andosa

How many people work on Bitcoin (mining, exchanges like Coinbase etc)? What's the number of transactions (money transfers, loans etc) per employee in banking vs Bitcoin ecosystem?

Women are twice as likely to get a tenure position in STEM when compared to equally qualified men http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/women-best-men-stem-f...

I think in this context it's about businesses built on top of the platform and their direct revenue. A person brushing teeth is not building a business and generating revenue.

The thing I don't get about these stories: don't you have a contract specifying working hours? My contract says 8 hours a day, for x$ per month, this is what we agreed to and this is what I deliver. Asking me to do 12h instead of 8h would be the same as paying me 66% of my salary at the end of the month instead of 100%. That's a blatant breaking of our contract, why would I agree to that?

Your argument assumes that computers/AI/robots won't be as good as say a median human at any given job. I think that's quite a strong assumption

Way to dodge the question. And how did we get from always knowing when you're failed to "just drive very, very slow when", when dealing with situations that human drivers deal with all the time.

Let's not pretend that anticipating potentially dangerous behaviour from subtle clues is some once-in-a-lifetime corner case. People do this all the time when driving -- be it a drunk guy on the sidewalk, a small kid a tad bit too unstable when riding a bike by the roadside, kids playng catch nex to the road and not paying attention, etc etc. Understanding these situation is crucial in self driving if we want to beat the 1 fatality per 100M mile that we have with human drivers. For such scenarios, please explain how the AI can always know when it failed to anticipate a problem that a normal human driver can.

It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed.

That sounds highly dubious. Here's a hypothetical scenario: there's a very drunk person on the sidewalk. As a human driver, you know he might act unexpectedly so you slow down and steer to the left. This will help you avoid a deadly collision as the person stumbles into the road.

Now let's take a self driving car in the same scenario, where, since it doesnt have general intelligence, it fails to distinguish the drunk person from a normal pederstrian and keeps going at the same speed and distance from the sidewalk as normally. How, in this scenario, does the vehicle 100% know that it has failed (like you say is always possible)?

Yes, they are still there, but the protectionism is what allowed the local companies (Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba etc) to compete initially and be better in the end. Whereas in EU, local competition has been crushed and it is now stuck with the monopolies.

How has it not ever happened? China, who essentially blocked Google, Amazon et al, now have Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and other massively successful tech companies, while EU is stuck with aforementioned monopolies with near-zero chance of a local competitor competing with them.

Overrating domestic value creation is how you end up being a third world country. I think you are oversimplifying free market dynamics. Free market doesn't magically create optimal results for consumers (see monopolies and the resulting lack of competition and suboptimal results for consumers as one example). Similarly it doesn't magically create optimal results for maximising the well being of a country.

Noone is restricting trade, they are simply saying that the fact that you are "far away" doesn't give you the right to dodge taxes that local companies have to pay. If anything it levels the playing field.

It certainly didn't hinder Baidu, Alibaba et al

That's a shortsighted view. As the saying goes, "you can have the free apples, as long as I own the orchard". At some point, there will be no more free apples, and you have no idea how to farm

At some point you have to stop giving the benefit of the doubt. I draw the line where Google is unable to make a search page (that is making them the "x billion dollar" company in the first place) work with Firefox due to "lack of dev resources". Even though the only thing stopping the page from working in FF is a user agent check.

You are making exactly the same argument that Microsoft proponents were making when IE was bundled into Windows trying to push off other browsers. We don't have all the context, it must be too difficult to separate browser and OS code, etc

So a multihundred billion dollar web company doesn't have the dev resources to support Firefox? Even though it already works when you spoof the agent string?

That's why I put it in quotes. However, calling it "some demand" severly understates the significance of this fact. It's not just some demand, it means it's absolutely vital for vast majority of people and businesses in US. Which won't be the case for bc unless it becomes legal tender

One thing that makes the dollar more "real" is that you are required to pay taxes in it. This creates an automatic demand for dollars. Even if you make your money in bitcoin in US, you need some dollars to pay your taxes or risk being thrown in jail. There is no such "intrinsic" value for bitcoin.

Because you couldnt just walk into a shop and buy a car. You literally had to have a car buying permit, which might take years to get. Because of this, used cars could cost singificantly more than a brand new one from a shop.

You assume that robots/algorithms will never be as good at some jobs as a worker with median abilities. This is a very strong (and likely wrong in the long term) assumption to make.

Think of how limited our tools were just a decade ago.

Not sure what you mean here. What were the limits a decade a go?

Many top programmers still swear by vi(m)/emacs, both started 40 years ago. C is 40+ years olds, C++ is 30+ years old, Python is turning 25, Javascript 20, Rails is 10 years old.

Turbo Pascal, which is over 30 years old, was arguably on par with modern IDEs on very many fronts.

I would say the contrary, there has been very little improvement in the tools aspect.

That doesn't really refute gp's point. In medieval times, there were periods where dynasties didn't last, and every generation had new warlords from new families. That doesn't mean it wasn't a feudal society.

Not sure I follow. In what sense are things like Surface Pro, Hololens, Surface book laptop, open source .NET etc. purely marketing moves?

It definitely feels like Microsoft is on the right track with Nadella in charge.

As you're yourself saying, sages with insights did occur relatively frequently when there were the low hanging fruit in different sciences still available. But there is no reason to believe that there exists just one level of these low hanging fruit that just happens to be at around the level that exceptional human intelligence can grasp. Which means that that this hypothetical "amplified intelligence" could vrey well have it's own, next level of "low hanging fruit" that is simply too complex for current human intelligence to grasp, but is well within the reach of the more powerful intelligence.

Random forests being black boxes is something that is widely touted even among active practitioner, but not really true any more. There are methods available for decomposing random forest predictions into feature contributions, so that each prediction is represented as the sum of the bias term and contribution from each feature (similar to what you get in linear regression, but at the level of each individual prediction instead of one for the whole model), see for example http://blog.datadive.net/interpreting-random-forests/. Also there are methods for extracting, pruning and summarizing random forest rules to make them human readable, see for example inTrees package in R.

That's definitely a flaw in the study. On the other hand, I doubt using equally experienced males would change the conclusions significantly: majority of the tasks seem to have involved major physical effort, and you don't need a study to know that on average, males will perform better in physically demanding excercies.

Unions for example.

You are either completely ignorant of the situation in Estonia or deliberately spreading misinformation. A simple check on Wikipedia would show you that the majority of people in Tallinn are Estonians (with Russians being 37% of Tallinn's population). In the parliament, Keskerakond, which is the only party which could be called pro-Kremlin (and even that is a pretty big stretch), only has 27/101 seats and is not in the government.

So in the early days of a new market/category of product, the products are highly integrated

Not sure about this one, seems like the opposite to me. Twenty years ago, PC's were very modular, and it was very common to add/upgrade a sound card, memory, cpu, video card etc. Fast forward to now, and for the most common computing devices (think tablets and smartphones), there is almost zero modularity or upgradability. Even with current PC's (i.e. mostly laptops), it's increasingly limited.

The same trend is apparent in other similar technology. For example with analog TV, people could add a PAL block if their TV was NTSC or SECAM. Upgrading your car used to be significantly easier etc.

Dont know about touchpad or playbook, but you definately can on Android.