baumbart

Imagine an artificial intelligence (surgery robot) making this decision.

That's a good question. Interestingly not! For one part I think that drinking (modest) amounts of alcohol is not as bad for your health as smoking. I would avoid people who love binge-drinking though, for the same reasons as above. Also it is much harder to find non-alcoholics than people who don't smoke, I would think.

Being overweight is a different card, because it's a symptom, not an action that is chosen voluntarily. There can be many reasons for being overweight... maybe genes, some kind of illness etc.. I can't judge based on something I don't exactly know. But then again ... when I see someone eating lots of fast-food, chips and drinking Cola ... I would probably hesitate to ask him to become my business partner.

I would never want to become a business partner with someone who is smoking cigarettes. Why? For me it indicates a lack of intelligence, not being good at dealing with stress and bad long-term thinking. When smoking cigarettes you are paying twice - first when spending money in order to ruin your health, and many years later when you are spending money on health-care in order to fix your ruined health. The Greeks have understood this.

Also, when you are getting closer to an emergency situation than we are normally today, you will also start caring more about your health automatically. That's what evolution has taught us, it is natural behavior. Modern luxury has let us care less about our bodies than we should.

Thanks, makes sense!

Could someone explain to me how Golang would compare to Rust for this purpose? I'm a Golang newbie and I always wondered if it would be possible to write an OS in it (+ some assembly).

As humans we are evolved to have more compassion the more similar a being is to us, and less compassion the more different it is from ourselves. Human ethics is often selfish (pun not intended) in the sense that it is based on what feels bad for US when doing it. In my opinion, there is nothing objectively "good" or "bad", there is only harmony or disharmony in nature.

Pain indicates critical disharmony with the ideal state of any being. Same applies to plants! Do you think plants feel pain? They certainly do, but "pain" means something entirely different for them. What about planet earth and its ozone levels?

The real question we have to ask ourselves is, how much are we responsible for increasing the harmony in the world around us, vs. focusing on our own expansion in terms of technology, luxury and total population.

This is awesome, thanks =)

Yeah how are they solving the tor outproxy problem? You are essentially letting another user use your IP to access websites, which holds a lot of room for abuse.

Hi, I am gladful that I stumbled across this question. I am not going to tell you a sorry.

The essence of my answer first: You can heal yourself. The body follows the mind. First there is reality in your head, and then in the physical world.

Second, read the book by Dr. Joe Dispenza, called "You are the placebo". If you have a bit of patience, read the two earlier books mentioned there ("Evolve your brain" and "Breaking the habit of being yourself").

I have read a lot of books, covering spiritualist topics, healing, taoism, traditional chinese medicine, ritualist magic and psychology as an overall topic. The essence is, that what we call the rules of physics and medicine today are short-sighted and often plain damaging. One example for this is the belief that you can't change certain things.

Denying your own possibilities when they exist is a self-fulfilling prophecy, you cannot disprove it if you don't really believe in it. Doctors telling you that you have a serious illness (or just in the risk of becoming ill) are doing serious damage to you if you believe them, because your mind is making it real.

Illnesses are an expression of something going wrong, which means you have to fix it by changing how you live, what you do, and essentially, who you are. I have had some minor illnesses such as cavities and hay fever, both of which I fixed using meditation and visualization.

The books I mentioned show a practical way for us people today who essentially believe science to be "true". It builds upon that belief, and I can really recommend it if you don't have time wrapping your mind around ancient chinese belief systems.

The reason I was not going to tell you a sorry is that I don't feel sorry for you, I feel hope and I feel gratitude - there is a reality (which implies it is real and exists right now) in which you are 100% healthy, and giving your experiences of becoming healthy out to the rest of the world. It is possible, and it is your choice. I am not wishing you luck, because luck is not what you'll need. I wish you will be able to grow yourself from being a victim, to having your live in your own hands. I wish you'll be able to take action, and make decisions, and for the entire time, enjoy your process wherever it leads you.

One last word, you will be free of injuries or problems if you find yourself being free of them, it is the moment when it makes "click" in your brain, and that is the moment when reality changes. For me it was the moment when I discovered that I had no cavities, and that they are healing, and that my doctor was wrong. And in the same moment, my doctor became wrong because reality had changed. That is how it works.

Linux does not have lost its way. It has truly followed its way, and that's what you got. It was always clear (at least for me and many other people), that if you don't design a system but put it together step by step, you will end up with a mess.

I have always been on the NetBSD side, and it's bright over here. Even FreeBSD suffers from similar problems as Linux, trying to get new features fast. That's just how software development works (or does not), you have to follow proper design to get something for the future.

Linux will always be stuck in past design decisions, and in order to stay compatible, things will need be become more and more complex, until they break.

Nice article! One of the authors points was that people are not effected in their daily life through privacy problems (or at least that's what I read between the lines during that "dead bodies" metaphor).

So here's my idea: I'll place a warning in my email signature, that people should take care what they write to me because my email account is spied on and everything is recorded.

There are two points in this; first, it is quite accurate to reality, my (and everyone else's) email IS scanned for suspicious content for example. Second, it will shift the focus of people writing their text to this fact, that they are being monitored. This in turn should raise their awareness of the problem and put some effect on their life that they can easily perceive.

For me, the language of a project has a large impact on whether I would consider contributing to it or not. When I dislike the language, I'll usually not want to be involved with the project, but just watch it growing. Thus, it makes a project more interesting for me if the language is nice.

No. Bitmessage is essentially a decentralized version of alt.anonymous.messages.

https://bitmessage.org/

First reaction: Jeez. Not this shit again.

Second reaction: Whatever works. There are too many ideas for one problem to find and establish "the best". This is definitely not elegant, but let's see what it gets.

Well for me, Email is already dead. Of course, dead software still exists, for information can not be destroyed. But, there will be more surveillance. There will be more counter-surveillance tools becoming popular. But Email will not stay on that list. Over the long run, the electronic mail will fall back behind inherently encrypted solutions. At least I hope that.

Note that you can use Nix packages in Guix. They are compatible.

I have used both NixOS and Guix and can say that I definitely prefer Guix. Internally, the package manager is really the same. On the interface side, Nix uses its own functional programming language, while Guix uses Scheme which I am used to and prefer syntax-wise. It's awesome to write configuration files in Scheme! You can write scheme functions that output a valid system configuration for guix. You can then apply guix, reboot, and have a new system. It's also very easy to maintain different configurations.

On the OS side, dmd is also pretty damn cool. The whole system feels kind of polished and reminded me much of current *BSD systems, including a decent texinfo manual on the first boot. With the difference that you get a working framebuffer through linux on startup.

While NixOS is kind of an academical experiment, I think Guix really has the potential to become the only true GNU system. It still lacks stability and has some rough edges of course. Maybe Guix will also help merging the Emacs and GNU operating systems to create a single, tightly integrated Lisp OS ;) There is already an Emacs interface for Guix.

Oh dear. Not this shit again. The discussion is always the same. Windows vs. Linux. Or maybe a Mac? C'mon, just use what you like and leave us kids alone.

Leave Emacs? Never, ever. A fool who thinks he could beat the power of Lisp! :P

"I see the future of "resource coins" as being efficient mechanisms for p2p resource distribution." -- Agree. This is totally valid and can definitely work; it's kind of a special purpose currency or intermediate currency then. Just a way to measure the value of a service, like storing stuff.

I'm still not convinced that you could actually use that revenue as a value in itself, like, storing it for later use. To be fair, I did not read the paper. If you would get existing coins for sharing a resource, that could work ... if you only rely on the mining process to earn value, it won't.

I think this kind of belongs to the MysticalProgramming corner (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MysticalProgramming).

Ok, I see some similarities to other projects here. Let's introduce one additional layer of abstraction that we call "resources-coin". Disk space is not the only limited resource that can be shared using an economic system; CPU cycles (not for hashing, but doing actual work), network bandwidth, storage space (like this project) are all things that have some value that one can be rewarded for. I bet there are many more ways.

The difference with traditional bitcoin is that, we're not talking about an absolutely limited resource here. While bitcoin will stop growing at a certain point, no matter what happens, storage space on earth will always grow. So will the overall bandwidth, overall computational power etc.

And that is why these things are not going to work on the long term. You cannot build a currency based on reward.

Well thats an interesting question. Among the best is certainly "How to design Programs", http://htdp.org/ It's about Scheme. It does a better job than SICP I think, even though it still needs some endurance to get through.

Generally, there are plenty of good books, you get some ideas usually by combining knowledge from different books...

Even though this may sound a bit old-fashioned, simply in terms of quality and self-containedness, "The C Programming Language" by K&R is by far the best technical book I've read. You can certainly download it as PDF somewhere.

So, the first thing you have to think about is: What is a programming language? Or better, what is the purpose of a programming language? PLs give the programmer a way to express their idea in such a form the computer can understand. Here are two aspects already: 1) Expressing an idea, and 2) interpretation by the machine.

Certain PLs exist to formulate certain ideas in certain ways, that the computer interpretes in certain ways. That way, the popularity of a PL depends on

1) how many people think that way,

2) how much effort those people put into developing the needed tools

3) how much this way of thinking is needed and supported by the industry

4) how well this way of thinking is compatible with previous work

5) how well the computer can execute these expressions using its architecture

6) what architectures exist for which purpose, and whether these purposes comply with the way ideas are expressed in a PL

7) ... and so on, this list is endless

For example, stack-based CISC computers using the von-neumann-model have a long history and are very powerful these days, and using software has become common in non-IT industries, which is why object-oriented imperative programming languages like Java and C++ are so common.

When some great programmers love a special language because because it matches their way of thinking, then it's most probable that this PL is not very popular, simply because few people think this way. A genius may invent the mightiest programming language in the world, but nobody else would use it because nobody else could understand it.

You could say, the only thing that a PL actually expresses can be seen on the people who use it.

Could maybe someone explain to me: What exactly is wrong with Adblock Edge + Ghostery? If not, why do they make another similar extension then? There is no actual manual configuration needed, they don't use me for their business model (or none of that I know).