arthurrr

If you traveled back to the 90's, it would be a good fictional story about computing dystopia.

In fact, it is still a good story about computing dystopia. But it's no longer fiction.

This is a story that I've always hated because I think it is very very unlikely to be true. If he actually did play blackjack, I'm curious to know how many hands he played, how much he was betting per hand, what casino he was playing at, etc. If he bet it all on one hand, what if he was dealt A-A and didn't have the money to split?

I think somebody who is reckless enough to gamble the remaining funds of the company, is not disciplined enough to walk away from the blackjack table after having won just enough for the fuel payment.

If he actually did play blackjack, it would be more likely that he started out winning, won enough to pay for the fuel, but then continued gambling and gave it all back.

After reading the interview, I have zero interest in reading any book from Eric Schmidt, but I am thoroughly fascinated by what Assange has to say. This interview is probably going to be much more insightful than any book Schmidt will write.

everybody has a different definition of intelligence.

personally, i don't consider the vast majority of humans to be intelligent.

if we are trying to create artificial intelligence, it's probably a bad idea to use humans as a model.

what did you do (if anything) to get 270.2 in apr (apr is not even finished yet)? and 155 in mar? why are some months missing?

I started out as a computer programmer. After a few years of dealing with the braindead corporate system in America, I decided to make a change. I ended up moving to Australia (just applied for citizenship), and I work as a kitchen hand at an all girls boarding school. I get $20 an hour, penalties on weekends and public holidays, 4 weeks paid holidays a year, and superannuation (a retirement fund). Best decision I ever made.

If I didn't end up leaving, I might have ended up just like him.

Yup, the good ol' pump and dump. Bitcoin is trading like an IPO stock during the dot-com bubble.

yes but why in the world would you compare "software development" to "building bridges"? I think this is a major fundamental problem with the entire field of Computer Science, approaching it like it is similar to civil engineering. Bridges are physical, software is abstract.

Creating software is much more similar to creating a legal system. Lots of legacy, nothing ever seems to work quite right. Vested interests.

SO what's the correct way to create a legal system that just works?

They're really good for delivering pizza in an urban area.

1. why not just finance the way they normally do, by borrowing (selling bonds), or taking money from the taxpayer?

2. currencies today are already essentially digital. the vast majority of transactions are handled electronically. the value of a bank account are just bits on a disk.

3. bitcoin can't become a reserve currency, there is no such thing as bitcoin bonds. the growth of the bitcoin money supply has been predetermined. government wants to be able to control the money supply, because it gives them power.

4. the usd as a reserve currency will probably be replaced by a global currency, SDR's, to the detriment of humanity.

i don't think it is farfetched to cook up bitcoin as an intellectual exercise. i think it is more likely to be 2, or 3 people in collaboration, because design by committee never works.

government is too short-sighted to have created something like bitcoin.

Yes, change the way the game is being played, but don't play the game that Google is playing. Change the way people search for things. Right now everything is based on the keyword search, there has to be a better way. Make the web irrelevant the same way that gopher became irrelevant. I really don't want to be using a web browser 10 years from now.

The way I see it, Google is the new Microsoft, and Microsoft is not dead yet, but becoming more and more irrelevant. Now, what has to happen for Google to become irrelevant?

Mexico? The wall along the border is not to keep Mexicans out, it is to keep Americans inside.

Cushman, you sound like somebody who believes everything that you were taught in school, and you are unwilling to entertain an idea that has the possibility of destroying the foundation of your world view. Don't try to impose your world view on events as they occur, rather, observe the world and consider all possibilities. Things usually are not what they appear to be. The expert is not always right, even if he thinks he is.

So Microsoft owes them metric dollars?

The more you understand, the more you realize that most people aren't very good at what they do. Not that they are bad at what they do, either. It just takes the magic away.

To call Objective-C a shitty language is, oh I don't know, really really ignorant. It's one of the nicer languages in my opinion.

And yet, here you are on HN responding to this thread. Just a little bit ironic :)

If this is the future of computing, then I quit. I don't want to play anymore.

People who label them as "conspiracy nutters" more likely to be conformist and closed minded. They will be more like to believe "the big lie", because everybody else believes the big lie, so you become crazy if you don't also believe the big lie.

The collective mind of society doesn't always get it right. Being "Cassandra" would be a miserable existence.

Intelligence and rational thought are orthogonal. I would say that cats are generally more rational than most humans I have met.

Intelligence is not a prerequisite for having a decent career or not being a social outcast. Society prefers people with high IQ's, as opposed to true geniuses, who are more likely to struggle to fit into society.

Being crazy means that you are completely different from the rest of society. It doesn't mean that you are wrong.

All of recorded history is pretty much a "conspiracy theory". Who really knows if it is true or not? But the majority of society simply accept it as fact, so it's no longer a conspiracy theory as defined by society.

But you have to start somewhere. There's never going to be a silver bullet that fixes the system. Because some people (the ones in power) do not consider the system to be broken.

Linus is not dead wrong. This should not be reduced to simple binary. To argue whether or not Linus is technically right or wrong seems pointless to me.

Tangentially, it really bothers me that there is even such a job as Government Prosecutor. Government should not have a self-interest. The system really is fubar, the only solution is probably 'rm -rf /'. At some point in Carmen Ortiz's life, she decided to devote her life to becoming a government prosecutor. That in and of itself speaks of her character. Whether or not she is lying in this particular instance is irrelevant, this is who she is, this is what she does, this is what she chose to devote her life to.

(Of course she's lying! She a prosecutor for chrissakes! AND she works for the government! Did she open her mouth? That means she's lying!)

I just wish that the guy who did the browser did a better job. I agree with Alan Kay when he said "the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource", and "The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."[1]

Here's an idea: Let's fix the web. I'm not talking about Web 3.0. Let's actually fix the web. Let's get rid of the browser. Let's stop building stuff on top of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, all of this so-called "technology". Let's fix the foundation first. And let's try to get it right this time.

I'm tired of my computer with 4gb of ram, 2 ghz processor slowing to a crawl whenever I open the browser, to the point where I'm reminded of typing over a 2400 baud connection.

Anybody know if it's possible to get the old Xerox Star OS running in an emulator? That seems like it might be a good place to start.

[1]http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit...

Actually he's saying the opposite. A black swan event is something that is unpredictable. He's saying that all of the futurists' predictions about the future have been wrong, therefore all of the innovations of the future will be black swans, because will have all been unpredicted. If the futurists were correct in their predictions, the future wouldn't have any black swans.

A black swan event isn't necessarily a low-probability event. It is dependent on the person who experiences the event, if that person does not take into account the possibility for that event to occur, it is a black swan event for that person. For the vast majority of the people, the most recent economic crash was a black swan event, but for a small number of people, it happened like it was clockwork.

Often, people will defer to an "expert", who they assume knows more about a subject than they do. However, in many cases, and especially in economics, the expert thinks he knows something to be true, but it turns out that what he knows completely wrong, but he has invested his entire life building knowledge on top of bad knowledge, so he is not willing change his mind. A person who knows something that is wrong is much more dangerous than a person who knows nothing.

Then what happens is that the expert will say something, and people will accept it as truth, because after all, he is an expert. And then it goes viral. All of a sudden, everything thinks something is true, even though it is completely false.

Then entire books are written. An entire field called economics is created. Universities teach economics using these books that are based on incorrect assumptions. An entire generation of people build their knowledge on top of these false assumptions. And the cycle repeats, perpetually.

I'm convinced that the entire foundation of economic thought is wrong, and that the entire field of economics contributes negatively towards humanity.

Regarding the great depression, you can make the argument that government intervention in fact created and prolonged the great depression. You'll never really know, because you can't go back in time and run the experiment again.

If you don't understand how something works, it's probably best to leave it alone, rather than try to fix it.

What if pigs are raised on these shrimp that have been raised on pig feces (recursive)?

I don't see the point of this rule. It seems like it would instill fear, and cause hesitation and second guessing. But I don't like rules in general, I prefer having philosophies. Personally, I would encourage failure and risk taking with limited downside and unlimited upside.

There seems to be much adoration on HN for anything Marissa Mayer says. I watched a few interviews of her, she has an uncomfortable personality, hard to listen to imo.

I don't see this being disruptive at all. I think they will be adopted in industrial applications, such as self driving dump trucks on mine sites, where humans are not riding in the vehicle, and where there will be significant cost savings.

There is also the human factor. People aren't going to give up their livelihood quietly, and people won't be willing to trust their life to a computer.

Also, who's going to control these vehicles, government? Does that mean that the government has the power to redirect a car to anywhere they please, depending on the passenger, who has been identified by facial recognition?

Trains/trams/buses are proven, already exist, and are a much better solution for public transport.

Anybody happen to know if the lightning port, in theory at least, can support Thunderbolt? In the future, I'd really like to be able to plug in a nice A/D audio converter to the iPad and use it as a DAW.

If it's not theoretically possible, then the lightning port really isn't future proof.

Technology cannot solve the problems of the world, because the real problem is human nature. Machiavelli got it right when he said that history repeats because man's passion never changes. The world is nonlinear, everything is cyclical. When history stops repeating, progress will have been made.