michaelf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUafzOXHPE

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Matthiessen

[2]http://www.salon.com/2012/05/27/exclusive_the_paris_review_t...

There have been several good summaries of this paper and the work that led up to it over the past few months (my favorite being this [2] one).

I'd take this author's view with a grain of salt (or something stronger).

[1] http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/complex_dynamics_final_clea...

[2] http://narrative.ly/pieces-of-mind/nick-brown-smelled-bull/

It seems very weird to put the word "experiences" in quotes. It makes it seem as if the writer is using it sarcastically, or is in some way disclaiming what they are writing. What in the world justifies the quotes, and why wouldn't an editor get rid of them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_physics#Crystal_str...

For the most part, contracts are signed by relatively new contacts (people not yet in my address book). E.g. new customers, partners, contractors, or employees.

I hope you'll get rid of this unnecessary intrusion into my privacy in the future. And, for what its worth, people who send around lots of NDAs, LIOs, term sheets, employee agreements and other sorts of contracts usually value their privacy.

And yes -- I understand that you say you won't be spamming my contacts or mining it for data. It's just that I don't know you.

In any other environment, I would have never had the opportunity to be a completely worthless drain on resources for so long.

So certainly avail yourself of any opportunity to get a job while in school. I was lucky in that I was essentially forced to do it based on the terms of my loans. Any parents reading this: see if you can do your kids a favor and secure them a loan that requires your kids to get a work study, coop, or internship. And no, working as barista at the campus cafe doesn't count!

If this model works out, I wonder if we'll eventually see traditional universities funding startups for top students out of their endowments.

Very exciting experiment, if you ask me.

I can't find any other information about it, so I'm guessing its a hoax / April Fools joke.

Its always bothered me to read about inventors who discovered beautiful and amazing things, only to die penniless while powerful interests reaped all of the financial benefits. Hopefully the people who discovered these codes have been richly rewarded for their work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHuWloNGo6c

I was sort of hoping that the factory would look like that plexiglass prison in the X-Men movie that was designed to prevent Magneto from using his powers.

Alas, it's nothing like that, but it's an interesting video nonetheless.

Could you elaborate on that sentence? What do you mean by "extractive"? In the context of natural resources, I take that word to imply that the resource is depleted (e.g. non-renewable). Do you have a difference sense in mind?

When a murderer enters a courtroom, he's the defendant because he is presumed innocent. If the jury returns a guilty verdict, he becomes an offender, and the roles switch back. Following the verdict, it would be justified to view the prosecution as having defended society against the murderer who committed the offense. Prior to the verdict, the jury agrees to see things the other way around.

Likewise, Apple brings suit because, in its view, its patents should defend their innovations against copying. Again, because of the presumption of innocence, Samsung (or whoever) plays the role of defendant until a verdict is returned. Should Apple win their suit, then (under law) Samsung will be viewed as the offender, and Apple will have successfully defended itself against unlawful copying.

Which is a long way of saying that, if you believe that Samsung has unlawfully copied Apple's innovations, then it's entirely correct to view Apple as the defensive party in this patent mess.

I desperately wish I was capable of seeing deeply into the meaning of that statement. I appreciate design, design thinking, human factors, etc..., but not nearly enough to understand it as the "fundamental soul," or how it (what?) expresses (how?) itself (who?).

If anyone here can provide a few words, or a pointer to some great communicator of design, I would very much appreciate it.

Maybe off topic, but this reminded me of a certain statement about poetry, by the poet WH Auden:

     For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
     In the valley of its making where executives
     Would never want to tamper...

  1. suspect that someone had walked away with 3 racks, or

  2. guess that some network hardware had gone bad?

http://www.schneier.com/book-applied.html

Edit: Note, this really barely scratches the surface for building secure software. AC says how to apply cryptographic primitives correctly. It won't teach you how to avoid vulnerabilities specific to particular application domains (like CSS, SQL injection, etc...).

Regarding Cosby's remark about black families, I certainly understand his sentiment, but I agree it was somewhat simplistic. My father (and my grandparents) all had a pretty similar view to Cosby's. In the particular black neighborhood of Philadelphia where he was from, that type of conservatism was the norm. By the early '70s, several of his friends (along with him) had graduated from college and moved out of the cities into the predominantly white suburbs, and this cohort was for the most part extremely successful. Not everyone managed to get out of the city, though, and it wasn't because the ones who stayed behind were necessarily lazier or less hard working (though certainly many of them were). For the most part, the opportunities just ran out.

With that came, I think, a lot of the anti-assimilationist sentiment you see today. Yang mentions something similar in his article. When you work your ass off to excel in all of the culturally approved ways, but nonetheless you are passed-over for someone who worked half as hard as you, what are you to think? There's a whole generation of older black men who were stung in this way (and, as Yang mentions, a whole generation of Asian men in a similar, but largely better, situation). (And incidentally, I'm speaking about men instead of women because women face different challenges that I'm not qualified to discuss). In many ways, I don't think the situation is much different than what lead to hooliganism in the UK during the '80s.

So is the situation getting worse, better, or staying the same? Economically, it's a hard time for a lot of people. Kids graduating from college (of any race) are having a hard time finding jobs. Thirty-somethings who saved up to buy homes in 2005 are underwater. As global inequalities are being addressed, global competition is at its highest, particularly for jobs that previously would have been "entry-level". These are also the sort jobs which are most prone to nepotism.

Its hard to say what lessons will be drawn from this period. It seems entirely possible that many of the hardest working, most optimistic young black people of this generation will find themselves out of work, disillusioned, and wondering why they didn't just have more fun in high school (and passing that attitude on to their kids).

BTW, you might (should) say "Don't Asian Americans face the same economic difficulties? They're employed at the highest rate of any ethnic group in the country." This is true, of course, and there's a lot to say about that. But I think this post is already too long, and none of this has been particularly relevant to hacking, except maybe societal hacking. Maybe I can end with a question: why don't white kids, generally, work as hard as Asians, especially when they are being out-competed for valuable educational opportunities?

It seems to me that when those authors were writing (and earlier poets like Langston Hughes), the problems of assimilation and alienation were both more apparent (as in "WTF!!!") and at the same time more vague (as in "WTF???"). It demanded the attention of artists. It was the same era that included the most creative period in the development of Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement itself. I wonder if Asian-Americans find themselves at something of a similar juncture.

Ultimately, and unfortunately, I think the direction of African-American cultural identity ended up following in the direction Yang has set for himself. Yang says:

"The first step toward self-reform is to admit your deficiencies. Though my early adulthood has been a protracted education in them, I do not admit mine. I’m fine. It’s the rest of you who have a problem. Fuck all y’all."

He's obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek here, since earlier he wondered if his "defiance is just delusional, self-glorifying bullshit that artists have always told themselves to compensate for their poverty and powerlessness." I'm sure he's (ironically) comparing himself to African Americans (otherwise, why the black vernacular "Fuck all y'all"?).

Something he touches on but doesn't really flesh-out is the problem with defining yourself in the negative -- that is, defining yourself in terms of things you won't do because you've already established a social identity where you aren't that thing. When he says "I love this hard and unyielding part of myself more than any other reward the world has to offer a newly brightened and ingratiating demeanor, and I will bear any costs associated with it," I hear the the constant refrain in the African-American community to "keep it real", where what this really means is "don't range widely." And incidentally, this is also recognized by African-Americans -- see Dave Chappelle's sketch "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong."

(btw, I'm an African American software engineer, so issues of race and culture are unavoidably fascinating to me)

I was surprised to find this old article from Time magazine back in 1956. It concerns the solution to Post's Problem, which the article describes quite succinctly as:

| The problem: Does each non-recursive, recursively enumerable set have the property that every recursively enumerable set is recursive in it? Post himself thought not, but it was not until young Friedberg came along that anyone had the proof.

Can you imagine a mass-market magazine publishing such a thing today? Perhaps it's unnecessary, since anyone interested in computability theory probably pays attention to blogs like Scott Aaronson's.

There's a quote from from Gödel later in the article that may also speak to the problem of popularization:

| "Unfortunately," says Czech-born Kurt Godel of the institute, "he wants to study medicine. An achievement like this at his age comes only once in a lifetime.

Out of curiosity, what are some of the top issues (of governance) that are important to the average Russian?

I really can't say how many lives are enhanced or saved by simply being more efficient. And I can't predict the future, so neither do I know if nuclear power will ultimately be our downfall. But the question is far more complex than "society considers the loss of life acceptable." Society makes these choices to support and sustain better (and more numerous) lives.