john_b

My M.S. thesis was essentially an attempt to answer this question. The answer, it turns out, is that the readings you get from single bright celestial sources (sun, moon) aren't accurate enough to enable navigation primarily from this data, even assuming perfect timekeeping.

You can use multiple readings of multiple celestial sources (stars) to navigate reliably, but then you've shifted the problem. With a single reference source your main problem is the sensitivity to error (slight angular errors translate to miles). But if you use starlight your primary difficulty is simply measuring the light sources in an affordable way (i.e. short of taking images in real time and doing real time image processing and graph construction on them).

Personally, the content I'm usually interested in when I visit a page is just the text and images. There are some exceptions, but that's what a whitelist is for. Even if you don't count the numerous security benefits, denying scripts by default has made my websurfing much more enjoyable.

I'm a mechanical engineer by training (B.S. and M.S.) but most of my day to day work is software development, testing, analysis, etc in the aviation industry. I haven't done anything "mechanical" for money since graduating.

Unless you want to do web development, you shouldn't try to sell yourself as "just a programmer." If a company is only looking for someone with programming skills they will probably favor someone with a CS degree.

Instead, leverage your background. There are lots of companies in the US (West Coast included) that do embedded software, robotics, and other types of software development where the software doesn't run on x86. Often it needs to run in real time and be qualified for safety. The methodical persistence and attention to detail that companies associate with a PhD is an asset for these types of positions. Your Matlab & Python experience will show that you can do both quick prototyping and heavy analysis, while your C++ experience and interest in Cuda, etc will show that you care about performant software and don't mind thinking about the actual hardware your code runs on.

If you have any knowledge of sensors, statistics, or signal processing, you'll probably be an instant hire for this type of company. Companies of this type (which aren't "software companies" by the usual definition, but which have software as a major competitive advantage/requirement) have trouble finding people with the right background. Traditional engineers who can't program don't fill the role, and neither do most CS grads who don't have the engineering knowledge to work with the hardware.

"Unsolved" is very different from "unprosecuted". The question here is why the courts are overloaded, not why there isn't additional load due to the 80% of property crimes you mention.

> "It's the engineers' job to resist with good reasoning. It's the visionary's job to convince them that we people only think the impossible things are impossible."

While I don't disagree with you, context matters greatly here. This is the same logic of every middle managing pawn or upper management narcissist who self-styles him or herself the "visionary" you describe. Someone like Musk has the technical aptitude and experience to accurately assess what is technologically possible or impossible and estimate how much it will cost and how long it will take. He has also surrounded himself with highly talented technical people who, from what I can tell, he listens to.

Unless someone has previously envisioned and brought to fruition some visionary product or service, we should remember that the most likely explanation for their insistence that the seemingly impossible is possible is some combination of their ignorance, incompetence, and narcissistic delusion.

> "What's different between weather and software is that everyone knows that weather is extremely complex, and we account for that when we think about the weather in the future."

Weather is governed by impersonal physical forces which can be described by mathematics. Software is built by groups of people who most defitely cannot be modeled as mathematical entities. Weather is a bad analogy here.

> "The equities market is an extremely complex system, yet we use market forecasts all the time. What's different between equities market and software is that everyone knows that equities market is extremely complex, and we account for that when we think about the price of an equity in the future. ("Maybe I'll diversify my investments.")"

Those market foreasts are often wrong. Even a company's own forecasts are frequently wrong, despite having the optimal perspective from which to make those forecasts.

Furthermore, diversifying investments is easy to do because the price mechanism makes those investments fungible (in a liquid market, anyway). This is not the case with software. Each piece of software is unique. You may "diversify" your software by investing in multiple projects, but ultimately you have a business need for a piece of software which does task X. "Diversifying" by funding software that does tasks Y and Z will not help you if the software "investment" in task X fails. "Diversifying" in three software projects, all intended to do task X, will roughly triple your costs for doing X. Again, equities are a bad analogy.

Software development is a process which can't be easily summarized by analogies to existing systems. In fact, the term "software development" can describe many different systems.

The real reason schedule estimation in software development is so hard is because, regardless of which system of software development is used, the problem of simultaneously optimizing to maximise a desired quality while minimizing the cost/schedule is inherently hard in a mathematical sense. Changes which promote one oppose the other, and the sensitivity of a software development system to unknown and unpredictable future changes cannot, obviously, be predicted in advance.

Your point about hedging one's bets is valid, but there are costs to doing so which are not as simple as carrying an umbrella or splitting up a pile of money across multiple equities.

> "What I dislike about the evolution of MtG is the placeholder words that they constantly add to the rules"

This is an odd criticism. It's the essence of DRY applied to a context with very limited space (the physical surface of the card). Would you really prefer to have something like this written out in 2pt font?

http://magiccards.info/bng/en/144.html

Having a named mechanic also enables rulings to apply to it, rather than just to individual cards with a particular wording. The keywords they introduce do create a learning curve for new players, but this is Magic we're talking about--not exactly a game for people afraid of learning curves.

You have completely missed the point.

Seneca cared about using one's time wisely in order to maximise the meaningful accomplishments and noble conduct of one's life. Whether time is illusory or real is irrelevant to his philosophy. One can only accomplish so much in life, and much of life is wasted because of poor choices of how to spend one's time. I've arguably wasted some of mine by writing this.

My favorite fact about Betelgeuse is that light takes 1.5 hours to travel the distance of its diameter.

Paris already bans drones at night and requires a permit to operate during the day. The fourth sentence in the article states this...

It's far easier to "weaponize" your car and park it by a target. You'll do far more damage and be much less conspicuous than a drone operator who needs to maintain a line of sight to the drone. Yet cars are not banned.

Anything lightweight you would weaponize a drone with is already a monitored substance. The privacy and nuisance concerns associated with drones are far more significant than the threat of weaponized drones, which is really quite ludicrous and impractical.

> "one is entitled to employ any and all effort necessary to further one's interests"

This is a classic mentality of victimization. By focusing on the theoretical harm that been done to the extent of all other considerations, you can justify anything. It's a dangerous mentality that has resulted in many evils throughout history. Hell, this is the same justification ISIS originally used when recruiting Sunnis who were tired of corruption and discrimination at the hands of the Shia Iraqi government, only with the economic context replaced by a political one.

A more mature ethical position would recognize that in some environments, while evil has been done which harms or disadvantages you, the strategy of employing "any and all effort necessary to further one's interests" is likely what gave the advantage to those who have allegedly disadvantaged you. If you successfully follow through with this attitude you'll likely perpetuate a cycle.

If you are going to cheat, break rules, or whatever you should do so because those rules or prohibitions have little or no moral and social value in the context in which they exist. If GPA is just a meaningless filter enabling incompetent HR departments at BigCo to trim down their resume pile, then sure, game the system to your advantage. But don't draw the conclusion that you are morally entitled to do whatever it takes to promote your own interests. That path leads to psychopathy.

The obvious counterargument to HN's policy is that the developers building the next generation of web services should be able to openly discuss mass surveillance and how our present technology enables it. And that, furthermore, this discussion is in the best interest of HN because developers on the whole are obviously passionate about the issue and will be a part of how it evolves in the future, one way or another.

I get HN's policy and the reasoning behind it; I just think it's wrong. Not all important discussions are constructive, and not all constructive discussions are important.

Or you could just, you know, check the published experimental results:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512281/chinese-physicis...

Physicists are increasingly convinced that time is an emergent property that arises due to low level quantum effects, principally entanglement [1].

The experiment in the Ars Technica article is the equivalent of the universe using lazy evaluation. It's really not so mysterious if you think outside the box of classical physics.

Regarding sending information back in time, from what I've read physicists are divided on the issue. Most agree that sending matter back in time is impossible, but information is still up for debate. In this particular experiment, however, any past observer who measured the information sent back in time would have collapsed the entangled quantum state and prevented the experiment from being conducted successfully. So being able to "successfully" send information back in time doesn't appear too useful if you can't read it.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.4691

> "being immune to a lawsuit as long as he was acting within the bounds of the law"

There is no need for immunity when one acts within the bounds of the law. All that protects against is the hassle and cost of frivolous lawsuits. Absolute immunity prevents having to have another lawsuit to determine if the conduct in the first one was appropriate, and so on.

But you are right that absolute immunity of any kind is nuts. It's the mark of a tyrannical regime, and claims of self-policing do not in any way diminish this.

However, the real problem is that gag orders can be enforced after the trial is over. Why would any form of democracy want to lock up crucial information about how its laws are being interpreted from the public? What is the point of even having laws if the public is not made aware of how they are being interpreted in court?

When a country's debt grows faster than its real GDP over a long enough period of time, some sort of fiscal tightening ("austerity") will become necessary to avoid default. This may take the form of reduced spending, increased taxes, or both.

Guess who will be paying for that? Future consumers and taxpayers.

Not all debt leads to this. Debt which is incurred responsibly and paid off in a timely fashion promotes growth. But there are examples (Greece is one) where debt is used by those in power to sustain their own power structure rather than dealing with economic problems under their watch. To the extent that economic changes negatively affect the ruling elite, those in power will avoid making those changes. If those changes happen to be necessary to preserve future economic stability, then it will be future generations who pay for it.

Tell him that he has no right to make that choice for others, and while he may think he is only making that choice for his own family he is also choosing to put others at a greater risk. The braking analogy in this article is quite apt.

Prior to the measles vaccine, about 3-4 million people got measles every year. In such a world, a 0.1% mortality rate still leaves 3000-4000 people dead from an easily preventable disease. And this says nothing of the people who suffer from it but don't die. The economic costs from kids and parents getting sick and missing school and work would total in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Even intelligent people can be narrow-minded. There is much more to a disease than its mortality rate.

Unfortunately you don't, and you never will. You'll have to get used to the fact that "emotivist social pressure" is usually a more effective way to change peoples minds than reason.

If people can't be convinced by reason that their dangerous and unreasonable behavior is in fact dangerous and unreasonable, then little is left besides social pressures.

There are actually multiple definitions that have arisen as our understanding of the cosmos has grown [1]. The word has always been a filler for "all the stuff there is" but as science has evolved it's become useful to make a distinction based on "all the stuff there is in <whatever>".

The context of this article makes it pretty clear that a brane-constrained definition is being used.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse#Max_Tegmark.27s_four...

True, but mathematical objects, unlike people, always behave rationally.

If anything, events like negative interest rates simply illustrate how ridiculous the classical economic notion of the "rational actor" is in the real world.

There are plenty of better ways already. A simple public/private keypair would go a long way towards this goal.

The problem is that everyone working on crypto products focuses on just developing technology, often attempting to make existing crypto systems easier to use for ordinary people. This is fine, but it's only a partial solution. We need to educate people who don't know and don't care about proper security. Nobody is going to use the most secure and easy to use crypto system if they don't see the benefit and think that a SSN or a driver's license is a good way to show their identity.

There is a lot of hand wringing about how hard it is to get ordinary people to take security seriously, but honestly this is a problem that will solve itself given enough time and enough breaches such as this. Until people understand that only secret information--which they and only they know--can be used to authenticate them and protect their information, this will just keep happening.

> "No quality control to even know you're getting what you ordered.

I mean, seriously, you can't just do that. Society is the victim."

This is a somewhat hypocritical claim. Society is only the victim of poor drug quality control because their sale and manufacture is illegal. Underground markets of any kind have problems with quality control; the solution to that problem is to make them legal.

> "But this guy was not doing anything to change those laws"

I disagree strongly. One of his primary objectives appears to have been to show that widespread use of drugs does not require violent criminal gangs, which is one of the main justifications for the drug war. In that regard, I think he succeeded. Simply demonstrating this and undermining that argument has done more to delegitimize the drug war than any vote or petition.

> "Yeah but there is one thing that people doing quick mathematics ignore when they pronounce Basic Income unworkable. And that is that it will absolutely have to work in some manner."

This is known as the head-in-the-sand approach and it is obviously nonsense.

Basic income is one proposed solution to the increasing automation of work and population growth. It's achieved such a cultlike status in some circles that those within them forget it's not the only possible solution.

And, truthfully, there is no guarantee that a solution will even be found. If one is, it may not be a "solution" in the usual sense. Here are some other possible resolutions to increasing wealth concentration combined with population growth:

1. State redistribution of wealth via tax and other changes

2. A shift of wealth from industries that automate things to those that produce valuable things or services which cannot be automated (i.e. as automation becomes increasingly cheap, competition in industries which rely on it results in those becoming commodity industries)

3. Society chooses to tolerate an increased number of homeless and poor people and their suffering rather than make changes to its tax or legal structure.

4. Artificial population control. A world with decreasing job opportunities can be sustained as long as population decreases in proportion.

5. Revolution

And there are other options, some completely unseen.

> "You are not going to put 50% of people of work, and you're not going to consign a hundred million people to a worsening standard of living even as those with capital get to live like gods."

The exact numbers may not be as dire as 50%, but historically plutocracy has been the norm and not the exception. Plenty of egalitarian societies (for varying definitions of "egalitarian") have sprung up and died off, but plutocracy as a system exhibits long term stability due to the nature of wealth and inheritance. Whatever its moral deficiencies, plutocracy is simply a consequence of the fact that wealth naturally tends towards concentration rather than dispersal.

The real problem with basic income is that the inspiration for the system not only relies on an unproven assumption about the future, but one that has no historical precedent: the destruction of job opportunities for most people without a corresponding increase in new opportunities. The former has happened over and over throughout history but it has always been followed by the latter.

What we've seen over the past century has been a steady automation of mundane tasks displacing menial labor and an increase in the number of people in "creative" professions. Until strong AI comes along, and in particular a strong AI that enjoys making art, there will always be a need for human beings to serve in the latter category of jobs.

A bigger economic problem, and one which actually does deserve serious thought and consideration, is how to make the economics of a creative economy work. The old feudal style model of publishers lording over their effectively serf-like artists (while the latter churned out content whose profits were largely eaten by the former) plainly doesn't work.

The bottom line is that changes are coming, and while those changes can't be stopped it is hubris to claim that one and only one never-tried-before solution will solve a never-occurred-before economic problem. The reason you never see faithful proponents of basic income discuss it in terms of hard numbers is because doing so makes it obvious that other solutions will have to be considered. The mainstream proposals for basic income are an economic religion complete with all the hallmarks of religion: an unfalsifiable dogma ("in the future, robots will take all the jobs"), guilt and fear as a means of control and persuasion, and an apocalptic narrative. But they are most definitely not economic science.

> "Well you can realize that taking care of those people is not going to be free."

Virtually every discussion of basic income on the internet these days avoids doing even the most basic arithmetic. So I'll give a very oversimplified set of calculations below. The details can be nitpicked ad nauseum, but this is essentially Feynman-style estimation, so please see the forest and not just the trees.

First, some facts:

According to the BLS, the lowest quintile of Americans spent $12,955 on goods and services in 2014 [1].

The US adult population in 2014 is about 242.5 million people [2].

So if we wanted to provide a guaranteed unconditional income equal to the average yearly expenditures of the bottom quintile of Americans, the cost would total about 3.14 trillion dollars.

Total U.S. tax revenue in 2014 was 3.2 trillion dollars [3].

So a basic income program that merely provides poverty-level income for all Americans is going to cost all of our current federal tax revenue, and we are already running a federal defecit.

This is plainly not feasible without vastly increasing tax revenue.

You could argue that state and local revenue could pick up the slack, but states and municipalities are generally under severe budgetary pressures as well and have even less power to raise additional revenue. Even if all tax revenue in the US from any source is considered accessible for a basic income program, that pile of money is only about $6 trillion, so a poverty-level basic income program is going to consume half of all tax revenue collected from any source in the US.

All of this is an optimistic calculation. It doesn't account for the contraction of the economy (and thus tax revenue) that would occur due to people ceasing part time work or other low paying jobs. Or the increasing amount of federal revenue directed to servicing our national debt [4], which will make any basic income system increasingly unaffordable in the future (absent corresponding economic growth). You could alleviate some of that economic contraction by taxing the basic income itself (possibly conditionally, based on economic circumstances), but then you are providing a post-tax basic income that doesn't even meet the poverty level.

The fact is that the demographics of the United States simply prohibit any meaningful basic income system from working at the present time. It simply won't work without increasing tax revenues to levels that will destroy the economy. And this is ignoring the political obstacles that would have to be overcome (such as placing most of the additional tax burden on the 1%).

Our existing welfare systems, inefficient and bloated as they are, at least attempt to target those who are most at need. If you try to make a basic income system that essentially replaces existing welfare programs by taxing most of the basic income back from people who exceed certain economic threshholds, you are doing little more than inefficiently adjusting tax brackets.

It's a nice dream, but somebody has to pay for it and right now nobody can.

[1] ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2008/quintile.txt

[2] http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-populat...

[3] http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/fed_revenue_2014US

[4] http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-GT738_ristid_G_...

It's chilling how far those in power will go to silence even the possibility of dissent that honest journalism provides. In this case, the Obama justice department inherited a case from the Bush era and fought it all the way to the supreme court to get a journalist to incriminate his alleged source.

The information disclosed by Risen was already out there and the damage was done. That it embarrased a previous administration did not seem to matter. The DOJ seems to have wanted at least one head to roll in order to send a message to government insiders: "talk to the press at your own peril."

> "valuable"

Your post only uses that word in its economic sense. Thus statements like this:

> "Over time economic cycles destroy things that were once valuable."

Are tautologies, not arguments. The set of things which people find valuable (in the subjective sense of the word, not the economic one) and the set of things which people will pay for are not equal. A great many important works of art were once produced under a patronage system, in which only one person found the artist's work "valuable".

The reason patronage as a system is no longer as prevalent as it once was is because it was once a status symbol, whereas now it is just seen as some sort of hipster endorsement of some niche thing. The ability to offer patronage to an artist was once a display of great wealth and personal connections; now it means you have an internet connection and a few spare bucks. Maybe it can still work, but the social significance of the system has changed.

I don't know if this reflects one or more widespread trends, but as someone who plays amateur hockey I've found that a very large number fellow players are engineers, programmers, market researchers, or some other white collar professional occupation. At least at non-professional levels, the sport seems to be full of very intelligent people, but not necessarily "intellectuals" per se.

It could just be a self-selection effect due to playing a relatively expensive sport (since income and education are correlated), but given how popular sports of all types are (both watching and playing) among so many different types of people I am amazed that the denizens of ivory towers have been able to maintain the stereotype of sports as "low brow" for so long. Especially given that many ivy league universities have historically had popular and successful teams in sports like boxing and wrestling.

It's deeply, tragically ironic when you consider that the origins of those same intellecutal bubbles are rooted in Greek and Roman classical studies, both cultures that prized a well developed body and mind, and considered a man incomplete if he lacked either:

"No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable." - Socrates

> "forced depression"

Nothing about Greece's current situation was forced on them. Sure, lots of politicking went on and the current situation was definitely engineered to benefit others, but Greece was effectively bankrupt and in default prior to the bailout. You just can't tolerate the level of corruption [1], tax avoidance, and union greed that Greece tolerated for so long. A normal sovereign default would have been just as painful, but in different ways. Greece as a country decided it wanted to stay in the Eurozone, thus picking its poison.

Comments like this remind me of people like Cristina Fernandez of Argentina, obsessed about the pain of their economic situation to the extent that awareness of how they got there in the first place is lost.

Greece got itself into a very deep shithole with only two main ways out. People look at the hardship of the current path out and see that it's obviously painful, then make the classic fallacy of the-grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/greece-most-c...

> "This idiocy encroaches on property rights."

Notably, the property rights of the hotel patrons who bring their legally owned property on their person into the hotel and find that the hotel has surrepetitiously disabled it against their wishes for the purpose of creating a local monopoly on a service (internet access) which they have no right whatsoever to regulate or control.

So yes, it does encroach on property rights. Just not in the way you seem to think.

> "Yes I do"

You most definitely do not. You may own the equipment that emits or attenuates those waves, but the waves themselves are not owned by anybody. They are in the commons and are regulated by the FCC as such.