's effective. The GP is suggesting that if it were effective and legal, do you really believe he would refrain from doing it on moral grounds? It's the prerogative of the FBI to pursue cases using essentially all effective legal means, and it's no surprise to hear they are lobbying for more tools to become legal.

It looks like it's down for me. Is anyone else still able to see it?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but your last paragraph seems to imply that the "Tesla approach" is unable to "plan an emergency maneuver for collision avoidance"

If true, that would seem to mean that Tesla's self-driving car program is dead on arrival. Clearly emergency collision avoidance is not optional for a self driving car with mass adoption. That's a pretty serious claim to make.

I wouldn't rule it out, but no computing hardware platform has ever been dominant for 50 years before so there are reasons to believe we're not about to get started with that kind of cycle now.

Mainframes, minicomputers, desktop personal computers, laptops, and now tablets and smartphones. Maybe we have reached the end (for 50 years at least), but I think the safer bet is that the next big technology 30 years from now will be something that surprises us, not something we already have or could easily predict having wide adoption.

I was a bit disappointed when I found this out about it:

"The formula is a general-purpose method of decoding a bitmap stored in the constant k, and it could actually be used to draw any other image."

That makes it less of a self-referential formula in my opinion, and more of a cool formula that can print any bitmap.

I mean sure, maybe they will. But people have been saying this for at least 6 years. When will this happen exactly, and why? Bitcoin may never achieve the status its proponents hope for, but interest from investors and the financial sector in bitcoin and it's underlying technology suggest it's unlikely to suffer this fate anytime soon.

Unlike HYIP, which are a malicious scam, and LR, which essentially only existed for money laundering and had a single point of failure, bitcoin is at least some kind of innovation.

This position isn't really better than the knee-jerk "bitcoin will replace the Federal Reserve". Both are based on feelings or ideology rather than research, and both fail to acknowledge the great uncertainty that clearly surrounds the future of bitcoin and blockchain technology.

So in a blockchain, it's straightforward to verify whether a block contains only valid transactions or not (in the sense of an address only being allowed to spend coins it really has for example). Any node running the reference implementation will reject any block that is invalid regardless of mining.

The issue with one actor controlling over 50% of mining power is that they can spend their money, then go back in time to before the spend to create an alternative chain. Since they control the majority of hashpower, their alternative chain catches up and ultimately becomes the reference chain in the view of the nodes in the peer to peer network. The bad actor is then free to spend the coins from their original transaction again, despite presumably having already received the goods or services from the original transaction.

The real innovation of the blockchain is that it solves the Byzantine Generals problem in the case where less than 50% of the hashpower in the network belongs to coordinating bad actors. In the absence of that level of centralization and collusion, you can be sure that nobody is cheating.

Failing to boycott is not the same thing as breaking a strike. If this whole incident has revealed one thing, it's the extent to which the labor movement has lost cultural and moral mindshare. Forty years ago, everyone knew what scabbing was, what it wasn't, and had social/political/moral ideas about it.

Now that the labor occupies a much less central place in our society, these common norms and knowledge have been lost. I happen to be appalled by this because of my own political views, but good or bad it's certainly a sign of the times.

Off topic, but can you tell me whether you're using a browser extension to render $e^2$ (and if so which one!), or if you're simply using the $ character as a delimiter for humans who read and write a lot of LaTeX code?

You're not wrong that politics is enormously complex, but I think you are wrong that the average person is able to pick a side perhaps only because they lack analytical depth or consideration. Rather, it may be that most people are more comfortable than you are at making judgments in these fraught, ambiguous scenarios, and that this is not at all a bad thing.

Most art, politics, and even sports (physical qualities being considered equal) are all areas that can't really be solved by a complete analysis because, as you say, there are too many variables. Nonetheless, some people are much better at these things than others due to qualities that are hard to describe exactly. This ability to make good split second decisions without a complete analytical understanding of the problem or even the current state is one of those qualities.

I don't think this ability is superficial, or without value. Rather, it just goes to show how different people are from one another. So I would encourage you not to suggest to others who do have strong political views that their views are unfounded just because they are strong and the domain is complex.

It's definitely true that startups are often founded for the sole purpose of being acquired by one of the Big Boys--but not so that the founders get to work there.

It's because they're hoping to get rich--make the perhaps $10M+ so that they can do whatever they want with the rest of their lives. You almost make it sound like the startup is part of their Google interview strategy and acquisition is how they get hired, but I'd venture that most founders probably don't want to spend more than a couple years at the parent company. They want to start the next phase of their lives.

There are a lot of people on this thread crapping on Signal for its various flaws and downsides. It's nice to be smarter and more informed than everyone, but for the rest of us we really need advice about what we SHOULD do if we want a baseline amount of privacy from mass surveillance.

I'm honestly asking here--I don't have the knowledge that many in this community do about the exact risk of Signal requiring Google Play Services for example. If Signal isn't the answer, what should I and others use who require a usable, reasonably accessible to non-tech-professionals solution?

Most people only have the NSA as an adversary in the minimal sense that they're caught up in a very broad mass surveillance net. It's true that if you're a whistleblower with sensitive government information Signal is not a complete solution for you. But who cares? Almost nobody is in that situation, and people in that situation have access to other tools that actually do help.

Your last sentence is extremely unfair to Signal and dramatically underrates the privacy it provides to ordinary people. It's dangerous to suggest that because it requires a phone number and lives on an app store it provides no useful protection at all, because that implies it's no better than e.g. WhatsApp when in fact it has a much better featureset.

I think it is a mistake to buy into the logic that using encryption means you have something to hide.

Regardless of the framing of the article, many people likely read this and thought, "yes, it would be nice to be confident my messaging is private even from mass government surveillance."

This does not mean they are drug dealers. It means that they have concluded wide-dragnet surveillance programs are worth opting out of, especially if it's very easy to do so.

I think I misspoke. Rather than a true burner phone you'd want to use a prepaid phone with minutes that don't expire, or that you can keep active by using a minute every 90 days etc.

Definitely a hassle, but for anyone for whom a phone number is insufficiently anonymous I would imagine they're used to it.

I admittedly don't know as much about the options for VOIP but I've got to to believe there's a way to get a phone number on the internet where you can receive SMS and keep it active indefinitely.

I'm sensitive to this concern, but remember that the phone number you register with Signal doesn't have to be your real phone number or identical to the phone number of your primary Signal device.

You can just get a VOIP number or burner phone somewhere in a relatively anonymous manner, register it with Signal on your android phone, and go about your business if anonymity is an important requirement for you.

It's a welcome surprise to see an unreasonable and inflammatory post end with such a good piece of advice.

Needless to say the notion that python and ruby programmers are greybeards who need to "die off" to make way for the future of software development is not a rational assessment of the state of the industry.

Some more:

W2202XA Walked into lamppost, initial encounter

W34111A Accidental malfunction of paintball gun, initial encounter

W5629XA Other contact with orca, initial encounter

Y36511D War operations involving direct blast effect of nuclear weapon, civilian, subsequent encounter

V657XXA Person on outside of heavy transport vehicle injured in collision with railway train or railway vehicle in traffic accident, initial encounter

Y92331 Roller skating rink as the place of occurrence of the external cause

That analogy would make more sense if software engineering required as many time-sensitive split second decisions as doctoring does.

Doctors go through years of schooling involving a substantial amount of memorization as well as board exams, residencies and so on before they're allowed to do much doctoring at all. This is the case because it is crucial that they not forget in an exam that neck pain combined with a headache could be a sign of meningitis, etc.

If an engineer needs to know which sorting algorithm is best, taking some time to research and google it is not going to cause a problem. That's why questions like this are bad, even offensive--they make people feel as though they're bad engineers when actually they're being put through an ineffective interviewing process.

To me this sounds similar to the problem of how to execute a timing-based attack over a network with variable latency. The key is to make lots of requests very quickly. You can then statistically narrow down very small variations even though they're built on top of a larger trend signal like the network latency or a piece of music.

As another commenter suggested, there may also be signal processing techniques to "mod out" the interference from the music (perhaps measured with a probe on the audio output?) and measure only what's left.

I think it's going to be safe. It demonstrably saves much much more than it costs, so conservatives will likely support it from a cost cutting/reducing government "waste" perspective. Liberals will support it because it's smart and makes government run better.

I think only an extremely cynical view would suggest this program isn't safe, a view in which conservatives intentionally dismantle good cost-saving government programs while leaving bad ones for the sole purpose of giving government a bad name.

I heard an interview with the inventor on NPR last night where he claimed that all the materials and indeed, the technology needed to do this already exist.

The reason this contradicts your reading is likely because, as others have commented, it's not a real space elevator. It doesn't go to space, and it is more like a super-tall building with an interesting adaptive stability system than a tether connected to a counterweight as in traditional space elevator designs.

So this also means it may not be prior art. The innovation is located in however it is they plan to keep a 20km tall structure stable and attach an electric elevator for rockets to it.

I'm hoping that even though we don't seem to be so lucky, there are other solar systems out there with multiple worlds where intelligent life developed roughly in parallel.

At least someone in the universe would be living out my space opera fantasies!

As a healthcare IT professional I find this to be a highly misleading portrayal of what Epic is and its place in the industry. Epic is admittedly typical enterprise software that doesn't meet the standards we've come to expect in the 21st century. But you have to take that in the context of healthcare which is at least 20 years behind in this respect.

Epic is far more sophisticated and good than 90% of the other options in use by real hospitals today. I'm only half joking when I tell my friends in tech that it's hard for me to talk about what I've seen. Not just bad software but horrible 80s era curses GUIs, truly garbage proprietary query languages, systems with 100 different pieces of shoddy vendor garbage bolted on here and there to cover the gaps in their functionality.

Epic is best in class--and that's sad. Maybe 20 years from now we'll have EMR and patient accounting systems that will please 2015 HN.