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jckton We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It

Try cheffing. Up to 16 hours a day at a high-end place with only a 5 minute breakfast break, 5 minute supper break. Mind's constantly working. Certainly not solving world hunger, but creativity and concentration are required all the time. Shit job if you don't really care much about food, and even if you do, the job itself is still not that great.

jckton Linus Torvalds and other developers are leaving Bitcoins on the table

http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/linus-t...

Pretty shitty reference, admittedly.

jckton What I Didn't Say

Certainly "I'm right but I don't have the time to prove I'm right" comments are just as bad, if not worse because, at least the "you're wrong" comments give us a healthy dose of scepticism?

jckton Glenn Greenwald keynote at Chaos Communication Congress [video]

Youtube handles traffic better than ccc's site, maybe?

jckton Even fine restaurants serve coffee made with capsules

Haha it does cost quite a lot though...I've only ever seen them in professional kitchens.

jckton Even fine restaurants serve coffee made with capsules

> I fail to see the difference

The difference is that food, by and large, is not even an art. And I'm saying that as someone who cooks professionally and looks up to the greatest chefs of all time. If you are not developing new dishes or pushing the edge of your cuisine, what you're doing is not really an art. People have to stop perpetuating the myth that food is this black box that just happens. It only serves to make some chefs richer and dumbs down the rest of us.

> Nutrition is a solved problem. Just drink soylent.

You're trolling right? Nutrition is not a solved problem. That's like saying medicine or human biology is a solved problem. We still don't know a lot of things -- what we need, what we want, what we should avoid. And I'm sorry to break it to you but Soylent is not a solution. Might be in the future, but drink it full-time in its current state? Not exactly nutritious.

> But it's hard to reproduce food from recipe.

I realise that not everyone is a good cook. But to be honest, practice goes a long way. You might think those few hours of your time are wasted, but I really think otherwise. We spend orders of magnitude more time reading, IMing, working. Spend one whole weekend cooking. I guarantee you'll be a much better cook. And it's a skill that will last you forever. It's also tasty.

> - better frozen/packaged foods

What's wrong with fresh food? (Not living in the USA, but fresh food is plentiful where I live). Even then, what's wrong with your frozen chicken breast? Cook it well, and it will beat out the offerings of most average restaurants.

> - detailed recipes

How detailed do you want them? I can recommend a few books if you want. Youtube helps too.

> - food 3d printers!

I actually don't know why you want this. Like, are you trying to replicate restaurant food with them? No restaurant I've heard of uses them.

PS: Throwaway account? You seem to be familiar with how to post on HN, yet your account was created only 10 minutes ago

jckton Even fine restaurants serve coffee made with capsules

I disagree. I believe this actually puts food farther away from the common man, more esoteric than it really has to. Food is fundamentally different from the arts you mentioned. Some people may facetiously say that they can't live without visual arts, or music. To say you cannot live without food -- that is a true statement. Programming, painting, writing -- we only started doing these things relatively recently in terms of our full history, and were some near-extinction event to happen in the future (distant, but an absolute certainty), it is possible we may stop doing them in the future. But we will always be eating and drinking.

I can tell you that food can indeed be "recorded, transmitted, and reproduced" -- we do it by doing the cooking ourselves, learning from recipes and our imagination. Why should food be so hard? That it's considered an extraordinary feat to cook a wonderful dinner? Why should it be on par with painting a painting or writing a book? I assure you that if you ask any honest cook or chef, they will tell you that cooking isn't difficult. Their job is fucking hard, but the cooking itself? As simple as arts can go.

The upper limit of cooking has, admittedly, increased. This is a recent phenomenon. In the future, this may become easier as certain technologies become democratised, and the avant-garde again becomes the status quo. We saw this with Escoffier, Bocuse. We will see it again with Adria. A competent home cook will not miss out on the food of any great restaurant (bar the cutting edge, maybe?) as long as he/she is willing to learn a few tricks (with the restaurant book craze, there are no more secrets) and pay a bit more for groceries (thanks, globalisation).

I hope I don't sound too hostile. I didn't downvote you either (hah, don't even have the choice to). I just think that you're looking at food from too academic a viewpoint -- too high up. That's not to say that food cannot reach greater heights. But not in the way you predict or wish it to.

Of course, I do hope you visit more great restaurants. Having worked in the back of house of said restaurants, I do want your business! The experience of a restaurant transcends its food, and the unique whole package is of course, not replicable anywhere but in that restaurant. Would there be "restaurant media"? I don't know -- restaurant documentaries don't cut it, maybe the VR headsets we were promised a decade ago would be the solution?

Somehow I think that actually going to the restaurant is, in the end, the only way to do it.

(Whether or not the concept of restaurant will survive into the far future is another debate)

jckton Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

This looks rather good (sadly no iDevice). Looks as if Apple came up with it, if they weren't so silly with the way they applied their skeumorphism.

I always imagined that if you were aiming for the mathematician market (huge market!!1 /s) you could have an app like that except on a tablet you'd use with a pen. Then you'd just write down calculations and OCR would figure out what you are trying to calculate and do the number crunching (where applicable), and intelligently recognise variables and a lot of different mathematical functions (I just don't like the whole process of going back and forth between my TI and my legal pad). That'd be a mathematician's (or just mine) wet dream.

jckton Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

By OSS spirit I meant that it's better to get coding than start complaining. But I see your point -- indeed we should do both, and plenty of it.

jckton Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

Graphing functionality on a phone reminds me of an old TI calculator. I really don't know why recent OSes (be it on PC, smartphone, tablet) always came with such feeble calculators. It's not like TI calculators are difficult to use. Sure if all you want is add/min/mul/div functionality the TI is essentially a traditional calculator, and then behind that you've got all these nifty graphing utilities. It's not like a graphing calculator app is going to be that difficult to program, or going to be large in size. But no, in 2013, vanilla OS installations are stuck with a calculator app that has less features than that of a computer a few million times less powerful.

(Now I feel bad; bitching and complaining is against the Open Source Spirit).

Edit: I do recall that OSX comes with something similar, except that not many people actually know of it (as far as I can tell, from my friends with OSX).

jckton Universe May Have Been Around Forever, According to Rainbow Gravity

Ah, thanks for that. I look pretty stupid now...I have actually heard of that definition but somehow I was thinking of time being ultimately defined by Planck units (time required for light to travel a Planck length).

jckton Universe May Have Been Around Forever, According to Rainbow Gravity

The whole dimension-tautology has always irked me. Time, as a unit, is simply the "time" it takes for light to travel a certain distance. Distance, OTOH, is the "distance" it takes for light to travel under a certain amount of time. AFAIK one of the authors of this theory is a proponent of a variable speed of light. So if at some point in time light didn't move, then time didn't move, then that would mean that our universe existed since forever...? Not a physicist, but sometimes I feel weird when I am reminded of the fact that the Big Bang had a definite starting point 13.8B years ago (as you have done so), and then think about how time is really... a function of length and length is just a function of time.

jckton China lands Jade Rabbit robot rover on Moon

IR radiation?

jckton Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome (2012)

Assuming the un-promoted person is pretty good at judging people's expertise as well, as per the DK study. In your experience, do you think incompetents' promotions tend to increase or decrease the confidence of the competents'?

jckton An open letter from Carl Bernstein to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger

He said more people in Ivies are there because of legacy/earning power of parents, relative to the average school (which I think is a rather uncontroversial point). He didn't say everyone, which is what you're saying.

jckton Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

Yes but you don't necessarily lose tenure if you don't publish, no? So realistically the promise isn't that important if you don't really suffer from failing to keep it.

jckton Why Microsoft needs three or more operating systems

I wouldn't say the whole Ars team, just Peter Bright (not to offend -- it's his opinion and I myself don't really have one), who is mostly responsible for MS coverage.

jckton Jolla CEO: You will soon be able turn your Android device into a Sailfish device

I know quite a few of these people and most of them say that when they do that it feels like they're using a totally new phone, without much cost.

jckton The string type is broken

Exactly. Engineering =/= Maths.

jckton Why 23andMe Terrifies Health Insurance Companies

Does it make sense to buy insurance if you take a hypothetically accurate genetic test? The business of insurance companies only makes sense (at least to me) if we are talking about preparing for uncertain loss. But with a genetic test kit (and for argument's sake let's assume it's very accurate) the concept of "uncertain loss" flies out the window, if not at least vastly different from its current conception.

Doesn't this just mean the eventual death of health insurance completely?

jckton How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

Maybe not as violent, but a bad diet can quickly lead to disease. We never see it in the affluent West but micronutrient disease was and still is a pretty big problem -- you are getting enough food energy, so while you're not starving, you're still dying from your diet.

We've only begun to start understanding some of these diseases (like Pellagra: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra#Epidemiology), and we don't really have it all nailed down yet.

jckton Hacking the Olympics

You raise a fair point wrt the context of the word, but this isn't actually a new use of the word "hack" or "hacking" or "hacker". In fact, if you read this link by our beloved rms:

http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

it would seem that the "old-school" (typically a more conservative) generation of hackers would not have found this use of the word "hack" incorrect at all.

jckton Cheap razor made after P&G watches Indians shave

> They spent 3,000 hours with more than 1,000 consumers at their homes, in stores and in small group discussions. They observed people's routines throughout the day, sometimes staying late into the evening.

Is this really necessary?

jckton China to lift ban on Facebook, Twitter, NYT within Shanghai free-trade zone

I think by competition he/she meant spying and not social media?

jckton Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong

Skimming, sure. But really reading the paper, ie confirming its soundedness, requires going through most if not all the ideas and steps presented. Depending on the paper it can take weeks or even months. The ten tests in the OP take at most a few hours, I think.

jckton How We Uncovered the Biggest Fraud in Kickstarter History

And no offence to beef-jerky lovers, but good beef is wasted when turned into jerky...

jckton Soylent International

I doubt they really care about HN's opinion given the vast number of criticisms put forward, but I do really hope that they'd post more product information, perhaps more of the science, more of the research. Again, as I've said before, hiring a few more relevant scientists would help with their credibility, and might it be possible? -- improve their product. That is all. May there be no more flamewars.

(Granted, I've stopped following this story, so my information might be way out of date)

jckton We Should All Have Something To Hide

This. I've been thinking a lot about this (not particularly hard, admittedly) lately. I suppose the main problem would be that those in power, i.e. politicians, will mostly be out of a job once such a task were to be undertaken.

jckton Court found NSA surveillance unconstitutional in 2011

Exactly. War can happen without it being declared. Now that's scary.

jckton David Brooks and the Mind of Edward Snowden

Basically every country that he can probably go to under the conditions he made (medical), without rousing suspicion, has an extradition treaty with the USA. Certainly if he wanted to go to Afghanistan for "epilepsy treatment", it'd be weird, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_the_United_S...

Which one's good? If you really cared about the extradition treaty so much, you'd have a problem going anywhere (given his situation, and I think even for the typical tourist most countries on that list are countries you might not even ever think about visiting. Though I've admittedly visit quite a few of those, so I may be wrong on that point).