lolcraft

Agreed, but, I don't see what a PhD has to do with any of these. My snarky, probably very ignorant, reply would be something like, if you want intellectual freedom, get a subscription to a library. Renegotiate your lowly Bachelor of Sciences' contract to work fewer hours, that'll get you physical freedom.

Seriously. IMO someone reading through, say, the TAOCP, Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis, Horowitz & Hill's TAOE, or any selection of good, difficult books like these, will have acquired undoubtedly more intellectual freedom afterwards than any PhD graduate. For starters, it's self-directed study, which is orders of magnitude harder, and more important to self-growth, than study directed by an advisor, or any bit of structure. It's also faster. It doesn't sink you in any significant debt, which is a plus on the order of physical freedom. It's much more eclectic, which is incredibly important, both in terms of the monopoly power you'll bear, and the scientific value your unique analogies between concepts will create. Hopefully.

Sure, there's no paper afterwards to show. My take is that, credentials or not, you'll still have to show your competence to a potential employer or investor, your exposition tailored to the particular needs you suspect they have.

My take: Kim Dotcom knows very well that Bitcoin is an absurdly deflationary currency, and wants to long it as much as he can, as soon as he can. As you very well point out, there's a possibility the bitcoin economy will grow exponentially, from a very small monetary base :)

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

What my country (Spain) labor legislation does, and I suspect many of the european ones, is not at all what you think it is, don't worry.

The law just allows workers, if they consider their rights to have been breached, to file a demand. It's somewhat complicated, because your employer, in principle, is still free to fire you when they want. In practice, employment here is and has always been, believe it or not, at will. What dismissal is not is "free as in beer": without a good cause (wrongful dismissal), they will have to pay you some quantity of money. With a good cause, it's disciplinary dismissal, which is free. That's true in all but a few cases, which protect you from wrongful dismissal. Say, you're the union's representative, or your son has cancer.

So you can demand to have your dismissal count as wrongful. You're still fired, but at least you get some extra money, including all extra hours, which have to be paid when demanded. If your employer threatens you with dismissal if you don't work 50 hours/week, then dismisses you, the judge could make it void and file a civil suit for threats, so there's still that protection.

But the catch is, no one can force you to enforce your rights. No one can demand your extra hours (any over the standard 40) be paid to you. Workers are still free to kill themselves on insane hours, if they want. In fact, because of ignorance of labor laws and fear of being fired, it's actually pretty common to do so.

I sympathize, but take notice that this is part of the classic one-two strategy that capitalists, as a class, have historically used to gain a disproportionate amount of power in certain historical periods. Say, the 19th century, or the 80s/90s. Not with malice, or even consciously, of course, but it's worth to watch for it, lest we fall again, and again...

First, claim the reasonable principle that law should guard morality, and business should attend only to business. It's in principle correct, so it gets accepted by everyone. So, if child labor were allowed, business owners would be in no moral fault for hiring kids to mine ore -- to pick a extreme example.

Second, claim that economic progress is good for everyone. Again, very reasonable. Then, organize as a political class (say, in nowadays Republican party) to get some legal concessions that were morally abhorrent in the past legal framework, in more or less degree, but would bring economic progress (for some definition of it). Say, legalize child labor. Voilá.

Now, it's obvious that capitalists should be, of course, allowed to organize politically. But, I argue that we live in a world disproportionately controlled by capital (specially the US), for various reasons. It's disingenuous, thus, to be a capitalist and have your mindset. You, as member of a class, have certain privileges that other classes in our society would consider unfair. Our current legal framework is loaded in your favor, after all.

Yeah, yeah, cool stuff, but those aren't ideas. Those are technologies. Evolution theory, universal democracy, organized labour, atheism, those were massive ideas. The Internet was a massive technology. Well, to be fair, that was a bad example. You will tell me that the Internet was a great technology that enabled great ideas, and I will agree with you [1]. But tell me, do you believe any of these ideas here could do that? I doubt it.

Real ideas that could change the world? I would put Big Data there, or my understanding of what Big Data could be: instead of focusing on thinking the best, fanciest hypothesis you can, focus on getting a lot of the best data you can find. Pure thinking from principia won't bring understanding to the human genome, but smart data crunching might.

Do you people have any thoughts on more ideas that could be like that? I'm actually interested.

[1] Technology provide the material/economic substrate from which philosophies and understanding comes. Automation, division of labour and credit brought capitalism, that brought bourgeois values: democracy, meritocracy, disdain for aristocracy, disdain for the disdain of "usury"... So it's given that technological progress becomes more than just "technological".

The Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes are the shit, though.

But honestly, yeah, the Bible is the poorest written fiction I've ever not finished reading. It's not even worth the paper as a religious reference, surprisingly. Maybe reading something like Norman Cohn's "The Pursuit of the Millenium" would be more useful for someone wanting to understand (more deeper) christianity, though it's quite a heavyweight. And I understand Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" is a classic, though I'm yet to read it.

Playing chicken with the world in order to prevent another conventional war between two superpowers... justified.

Otherwise, a hardline faction in any government could have easily pushed for it. Not the mainstream political force in the USA, most probably. (Though, who really knows, looking at Vietnam.) Also, my understanding is that the USSR was in an echo chamber that led it to believe capitalist USA would collapse on itself (hence the "we will bury you" line), so probably they wouldn't have attacked neither. Though the USSR had clearly the edge in a ground war, and I'm sure plenty fanatics could have been found. So there was still that possibility.

Of course, the perfect solution would be a perfectly-balanced economic/political federation of countries, policed by a neutral organization. That couldn't happen then, and that won't happen in the future. Neither Western countries, nor China+Russia, nor specially Arabic countries, will submit to a UN decision that violates their core political tenets, be it justified or not.

So, if I get this, the "party line" was that C++ is great because it's OOP -- never mind if it actually does not provide encapsulation or modularity. Or garbage collection. Or reflection. But now it is that C++ is great because it's not OOP, it's generic. It still does not provide encapsulation or modularity.

And all of this is derived from the design choice of making it not-even-compatible with C. To me, that's ideology.

That the compiler doesn't load a bunch of .o files does not mean there's no dependency graph. There is, it's just on header files, which makes things worse. You just moved the "modularity" from the linker/loader stage to the compilation stage. Which is the opposite of modularity. You can't modify a template with LD_PRELOAD. You can't have pluggable templates. If you modify a template, you have to recompile everything that uses it.

The STL never had to be efficient. It just had to be convenient. Anyway, you won't get efficiency from generic code, because real efficiency requires knowing what's the problem you're trying to solve.

I think Go got generics much better. Pass an interface{LessOrEqual} to a Sort and you're golden.

Nah. That's a bad analogy. The film equivalent to BPM is composition (scene switch, montage) speed. Much better to think of 48 fps as going from ~ 40 kHz to 48 kHz sampling rate: instead of fitting more things into a movie, what you film has higher temporal resolution. Net gain, easy to downgrade with a low pass filter... People can even notice the change, which is more than you can say for 48 kHz MP3 to 96 kHz FLAC, for instance.

> I think most dollars spent by both poor people and rich people are spent on consumption, not investment.

Not at all. Poor people expend on consumption. Rich people spend far more on investment and savings. Yeah, Paul Allen might have a 10G$ superyacht, but he's worth 14.8T$, the majority in securities, bonds and so on, I presume.

> Growth caused by dollars spent on consumption is linear [...] Growth caused by dollars spent on investment and innovation is exponential [...]

Well, you implicitly assume there that this investment would mean that demand would increase. That is, you assume Say's Law holds true. But you are not being fair here. Symmetry in your argument would require that growth by demand should also be "exponential", as any increase in demand would the same effect in investment that any increase in investment has in demand. So both would be positive-feedback loops, to the exact same degree. Say's Law says it is.

Second, this is the classical economic framework, which doesn't work. You need to factor in savings and debt, and then Say's Law breaks; demand doesn't equal investment anymore, and you need a Keynesian, IS-LM framework. Now, what I understand is that, while a failure of aggregate demand is a positive-feedback loop ( less demand -> less investment -> less income -> less demand ... ), the mechanism of debt makes a failure of aggregate investment be nothing at all: less investment -> more debt -> more investment -> more income -> more demand -> more investment ... Well, actually you have debt now, which can be easily be a problem. But my cursory, layman's understanding is that it's a much less severe problem, since d(GDP)/dt > 0 now.

I see the Singularity as an apocalyptic prophecy, textbook millenarianism [1] that takes much inspiration from old-school Marxism. Like the latter, it presents itself as economic and scientific because it has big-sounding concepts like Law of Accelerating Returns [2] / Law of Accelerating Misery; both seem well reasoned, are slick, intelligent, and easy for smart people to believe in.

Now, Marx couldn't think of politics as independent from the interests of the capitalist class. That's why he failed, as Popper described: the New Deal, Social Security, public and subsidized education, progressive taxation... all those things came and made his prophecy fail. As in hindsight was to be expected, if only because prophecies rarely become true.

Today, Kurzweil can't think of biology as the vast, incredibly complex area that it is, and so his prophecy will fail when it's clear how difficult it is to achieve immortality, or full cybernetisation of the human mind, or general AI, or whatever. I am 90% confident in that outcome.

Yeah, we are not hard wired for religion, but still it's very easy to fall for it. Scientific reasoning is not and probably never will be the norm, if simply for the fact that we're just poor dumb chimps. After all, religion didn't stop appearing after 1900. The Scientologists are proof of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenarianism : a Great Event will come during which Humanity will be Judged and Reborn. Singularity just takes out the Judgement part.

[2] LOAR forgets how Moore's law, for example, was very specific and probably short-term. If Kurzweil had been born in the 19th century, he would have probably been talking about the coming Steam Engine Singularity. In the 60s, he'd be talking about scientific bases on Mars by 2000...

complexFn = do x <- getSomeData y <- computeWith x z <- computeSomeMore y return z

Let's say you have here straightforward imperative code. Of course, a real example would be more complex. But suppose x is now a list and you want to vectorise computeWith. Put your x in a box/monad, let's call it Parallel. Define return and bind to be parallel (bind = par . fmap, or something), and that's it. Transparent parallelism.

Maybe it does numerical algorithms, and you want x to be an interval, or a tuple (value, error). Again, define the corresponding monad. Same thing with non-deterministic computation, amb-like operators, passing state between calls... The code that calls them stays the same.

It also provides type safety for operations. For instance, some Haskell libraries allow programmers to specify a network protocol with monads, then write servers/clients that are statically checked to be correct. All sorts of things like that.

Conceptually, a monad is a box with a tag on it (the name of the monad), and your rules for (1) putting things into it, and (2) applying functions to what's inside. Plus compile-time guarantees that you can't do weird things with them, like mix tags and stuff.

Well, to be trollish :), he also didn't want it because:

1 - With TCO, there would be no more "recursiveFunction recursiveFunction recursiveFunction" x 1000 stack traces. Which apparently is bad. Might force someone to use a debugger, you know.

2 - Non-standard Python implementers won't be competent enough to code it, so it's best he doesn't force them to.

3 - He doesn't believe in recursion. He doesn't like it. I mean, the look of it. It's too nerdy.

4 - He made a bad choice in basing his language in dynamic binding. He recognises it, says it's horrible style, un-pythonic, but won't make it go away because users, users, yadda yadda. All this from someone whose job description is BDFL ;)

Yeah, I'm bitter about some minor quirk no one cares about, but... you know, I might have preferred a "I can't be arsed to do it" answer. Those arguments are pretty laughable.

Hmmm, that's a bold move from Notch. I wonder how political activism in the US by a Swedish citizen is going to sit. Personally, I would just have thanked my luck for working in a country with sane patent laws.

I don't know why Clojure does not do TCO, but I would be surprised if the Java VM has something to do with it. I mean, why? TCO is just an AST transformation. Takes a function, returns a function and a for loop. Yeah, yeah, the easy implementation needs goto, but it's not necessary. AFAICT any tail-recursive function can be implemented as a for loop plus continue, break and return.

Now, while Clojure just not implementing automatic TCO would not be a bug or a design flaw per se -- clisp does fairly well without it, because the developers just didn't bother -- if implementing such an AST transformation in the Clojure compiler is impossible, then the compiler's design is faulty. It's like programming FizzBuzz so that you can't later modify it to add a case for multiples of 7. OK, yeah, TCO without goto is not such a piece of cake, but you get the idea.

And I don't think it's a trade-off in the least. If so, what are Clojure programmers winning now? The glorious overhead of thousands of function calls? Those tasty "stack overflow" back-traces, with thousands of calls to the same function?

Look, I get it, it's funny, but please stop throwing conspiratory shit around. The most likely explanation, by far, is that the photo is real and the EXIF tags are real. If the photo is not real, why care about the tags? You weren't there. And if the photo was real, but the tags are fake, why tell the police so?

But if the photo is real, and the EXIF tags are real, then, and only then, it makes sense to claim you modified them to throw the cops around. Well, it makes sense only if you're delusional, naive or extremely desperate. Any of which could be applied to McAfee. Dude's psycho. Remember that story he posted about how he stood six hours in his porch at night while he was stalked by "cops hiding in bushes", waking up covered in puke and babbling? He's completely lost it. Those jerkass Vice guys should've just got him to a Guatemalan psychiatrist, instead of making "ironic" bitch jokes and laughing at a mentally disturbed person. Fucking hipsters make me sick.

And yeah, the photo is real. Sure, the head is blurred, it looks fake. Just cover it with something and look at the body. Tada, it's real. The head distortion is just those fat fingers on cam sticking grease over the lens.

I guess we, in our youthful arrogance, dismiss our seniors as enterprise relics of a lost age, without considering what led them to that place before. Things don't seem to change that much, after all. Sadly. Which is coincidentally the theme of this article.

This is, surprisingly, a warning for entrepreneurs worldwide. You should read it.

"After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by he new class of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as I used to live among tie-wearing abhorred bankers."

"But these conferences felt depressing. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance."

Take its message as a humbling lesson: "Technology is at its best when it is invisible."

I don't find the Chinese room argument convincing in the least. After all, it's the software that does the understanding, not the hardware. Otherwise, it would be like asking my fingers to understand this comment, or even asking my brain, when it's really my mind that's understanding.

Speaking of rationality, it's probably safe to say that you will end with a sometimes irrational program no matter what you do. Neural networks have glitches, configuration spaces have local minimae, software has bugs. It's as if you saw AI as being "programmed" via a series of rules, when it's more a grow process, arising from probabilistic dumb agents. Even if these agents were to be rational, the system could become irrational: I refer to the current economic crisis.

This is a great read: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm . Talks about how the Air Force requirements for launching spy satellites, the Cold War and SDI madness affected NASA's Shuttle design.

I wouldn't make of it a shallow "government is incompetent by nature" argument, of course. For instance, the Apollo program was a complete success. It just turns out that massive, complex "enterprisey" projects lacking both focus on a clearly defined objective, and strong leadership with a vision, go badly. Not that unexpected in hindsight, I guess.

Well, I understand he didn't knew about the Keynesian macroeconomic framework, or was understandably suspicious of it's validity, as new as it was. Microeconomic theory just couldn't model an event such as the Great Depression, at the time. And even FDR, who had the correct framework, had a very unlikely event happen to the world that relieved the economic pressure of the depression. Wouldn't find blame on him for that.

Well, actually, it is. And it's spot on. Some might have this fetish for rationality that claims if it's delusion it's a lie, whatever, you might think that too. Honestly, in a career path that requires a very big blind bet, and hopes for one in a billion, striking it rich opportunities, those not self-deluded enough about the importance of their start-up are probably going to quit, or not even try.

Not judging? "... most likely you're either missing something you really should know, or you're lucky enough to be working within a narrow area where your deficit doesn't matter."

Talk about reading just part of the sentence.

Actually, I agree with the article: if you have a Brilliant Jerk on board, please fire them as soon as they've got another job. Think of it not as your company outgrowing this person. Rather, face that this Jerk is simply in another level. Your big, homogeinized corporation can't play it anymore. They need to graduate to bigger things.

Honestly, if I were to manage the kind of self-driven, startup oriented, charismatic doctor that the article talks about, I would feel like I was wasting their talent every time they came to work. This kind of talent doesn't belong in a proverbially esclerotic Enterprise, it belongs in a medical startup or something. Kick them out and send them to an employer that really needs someone like them. You're not that startup, you're BigCorp now. Put on your grey suit.

Today's first-world sub-economy is not limited by total energy output, but by consumer demand and private credit. Furthermore, production of high-energy products would be moved towards underdeveloped countries that aren't on the Annex I of the Kyoto Protocol: that is, countries that don't have any restrictions yet on their maximum CO2 output.

Yeah, non-Annex I countries would be screwed if they tried to export energy to developed countries. That could be one way it could backfire, I guess. Given our demand for petrol, the upcoming demand for coal in under-developed countries once we move our primary and secondary economies there, and the traditional "resource curse", I would argue they should worry about other, more interesting things, like corruption.

You don't convince me. Also, please explain what this "net creation of poverty" means.

If Apple has shown something, is what putting millions of dollars and more than a thousand full-time engineers working on a Unix OS with custom hardware looks like. Most Linux users don't care about the X server nor find it underperformant. Hell, not even GUI developers have to touch it.

I would argue that Linux isn't mainstream because it has nothing like Apple's budget, specially on design and marketing. Add to that those hardware vendors that are actively hostile to support from other operating systems, and software developers that don't care, and you have it. Still, Linux is doing fine, for what resources it has.

I don't see how any rational person could see any difference between dying in an accident and being murdered in a random, untargeted act. Is it dishonorable or something? Would they be heartbroken by this terrorist cell show of rudeness?

Now, if I were an embassador, or judge, or some big fish, I could understand that this intent would make an attack more probable. The vast majority of people, however, will never have the luxury of a powerful enough enemy mailing a fundamentalist hit squad to their homes. We, fortunately, are the tourist-class fliers of global terrorism, lacking any kind of personal attention.

Coincidentally, it would be thirty hundred thousand times the amount I would pay to a local Cambodian corrupt cop to get that dude's ass on jail. With little variance. Point is, Swedish readers, you should vote me for chief prosecutor of your country.

No, seriously. TorrentFreak here wants us to believe that Cambodia got 40G$ for arresting someone who is not precisely Pablo Escobar reincarnate. Do they seriously want us to believe that the Swedish Minister of Justice is that incompetent? I mean, some calls, an Interpol red notice... I could get it done for less than a million, my fees included. So vote me.

I would downvote it, not only for the historical egocentrism of claiming that somehow those fighting the Vietnam War were protecting united-statesian lives (as if the conflict ever was anything other than wrestling for political influence), but because it's inflammatory. What does the GP propose, that every single person of every country should go and fight a stupid war on another country? Or else what, be shameful of not being on the glorious warrior caste?

Interesting article, but that submission title ("NASA faked the moon landing--Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax") is shit. A much better one would be "An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science".