saintgimp

The article uses the word "organic" in a highly technical manner, meaning chemical compounds that contain carbon, and of course we already know that space is filled with that sort of thing. It does NOT mean "organic" in the casual sense of originating from something alive.

Although to be fair, dust is definitely a problem if you want to see into the center of the galaxy which is why most of the observations of Sagittarius A* are done in the infrared or near-infrared spectrum, which can penetrate dust. It's also why we can't see clear across our galaxy to make out what's beyond it, so we don't know what the Great Attractor is.

It really is that empty. Science fiction movies mess up our perception, but reality is way more mind-boggling that we realize.

Check this out: if you want to build a model galaxy to scale and you start with the Sun as a two-foot-diameter exercise ball, how far away do you have to travel before you can set down a smaller ball that represents Alpha Centauri, our nearest(-ish) stellar neighbor?

10,993.3 miles.

Just bask in that for a while.

(http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/)

The "lump of labor fallacy" isn't really relevant here because we're not talking about work going away. We're talking about the usefulness of human labor as a means of production going away. No, not entirely, but enough that our economic system as it currently exists will fail and we'll need a new one of some sort.

You know the old illustration about the buggy-whip makers complaining that automobiles were destroying their jobs and putting them out of work, and how could anyone possibly survive that? Then, oh look, there were tons of new jobs created in automobile factories and everyone was better off than before.

Well, in that story, we're not the buggy-whip makers any more; we're the horses. Horses didn't move on to better and more productive forms of transportation employment. They simply became useless except in a few remaining highly-specialized working roles, or as pets. Or glue.

The word "job" as used here is a technical term. It doesn't mean "anything that needs doing". It doesn't mean "anything I find enjoyable or worthwhile". It actually means "activities that someone will pay me money to do because I can do it better, faster, or cheaper than anyone or anything else, including machines." (For the purpose of this discussion there's also an implied meaning of "someone will pay me enough money for those activities that I can purchase adequate food, shelter, and discretionary items so as to have a reasonably comfortable existence.") That set of activities appears to have peaked in per-capita terms and is probably on a decline which will accelerate rapidly in the future.

So yeah, you're right that this problem is inherently an economic problem, not an "I don't know what to do with all my free time" problem. That doesn't make the problem any less urgent or less difficult to solve. It's actually incredibly difficult to solve because it'll involve rejiggering our social contracts, which will probably take several generations to complete.

Actually, a lot of California is going to turn into some sort of desert. There are several borderline ecosystems that used to support mature trees but once we lost them to disease or fire no trees of any kind appear to be growing back; just chaparral.

Yes, Life (capital L) moves on, but perhaps not the kind of life that we'd prefer. We can just shrug and say, "Oh well" or we can take a moment to reflect on what, if anything, we might do to steer natural selection in directions we find more pleasant.

No, he's saying that "merit" is an incredibly easily-gamed metric. We can measure results all right, and we can measure ability rather less so, but "merit" implies a casual link between ability and results that is very hard to unambiguously prove and shockingly easy to fake (even if just by disregarding beneficial external factors).

Um - in this case we're saving the internet (well, really radio spectrum that people use to access the internet) from private corporations, not the government. A totally free market sucks because there will never be a properly-maintained commons. If it weren't for the government, maybe I'd bolt my router to a 10-kilowatt transmitter so I can get my home wifi signal while I'm grocery shopping. So what if it sucks for everyone else! The government quite rightly regulates me in that area and says I can't do that.

If the internet as we know it today ever dies, I'm 80% sure it will be due to private corporations screwing everyone to make an extra buck, not due to government over-regulation.

Dr. Pamela Gay wrote an article about the difficult state of non-tenure jobs in research and academia: http://www.starstryder.com/2015/11/12/dreaming-of-success-in...

It's the same problem for software devs, postdocs, research assistants, adjunct professors - basically everyone except tenured university professors. We're not rewarding the right things.

As far as I know, no one (not even the investors) has claimed to have seen a working prototype deliver significant power to a cell phone.

That's the point. It's likely that at the time, she honestly didn't know the difference (or didn't understand the difference well enough to realize that it would be obvious to other people). She did a Ted Talk where she bragged about how she didn't know anything about engineering when she started uBeam.

Seems like they need to do the hardware equivalent of a "git bisect" here. Instead of fiddling around with the current version of the device, trying to figure out if the observed effect is actually propulsion or just an artifact, someone should start tearing the thing apart, testing as they go, and find out at what point the observed effect goes away. That would probably be instructive.

And I think at some point the customers are going to figure out that the startup merry-go-round is and never was intended for their benefit. Over time it's going to get harder for new startups to attract customers because people will realize that flashy new product offerings aren't likely to stick around (in a form that we actually want) for long.

I've lived in Seattle for 20 years and the only earthquake I've ever actually felt here was the Nisqually quake in 2001. Contrast that with some parts of Japan where you feel quakes on a monthly basis or more.

There will be significant damage from water all around inland Puget Sound, though I agree not on the scale of the full-blown tsunami on the coast. Everything is going to shift 30 to 100 feet west over the course of a couple minutes - the water in Puget Sound is going to slosh around like crazy.

Yes, this, a thousand times yes. The transparently-malicious abuse of ads on SourceForge is a tragedy and it's been that way for years and years. It is a honeypot for lazy people (or those without meticulous attention to detail) and the malware venders didn't even have to purchase the site. SourceForge just rolled over and let them do it.

That's a very unreasonable point of view. Sure, it's true that in the past 200 years we've had an explosion of technological progress but there's absolutely no reason to assume that it's possible to continue it for an infinite amount of time. It's rather more likely that over time we'll discover the lines that separate "hard but possible" from "theoretically impossible given the physics of this universe". The only real question is when that will happen for any given area of technology.

Asserting that technology will just continue to improve and advance forever simply makes you sound like a stock-market broker in 2007.

Relativity kind of messes with our notions of time.

Any event that happens outside of our lightcone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone) cannot have any casual effect on us, even theoretically, until it enters our lightcone. Before then, the event literally doesn't exist from our point of view. Because of this, it's reasonable and valid to take the position that distant events "happen" when we're first able to see them happen. It's not the only perspective you could have, of course, but it can be a useful one and astronomical events are often discussed this way.

I completely agree with the capitalism problem, but the most likely hands to end up holding the web of trust would be the browser makers, not the banks.

A couple of problems:

The average internet user has no idea who's trustworthy and who isn't. If they have to personally grant trust in order to get at some content they're looking for, they'll simply do it. This is the same behavior that causes people to execute boobs.exe attached to a random email that landed in their inbox.

In order for this to work, the average internet user must cede the trust decision-making process to some other entity who claims to be more qualified to do it, like say the company who makes their browser. There are four browser makers that account for probably 90+% of usage. Now you're right back to where you started with the current oligopoly system, except that with the new system there's a much larger attack surface for nefarious agents to use when trying to insert themselves into the trust chain because anyone at all could let them in.

Cynically, that's the problem with internet security protocols in general - they have to work not only for smart, self-interested people but also for stupid people who are actively self-harming. That's a really tough bar to meet.

As computers/robots get better and more versatile, they inevitably "compete" for jobs and provide downward wage pressure the same as if the skilled human labor pool (but not the human consumer pool) had drastically increased. Fundamentally it's all about who can do the job better and/or cheaper. If you aren't the one at the top of the "better" or "cheaper" list in some category, you don't have a job. Period.

As a simple thought experiment, imagine a world in which a computer or robot could do literally any job a human could do better and cheaper than a human could do it. In such a world, the only reason a human would draw a salary would be due to charity, not good business sense. Of course, in such a world you don't have an economy as we know it either, which is kind of the point. Our current social contract won't survive in that kind of a world. We'll need a new one.

You might argue that such a day will never come; that there will always be a large class of jobs that humans can do better or cheaper than machines. Perhaps that's true. But that's what this conversation is really about: do machines have fundamental limitations due to physics that will keep them below the level of a large majority of humans forever? I think that's a strange position for most of us at HN to be arguing. Even software development will someday be automated to a large extent, I expect (yes, not anytime soon), and then where will we be?

The problem of standardized testing has a direct analogue in software engineering that makes the situation crystal clear to any programmer - remember when our industry thought it was a good idea to measure programmer productivity primarily (or even solely) by the number of lines of code written? How did that work out for us? Terribly, of course. LOC metrics have a passing resemblance to the thing you want to measure in software engineering but it turned out to be horribly bad at predicting the thing we actually cared about - working software.

Standardized testing bears exactly the same relationship to the outcome we actually care about in education.

In both realms, there is no easy single metric you can turn to. In the end, you hire great people and get out of their way. The best measurements come from multi-dimensional feedback from managers, peers, and customers. No it doesn't scale very well but it's the only thing that works.

Really? You must be on a rare and exceptional org, then. I left Microsoft because the stack rank system most often worked exactly as described in the article and it was just as corrosive as they described. (I’m making more money and having way more fun now, too.)

In my extensive experience as both an IC and a lead at Microsoft the curve is enforced down to at least the dev manager level (i.e. teams of 20-30 people). A manager with 20+ people often ends up having to pick two sacrificial victims to receive a punitive review score (i.e. a 5 in the current system) even if everyone’s performing well. This causes all kinds of unintended side-effects and has absolutely rotted the company from the inside out.

I understand that the idea is to keep everyone on their toes and encourage them to keep pushing. It might even work ok if there were some fool-proof way to guarantee that everyone always got evaluated on their actual product work, but engineers are smart people and they usually figure out that it’s easier and faster to optimize for networking/schmoozing/backstabbing than it is to merely do brilliant engineering.

If a low review score was just a momentary, “better luck next time” sort of thing then it still might work ok but a low review score is a terribly punitive thing. You get no raise/bonus/stock, you’re not allowed to interview with other teams, and you’re in serious danger of being fired. It drastically affects your career prospects for the next several years. If that happens to you, it’s not worth sticking around. Because a low review score is so punitive, people are highly motivated to do anything possible to avoid it. The most efficient and effective means of avoid it is often not to spend time doing great engineering, but rather to spend time on non-engineering tasks that “increase your visibility”, or doing things that make everyone else look bad. Some people are quite good at doing that and they tend to be rewarded for it.

Sometimes low review scores are handed out to people who deserve them but often they go to people who just got caught at the wrong end of the political network. Being “the new guy” on a team as a result of a reorg is one of the most hazardous places to be at Microsoft. If a manager needs to dump a low review score on someone, he’s going to choose the most expendable (i.e. least well-known and well-connected) person. The point is that you can easily end up with a low review score through absolutely no fault of your own, then your career at Microsoft is screwed. That kind of chronic stress and fear shapes the company and has made it what it is today.

Granted, not every team at Microsoft is completely disfunctional, but enough of them are that the company tends to bleed great engineers and visionaries. The proof is in the stock price.

Have you tried it? I have. It's quite startling the first time you put a bunch of helium balloons in your car, accelerate away from a stoplight, and have them all crowd up against the windshield.

In an accelerating car, the air sloshes toward the back, producing a pressure gradient. The helium balloons, being ligher than air, will be crowded out by the sloshing air and will drift toward the area of lowest density, which is in the front.