charlesism

It's the same article, published on multiple sites. Is there a reason (eg: only one site has the rights) to prefer Huffpo? My inclination would be the other way.

This would be easier if the internet were optimized around enlightenment values (for lack of a better phrase) instead of the values of a tabloid newspaper.

The Rio had slow transfer speed (USB), hardly any storage (less than one CD), big ugly form factor... and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t rechargeable. My buddy at the time bought one. It did not impress.

The tech for the first iPod (Firewire and a 5GB hdd) made it essentially a different category of device.

I can’t remember any portable MP3 playing device before iPod that wasn’t a joke. Are you thinking of a particular product that was comparable? I’m curious.

We seem to agree about the level of risk. It's no more my place to tell you how comfortable you should feel with that risk, than it would be for me to tell you what genre of music should be your favorite. That's just personal preference.

Well then. Carry on :)

   >  it won't be a good business decision

You don't think it might be better to assume all this data will leak or be hacked? You most likely have decades of life ahead of you, and once a file is free on the net, it's there forever.

Good one :(

Underrated comment. The Blade Runner esthetic started with Moebius. Hard to imagine what the movie would look like had he never existed.

If you post "go ahead and downvote me", whether justified or not, readers feel manipulated, and do.

Google has done away with most of its original competitive advantages. Its biggest advantages now are its name recognition and its size. If Google had started off with paid search results and what-you-search-for-is-not-what-you-get we'd probably all still be using Altavista.

I’m guessing once “customer education” fails Boeing, they’ll make a few minor alterations and sell the thing under a different name. Hello “Boeing SFTY9000” or something.

Why isn’t the Schrödinger's cat thing sufficient? I don’t know much about quantum physics, but if we find situations where matter has odds of behaving a certain way, that seems like evidence. How do we explain events not always having a predictable outcome unless all possible outcomes occur somewhere?

  > what you're describing sounds more like a multi-dimensional (above the ones we're aware of) universe rather than a multiverse.

We’re aware of the possibility that we might do something, or could have done something. Does that count as an awareness of higher dimensions?

I don’t know enough about physics to understand how a multi-dimensional (above 4D) universe is different than a multiverse. I assumed they were one and the same concept.

Shouldn’t the default position be that a multiverse exist? A multiverse is what logic suggests (starting with “a point in motion is a line” and moving up to higher dimensions)

Everything past Snow Leopard. Lion was a disaster, and there is literally no feature I use that I prefer in any Mac OS created since then. What's more, the OS has become uglier and buggier.

Edit: actually, I like the addition of Finder > Cut, and Finder > Rename. So, hey, there is something!

Many of Feynman's capers and eccentricities are covered in the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" It's a collection of his essays. I've actually noticed the title pop up a few times before in the comments here in HN. It's a fun read.

It hasn’t gone far enough; not by a looooong shot.

Billions of compromising documents, photos and personal details are now sitting around on the servers of a half dozen for-profit companies.

Only Equifax has given us a taste of what is in store.

Is the world prepared for the day when a trillion Gmail messages leak? Billions of personal camera-roll photos? Trillions of search history entries?

We needs to start taking these issues seriously.

I think of the Internet today as being in the “gathering” stage. All our data is just being slurped up, hanging around on the servers of a few dozen companies. It’s alarming, to be sure, but just you wait! A few years from now - when computers are faster and storage is cheaper - we’ll enter the “disseminating” stage.

That’s the stage we’ll enter as soon as an entire internet’s worth of content becomes easily transferable.

That’s when all your private information from 2019 (your medical history, gmail messages, bank details, your search and browsing and shopping history, your private photos, etc) will leak to the public.

It’s just a question of time because any morsel of data only needs to leak once to be henceforth online forever. It will be a complete nightmare.

   > And yet: When people want 
   > to migrate, no one has Finland 
   > on top of their wish list. 
   > It’s America. Always America. 
   > Why is this?

Because Finland is cold.

I honestly think there’s a higher chance of Comcast killing 100 million people over the next century than “broadband for everyone”

Yes, the reason is that it takes around two years before a user realizes how ineffective the site is. That’s about the maximum amount of time a user can fool themselves into thinking “I’ll start to see some progress any day now!”

If Duolingo were as effective as sites that require the user to make actual effort, its popularity would be more than justified.

It’s bad because it takes a very long time for a language learner to assess their own progress. Duolingo relies on its userbase making an uninformed choice. If Duolingo warned a user “it will take a you 30 years of daily ‘Casual Level’ use to learn the basics here” he or she would likely choose a different website or strategy.

   > Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed or lying. 

Duolingo's "Goal" settings:

   > Basic 1XP | Casual 10XP | Regular 20XP | Serious 30XP | Insane 50XP per day

50XP requires no more than 25 minutes of work.

So, according to Duolingo, it is "Insane" to devote 25 minutes per day on learning a language. To learn a language typically requires 50,000 minutes. And that's just to reach a basic level.

I wonder if Duolingo's "Casual" learners realize that that setting implies a 30 year commitment.

They have the most money because they got the most users. They got the most users because their courses demand the least effort.

I have used several of the alternatives, and all of them are more effective at teaching languages. Granted, Duolingo is better at raising money.

That’s not very nuanced.

A big Finnish government is different than, say, a big Russian government.

To me it seems like saying: I fundamentally disagree with dining out because it requires restaurant, and restaurant is always bad.

   > Why the second constraint? one might 
   > ask. Besides the obvious potential for 
   > profitability, our mission was

The search engine the world needs is one with independence and non-profitability. If the creators are preoccupied with turning a profit, they’ll introduce the same garbage features as Google. It’s a shame, because a good search engine could shorten the time humanity has to wait for advances (eg: cures for cancers, cheaper energy, etc)

Ah, okay. I thought you were referring to well-defined borders, and strict border controls. Both these were generally lax before the 20th Century.

I don’t see how this poses much of a safeguard, in any event. If millions of Chinese wind up starving due to a trade war, for example, a shooting war is almost inevitable.

This comment seems strained. A history book would neither back up the claim about unfettered travel, nor the claim about corruption.

The parent comment actually seems reasonable to me. It really wouldn’t take much escalation for a trade war to turn into a shooting war between, at least China and America.

Yes, that’s what I was thinking.

I can’t disagree that users tolerate ads, since advertising is the model of plenty successful websites. It’s just that, like bundled OS crapware, the user experience is better without it.