dspeyer

I had a really bad feeling reading this article. Especially the parts about cleanliness and alcohol. Empathy's always a tricky thing, but I'm picturing something like this:

Welcome to $company. Here at $company we understand that $your_group people are different from $most_of_us_group people, especially with regards to $list_of_old_stereotypes, and we've made accommodations on that basis to make you feel more comfortable. We hope you appreciate this.

I observe that their ads are all flash. I don't block ads, but I do block flash. I suspect there are a lot of others like me in this.

So long as humans can do general purpose thinking and machines can't, any task that requires general purpose thinking will require humans.

Many of these tasks may be things that go undone now, but will become affordable when machine-made stuff gets cheaper and removes expenses from people's budgets.

Assuming the economics doesn't mess everything up. Which it easily could. But the fundamental problem is self-solving until we run out of applications of general purpose thinking.

They said "slightly".

OSX is hardly open at all. Only a few pieces are (important pieces, but still). Something completely open is more than slightly more open than OSX.

Slightly more open?

In what way is Ubuntu closed?

The question isn't whether the 95% can do neurosurgery. It's whether there's anything they can do better than a robot that other people want.

Given the overall flexibility of the human mind, and the complete failure of general-purpose AI, I bet there's something. I could be convinced otherwise, but it would require much stronger evidence than a half decade of unemployment that could easily come from economic or political causes.

Well not if we don't work toward it!

A leisure-filled society is an inherently stable thing. It's just not a direction we're headed. But perhaps those of us with long-term vision can steer things a little.

After all, those slums aren't a stable thing. They're a civil war waiting to happen.

Any idea whether or not you were right to be scared?

You have completely missed the point of the comment that you are responding to. It's not that she's a woman, but that she put so much of her efforts into that identity.

Or maybe you're joking, but jokes don't go well in discussions like this.

Your post seems to imply that solving problems and focusing on goals are male-specific patterns of action. That's a rather more dangerous meme.

Here's the key line from the article:

> Here's the profile of a female entrepreneur that I want to work with

Note the use of the word "I". When the author brings herself into the article like this, discussing the author is entirely relevant.

That effect has been studied too, and you're right about the quantity effect. At least in India.

It's not his million. It's the researcher's million, which the offerer is proposing a way to split.

Does anyone have good numbers for how much storage we'll need? We have data on wind and sun across the US going back a while, though most of it isn't from an energy perspective. I know that so far Europe's done well with the "it's always windy somewhere" strategy, but they haven't been doing it very long.

Could be. This is Boston. Remember Aqua Teen Hunger Force?

I'd still like to know what actually happened, though.

> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though.

NoSQL still stores tables, not trees (or at least the NoSQLs I've paid attention to do). That's the change he was predicting. You still need a tabular schema for your NoSQL database.

We're not that far from the speed of light barrier. There's a fixed amount of time it takes for any information to get from one end of a chip to the other and back. Only shrinking the die will decrease that.

Bicycling is certainly quiet.

When I'm walking and a bicyclist passes me, I generally don't hear them coming until they're past. Likewise when I'm bicycling around a pedestrian, they don't hear me unless I deliberately make noise.

I do hear pedestrians.

Sure they do. Right here. :-)

Those exams required minimal time (for Einstein -- a student of average intelligence might have a different experience).

If passing the exams requires spending most of your school time preparing for them, it's a very different situation.

Portal does better on the character front. Cave Johnson and GLaDOS are very memorable. The two of them just bantering... has potential.

The threading here is completely broken. Replies are hidden unless I mouse over the post being replied to. Some of the messages are tagged with "in reply to $username" but I can't tell which of that user's posts.

If I need a forum, I'll create a subreddit.

JSONP lets the server turn off the same-origin policy. If XRFing your data is dangerous, don't use JSONP. But often we don't care about XRF, and the person writing the server is well-placed to know.

There's a lot of blank space in the year one map. I bet there were people living in those places.

These seem to be in Austin. Are there similar openings in your NYC office?

Is there any parser autogeneration tool that can cope with c++11's grammer? Including weird edge cases like template vs. comparison depending on previously declared types?

Same here, but it seems kind of justified. C11 looks a lot less ambitious than C++11. Just tweaks outside of the threading stuff, and I suspect most thread users will stick with their existing feature-rich but nonportable libraries.

C++ has always had the feeling of a language that isn't quite finished, so there's a lot of interest in where it's going next. C has the feeling of a language that does exactly what it sets out to do, so it's not really going anywhere.

Using something like cytochrome c reductase to turn hydrocarbons (bio- or geo-) into electricity and then into motion would be a big efficiency improvement over our current heat engines.

Still, it's only half the problem. We also want an efficient and compact way to turn electricity into energy-dense chemicals. AFAIK, that doesn't exist in nature; we'd have to start from scratch.

Hmm...

Having now gone back and researched that a little better, it's only Waved Albatrosses I was thinking of and sources seem to disagree on whether they can take off from flat ground or not. They certainly prefer a cliff, and will make a long walk to get to one if necessary.

And yet, let's take a look at the market. A one-bedroom Manhattan condo costs more than twice what a two-story house almost anywhere else does. There's no lack of demand.

Building more housing in a city is hard. You have to buy out all units in the existing building, and the current residents may be quite reluctant. And actually extending a city is even harder.