FYI, glycine is the smallest amino acid, its chemical formula is C2H5NO2. color me surprised when they find tryptophan on a comet
91 karma · joined April 30, 2009
So I'd modify your idea a bit -- have many short snippets about rumors/events that quickly introduces a subject, to build interest, and will be free to everyone. Then have followup stories that will be voted upon.
The original comment had to do with amateur programmers that can't do anything else other than write simple php with complete disregard to the complexity of computer science. But when you're making a scalable commercial webservice, you need to know a quite a bit about compilers, concurrency, inheritance, and hardware. Probably the only major difference is that you learn about html + css + ajax instead of MFC (or gasp visual basic).
Software is about the value to the end user, but it's also about cost. When you want to be efficient, you can't just use the simplest tool to implement the features, you need to know much more about the specifics. It just so happens that web development is easier to do poorly than desktop programming.
I think it's ridiculous that it is now normal (or actually preferable) now to be in school until you are done with 1/4 to 1/3 of your life without seeing what "the real world" was like. This means the average person won't be able to do anything significant until they have already wasted their best years in school and low level positions.
I can get decent grades pretty easily (much like many people here) and so slacking off and procrastination was just a smart way of using my time. Now that I think I'm of the age where I can make something of myself, I need to unlearn a lot of the bad habits learned in school in order to get things done. Many smart, ambitious people I know do not try to start independant projects because they are still "just students," but then go on to do amazing things after graduating and finding their purpose in life. Much of this can be prevented with an early firsthand exposure to a life outside of the artificial punishment and reward system of school.
Chances are, even after reform people will probably still go on the same path -- highschool, college, graduate school, but they will have a much better reason to do well, since it will be what they chose to do.
Like, "punishing a robot" ...? No AI scheme I've seen ever has a sense of self worth. You can give it a negative reward, but the AI doesn't care much for its _current_ reward, it only performs actions to maximize the expected reward. Which means you can tell it to avoid doing these bad things, but punishing it after the fact would just leave it confused about why its reward system changed, and then go about trying to maximize its rewards again.
I for one, am all for the 3 laws of robotics, but it probably won't work for a much simpler reason -- it can't identify the terms. How would an AI recognize when a human is at harm? Would it show the drowning patient a picture of distorted letters and ask what the word is? Or would it jump in to save posters from being damaged? And that's the easy part... how would you define harm? These questions need to be answered before anyone tries to figure out the ethics guidelines for robots to follow.
You would seriously learn more about robot ethics from I, Robot than from this poorly written article.
if(condition_variable==condition2)
/*{
//Block temporarily commented out.
condition_variable=condition1;
}*/Case in point: I have an idea for a cell phone program to set the ringtone volume relative to the background noise (the ring is loud when your surroundings are loud, and quiet when your surroundings are quiet). It'd be an awesome feature to have on cell phones, but there's really nothing to sell.
I think it's much less about the idea you have for the product, but much more about the business plan you use to make money.
If you agree with that vision of computing on the cloud, you'll see that software and the way we interact with it on a daily basis will be completely different. Just like how television changed media, cloud computing will change technology. For instance, moving things to the cloud means you can access the information anywhere, so "your computer" won't be a physical entity, but an account, and soon, you probably won't need a full computer to access these services. So I don't think it's right to just say that cloud computing will "just" be better, it's going to change the game.
As for privacy, I think it's a good trend that this is being brought out into the open. If someone had the desire, people can find out a great deal about you with what's available now. Knowing about it and actively trying to protect privacy is the only way to prevent the big-brother scenario from happening. There was an article on something related to this not too long ago on hn: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685095
On a side note, I wonder when are they going to use this technology to start offering a complete desktop replacement service on the cloud, and not just offer games, but the full range of productivity software as well as storage capability. My thoughts on this kind of development is on my blog. http://lchou1.blogspot.com/2008/12/future-of-computing.html
To measure the speed of a wave, you find the length between peaks, the wavelength, and then the time it takes to go from peak to peak, the period. Wavelength / period = speed, which has nothing to do with the motion of the particle. But the interesting thing about waves is that it can stack without disturbing each other, and if you can stack different waves just right, you can make create something that looks periodic, but travels faster than any of the combined waves.
Shining light on the moon or motion on a LCD screen uses a similar idea where the peak intensity is moving much faster than the components (pixels don't move at all in lcd screens). If this is periodic, you can call it a wave, whether it makes sense or not to call it as such.
But you're right, this is just a trick to make something look like a wave that's travelling faster than light. It takes the same amount of time for it to get to you, but when it does, it looks like it's travelling faster.
What he suggests is that there is a ranking for each person in the world, and the content he creates will be ranked higher in the world. Merely tracking the same author could either be an invasion of privacy -- tracking the ip and/or taking a peek at the person's cookie, or ridiculously hard -- analyzing usernames, vocabulary, tone of voice, etc.
He mentioned doing something special with openid, but it would need widespread adoption before this could be done.
Compilers and languages -- Right now I've got ideas on how to create a new and better programming language (hopefully that will be the 100-year language =P) which will have stuff from lisp, prolog, C++, Java, and first order logic. honestly, there would be no way that I would try to learn lisp by myself, much less understand the elegance of lambda calculus. I wouldn't know where to start thinking about other complex things like knowledge representation and complexity related to it.
Linux / vim / eclipse / makefile -- I picked up how to use a lot of tools in college, when some other friends also used it. It would have really bad if I had to learn all of those without being able to call someone up and ask for help.
networking -- I've done some stuff outside of school for a year that had nothing to do with CS. I really haven't met so many "simple" people before... not that there's anything wrong with that, but I really do not think of them to do interesting projects with. Not all the people I knew from college was a CS major, but I can see myself working with a lot of them for various projects.
Machine learning -- This was one of those things that I was interested in, but I can't see myself learning about it all by myself. I took a class about it for audit, then took it again a few years later. It really makes a difference to be pushed to do the work. And even though I forgot about a lot of the details, I don't think it would be too hard to re-learn about random forest, bayesian networks, reinforcement learning, etc.
It seems to me that there are a lot of software companies out there that do some stuff that are pretty heavy on the theory side. Google's pagerank, spam filters, antivirus software, etc. I'll bet those kinda jobs are better than a "4-year-experience-with-java" job.
I'm also not too sure about the "replacing college with an incubator" thing... college is something you gotta do, doing a startup is supposed to be a risky thing. I've done a year long senior project that I just totally blew off because it was a "class project". People have done much more stuff in three months than what I did that year. If people see the startup incubator as something that's required, i don't think it would work out as well. But I think it would have been helpful if there were more incubators that were closely tied with the school, so that it wouldn't seem like such a far-fetched idea to do a startup.
btw, those humanity classes really are a total waste of time.
People in research focus on how to make it work, but we need people to think about how to plan for the future. I don't really agree with all the predictions they make on the singularity, but it's great that they make people think about talk about it.
quick plug -- I'm working on my own unique approach to AI, so find me if you're looking for a 0.0000001% of making the most important discovery ever. =P
There will definitely come a point when technology will be able to improve the ones improving technology, whether they're AI or cybernetically enhanced humans. That's going to profoundly affect everything related to technology (which is pretty much everything). Imagine if your neighbor can just think up the plans to make a nuclear bomb by getting a cognitive implant, how would that affect the world?
There is a lot of speculation, but kurzweil has been fairly accurate with his predictions so far, so I'm curious to why people don't buy it.
So being bad academically is more like losing a school wide competition, rather than the American system of being able to shrug it off as something you don't care about. In Asian countries, they don't buy the idea that people can be talented at different things, it's more a black and white "you're smart or you're not" thing. So of course people like winners more than losers.
So back to the point in the article.. I don't think it's about the actual utility of a person's skill, but the perceived successfulness within the context of societal values.
Which brings up an interesting point: other than using the societal values, how else will you know how successful a person is when real success is often based on luck and isn't apparent until ~30?