maxander

If you think you like driving into the city anytime near rush hour, then yes, I think you’re definitely brainwashed. :)

Poking around the guy’s website [0], I’m not surprised his sales are so dismal- it’s a very earnest description of a project its developer obviously likes, but which he describes in terms of other, pre-existing games and game-styles (e.g., metroidvania, roguelike, procedurally generated, crafting, etc)... which reads as “a mashup of other games you’ve already played.” The one differentiating bit, that it’s a metroidvanian roguelike that can be played in the browser is buried a ways down the page (after a paragraph about how skillfully it’s coded- good on you, but players don’t care.)

If he really wants a commercial success, my guess is that he would be well advised to make a concerted, well-advertised run at the in-browser gaming market, and try to find ways to monetize that (likely by scummy micro-transactions.) His chances still wouldn’t be good, but perhaps better. (Getting on the front page of HN is a pretty good tactic too, though. : ) )

[0] Well, I spent about ten seconds reading the site’s front page, but that’s probably more than most of his hits did.

I mean, are you expecting power in the future to be a tenth as expensive as it is now? A hundredth? With “cheap enough” energy anything is possible, but I don’t see where we would get order of magnitude improvements there anytime soon.

Because I’m bored- Googling “cost to desalinate water” gives $2k per family of five, and googling “population of California” gives roughly a population of 40 million. 40mil/5 * 2k == 16 billion (if I’m counting zeroes right.)

So it’s in the ballpark of a percent of California’s total GDP (which is roughly 2 trillion, IIRC) for non-industrial uses. (But industry, including agriculture, is responsible for that GDP- how easily a “dry” Californian economy could support desalination can’t be inferred from these numbers!)

In the context of a society with gender norms like ours, it is special and probably quite unusual. And typically in male-supported households the woman is responsible for housework and child care, which clearly wasn’t this developer’s primary occupation. We can certainly hope for a world where this sort of thing is commonplace, but it’s not the one we’re in right now.

Saying "just use common sense" is very pat and appealing in cases where we have direct apprehension about the domain in question- such as in plane geometry- but in cases where we have no direct access to a question aside from experiment and abstract reasoning (such as deep history or physics,) how do you distinguish "common sense" from simple conservatism?

I'd imagine there's plenty of possible reasons pre-Clovis Americans wouldn't have been as numerous or left as much evidence as Clovis-people did; most obviously, that the continent was much colder, and therefore supportive of much smaller populations, than it was in the Clovis culture era- particularly in the northern regions, where it's often objected that they "should" have left remains. Obviously, this isn't an argument that there were pre-Clovis settlers, but an example of why the idea can't be objected out-of-hand through "common sense."

True masters of naming make sure to use variable names that are long but unambiguous after the first several characters, so that with tab-completion you get the best of both worlds.

I’m not an economist, and the following argument is qualitative- “cost of capital” essentially means the cost of things (as opposed to, the cost of services/labor.) Perhaps, indeed, when the cost of things goes up, this will lead to an increase in wages- but humans also require and purchase things, so this will drag their effective earning (their purchasing power) back down, even if their nominal wage has increased.

Which leaves peoples’ motivation to be truckers (and the fortunes of the middle class) in roughly the same boat regardless of the cost of capital.

Lurking behind the article's entire thesis, and yet barely addressed in it, is the issue that despite demand for truckers outstripping supply, their employers aren't willing to significantly raise wages. They instead eat the costs of trucks sitting empty despite loads available to carry. "Higher demand for labor raises wages" is the bread-and-butter of mainstream economical arguments for how to help poorer segments of society and, fundamentally, why economic growth is a good thing- yet cases like these show that it is simply not true. Raising wages for less skilled workers is apparently so absurdly painful for employers in almost any field that they'll pay almost any other cost.

This is how wage growth has stagnated for the majority of workers in the U.S., even in the face of a prolonged economic boom [0]. The standard economic models of the labor market do not work, and yet almost no one is willing to acknowledge this.

[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...

WWII was also distinguished by the use of aerial firebombing, where tons and tons of explosives were hurled into cities more or less at random in the hopes that it would have some psychological or material impact. The whole idea of “precision strikes” and not harming civilians is a fairly recent development in the history of war. (Let’s hope it sticks around!)

Impressive- it's a sample-return mission. Sending up cameras to capture photons or sample enclosures to capture bits of dirt is too pedestrian for SpaceX. Instead they'll send up artists to capture samples of space-ness, to be studied by humanity back on Earth.

> The answer they found: if the Earth’s oceans had twenty times more deuterium than they actually contain, they could be ignited by a 20 million megaton bomb (which is to say, a bomb with the yield equivalent to 200 teratons of TNT, or a bomb 2 million times more powerful than the Tsar Bomba’s full yield).

A factor of twenty in the elemental composition of hydrogen, and a factor of a million in the fission efficiency of uranium. We’ve been lucky with regard to untested physical constants so far, but there’s no promise that that will hold going forward!

If that wasn’t surprising enough for you- there’s a cancer line that has been propagated between dogs for centuries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_transmissible_venerea...

Wonderful bit of synchronicity- seeing this on the front page of HN right after I got back from being (deliberately) lost in the Fells reservation north of Cambridge. (In this case, of course, my algorithm was made simpler via access to a GPS oracle, when it started to get dark. :) )

> It was included in a list of 12 problems described by the mathematician Scott W. Williams as "million buck problems" because he believed that the techniques involved in their resolution will be worth at least a million dollars to mathematics.

Does that mean it would be worth that much via (perhaps indirect?) applications, or worth that much to mathematicians? What does it even mean to say that a non-applied mathematical theorem is “worth” some sum of money? (Absent a rich mathematician willing to pay a bounty, at least.)

What changed between the few-gene era and the polygene era is that we got sequencers that could read the genomes of an entire experimental cohort at reasonable cost. Likewise, when we have the capability to do single-cell profiling of the epigenetic signature of an array of relevant cell types, for every member of your cohort, there’s decent odds biologists will think it ludicrous that we hoped to get meaningful results out of lone, unannotated, out-of-context genomes.

EDIT: I would specify that I'm not saying that experimental biology "doesn't work" or doesn't get meaningful results before the bigger new technology arrives. I think the Slate Star Codex article overstates the helplessness of single-gene theories, which did explain a bunch of diseases and simple attributes, and had significant medical impacts in understanding things like cancer and chemotherapy effectiveness. It just failed to accomplish a set of other things that people wanted, like explaining intelligence or height. Each new advance (cheap genome sequencing, epigenetic readouts, hugely longitudinal metabolomics, molecule-level microscopy, and the hundred-plus advances in this direction we haven't even conceived of yet) expands the territory of what we can address through molecular biology.

Scientists are often really optimistic about whether topics of interest lie inside or without this territory at a given moment, which I think has to do more with the incentives of grant writing than anything else.

I suppose the reason is related to the cliche "companies just do whatever they can to maximize shareholder value"; it is instead that they don't actually act to maximize shareholder value, they act to maximize future expected shareholder value. I'd imagine that the guys leading the Google push into China are well aware of how things will go, and they've likely even reported it to the top brass. But shareholders probably aren't as well-informed, so they'll happily bid up the price on GOOG on the back of stories about an imminent takeover of the Chinese search market... which has roughly the same financial impact of actually achieving something, at least temporarily.

I wonder if this sort of silica coating could be an alternative to lipid-wall cells for silicate-based extraterrestrial life.

The average HNer probably has, yes. The average American, quite possibly not.

Do you think that these Ubers-but-with-buses would be cheap enough that the homeless could ride them? Most urban public transportation operates at a substantial loss; a private busing company would cost several times more than standard fare. It would be about as securely class-protected an experience as an Uber pool ride.

The "build more roads, people fill them with more cars" is just a symptom of a huge problem that's existed for so long that people can't see it anymore- that there's orders of magnitude more demand for intra-city transport than there is supply. The problem isn't a law of nature; keep giving people more ways to get from A to B and eventually you'll reach the point where you have more routes than people to travel them.

...But, in a car-based society, this won't happen until your entire city is a single level surface of pavement. There is no way to get the required efficiency out of a system where one person usually takes up a full 6'-by-10' lot of street space, and where speed is limited by the inherent dangers of having multi-ton masses of steel and aluminum passing within feet of pedestrians. Self driving cars might up throughput by a factor of two; I'd estimate we need about a factor of a hundred before we can call the problem solved.

“Leak” sounds small, too, so it gives a minimized impression of what happened.

“Hemorrhage,” perhaps. :)

Twitter isn’t going to broadcast or link to tweets that were bad enough to merit a ban, for obvious reasons- they’re banning it precisely to avoid having that content be propagated any further.

Ack! Serves me right for googling without thinking. I suppose I saw the figures for a different Crick.

Fingers crossed! Certainly much more will be known about human biology and the mechanics of aging by then, given that what we know currently is mostly so recent (it's instructive to remember that the two of the guys remembered for discovering the nature of DNA, Watson and Crick, are still alive, and the latter is still an active researcher [1]. Molecular biology is that new.)

But- all your examples suppose not only advances in biomedical science, but also medical care aimed at correcting each of these problems. It adds up to a lot of drugs, therapies, or other interventions. In today's system, a well-off and health-conscious individual would receive that level of care as a matter of course- but today's system is a sprawling and highly dysfunctional apparatus already, and I don't feel entirely confident about how it will change in the face of future economic upheavals, political madness, climate-change-fueled social instability, etc etc etc.

The lifespan of humans is increasing, but the lifespan of social infrastructure such a the medical industry may be decreasing... which is especially problematic since the former depends on the latter.

[1] Rosalind Franklin, sadly, died of ovarian cancer at the young age of 37.

That's interesting. Certainly, we've all been cued by the sound of our hard disks that something in our code was wrong or that our computer is up to something unexpected; now that disks are getting quieter and/or replaced by SSDs we lose that important "feature." As code-relevant hardware gets more complex (GPUs and other outboard processors, interaction with robotics or media headsets, etc what-have-you) that sort of hardware-level diagnostic should become more useful, rather than less. Has anyone tried to get this to happen on purpose? E.g., little electrical taps on relevant bus cables, with an audio jack.

Biomedical progress will accelerate as we accumulate, and become more skillful with, tools like CRISPR and genomic sequencing, but the real rate-limiting factor in these developments is testing. Making sure a treatment performed on humans is safe is an extremely important and still very difficult process. Without innovation in that sphere we’re unlikely to see stem cells and co. generate a fraction of the possible advances, in the near future.

The name stands for STimulator of INterferon Genes, where interferons are essentially message-carrying molecules involved with the immune system. STING protein, I believe, is essentially a detector which gets triggered when a cell is invaded by a virus or encounters a parasite. For that, it still serves an important purpose.

It's not bad, it's wrong, since they make reference to the "entangled photons in the light coming from the quasars," which is entirely not how the experiment worked. The light from the quasars (which weren't measurably entangled with squat!) were essentially used as random number generators, in order to perform standard Bell test experiment [0] using a standard laboratory entangled-photon source.

I recommend reading the paper instead, if you're interested [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments [1] https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...

There are some good artists in there, mixed in with the rest. But also consider, most artists on these platforms (minus maybe YouTube) are doing it to build portfolios to be seen by potential employers. That skews most of them towards commercializable styles and forms, which aren't going to tend to be groundbreaking.

An apartment is fairly easy; if you don't have to live near a big city in order to work, land and construction labor is relatively cheap.

A Netflix subscription is just data. A subscription and the broadband access to go with it is within most peoples' means now; broadband to the far-flung reaches people go to live when, as mentioned, they're not constrained to urban areas might be a challenge, but before too long LTE data will be sufficient for most purposes (especially in regions with lower population densities!)

People don't need a new iPhone X. Period! There's cheap alternatives that do 90% of the same thing. People who would be likely to spring for universal-income-based life are unlikely to be able to afford one in either case.

More broadly; food and housing is (given some geographic freedom) trivially accessible and cheap, internet access is almost at the same level, and most of what we consider "nice things" are trivially replaceable with much cheaper "nice things" that simply haven't had the same level of advertisement support. There's no material barrier to people living good lives on universal-basic-income-level resources.