hoilogoi

I think one of best examples of this was the push to make mandatory the National Animal Identification System. The idea was put every farm animal into a database and RFID the larger ones. I'd heard that farmers would need to log the timestamp of every feeding or watering (though I can't find any source for that in 2 minutes of Googling.)

I did find this. "... the animal owner would be required to report: the birthdate of an animal, the application of every animal’s ID tag, every time an animal leaves or enters the property, every time an animal loses a tag, every time a tag is replaced, the slaughter or death of an animal, or if any animal is missing. Such events must be reported within 24 hours." From http://www.countrysidemag.com/90-1-mary-zanoni

I would argue that this is burdensome and easier to rationalize for an urbanite. Also note that they likely didn't consider how small farmers will often arrange to have their animals graze on a neighbor's field, which would mean logging entry and exit twice a day.

I was reading the proceedings of the 2013 SAT competition and was pleasantly surprised to find Knuth listed as a contestant! It also included a few paragraphs he wrote about his submission.

Counterpoint: try googling "Volstate EPB".

I'm no expert, but I think it would be a shame if small struggling ISPs get the short end of the stick. It's hard for me to make a judgement on this specifically.

For me, testing comes to mind.

Absolutely. I was really surprised to hear this. I'm sadly getting the impression that the only large entities who have thrown funding into audits are the intelligence agencies.

I drag the scrollbar and use pageup/down keys as much as I use the mousewheel.

I don't enjoy getting near the bottom of the page and suddenly being warped several screens ahead, then having to go back and figure out where I was. Find a way to prevent this if you're just loading comments to an article.

I find the scrollbar less disorienting because it has a high resolution than most mousewheels, its feedback loop is tighter, and I can jump both short and long distances; that is, there's no tradeoff between speed and continuousness.

I switch to pageup/pagedown/home/end on pages with infinite scroll because I can be guaranteed I won't miss any content and it's just less tiresome that using a mousewheel IMO.

A really stellar example of these sorts of bad user interaction is the Google Art Project if anyone cares.

I just looked at 1024 on Google Play, and I have to say it would really sting to work on Threes for a year then read that "If you played 2048 in Hacker News, That [sic] you should know this is the original one."

Not unpleasant. The 'i' feels funny and I'm not sure about the curvy 'y'. Maybe it's too similar to 'g'. But really not unpleasant.

It would be funny if a technology pioneered by "Singular Computing" were a primary contributor to reaching the Singularity.

Part of me wonders whether https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6967516 was related. This is all very sobering.

I enjoy HN comments for their tempered, rational thought. I don't think diminutive hyperbole benefits your position here.

I disagree that jack0fnone is mentally ill. I see him as a 14 year old. It's perfectly understandable that a 14 year old might go through a bitcoin phase, be awestruck by gwern.net, daydream up these crazy ideas.

Kids go through crazy phases and still mature into stable, reasonable adults.

Edit: To me, the writing style seems very teenager-ish as well, though I don't have a good baseline for mentally unstable writing.

Cellist-Organist-luthier here. Don't be silly. Imagine arguing against the merits of the organ by saying "It gives up the expressiveness of the Oboe/Flute with no tangible benefit beyond being able to play more notes at once." Keyboard music is meaningful in different way. What it loses in the articulation of individual voices, it gains back in the interaction of multiple tones and voices, for lack of a better way to say it.

This critique is using a 1820+ vocabulary for what I would call a "Baroque" instrument. "The right way to evoke feeling is by using expressive articulation on an expressive, lyrical melody line (among other differences)." It perfectly befits a Baroque keyboard instrument to work better with ornamentation and polyphony.

As a side note, I think the tone could gain a lot from gut strings. I don't think period strings work as well with steel.

I don't have anything constructive to say besides that I'm always impressed by your work, Gwern.

Thanks for all the references as always.

> How many diseases have we cured in the past 20 years? The past 40 years? Medical advances are really, really slow.

It would be really interesting if we began noticing a medical analogue to Moore's Law in the next few decades (though I don't know how you'd measure it). Supposing conservatively that medicine is 100x better in 2013 than in 1900, one might expect medical knowledge to double between now and 2030. The size of the advances in computing from 1900-40 and 1940-80 differ by several orders of magnitude.

Of course I don't think we have the data to assign a model right now so this might be BS.

I'd be interested to get a sense of how these issues vary from country to country and field to field.

Microsoft needs to pull out of mobile and tighten their grip on the desktop market. I can say anecdotally that the only reason many people stay with Windows is for games.

I'd like to see Windows rebranded as "The Gaming OS which does much more than just games". They need to keep the value of Windows tied to the value of Steam. This means bending over backwards to the needs of game developers and cementing the expectation that you need Windows if you want games before that expectation goes away.

This may even mean marketing themselves to Mac and Linux users as the OS you should dual boot if you want to play games. What a crazy thought.