e_modad

I was interested in this when I saw it posted recently, but I don't have the money for it, so I'm definitely interested in getting into the beta. Where would I even get the code though? Twitter? Reddit?

That's a good question. Do you think Steve's opinion on gaming is still baked into the company?

I remember being 12 years old and obsessively reading through fravia's pages into the morning in the mid-90's. On a whim, I e-mailed +orc. He responded so kindly that it had a significant effect on my interests and attitudes. I'll always remember that time fondly. It's too bad fravia passed. His legacy lives on in those he influenced.

I always thought of Opera as the quintessential engineer's browser. I switched away from Chrome a couple years ago and haven't looked back since. It's fast, has tons of extensions and works well for pretty much everything.

Hyperscale is a term already right? I don’t know a lot about HPC, but I think it’s already part of the nomenclature.

The full name is the "Yerkes-Dodson Law of Social Facilitation." It's this idea that a task requires an optimal amount of nervous system arousal. Too much and you get jittery, too little and you get lethargic. So it looks like an inverted U with the optimal performance at a middle level of arousal.

Although you're right it's more complicated. If you're an expert at a task, then you do better if you have increased arousal. This is because stress hormones cause new synaptic production to slow down and old networks/circuits to increase in their conduction/strength. So if you're an NBA player, and it's the playoffs, you're going to be better than normal - because you're an expert at the task.

If however the task is 'complex' (like, say, software development) then if you put pressure on people (or if they're putting pressure on themselves), the performance falls significantly. I forgot the name of the study, but this was shown cross-culturally. They gave poor Indian men (in India) 3-months salary to solve a decently straight forward lateral thinking puzzle. The men who got paid performed way worse, then the other men who weren't paid at all.

Sometimes that strikes me as oddly familiar. Paying someone to do something they love and putting too much pressure on them makes their performance degrade.

The major difference is that a warrant to access a safety deposit box allows the keys for that specific safety deposit box and no other. What the FBI is asking for is the equivalent of asking for a master key to all the safety deposit boxes to access just the one box. Given what was revealed in the summer of 2013 by Snowden, I think we'd all agree that the FBI and other state agencies (not just American agencies) will use the software as a backdoor to access whichever iPhone they choose. Let's not be naive.

Fascinating! Also, I couldn't help but think of that scene from The Graduate when I first read your post.

Do you have any books or posts that you'd recommend looking at? There's a huge mountain of information I'm looking at right now. Any specific leads? I'm genuinely asking because I agree with you but didn't know about any link.

That was a great visualization. Thanks for the information lead.

But are they just cogs in a machine? The author betrays his own thoughts on the subject by discussing it that way. I order delivery all the time and have never though of the cooks and delivery people as "cogs in a machine." They're people with jobs, with their own complex lives. It's not my responsibility to worry if the delivery boy who's a Sophomore is having trouble doing his homework because he's working part time for Sprig. I tip well and always smile and don't feel guilty that it's convenient.

Exactly. "Dystopian"? Hyperbole much? This person is just ordering delivery, leaving a nice tip and then making a huge assumption about the lives of the cooks and delivery people. It's not like the restaurants have child labor camps making you dim sum for Christ's sake.

Source? That sounds a little high.

Craig Venter says here[1] that Franz Och (of Google Translate fame) has done some analysis for his new company Human Longevity Inc that shows that about 50% of the genome is responsible for the brain. So the number is quite big and much larger than I would have thought. Excited to see more results from HLI.

Comment at 13:12 [1] https://youtu.be/D3nIIKwwiLc?t=11m43s

Ah ... you think so gwern? I would assume that most people would think that twins are incredibly similar. Or maybe I'm in an echo chamber and need to get out more.

Isn't it? Kudos to the authors for a super clear paper. The graphs make everything crystal clear. Succinct and clear graphs are oddly satisfying for me.

Sure. So here are a few of the highlights of the paper:

- They looked at nearly every single twin study over the last 50 years

- The combined population of the all the studies is 14 million twin pairs

- The results strongly suggest that every human trait is heritable as they didn't find one trait that had 0% heritability.

- The most surprising result for me is that across all the traits they compiled, the heritability is 49%. Which is much much lower than I would have expected.

There's a few more interesting points about monozygotic vs dizygotic, but I'll spare you the technicalities since it has a narrower scope of interest.

As always, thanks Gwern for the informative post.

Congrats!

Such great advice. Don't wait for permission just get started.

My big problem is the price. It's just outrageous for software that I just want to hack on something every once in a while.

The whole time I was thinking "Man, this is crazy, don't they see how that hurts productivity?" And then I thought about Europe compared to the United States. To our European colleagues: Do you think of us as working ourselves to death?

Likewise! I'm curious too. Why is COBOL your main language? Bank legacy servers?

Hey Adam, I just want to say I loved the recent talks you've given. The one at Hadoop Summit with Josh Patterson was so cool as a general overview. Keep it up!

I'm actually curious, why LCD displays? Was it thought to be incredibly difficult to achieve before?

That's an insightful way of looking at it. Reagan was likely the crest of a wave rather than the start of a new one.

"EDIT. Just in case anyone is wondering: for goodness sake I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be concerned about people's needs. But if the above idea is how the world really works, then there is no point in denying it."

No no, I get your point. No need to worry.

I would add a counter-argument here though that there was definitely more time to think in the past. There was more peace of mind because people had a less hurried lifestyle. Also, things had always been bad and were getting much better relative to the past. For example, for new parents today, think of all the various concerns that are constantly hitting them from all sides. This wasn't the case 150 years ago and I think that allowed for people to devote a least some portion of their mental energy towards innovation. And if not innovation, at least towards being socially engaged in the discussion about innovation.

I think one of the big reasons we haven't seen the kind of progress our predecessors had hoped for is because most people don't have the physical or mental energy. For big technological and social advancements, you need everyone (or at least most) engaged, enthusiastic and focused. Most of the world, including most citizens of the United States, are still moving up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So yeah, you get Angry Birds instead of a Hyperloop because most people are so stressed and tired that they're just hoping for a tasty bite to eat and 5 minutes of peace. The corollary is that if we want a Hyperloop (and we do) we should be actively engaged in trying to bring everyone up that hierarchy. When every day isn't an emotional or financial crisis for so many people, we'll have the kind of progress Peter is hoping for.

That is so cool! I love HN for stories like this.

I think warrenmar is referring to the fact a paper's impact can be measured by counting the number of times other authors cite the original paper.

IIRC, Larry and Sergey used that idea as the conceptual framework behind PageRank. Indeed, they were right: the relevance of a search result can be increased tremendously by indexing as many pages as possible and then calculating how many people are linking to said page.

They don't do it like that anymore but that's the basic idea.

Terence is doing something vitally important. 3D printing is likely to be a "next big thing" and we have a duty to ensure the technology stays as open as possible.

As a community, we're lucky that ideas like 'open source' and 'freedom to tinker' are highly valued. Each of us has benefited tremendously from that commitment. But it wasn't an accident. Hackers, scientists and engineers have been fighting mini-battles over those ideas since the days of the 60s counter-culture.

When I stop and think about it, I feel a lot of gratitude and respect for our colleagues who set the precedent for an open Internet so early on. We have an obligation to pay that precedent forward so that technologies like 3D printing and DIY Bio can develop into vibrant ecosystems like the Internet.