zkhalique

Sneakernet thief!

I wonder where I can read about frank male experiences in a female-dominated field, such as nursing, or teaching elementary school.

Actually, a lot of people will try for you. If you don't do something, someone else will. It's an interesting question as to why we humans want to be personally responsible for the major changes in the world. I think we want to leave our mark because we want our name to be remembered. We want to have made a difference because we are concerned about our biological death. There is a book called Denial of Death that explores this theme, I think.

After all, why does it matter toa particular person if they are the inventor or originator or driving force behind a new technology that would have come about anyway? If money wasn't an issue, say, like for Nicola Tesla.

Do we really think someone else won't do it? Actually we usually think the opposite.

This reminds me of a video I saw recently whete Ted Cruz, along with other republican senators, politically attacked NASA for studying Earth's climate!

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=peL7Qecg3qQ

Zak Khalique, cofounder here. Let me try to weigh in on this.

Right now, you don't have much power with FB. When they rolled out the newsfeed, or instant personalization, or made site changes there were huge outcries, but it didn't matter. If you want to customize your profile, or get paid for your content, you can't.

If you're a company, you have to pay just to reach your own fans: http://readwrite.com/2012/11/13/mark-cuban-facebooks-sponsor...

If you're a developer, you live in fear that the platform can kick you off at any time or compete with you: http://mashable.com/2011/06/01/twitter-photo-services/

There is a story trending on just how powerful FB is: http://blog.naytev.com/facebook-is-king/ and it's bought Instagram and WhatsApp to consolidate even further. More centralization means less power and choice for the end user. And if you're an end-user in Africa or India or somewhere without a megabit connection to the global internet, your community can't even connect with each other. A local network would work much better.

Is this an April Fools joke itself?

And what happens to those cash equivalents? They really don't generate any movement of money but just store value?

You could describe them that way. Here is how we describe them:

http://qbix.com/platform/guide/messages

I agree that sync and offline storage is hard to get right. We developed a whole general-purpose platform to do exactly this, in a way that also supports multiple users, decentralized publishing, offline storage, synchronizing messages, optimistic updates etc.

And unlike Firebase, Parse et al it is based on posting messages to streams that people join, rather than diffing objects. This way you can have a history of changes, and just focus on implementing the front end handlers for the changes.

What happens to the cash that is sitting on their balance sheets? They don't keep it under a mattress. It get stored in banks, and forms the fractional reserve for new loans. Who are those loans given to? Smaller businesses, mortgages on houses, etc.

At least, that would be true if the banks would lend. And if the companies would keep the money in local banks and not overseas. Our tax code encourages offshoring the money!!

Has anyone tried adding OpenEars to their app, to prevent having to send things over the internet from e.g. a basement? Is it any good at recognizing basic speech?

Could someone write an article about Patrick McKenzie's appeal and techniques on marketing to the HN community? :)

And by marketing, I mean getting their attention and building a brand, not money.

"in the regimes we have tested"

That sounds a lot like the qualifier so far as we know in your own example. In fact, the only example you've given where it arguably doesn't apply is mathematics.

David Hume famously argued that causality is based on experience, and experience similarly based on the assumption that the future models the past, which in turn can only be based on experience – leading to circular logic. In conclusion, he asserted that causality is not based on actual reasoning: only correlation can actually be perceived.

Listen, can't every argument contain that qualifier?

And don't forget, the human grows organically from a complex system of DNA that also codes for way more than playing Go! And is able to perform a lot of tasks very efficiently, including cooperating together on open ended activities.

Wow! Incredible! Now we know that they have a chance against each other. I would say that this was a very major point... otherwise we wouldn't know whether AlphaGo's powers have progressed to the point where no one can ever beat it. Now I take what Ke Je said much more seriously: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1219091...

On step 5, I don't see any share option.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/882/

Finally! I wondered how people actually know that the genetic code is the same in every cell. How would you prove that? What if everyone is a chimera to some extent? We are just getting started understanding epigenetics.

So, they always bounce back from it, it's not as if they haven't botched things before.

Emojis are fine. But I remember the first times I started seeing "LOL" and "ROTFLMAO". And I realized that the person wasn't really laughing, but they were quietly typing that on the keyboard. If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much. I mean, you could fake a small laugh, but you didn't outright say that you're rolling on the floor laughing, while you weren't even cracking a smile physically. That would be impossible over the phone, and AFAIK people didn't do it over email, either. It's a product of the instant-message culture.

And it also symbolizes the disconnect between the online persona on facebook, posting all those cool photos, and the real-world person sitting by the computer all those lonely nights. The emotions and the fulfillment of the emotions have become stilted, computers now provide a superstimulus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus) that replaces deep, real-life conversations with a steady stream shallow online interactions. Notifications pull us back in for more like an addictive slot machine. And our kids are ill-equipped to fight it, which is why they spend a great deal of their lives addicted to effectively meaningless communication with people who are not next to them:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...

I always thought that the main advantage of graph databases is the O(1) lookup instead of the O(log n) lookup in a traditional foreign-key relationship. There is no need to search an index, since the pointer already records the location of the adjacent document. On disk, the seeking time would be roughly equivalent if the database is heavily used, since reads/writes would be batched as the disk head moves over the disk, or for other types of drives some similar technique would be used.

Yes, obviously the binary decisions are being aggregated, but at the end of the day, everything is filtered through these binary decisions. It's not like "I survived and reproduced and it was all because of X". It's just a binary outcome every time an animal reproduces. It's a vote for a certain combination of traits out of myriads, and now you have to show mathematically that this sort of selection can lead to evolution.

And also keep in mind, the "beneficial" mutation step happens in only one animal, that had the mutation when the genes combined to form its genetic expression. And you need several of these steps. It's not like all of a sudden a bunch of proto-birds started to develop wings. Just one animal developed a proto-wing trait, and then reproduced along with 99.99% of others who didn't. But then, the proto-wing happened to be so beneficial despite not conferring an ability to fly, that the proto birds with the proto wings simply died less than the other 99.99%, and started growing in prevalence. And all this still assumes that, at every step from non-wings to wings, the improvements were beneficial for genetic fitness. Now, what if they weren't? How can evolution wait until a string of mutations detrimental to fitness takes place? Wouldn't that make the population with the proto-wings actually shrink -- when it was already 1 animal or so, it might actually be eliminated if we assume proto-wings were genetically disadvantageous before becoming wings?

Again, there is no math in these explanations. Just descriptions and handwaving. Where is the actual math backing these claims and the explanation of the mathematical results! How does it actually work out? It clearly doesn't seem like it should!

So what are the genetic advantages of being gay? And how come nature hasn't figured out a way to make these advantages without also producing gay siblings, which would seem to bring down the overall fitness of the genes?

I think we should be working more on improving consumer and enterprise software for local area networks!

The global internet does not need the level of hops we are using to transmit data. Things should be done locally first. I don't even want to say "offline first" because the idea of a binary online/offline is again a symptom of thinking that one is either "connected to the internet" or not, with the former implying very comfortable access to the internet to get anything done.

We should be encouraging things like IPFS. Back in the day, usegroups and other software did things better than the glorified mainframe approach of today.

How does it know where the local files would be?

See that just further goes to show my point. Where is the evidence of these assertions? Mainstream evolutionists have said that "group selection has been disproven" except possibly kin selection. So your example clashes with what they've said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Good_of_the_sp...

I personally think the benefit of the community is definitely one of the factors. And I think the evolutionists have it wrong. But why does the public just accept whatever they say? It hardly sounds like a settled theory.

Have you ever seen the mathematics on this? When so much is being selected "at the same time" it seems like most of the time it would never get selected in the wash. After all, selection works on an individual organism, and it's binary: either the organism survives, reproduces and passes on its genes, or not (we are not talking about DNA swapping between microorganisms here). This binary signal is supposed to be the "vote" for whether a particular combination of genes is more fit or not. But you can't just say "it's all possible given a really long time", you'd have to actually quantify what the chances are of say, the mechanism a single vote selecting simultaneously 1000 different traits, would increase the prevalence of all the "beneficial" traits. Do you have enough resolution to decide e.g. whether the bone density, color of skin or the length of legs was the factor that led to survival?

I am especially not sure why it would select the traits -- like a colorectal angle -- that would make an individual simply more comfortable rather than make a tangible difference to survival.

If we took the predictions of evolutionary theory seriously, then their contrapositive seriously too. In particular why would gay people exist if genetically homosexuality confers a much lower genetic fitness? Why do we say homosexuality is primarily genetic if evolution is true?

When can we expect something for PHP?

It comes back to what Marshall McLuhan said, "The Medium is the message": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

I've come to realize is that the expected audience is a crucial aspect of the communication requirements. On the internet, the audience is quite wide, and disagreement / outrage usually leads more responses / activity than does agreement and acceptance. I should say, in fact, that agreement leads to further sharing, whereas disagreement leads to comments. Thus, an article that some people agree with and some disagree with, gets re-shared and exposed to a lot of controversy. That eventually finds its way into other outlets, whereby each compelling article has a counter-article somewhere else in addition to all the substance-free vitriolic comments.

What the internet has really done is stop letting us get away with echo chambers, by breaking the walls between them. I think that is a good thing.

I should write a blog post on that :)

PS: This is not new. I think Bertrand Russell said: "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Now, those doubts are reinforced by the threat of being shown wrong. I think it's quite an art to articulate compelling arguments out of factually true statements, and even more of an art to think several steps ahead, choose which statements to focus on in order to draw certain reactions from an audience, and thus build receptivity to your next statements. Daniel Dennett said: You should be able to understand your opponent's arguments so well that you can say it back and they say "I wish I had put it that way". And of course, to do that, we shouldn't just write, we should also read, and all be exposed to the other arguments, instead of the echo chambers that social networks make money off of:

https://sealedministries.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/3-reasons-...