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demallien

2,742 karma · joined February 18, 2008

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demallien··on Why Teenagers Are Fleeing Facebook
Teenagers as a group are not trendsetters for other age groups, for example when did you ever see a Justin Bieber hairdo on anyone over the age of 17?

They are time rich and money poor, a situation that reverses as you get older. They live geographically close to most of their friends. This is mostly not true for adults, who tend to be time poor, wealthier than teenagers, and geographically separated from their friends. Because of this, looking to teenagers to understand what most people want from their social media does not seem like a particularly good idea to me.

demallien··on Why Teenagers Are Fleeing Facebook
Worrying about your parents being on the same social network as yourself ceases to be an issue when you become an adult yourself, and you no longer have to hide the fact that you were out partying when you were supposed to be studying at a friend's house. And as the GP notes, Facebook solves the problem that teens haven't yet had to confront - how do you catch up with your friends when you don't seem them several times a week?

In fact, the thing that has made Facebook such a phenomenon is not that teens found it cool, but rather that the much larger older population found it useful. I would be willing to bet that teens don't even make up 10% of Facebook at this point in time. When adults stop posting and stop receiving notifications on Facebook, then Facebook has something to worry about. Until then, my money would be on teens gravitating back to Facebook as they get older, and being cool becomes less important than knowing that all of your friends are contactable on Facebook.

demallien··on The Strategic Consequences of F-22 Termination (2009)
It is not the defence of the mainland that creates problems. For example that unprotected Western Australian coastline that you pointed to is substantially covered if you take into the account the existence of bare bases such as Curtain.

No, range is more of an issue because Australia's current defensive posture is to try to stop any potential enemy in what is called the air-sea gap. That means interdiction at long distances off the coastline. With aircraft carriers being financially out of reach that leaves long range aircraft as the only viable option. The f-35 is going to be a disaster for Australia's defence, we can only hope that the US honours the goodwill that the purchase of those systems was supposed to procure. Of course, they're going to be flying the same crappy airframes, so meh.

Just one last thing in defence of the JSF though. It's unique capabilities in takeoff / landing make cheaper aircraft carriers a real possibility. Of course Australia hasn't actually tried to procure any such thing so it's only a theoretical, but if tensions were to start to mount in Asia that is something that could be rectified relatively quickly...

demallien··on TuProlog: Making Prolog Ubiquitous
I have a question that I have often wanted to ask of someone that knows something about declarative programming. In my day job, I spend most of my time worrying about trying to make my code run faster (I do low-level user-interface work - building the libraries that application UIs then use, so it's all about moving pixels as fast as possible, getting data to the app as fast as possible etc. If I need to make a SW blit run faster, I go into the function doing the blit, and I may replace some of the C code with some SSE-style vectorised assembler. Or I may choose to run an expensive SQL query once a day, storing the result in a binary file that is then used to feed application data requests, or other things of that nature.

I just don't see how those kinds of optimisations could be done in a declarative language. Do I just have an unusual use-case, or are these languages seriously constrained with respect to the types of programs that they can be used for?

demallien··on Silicon Valley Has an Arrogance Problem
I never thought that I would get to quote Jane Austen on HN, but here's a perfect one : "Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride - where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation."

So says Mr Darcy before he realises that he's actually a bit of a dick...

demallien··on All around the world, labour is losing out to capital
Yes! This is the point that always seems to be missed when we talk about abundance economics. There are some goods that aren't abundant - housing is one of them. If we can't find a solution to long commutes to work / restaurants / theatre / the beach etc then housing Ina good area will remain a scarce good. It will take a bigger and bigger slice of our income, because we are competing with other people, and the abundance of other products, freeing up that money to be spent on housing. If you want to live in the middle of nowhere, you can buy a house very cheaply - they don't cost very much to build these days (thanks abundance!) but if you want to live on the river front, or in the cafe district, well, be prepared to sink a large percentage of your income into your house.

Of course we may end up finding a solution to the constrained housing supply - maybe populations will decrease, or robotic cars will make commutes shorter / less painful, or maybe we will develop virtual living, with people hanging out / working in virtual reality, not real reality.

Housing isn't the only scarce good. Being able to go to a live performance of your favourite band, and indeed the host of things that you can't do today at any price are other examples. But housing is far and away the scarce good that has the largest impact on most of us, and that is only going to continue to grow in importance in the near term.

demallien··on Pixelmator 3.0
Have you tried Acorn?
demallien··on Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
Anyone who wants to build a fork can do so

Not really. You will have your mainline Abdroid implementation shutdown if you do this. Google is clearly doing this to make forking a very risky proposition for device manufacturers. It's the antithesis to open.

demallien··on What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
which for those that don't speak French translates to "cassette" tapes (ka - sept)...
demallien··on Want people to trust you? Try apologising for the rain
You know, I've never been able to convince myself that the quantization error is correctly taken into account by standard statistical error bars / power of study.
demallien··on Why Registers Are Fast and RAM Is Slow
Or on a more light-hearted note: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Sou...

Which just goes to show, hitting memory is a Bad Thing(tm) even when you're running on a slow(from today's perspective) processor like a 68000.

demallien··on Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance
That's not how mandatory voting works, at least in Australia, one if the few democracies to have it. It's mandatory to show up to the voting place and get your name ticked off the roll. It is not mandatory to actually cast a vote. You can turn around and walk back out as soon as your name has been crossed off. Or you can cast a blank ballot. Or an invalid ballot, or a donkey vote etc etc
demallien··on Algernon's Law
Bench presses are measuring your ability to bench press. Iq tests are measuring your ability to do IQ tests (and not your IQ)

Edit: just to clarify, the fact that you can train to improve an IQ score means that it is not a very good measure of innate ability. You can't really talk about "having an IQ", all you can say is that you got 130 on your last IQ test, a bit like how you might tell someone what you got for your SATs.

demallien··on World won't cool without geoengineering, warns report
But put that aside, let me give you a primer on climate change.

Here are some indisputable facts (well, to dispute them, you would need to overturn quantum physics, not impossible, but quite a hard task):

1) CO2 absorbs more infrared light than visible light. This can be demonstrated in a laboratory, and we even know why this is the case, thanks to quantum physics.

2) When sunlight hits the Earth, some is absorbed, and then re-emitted red-shifted. Again, we have direct satellite measurements of this, and we also have the theoretical explanation as to why, thanks you again quantum physics.

3) We know that we are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Again, direct measurements show this, plus we know that we are producing CO2 with our industrial processes.

Put those 3 facts together, and the baseline conclusion is that unless there is some unknown fourth factor, our planet is going to get hotter. Scientists noticed this back in the sixties, and started conducting experiments to see if this was indeed the case. All of our measurements since then show that global temperature is increasing, on average, which ties in nicely with what we expect from theory (points 1-3 above).

Anybody that wants to make a serious claim that climate change isn't happening needs to either demonstrate that one of points 1-3 is wrong, or that there is a fourth factor. A fourth factor would be something like "as the world's oceans become more acidic due to absorption of CO2, past a certain threshold value the surface becomes more mirror-like, increasing the albedo, and hence reducing the amount of red-shifting of light". A paper that demonstrated this, and demonstrated that the effect would be big enough to overcome the increased absorption caused by increased CO2 would indeed have demonstrated that climate change would indeed be limited by the threshold value. If such a paper were to come out, I personally would probably breath a deep sigh of relief and then throw a party.

If someone tries to claim that climate change isn't happening without demonstrating that points 1,2 or 3 are wrong, and without demonstrating an unknown factor that hadn't yet been taken into account can be safely dismissed. You can question the specifics of the models, like "is the Greenland ice sheet going to melt in 10 years? 100 years? 1000 years?" That's fair game, and if you go and read the papers, you will see scientists doing just that. But the overarching question of climate change? That's settled business already, and anyone claiming otherwise deserves the title of "denialist".

demallien··on World won't cool without geoengineering, warns report
Yes, if by "appeal to authority" you mean "go read the best research available on the subject and make up your own mind". Oh wait, that's the opposite of appeal to authority...
demallien··on World won't cool without geoengineering, warns report
If that's how it seems to you, you are not paying enough attention. Scientists are providing full data sets, and denialists are cherry-picking. I can't convince you just by saying so, but seriously, this is an important issue. Set aside some time (a day or two) and read some if the key papers characterising climate change. You will come away with a very different idea on where the truth lies in this "debate".
demallien··on In 2016, Paris to be home to the biggest startup incubator in the world
Well, I suppose one way to look at it is that, bearing in mind that taxes and bureaucracy are intensely difficult to change in the right direction in France, they should try and make things easier for start-ups in other ways. Subsidised office space, and easier collaboration are both good ideas, and are all the more necessary given France's problems in other areas. It should be noted that France turns out some really good engineers (my opinion, as an Australian in France), and it's just dumb not to benefit more from that.

The government has made some good changes in the red tape department too. For example, you can now kick off a one-person start-up by using the status of "entrepreneur" to start with, allowing you to start making money whilst holding down a steady job - once you've stabilized income at ramen profitability, you can then go and fight the red tape to become a proper business. Obviously this is not a model that works for all start-ups, but at least some are going to be able to get off the ground using this ramp.

demallien··on In 2016, Paris to be home to the biggest startup incubator in the world
Ha! I bet Free employees (Free is Xavier Niel's main business) are a bit ticked off - Free is renowned for being cheap with regards to it's employees...
demallien··on Apple’s iPhone 5s And iPhone 5c Sell 9M Units Over Opening Weekend
The under supply can't be too bad though - I just checked on eBay, and 16gb gold iPhones are going for around $1000. You can buy a TMobile contract free for $650 online through the Apple Store. That's only a 50% markup...
demallien··on Apple’s iPhone 5s And iPhone 5c Sell 9M Units Over Opening Weekend
Apple doesn't break down numbers to the device level. 5M sold last year was 5m combined iPhone sales (all models). So this really is an apples to apples comparison...
demallien··on Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID
I would be very surprised if the fingerprint is sent over the wire. Instead, I would expect the "secure enclave" to validate the fingerprint, and then emit a time-limited certificate of some sort to authenticate with servers. The fingerprint information - or derived information such as hashes - never needs to leave the phone.
demallien··on How Weev's prosecutors are making up the rules
Which, castle doctrine or stand-your-ground?
demallien··on How Weev's prosecutors are making up the rules
Again from Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin)

"The "stand your ground law" was not used by the Zimmerman defense team during the trial, although it was considered at an earlier time. Some sources have pointed out that “Stand Your Ground” was mentioned in the Jury Instructions preceding the trial,[308] however, this is part of the required Jury Instructions in all Florida murder trials in which the defendant claims “Justifiable Use of Deadly Force” as part of their defense."

And: "The police chief said that Zimmerman was released because there was no evidence to refute Zimmerman's claim of having acted in self-defense, and that under Florida's Stand Your Ground statute, the police were prohibited by law from making an arrest."

Honestly, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that SYG played a role in the jury's decision-making process. But hey, don't take my word for it, what about the reaction of the Governor of Florida (again from Wikipedia): "Three weeks after the shooting, Florida Governor Rick Scott commissioned a 19-member task force to review the Florida statute that deals with justifiable use of force, including the Stand Your Ground provision."

If that's still to tenuous a connection for you, let's hear from one of the jurors on the case: "An anonymous member of the jury appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 on July 15 to discuss how Florida's Stand Your Ground law provided a legal justification for Zimmerman's actions. According to the juror, neither charge against Zimmerman applied "because of the heat of the moment and the Stand Your Ground" http://thewabashc3.blogspot.fr/2013/07/timothy-johnson-media...

So yeah, I really do think it's "sensible" to think that SYG helped Trayvon Martin's killer walk away as an innocent man.

demallien··on How Weev's prosecutors are making up the rules
"Citizens in the US have a duty to de-escalate the situation, a 'duty to retreat', unless they're backed into a metaphorical corner ('castle doctrine')."

From Wikipedia: "A Stand-Your-Ground law is a type of self-defense law that gives individuals the right to use deadly force to defend themselves without any requirement to evade or retreat from a dangerous situation. It is law in certain jurisdictions within the United States." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law

This is the type of law that allowed Trayvon Martin's killer to walk away as an innocent man.

demallien··on Apple’s iPhone 5 touchscreen is 2.5 times faster than Android devices
They do. When they don't have access to better tools for one reason or another. This is not my brother's case though - he simply found the iPad to be a superior solution to the problem.
demallien··on Apple’s iPhone 5 touchscreen is 2.5 times faster than Android devices
Wow, you had better explain that to my brother - he just finished illustrating a children's book with beautiful water-colour style images - all done on an iPad. But maybe I imagined that...
demallien··on More on Lithium Batteries
Your reply to Jared is talking about quoting out of context. There is no quoting in this case. The guy is simply introducing the research paper that he himself wrote and got published. Seriously I have no idea what on earth you're going on about.
demallien··on More on Lithium Batteries
There was a honking big difference between pseudo-science and this blog post, and it was right at the start. Specifically:

"So I decided to find out - and I did! "

Followed up by a link to a published scientific article. Seriously, I don't know what your complaint is. There's a nice dry scientific paper, and a blog post with a more accessible tone. This seems like a pretty good mix of the different types of media (putting aside for now the issue of the paper being behind a bloody paywall).

demallien··on Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
It's convenient for the owner of the Android phone, but the wifi password is not necessarily theirs to give away. That's the problem. It's not because your friends and family have given you their wifi password that they intended to give that password to Google as well. You're trading their security for your convenience.
demallien··on Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
That's not the problem - choosing to give up your own secrets is fine, but giving up the wifi password of your friend's router because they kindly let you use the network whilst visiting is not cool at all. I personally refuse to allow access by friends with Android devices, and they are shocked to learn what Google does when I explain why...
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