oberstein

To test this manually, go to google maps and paste the lat/long into this site. e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6205099,-122.3493306,19.75z --> http://avoidhumans.com/list.php?lat=47.6205099&lng=-122.3493...

Is their data purely comprised of people who use this app? No wonder everything is green everywhere...

Depends what you expected those initial coins to do. Did you get them as a speculative investment with a chance of "interest" of x%/year? Then a 100% increase is pretty damn good as far as investments go, you shouldn't feel too bad about selling now. You'll have regret if it continues to grow to the moon, so maybe sell half or 3/4. But also calculate the potential unrealized earnings if it went to the moon -- i.e. if your little pile was only worth $100, now $200, even if it doubles twice more the difference is just $600.

"The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker.... I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."

-- Richard Stallman (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates) https://github.com/llimllib/personal_code/blob/master/python...

They're different sub-genres. I really enjoyed BSG, but for me it didn't take away anything from TNG. The only criticism I have with TNG is that tech isn't the solution to all their non-philosophical problems -- they are a civilization with, to a first-order approximation, complete mastery over energy and matter, with even the Q wary about their further potential. Yet the pattern buffers can't store swathes of human backups because reasons? TNG is at its best when it's philosophical, that aspect is essential to its sub-genre.

As for DS9, it was great, but it wishes it was Babylon 5. B5 was superior in every way except budget.

> Would you ever consider rubbing yourself with paper a valid realistic alternative to showering?

Yes, all the time, for many classes of uncleanliness. Pants and paper towels are amazing. I'm careful with your wording, though -- those are an alternative, not a substitute, and especially an alternative for right now. If I had infinite time I'd love to take a full shower after every crap. If I worked up the slightest sweat bead on my forehead, I'd love to go shower and cool down immediately rather than rub against my shirt or a paper towel and continuing with what I was doing.

One day I might get a fancy Japanese toilet. For now, wiping is a fine alternative to a full shower and even in the gross cases of not washing hands afterwards you're still going to be less likely to spread disease than you would be in a culture where touching things with the left hand is frowned upon. As you say, I can be sure about one, and it's the most important one from a public health standpoint given that the other even if not super clean is contained until shower time.

I too would be interested in studies. But I do think environmental cost is factored in to the cost of most things, especially if due to environmental damage it is no longer possible to get a Thing at any price. I think the true cost of a single pencil is well reflected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8

The problem with the profiler analogy is that economic costs can open up economic gains, whereas wasting billions of cycles in a dumb loop opens up nothing. If you analyzed the human activities that produce the most environmental cost, the individual contributions would be nothing. Only when you look at economies of scale driven by collections of people do you get to anything remotely resembling significant numbers. And you might think "Let's ban all cars", since that's a somewhat noticeable effect in aggregate, but by doing so you would kill off many other parts of the economy. Depending on the reaction, it could be good or bad for the environment. It could be good if humanity went extinct and the costs we directly produce went to 0 (leaving only the 'natural' costs), but that's not a world I want to live in.

> Five months into the experiment, after some initial reservations, I gave up toilet paper. Now I do things the way hundreds of millions (including my extended family) in India do — with water and my left hand.

That's pretty gross. What's the delta for the energy cost of doing that, its use of extra water and extra heat and extra soap for the water to clean his hand, with the energy cost of a few squares of toilet paper and less water and heat and soap?

You must be new here.

It will be interesting to see what the final winner of GPU programming looks like. There's also the possibility of FPGAs making their way into consumer hardware, and right now the pure-Python library MyHDL is a great choice for those. There are a few attempts at abstracting over OpenCL like https://github.com/eholk/harlan, and some intriguing domain specific attempts like http://halide-lang.org/ but I think it will be a while yet before something takes over. I also don't think whatever it is can succeed without corporate backing.

> Let me warn you. If you persist with your propaganda on Python3, then GOLANG will be the future of Python. Does that register with you guys?

This abstract future of Python has already been ceded to something that is not Python, just as once the abstract future of Perl was Python. Ruby once tried to take the mantle but failed. Go is now taking a lot of mindshare (from 2 or 3 more I wonder?) and I agree the Python 3 crowd just makes Go more likely to succeed, which is terrifying since it's probably the worst possible choice. My message is simply despair and accept the inevitable: Python will fade -- by all means keep using it, people still use Perl, scientist will be using it for a long time -- but the rest of the software world will pass you by. If you care about what the rest of the world is doing at all, you can help make sure the future passes to better general purpose high level languages like Nim or Clojure or OCaml, and for specific niches like scientific computing goes to the likes of Julia eventually. Anything but Go.

Yeah, but Israel is also tiny and can still kick the ass of everyone else in the Middle East. Similar to Israel, Singapore has a lot going for it with respect to modern warfare that makes up for its population and landmass deficit. I agree that total invasion is probably very unlikely in the foreseeable immediate future.

Me too. It does take a long time, though, even with ccache on.

Are there any engineering efforts[1] being proposed or actively worked on by Singapore to solve this issue? Every now and again I hear about the hazes forcing everyone in Singapore to wear masks and stay indoors as much as possible until the hazes dissipate. That state should be unacceptable for a first world city.

[1] Like, a giant sci-fi ocean-fan... Or a military solution of invading their neighbors and running things better.

Crocodile humor.

If it's getting worse, you haven't hit full burnout yet. You should stop right now unless you really want to suffer that, let this be a cautionary tale: http://jacquesmattheij.com/dealing-with-burn-out I would just give a 2 week notice out of the blue. I'd say I'd made plans for a year's 'sabbatical', and I would give that to the company as the primary excuse for leaving -- if you can work out a deal where they'll hire you back then great but don't hold your breath. If you don't have a year's expenses saved up then you should also think about moving to a less expensive area. You can always move back when (and if) you decide to get a job in the area again, which may be much less than a year but if at the end of the year you still feel aversion your next Ask HN should be on reentering the job market but wanting to transition out of a pure programming role into something else similarly well paid (but maybe not even in tech).

Edit: Downvoters may not think this response is justified, but full burnout is very serious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_%28psychology%29 If you're still at the stage where a "break", even one so long as a year, can help you get your head back in the game, you need to take advantage of that now rather than later before you burn out completely and spend at least a year but maybe even a decade to build yourself back up to a passable shadow of your former self, productivity-in-the-field-wise. That you have been struggling to fight burnout for a year already while it's getting worse suggests you need a longer break and perhaps a big shift in day-to-day work rather than a simple week or two near a beach without internet.

Zuckerberg saying "Young people are just smarter" seems like an instance of https://antidem.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/glantons-law/ Age discrimination exists because most of us have direct experience with family members who diminish as they age, especially when these family members didn't keep up a habit of doing intellectual intense things they did when they were younger and instead spend increasing amounts of time watching sports and doing crosswords. It's possible to be a badass programmer in your 80s, Knuth will be one soon, but it's very rare. We thus shouldn't expect to have an equal distribution of old people and young people, regardless of whether that's desirable or not.

Why don't you pay one of the several startups doing book-scanning services?

A lot of companies have provisions in their EULAs to allow for copies stored in RAM or by the browsers, e.g. http://storedvalue.com/en-US/terms-and-conditions and I believe streaming services are doing that as well since going to the monitor will require making copies and transforms of the data from the network. It's all pretty funny until someone gets sued.

In my interviews with Uber drivers the only ones that really complain about the company are former taxi drivers.

It would need to be fairly ridiculously sized. Far easier to just cushion the ground and have the 'rig' waiting at the impact site. e.g. skydiving into a bunch of cardboard boxes with no parachute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLDSg8B4Cxo

Some of us initially poor but nouveau-rich would like to retire before we're old, you know. A wealth tax makes that much harder than it already is. You would also kill property ownership by all but the ultra-rich who have enough assets elsewhere to make up the continuous drainage because home appreciation does not grow that fast.

Thanks for bringing out his AI comment, it seems much more aligned with the main superintelligence research community now than when I read his thoughts last. Updated.

Fine, physics in general, then? I mean he's still my generation's (20-30-somethings) Einstein, great thinker, but Einstein had a lot of bad ideas about socialism and governance too.

Perhaps by continuing to ignore it. Hawking has some weird (if somewhat common) opinions about AI, aliens, and I guess capitalism too. He should stick to black holes.

What annoys me is he often has the basic facts right. For example, fully general AI is dangerous (but not really because of Terminator-like scenarios); if there are intelligent aliens we should not expect them to be nice any more than mean, and there are good arguments to expect mean, and so we should be careful (but not because of the very unlikely scenario outlined in Signs); and in this case he's right that further automation of the economy will produce greater economic inequality, but economic inequality is a good thing, it's absolute wealth and poverty that's the real problem, and I'd bet on the trend of the poor not in fact getting poorer, on an absolute scale, continuing. See http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html

Still cheaper (and more useful) than the F-35 program...

Those two possibilities vary hugely in their time consideration! 1 considers the far future outcome ("you go on with your life") but 2 only considers the next few months. 2a you find out you can do it and enjoy it, great career path for the next n years, 2b you find out you can't hack it and either quit or get fired, 2bi you then do what you would have done in 1, not a huge opportunity cost, 2bii your ego suffers a huge blow and you fall into a pit of depression and drunkenness and self-doubt about ever learning anything again and you: 2biiα eventually get out and do 1 (larger opportunity cost and potential permanent damage), or: 2biiβ die soon after...

A lot of people really want to avoid the 2bii tree and will shrink away from any action that seems to have a chance of leading from the bearable status quo to there.

Seattle is a godless soulless husk of what it once was, attitudes that spawn things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_the_Bastards_Out didn't win out. Try living in Utah for a while (as a real or pretend Mormon of course) if you want to see what real culture and community tastes like even in 2015.

I work in Seattle but I'll never live in the city proper. The rest of King County, excepting the south side, is at least a decent and modestly priced ($900/month single bed apartment) place to live even if it has no soul. Unfortunately it won't last, Bellevue is in the same place Seattle was not too long ago.

(This is more hyperbolic than it probably needs to be.)

That is a much better line of questioning since it avoids the arguments about what is meant by savings. Also clicking through I found it avoids the followup argument of "what about credit cards"? To quote the whole thing: "47: The percentage of Americans who can’t pay for an unexpected $400 expense through savings or credit cards, without selling something or borrowing money, according to the Federal Reserve."

But there's still a problem in that the $400 is "pay immediately". The other study from the same article showed 50% of Americans could cope with a surprise $2000 bill that they had 30 days to pay, in 2009.

http://morguefile.com/ is a lot better.

Solution: forced cryonics, with elements of Demolition Man thrown in as desired.