gmaslov

This article reads like some kind of sad science fiction scenario.

A team of scientists today reported the first results from their analysis of the "F-1 Engine", an artefact from the First Empire which was serendipitously discovered last year in nearly pristine condition in the storeroom of a museum. Although the documentation meant to accompany the engine has long been lost, the team is confident that they can apply recently developed scanning techniques to discover how it worked. These engines were said to be capable of developing an incredible 1.5 million pounds of thrust, and were instrumental in powering the First Empire's legendary voyages of exploration. It is hoped that the knowledge recovered from this engine will eventually enable the construction of similar devices.

Burn the heretic. Kill the mutant. Purge the unclean.

Why on earth is this framed as a "war against machines"? That's just plain wrong. The machines serve people. If there's a war, it's between people and other people.

Completely agree. It's time for the developed nations to start thinking about instituting a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income guarantee. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be anywhere even near anyone's radar at this time.

As for reproductive rights, that could be a problem that goes away on its own. I don't mean in the bad way. This TED talk [1], at least, makes a reasonably convincing argument that the world population is heading for a maximum of 10 billion simply due to falling birth rates all over [the peaceful regions of] the world.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.h...

I was disappointed to read that they gave up the principled modeling approach (the 80-year old German paper mentioned early on in the article) and instead collected 100 data points that "looked good" and interpolated somehow.

The article says that the Kubelka-Munk model achieved color mixing that was "too realistic" and therefore difficult to use for the purpose of creating a distinctive brand palette. What this tells me is that they weren't looking for a model of how colors mix together, but a model of what colors look good together.

> "We know red and yellow should yield orange, or that red and blue should make purple--but there isn't any way to arrive at these colors no matter what color-space you use."

Well, that's clearly not true. In the HSL color wheel [1], orange is halfway between red and yellow, and purple is halfway between red and blue. Should have picked a better example.

[1] http://www.workwithcolor.com/hsl-color-picker-01.htm

There we are, now uplift isn't as hard as it appeared: just introduce agriculture to a population and wait 10,000 years ;)

Well, an obvious way to address this would be to become emotionally invested in acting rationally. It's a pity that so many people aren't.

Not likely. I believe the record holder for longest free fall duration is Valeri Polyakov, at 14 months aboard MIR ;-)

I hope you keep a backup of it yourself.

A TCP connection costs nothing if it's merely open and waiting. OK, it costs a few bytes of space in some tables somewhere, but no actual bandwidth.

I think for just about any activity you can name besides checking email, most people aren't going to do it. Yet I'm sure that almost everyone with an MBP does something besides email with it. You can't design for the average use case when an average user doesn't exist.

Maybe I'm overstating the variability in MBP users, but I hope you get my point.

Well you can, but it's not very polite.

Reminds me of a proposal I read about once for a time capsule -- the kind intended to survive the fall of civilization and to help reboot it. It would be plain human-readable text and diagrams engraved into a hard disc of some stable material, starting out big and legible at the edges and gradually getting smaller and smaller as it spirals towards the center, until it's microscopic.

The text would start out as a Rosetta Stone type of thing, to try to establish a common language. Then as it got smaller, it would describe how to grind a hand lens so you can read further. Then even smaller text describes how to build a microscope. Maybe somewhat further on it talks about CD-ROM drives, and eventually transitions to /that/ format...

Why, they would write each other...

Even a theory without any experimentally derived values is still an experimentally derived theory.

Well, I believe this line of thinking leads to the inescapable conclusion that consciousness is only an illusion.

I love that quote. In a way, this article is talking about the "unknown knowns" -- the things that are so obvious now that you don't even remember learning them, or can't imagine not knowing them. These are the lurking biases and preconceptions that we aren't even aware of having, and may be just as dangerous as the "unknown unknowns".

It might be worth having someone up there to fix the equipment when something goes wrong... unless by that time we've developed teleoperated robots with the flexibility and dexterity and sensitivity needed to make arbitrary on-site repairs. You might remember from the Hubble repair missions [1] that these relatively simple tasks you might expect to take a few hours in an Earth-based lab took /days/ of EVA time. Imagine how much more difficult such things would be when you have to squint at the job through a camera (not as good as an eyeball), use clumsy manipulators instead of your fingers (you'll have force-feedback if you're lucky, but forget about feeling textures), and with some lightspeed delay on top of that. Don't underestimate the value of other human senses, either; often the first indication of a machine failing is that it sounds or smells wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-125#Extra-vehicular_activi...

Why? When I see "considered harmful" in a title, I know pretty much what kind of article to expect. I think it's a useful shorthand, and that its origins, and the whimsical attitude associated with it, are irrelevant. What alternative title would you suggest for this article?

Normally, Minecraft logic requires some time in-game to execute, but last year (IIRC) someone was able to invent "instant" logic gates and transmission wires, by exploiting some unusual interaction between pistons and the block-update rules. They're quite bulky, but they do get the job done of achieving FTL communication and supertask computation ;).

With an optimizing compiler to take advantage of these, it might not be unrealistic to implement Minecraft in Minecraft. The real-time speed would only be limited by the real hardware, not by the Minecraft hardware.

Maybe, maybe... But then we'd have to arrange things so that the rate of inflation decreases every year in such a way that the value of the note converges to pi dollars.

Of course, in "hot" data centers today the environment is no more dangerous than a nice sauna, but this development makes me imagine what it might progress to in 10 or 20 years. This is the first small step across that threshold between "comfortable for humans" and "comfortable for machines" in data centers, and the first such step is usually the hardest one. If it's more efficient to run the servers in an even hotter environment, or in one that's less-habitable in some other way, you can probably expect it to happen, now that the baseline technology and ideas are here.

Not that I'm trying to seriously forecast anything, or have any special knowledge of data center design; this is just a pleasant exercise in near-future sci-fi.

Heh. Never underestimate the power of a station wagon full of flywheels hurtling down the highway?

Very good point. Thank you.

I've been thinking about this problem with law a bit lately. It seems like our laywers & politicians want every legal question to be completely decidable, and this attitude leaks into popular culture too (or is it the other way around?), hence this article's preoccupation with the fact that good or evil intent cannot (as far as we know) be identified by any mechanical process.

This type of thing is of course a problem in computer science, but the law is not a computer, and I wish we could stop treating it like one. With humans involved, it's quite feasible to make decisions about undecidable things. This process is called exercising judgement, and we hire judges to do it. Frankly, I don't see what the problem is with a "don't be evil" clause. Pretty much everyone understands what it means in most any given circumstance, even if we can't write down a decision procedure for it.

I understand that part of the motivation here is the urge to CYA and offload all accountability for bad decisions from people to "the law". Not sure what to do about that.

Further reading: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120... ; appeared on HN yesterday; from paragraph 7, argues that these attitudes are partly responsible for the current incarceration problem in America.

(I wonder, can we make a proof of the undecidability of the good-vs-evil problem? I don't think it'll be as easy as for the halting problem; we know how to make a program halt or not halt, but it's unclear how to make a program "do something evil" or "do something good".)

I think in these metaphors it's important to draw a line somewhere between "to use" and "to program". That line isn't always clear -- the usual example being an Excel spreadsheet.

Using an application is like programming in its language of pushbuttons and input fields. Programming is like using a compiler.

What? They disabled Pinterest on ALL images which are not in the public domain? Sheesh, might as well drop the feature altogether if you're going to disable it on 99.9% of content.

Oh, you mean they allowed copyright owners to disable Pinterest on their images. That makes more sense.

Sorry, it just gets my goose when people misuse the word "copyrighted" this way.

Hmm, that's probably right. I thought that whoever visited the bottom of the Marianas Trench might be a contender, but again it turns out that there were two people in the bathyscape.

I'm sure most everyone on HN has read it already, but "What Colour are your bits?" http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 is always a good reference in this sort of discussion. The system you mention sounds like what the Colour essay is railing against; trying to create a mathematical solution to a problem which is rooted in the law, and cannot be resolved by mathematical manipulations, but only by legal manipulations.

Do you recall the title or author of that paper? I'd be interested in reading about the contradiction argument you mention.

Should be titled "The whole Pirate Bay magnet archive except this torrent" :-)

I think a magnet link is based on the hash of the contents too, so it might be an interesting problem to include the torrent's own magnet link in itself.