I love what I work on, I also love knowledge. Turns out the internets isn't just a place where people go for the latest Success Kid meme or double rainbow video, it's a link to the entirety of all human knowledge.
Oh yeah, and it's a link to the people I love and care about as well...
'by using "matter/antimatter annihilation," velocities just below the speed of light could be reached, making it possible to reach the next star in about six years.
"It wouldn't seem so long for those on board," [Hawking] said.'
The problem with any hypothesis that involves Earth being visited by extraterrestrials isn't the almost unthinkably large distances involved, it's the timescales involved.
For any two given planets in the galaxy that could support intelligent life, in all likelihood the technological progress of those lifeforms will not align, and it won't be close. Imagine one civilization encountering another, except the first is 50,000 years more technologically advanced. Or 500,000 years. Or 5 million years. What would happen?
The more advanced civilization wouldn't be playing games to keep from being discovered, that's for sure. They wouldn't care. Even visiting the planet would be a total waste of time since with that level of technology they could certainly observe from afar.
I don't think you can dismiss the possibility of an as-yet-undiscovered end-run around these limits. The problem with a critique of a hypothetically more technologically advanced civilization than our own which is based on modern understandings of physics is problematic at best.
There are larger problems with the ET hypothesis, though, and that is why generally, descriptions of beings associated with lights in the sky, although also often associated with knowledge of new technology and with kidnapping, are described in physical details differently by different cultures. Even in somewhere as narrow 10th century Europe, you have at least three different, if you will, species of entity associated with this sort of thing.
So this leaves the ET hypothesis with two bad choices, which are either we are more observant than our ancestors which is patently false, or else there is some intersteller convention somewhere which divvies up cultures for observation and follows them as they move around, and stops when the culture changes sufficiently. That starts to sound very implausible.
What about: a scientific expedition to earth is expensive, so when it arrives here, the ship takes shore for a while, sends scouts, gathers data, and then moves on until another one arrives, possibly from another planet? Is it so far-fetched?
Also, things are always described in a sociological context. What we would call "automobiles" would have been called "chariots of fire" by our elders.
You still have near-exact boundaries between culture and portrayal of the entities involved. If you are in Continental Europe in the 8th Century, these are demons or even Satan himself. If you are in Sweden at the same time, it's the dwarves and they are the best metalworkers in the 9 worlds. Folk religion in England at the time still talked about elfs being associated with this sort of thing, and folk religion in Ireland was different yet.
I don't think you can have regional stability and such variation between regions with that hypothesis. I think an anthropological one makes more sense.
Making hypothetical statments about the motivations of an alien mind that may be millions of years ahead of us, and then using the implausibility of it as an argument to dismiss any contrary evidence, is the weakest argument against this phenomenon. But it is always repeated in every single discussion about this topic by someone!
I have always wondered why the Adkins diet seems to work. The article basically says it is both more successful and yet has no physiological reason for being more successful. So why?
My first guess would be: carbs/bread is cheap and usually comes in large quantities, like unlimited bread baskets. Meat is expensive and comes in smaller quantities. So eating mostly meat just makes it easier to consume fewer calories by default. But again that's just a guess.
2) refined sugar/wheat is like a drug. Basically you get withdrawal symptoms that force you to eat more sugar soon. I bet that the food companies love it
3) ... and technically your body can't process over certain amount of protein per day (i think it was 300g). If you eat more than that for some reason, then you just pee it out.
I'm on "paleo diet" + cheese and have lost a lot of weight so far. I don't count carbs and I need to remind myself to eat (lack of hunger).
So eating mostly meat just makes it easier to consume fewer calories by default.
This is probably the most important statement in the entire thread. All of these fad diets basically trick the dieter into eating less calories. When Lustig, etc... cite various studies those studies never seem to account for overall caloric intake. Person A cut carbs, person B didn't, person A lost weight ergo carbs are bad. Yeah, it doesn't quite work that way. Saying that cutting calories will help a person lose weight doesn't sell books so authors have to pick something to demonize.
HFCS is a popular thing to demonize now. Is it surprising to anyone that if a person cuts out 4-6 sodas/day that had ~200 calories each that said person is going to lose weight? It had zero to do HFCS and everything to do with cutting out ~1000 calories/day. Again, that doesn't sell books or speaking engagements, but declaring X as evil does.
The study seems to indicate that low carb diets actually do trigger more calories to be burned for the same level of activity, about 430 additional calories per day. It's too early to tell if this affect is real (larger study needed), but the results are interesting.
This is what drives me crazy about the dieting issue. People will cite a study that involves 21 people. 21! Think of all the pain caused by people being overweight, and the insane costs imposed on our healthcare systems. With all that pain and cost, we can't come up with studies with larger sample sizes? Show me a double-blind study with 10,000 people and I'll start to take it seriously.
Low carb diets also increase metabolic stress (specifically ketosis), which is one of the suspected reasons for the additional calorie burn. Ketosis over short periods is good, but scientists differ on whether it is safe in the long-term. For diabetics (Type I or II), ketosis is not safe, as the body does not have the proper insulin response to maintain safe levels of ketosis.
Are there any studies on ketosis and diabetes? Because one of the primary drivers of insulin resistance in type 2 diabetes is being overweight. So, even if ketosis were bad, if losing weight improved your insulin sensitivity, it might still be worth it. Obviously, this shouldn't apply to type 1 diabetics, though.
I'm sorry, this needs a citation. I'm not trying to be a jerk, it's just that with a subject this controversial you can't simply assert claims like this.
Seems to me like they are often not actually out to delete the article, instead they're using the threat of deletion to try and spur the author to clean up an article to wikipedia's standards. Otherwise they'd have to do it themselves. In those cases I think it's actually a pretty reasonable strategy. There's a lot of crap and vanity articles that are thrown up there on any given day.
Um, you must be joking. Frame it like an opponent would who is running for political office against you in the year 2050. So you're saying take away people's privilege to operate a vehicle they own and paid for with their own money? You want to require people to use an automated machine that, in theory, the state could over-ride the controls of at any moment? You want to eliminate all jobs associated with commercial driving (buses, delivery trucks, etc.) many of which are union jobs?
No. No. No.
Also, the answer to the danger & death problem is well understood -- you simply require people to first accumulate several dozen hours behind the wheel, under supervised instruction, with training for emergency situations, just like we do now with pilots licenses. The fact that this hasn't happened yet in the US (like it has in say, Germany) should show you what a political impossibility what you're saying really is.
P.S. For added hilarity, the story directly below this one on HN is about cell phone tracking, where the top post is all talk of going without cell phones because the device's tracking could infringe on people's freedom.
Which is the scarier dystopia? Your phone keeps a running tab on your location, which could be accessed by the state or Google? Or your mode of transportation is tracking you, _and can be over-ridden or disabled at any time by the state or by Google_...
I'm FAR more frightened of being t-boned by a drunk driver than of big brother taking control of my car. Honestly can't tell if you are trolling or serious.
I was seriously trolling, also known as taking an idea to its logical extreme to make a point.
You're presenting a false choice here. There's lots of other ways to attack the drunk driving problem without taking everyone's drivers licenses away and banning normal driving, as the OP was advocating.
Ok I see what you were getting at now but I still don't agree with your conclusions and here's why:
1. Anti-drink driving campaigns and counter measures don't work. People make the choice to drive while drunk when their decision making powers are at their worst.
2. The issue with human controlled driving goes far deeper than just DUI. The fact is that we're (collectively) just not very good at it. Even if you are the best, most cautious most defensive driver there's nothing you can do about some idiot running a red light because he was adjusting his stereo. Your perfect driving record is intact but you're dead anyway.
3. The chance of being injured or killed while driving are astronomically higher than the chance of big brother having the motive/inclination to want to remotely control your car (although I might feel differently if I lived in Syria - even then this is getting really close to tinfoil hat territory).
The way I see it computer controlled cars shouldn't be seen as curtailing freedoms, rather as relieving us from tedium and making us safer.
I don't think your point 1 is as true as you think it is. Anti-drink driving campaigns seem to work: http://www.thecommunityguide.org/mvoi/massmedia_ajpm.pdf describes studies that identified significant (>15%) reductions in alcohol related accidents, with economic payoffs during the campaigns of more than 20x.
That's certainly a LOT better than I would have thought, although still depressingly short of the 100% reduction that computer controlled cars would give us.
I doubt we'd see a 100% reduction of accident injuries and fatalities with automated control of cars - diminishing returns due to other uncontrolled factors like pedestrians, dropped loads, pathological algorithm responses in unusual situations etc. Of course, spending 6x as much on road-safety campaigns as in the referenced studies won't deliver anything like a 6x improvement either.
It's easy to think of the political obstacles if you are expecting this to happen overnight. But it will be gradual. People will share the road with robots for a while, and when it's clear how much safer the robots are, there will start to be roads and then areas where people aren't allowed to drive.
As for "tak[ing] away people's privilege to operate a vehicle they own and paid for," they can feel free to drive on private property. Even today I'm not allowed to drive my off-road truck on public roads because it doesn't have proper smog equipment and mudflaps, and I own and paid for it with my own money. It's really not that unreasonable when it's a matter of public safety and the restrictions only apply to public roadways.
As for the automation stealing jobs argument, that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
Just off the top of my head, I'd guess it's due to a lot of e's in words that, depending on the language, you'll see in almost every single method or function. Things like return, end, else, true, include, self, private, etc.
Don't forget to copy it locally, in case they (or their acquirers...) ever take it down. The Evernote web-clipper plugin is great for that.
I also did the same with all the folks who posted technical details on their experience dealing with the AWS outage. Great stuff to hold on to for future reference.
There's an argument to be made that there's not a macro-economic bubble right now like there was in 1999, but that there IS a "Silicon Valley bubble". That is, there are so many early-stage startups proliferating and getting angel funding that there's a bubble for companies that provide services to other startups.
If this is true, there's a doomsday scenario: if the SV bubble collapses (say, due to some macro-economic change that dries up the glut of angel funding), then a lot of those companies that primarily provide services to other startups will collapse with it. There's more. As the companies go out of business for lack of (other startup) customers, a lot of the remaining startups that depend on those outside API's could go down for lack of infrastructure to stand on. Things could spiral down to a bad place pretty quickly.
Many of the companies raising good funding today are innovative and create value in the valley and in the world. I don't understand why people compare that to the dotcom bubble where 6-month old web companies with no significant value would raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Look at stripe for example, they're an excellent company that has proven their product is in demand. It's much more reasonable for a company like this to be allowed to scale versus the likes of pets.com.
because... facebook? twitter? colour.com? (what happened to them, anyhow?) Drop.io? I mean, that one is a pretty nifty weekend project, but ten million? come now. that's pretty silly.
I mean, much like drop.io, almost all of those companies have some value. Even facebook is worth something, it's just, well, not worth 60 billion or whatever it's selling for now. I mean, yeah, they do have the userbase (right now) to beyond what google has done to advertising... but damn, that's hard to do. And I don't think that Facebook has the deep understanding that google has that if people start thinking of them as creepy, they are dead. (I mean, I think google has the same problems as an autistic guy at a party; google /understands/ that being creepy is bad... but google doesn't have a good understanding of what creepy is. Facebook is the guy that read some "fast seduction" crap and is now proud of being a total asshole. )
I mean, I think I understand why google can make so much money off advertising and (very related) why people think facebook can make so much more; See, I just bought some advertising in Mountain View Safeway stores. Go to the mountain view safeway and you will see green on black prgmr.com logos on the dividers you place between your food, instead of the usual pictures of real-estate agents. I mean, all the people I know at google have talked to me about it, and they thought it was cool, but I've been talking about this for a while, so I don't know if they noticed it because they know me or what. Figuring out the effectiveness of meatspace advertising is difficult. If i bought ads on google, I'd be able to easily track how many customers I got per dollar, right? Of course, anyone would be willing to pay more for advertising if they knew what they were getting out of it; if you give me customers and I make $10 off each customer, what's wrong with giving you $5? heck, I could give you $9.
Problem is, I don't think that online advertising is as traceable as you think. I mean, sure, I know that guy that just signed up clicked on to my site through a google adwords ad, right? but you don't buy something the first time you hear about it. Maybe that guy saw a blog about me last month? the google adwords link might have just been more convenient for him than the organic search results.
I think that online advertising, in general, is overpriced because of this.
I understand that the value proposition of facebook is that they (potentially) can track buyers better. that blog you read about me last month? probably had a facebook 'like' button. Maybe they could then use that to better measure my actual advertising returns?
The biggest problem I see with that proposition is, well, that's a hard problem to solve at all... and not only do they need to solve it, they need to solve it and simplify the results down to the point where your average MBA can understand them.
I wish some insiders in the know would step up here in an unbiased way. Every weighty comments I've heard seems to have come from an emotional or defensive place.
I'm completely outside and absolutely not in the know but it seems to me like (a) professional high risk investors collectively investing $100ms in an industry where companies can be worth $100bs do not make a bubble (the 2001 bubble was in the trillions) and (b) a lot of the typical "bubbly" claims about new economic realities might be true this time.
I think both are evident here. The the former, this is $20m into a company that provides a service to customers that are willing to pay for it, not $200m into something with impossible to value (it could be zero) potential. High risk - yes. Irrational, foolish or systematically risky - I think no.
For the latter, this is a company that has already made an impact in the giant dominated world of financial transactions. The important part is that they did it with very little (relatively) capital input. At a pinch they probably could have done it with less, though maybe more slowly. That is a "new economic realities" type occurrence.
Maybe the world's huge credit card companies and banks can be partially replaced with much smaller new companies. Maybe paypal has run its course. Founded with millions by a few smart guys. Growing to massive scale (with the help of $200m investment). Spending 10-15 years in a dwindling cas cow phase and ultimatey being succeeded. Maybe it is viable for companies to exist on a smaller cycle: being founded, creating value and ultimately being outcompeted by new small companies in shorter timespans. etc. etc. That kind of thinking is bubbly in 2000 when its being used to justify $bn valuations for companies that lose money and don't really serve anyone. For a lot of the companies maturing now, they don't really need any justification, but maybe they can be explained this way. Stripe, from what I understand, creates real tangible economic value for its customers, charges for it and creates a lot of surplus value besides. Interestingly it helps other startups exist.
Heinleinian makes the (reasonable) argument that the interdependance (reliance on APIs) makes for economic fragility - investments fail making services fail making other services fail etc. But isn't this economies in general? Most B2C commerce would collapse if Visa & Mastercard went out of business. Construction collapsed when banking fails which collapsed when merchant banking screwed up. Interdependency is economics and overall its pretty robust.
To be clear, I wasn't saying that Stripe and Github receiving funding was a sign there was a bubble. I was responding to the other poster who was saying this was a sign there was _not_ a bubble, to which I'm saying, that's not so clear. (i.e. He's saying A, therefore B. I'm saying A is not therefore B, as opposed to A therefore !B...)
I suppose its possible that Stripe and Github receiving funding will signal to angels that companies seen as having a customer base that is primarily other start-ups are the way to go, and therefore open the floodgates of angel funding further. But maybe not. I really don't have strong feelings about this yet at all (which is why I said "there is an argument to be made" and not something stronger). Like you I'd like to see a discussion about it though. It seems like we're in a rather unprecedented time for new startups which makes it all pretty hard to predict.
Very interesting perspective, I wasn't quite thinking of them as "startup services", but it completely makes sense. They're certainly not wasting the opportunity, but as you said, they're on shaky grounds.
Oh yeah, and it's a link to the people I love and care about as well...