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a simple autostereogram:

   1     1     1     1     1     1     1     1     1     1     1     1
   
   2      2      2      2      2      2      2      2      2      2   
   
   3       3       3       3       3       3       3       3       3  
   
   4        4        4        4        4        4        4        4   
   
   5         5         5         5         5         5         5      
   
   6          6          6          6          6          6          6
   
   7           7           7           7           7           7

bfrson Stereogram Tetris

If you are having trouble with this, wikipedia has some good instructions which helped me. First try autostereograms [1] (these are more simpler to see), and then simple random dot stereograms (RDS) [2], and finally magic eye static and moving stereograms.

BTW, the book which introduced RDS: "Foundations of Cyclopean Perception" by Bela Julesz is considered one of the most influential books in cognitive science. With just a computer, using no invasive microelectrodes and animal sacrifices, he proved a fantastic result...stereopsis (fusion of the individual images from each eye) occurs before object recognition!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-dot_stereogram

bfrson InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonPainter

worth rewatching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrIrcV9Bgmc

bfrson Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

Vicarious (http://vicarious.com/) which recently got $15 million from Peter Thiel & Dustin Moscovitz would be a 9 on your scale.

bfrson Vinod Khosla says technology will replace 80 percent of doctors

Here's a recent anecdote:

A few months back I got a stomach ulcer and before going to the doctor, I decided to do some research. I came to realize that the primary cause is not stress or excess spicy food, but a particular stomach bacteria, H. Pylori, going rogue and attacking the mucus lining of the stomach that protects underlying tissue from the strong acid [1]. For this discovery, Drs. Marshall and Warren were awarded the 2005 Nobel prize in medicine [2], as it meant that ulcers were curable with the use of suitable antibiotics.

However, my doctor (and good friend) insisted that there was no permanent cure for stomach ulcers and they could only be managed by taking acid reducing medication (Prilosec) everyday for as long as I lived. I couldn't help wondering if his information was corrupted by big pharma, who always want to keep you hooked onto some drug or the other. So, I had to use extra persuasion and tact to get him to prescribe antibiotics for H. Pylori elimination (and thus permanently curing the ulcer).

I'm a bit skeptical that big pharma's tentacles will NOT reach Watson's doctor successors [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptic_ulcer#History

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Phys...

[3] http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/watson_in_healthc...

bfrson Robot cars on public roads? California says yes

Looks like you are forgetting manual override.

bfrson Why “just do it” is bullshit

In winner-takes-all games, being even in the top 99th percentile is worse than useless.

To use your own example, true you might get better than half the regulars in basketball if you spent 1 hr a day at it, but you'd make exactly $0 being in the top 50th percentile of basketball players. You would be far better off if you had spent that 1 hr/day for a year on improving your coding skills further.

bfrson And everyone gets a robot pony

@zanny: A lot of the action in the brain seems to take place at the synapses. These are much smaller structures, and a useful brain scan will need to make precise measurements of the strength of each synapse. I need to study this more closely, but at the moment, I think these measurements maybe impeded by the uncertainty principle.

bfrson And everyone gets a robot pony

Well, to me it seems that fine grained brain scanning would need something like Laplace's demon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon

bfrson And everyone gets a robot pony

I have a question regarding this brain scanning and uploading idea:

Won't Heisenberg's principle make this impossible?

bfrson Singularity U, or Singularity Woo?

Richard Dawkins made an excellent documentary, The Enemies of Reason, which covers homeopathy. Parts of the it can be found on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dawkins%20homeop...

bfrson Higgs Boson Explained by Cartoon

How come you missed something more obvious?

* Controlled Fusion

My guess is that the politicians were sold on the unlimited energy that successful controlled fusion would provide.

As somebody once said: Any problem on Earth can be solved with the careful application of high explosives. The trick is not to be around when they go off.

bfrson If you're not going to become a professor, then why bother pursuing a Ph.D.?

"Defaults aren't usually in the best interests of those on the bottom (e.g., Ph.D. students), so it's important to know when to reject them and to ask for something different. Of course, there's no nefarious conspiracy against students; the defaults are just naturally set up to benefit those in power."

That is very reminiscent of Nietzsche.

Also worth reading, when it comes to the question of to do or to not to do a PhD is: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

bfrson Hacker irked by reincarnation

Reincarnation, telepathy, extra sensory perception etc. are pipe dreams for us, but ironically, for AIs that we build, they will be routine!

Current operating systems are like rudimentary souls, and any OS routinely uses these capabilities:

Rebooting <-> Reincarnation

Networking <-> Telepathy

USB devices <-> Extrasensory perception

Andy Tannenbaum's MINIX-3 explicitly calls rebooting as reincarnation.

Future AIs will have Thompson & Ritchie to thank for making flexible reincarnation possible for them.

bfrson How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000

nytimes story on previously posted article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4145558

bfrson Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning

I think your comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3838971 is very relevant to this discussion.

bfrson Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning

"supplements-eating Kurzweil", ROTFL!

bfrson I don't "get" art

Obligatory references:

If it needs a long sermon to proclaim it's art, it's probably bullshit [1]

Modern Art - A Skeptical View [2]

[1] http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/Artsp.htm

[2] http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/

bfrson Visas for entrepreneurs

Since when did this point of view:

The individual exists for the support and enjoyment of the state.

overtake this:

The state exists solely to facilitate the individual's pursuit of happiness.

bfrson Exercise does not lift depression

Did prozac sales go down during the last few qtrs?

bfrson Don't Waste a Single Moment

If people take your advice too seriously, then maybe most marketing folks would be out of a job ;)

bfrson Ask HN: Movies for Hackers?

Some highly rated movies that I didn't like:

- Bladerunner

- Memento

- The Prestige

- Old Boi

bfrson Ask HN: Movies for Hackers?

These are some movies/tv series that I deeply enjoyed and (some I) wish I had known about earlier.

9.9 Hitchhiker's guide to the universe, BBC TV series

9.9 Contact (1997) based on a novel by Carl Sagan. Very few people seem to know about this movie.

9.3 War Games

9.0 most Akiro Kurosawa movies:

    Seven Samurai

    High & Low

    The Bad Sleep Well

    Ikiru

    Red Beard

9.0 Terminator 1 (watch again)

8.8 Terminator 2 (watch again)

8.7 Pirates of Silicon Valley

8.7 Matrix 1 (watch again)

8.7 The Italian Job (featuring Napster's original inventor)

8.7 Live Free or Die Hard

8.5 Track Down or Takedown (about social hacker Kevin Mitnick)

8.5 Revolution OS (2001)

8.5 Dr. Strangelove

8.5 2010 A space odyssey

8.3 Antitrust (2001)

8.3 Sneakers

8.3 COSMOS

8.2 Minority Report

8.2 2001 A space odyssey

8.2 Paycheck (2003)

8.0 The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

8.0 The Net

bfrson The Eternal Lorem Ipsum

The section on Legacy [1] is especially illuminating. Looks like Cicero is of the big guys referred to when they talk about the wisdom of the ancients.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero#Legacy

bfrson The Eternal Lorem Ipsum

I have browsed through the The Harvard Classics [1], but totally missed Cicero. I read XII. Lives, by Plutarch, but IX. On Friendship, On Old Age & Letters, by Cicero, must have seemed like a bunch of platitudes at that time. Now I know better and will read it.

[1] http://www.bartleby.com/hc/

bfrson The Eternal Lorem Ipsum

This Cicero guy seems like a very good writer. That is a nice presentation of stoic(?) philosophy.

bfrson Microsoft wins US import ban on Motorola’s Android devices

If this is true, then I have no more doubt that Microsoft is a zombie company.

bfrson Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

Such housing already exists in the US.

See http://shine.yahoo.com/green/simple-life-in-manhattan-a-90-s...

But, why do you think so small, when what is possible is a BIG, clean, modern, beautiful, 2 BR apt for $50/month!

bfrson Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

As a former Civil Engineer [4] and advocate of commodity-housing [1], I can tell you that rent control [3] is the minor issue here. I'm glad that HN is finally paying some attention to the elephant in the room...zoning laws. I bet that for most HNers who pay rent, it is about 50-60% of monthly expenses. This is freaking ridiculous! Look at it from a Civil Engineer's perspective: modern houses are built from very durable materials, and once constructed the maintenance expenses are minimal.

Is it that hard to connect the dots? People in power are all landlords, and they get a big chunk of their idle income via rents [2]. All they need to do is make sure that no new housing is constructed where they own rental property...basically protection racketeering. Next time you visit the Golden Gate park just spare a few minutes to read the plaque next to Joseph Strauss' statue. It says, "the biggest opposition to building the bridge came from the landlords of San Francisco, who feared that once the bridge was built, it would lead to a nose dive in rents".

[1] Housing so abundant that rents are on the order of maintenance costs, about $50-100/month!

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3959941

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/personal-finan...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3959500

[3] http://www.baycitizen.org/columns/elizabeth-lesly-stevens/sm...

This article describes in depth the problem you are facing, and since you are a new landlord it does seem like the biggest issue ;)

[4] One of the reasons for leaving Civil Engineering was the realization that the problem of high-cost-of-housing was not an engineering problem, but completely a political and social one. Constructing abundant, high quality and cheap housing was declared a solved problem in Civil Engineering by the 60s!

bfrson Stroustrup C++ "I did it for you all"

ROTFL!

These lines made me almost burst something:

...X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system,...

All that job security, just through one mistake of judgment.

Remember the typedef? Remember how long it took to grope through the header files only to find that 'RoofRaised' was a double precision number?