HN user
By Blizzard you mean Rockstar?
edit: An issue was opened[0] but there has been no response. I find it hard to believe a C&D comes with a gag order but IANAL.
I find it frustrating there's no transparency on this, and I hope I'm not being overly dramatic, but I would have expected more openness here.
There could be a very reasonable explanation for keeping mum on this, I guess.
A lot of this content originates from 4chan and other image boards.
Mathematica not being Open or free is the only complaint I buy. As for it missing features, I'd wager adding them to Mathematica would be less work than building a CAS from scratch with them- in which case I'm sure you'll be missing features from the original.
We were writing web based GIS in 1996, using ESRI's MapObjects IMS. Tiling, projections, yes these were solved problems by then using available commercial software.
We were storing data in Oracle or DB/2 with ESRI's SDE sitting on top, because at that time no mainstream RDBMS had spatial types.
I don't recall if SDE supported SQL Server back then. That aside, you could have built TerraServer with COTS tech in 1997.
TerraServer was impressive due to being publically available. Nothing we built at the time was available to the public as far as I remember. But it existed.
And that's just web based stuff, which really is the easy part. Large scale GIS had been around for decades prior.
Reminds me of Career Move, in Martin Amis' 2000 collection Heavy Water and Other Stories. In it screenwriters struggle for their art while poets are optioning treatments of their poems for "mid six figures".
I don't know whether or not judging programming ability is hard. But judging ability in computer science, which is what we're talking about, is not at all "very hard".
I'm sorry to hear your anecdote. I would have to come see your particular situation to see exactly what you mean by 1, 2, 5, because those don't seem unsolvable, but in general:
3) Orthoganality
You've introduced that by treating a relational store as a "hole to put your shit in". It's not fair to blame the database for that.
4) Duplication
Not with the project that is the topic of this thread you don't.
6) Lock in
As I mentioned in my original comment, you can be locked to your database or you can be locked to your ORM/DAO/ActiveRecord/DB client library or whatever it is you're using.
Not using database features isn't the key to heaven anymore than using them is the key to hell. I just meant to point out that in my experience they are underused massively.
There's also the "demarcation" issue.
This is probably just as significant as vendor independence or technical issues. But I remember it a little differently.
In the old days you'd have programmers who did the code and the DBAs who were tasked with making sure the data wasn't broken. They would write SPs, use constraints and triggers etc. Depending on the team programmers might do these as well or instead, but it was the DBAs domain ultimately.
Then programmers wrote ORMs and started doing all that stuff in code and somehow managed to seize control of data validation and semantics from the DBAs.
That's what views are for.
I never mentioned performance or scaling as reasons for using a database's features- though they might be worth considering. The fact I never said those words and it fired you up says more about your experience than mine I imagine.
This is good work and if I ever did web development, it would be like this. Why people in the web world don't use stored procedures and constraints is a mystery to me. That this approach is seen as novel is in itself fascinating.
It's like all those web framework inventors didn't read past chapter 2 of their database manuals. So they wrote a whole pile of code that forces you to add semantics in another language elsewhere in your code in a language that makes impedance stark. PostgreSQL is advanced technology. Whatever you might consider doing in your CRUD software, PostgreSQL has a neat solution. You can extend SQL, add new types, use PL/SQL in a bunch of different languages, background workers, triggers, constraints, permissions. Obviously there are limits but you don't reinvent web servers because Apache doesn't transcode video on the fly. Well, you do if you're whoever makes Rubby on Rails.
The argument that you don't want to write any code that locks you to a database is some stunning lack of awareness, as you decide to lock yourself into the tsunami of unpredictability that is web frameworks to ward off the evil of being locked into a 20 year database product built on some pretty sound theoretical foundations.
Web developers really took the whole "let's make more work for ourselves" idea and ran with it all the way to the bank.
You'd have to pay me a million dollars a year to do web development.
Consider the sequence
1, 3, 5, 7
what comes next? 9 right? Or is the sequence generated by 2n − 1 + (n − 1)(n − 2)(n − 3)(n − 4) for n ∈ N. Then we've got 33.
"among all hypotheses consistent with the observations, the simplest is the most likely"
33 is correct, but it's less likely to be the basis for the generation of the sequence.
Your answer of (x, 2x, 4x) proves the puzzle illustrates the confirmation bias, at least in your case.
Does the unit test that confirms your function returns the expected result given one set of arguments prove it correct?
I'm definitely not saying the internet is centralised! Perish the thought. I never mentioned it- the discussion was to do with the web specifically.
Forget the web as a whole and consider a single service such as HN. That graph has |clients| >> |servers|. More than the cardinality the client and server nodes are different in kind.
I consider a decentralised architecture to be one where the nodes can in principle participate equally.
You are arguing that the web is decentralised because there are many services to choose from. I don't disagree, but that's above the application layer protocol- which is what I thought we were discussing. In that case decentralisation happens above the application layer. So in humans? By that definition BBS's were decentralised because I could call a different one.
In other words, yes the web is decentralised because I can choose from many Forex APIs. But at the logical application layer of HTTP, OANDA is a centralised service. HTTP addresses point to specific nodes which may or may not be individual servers at the network layer, but from the point of view of HTTP that's what you address. In a decentralised application layer protocol I would expect to that not to be the case.
That Google is proposing this service is proof that individual web services are centralised. There's a single point of failure.
We're talking at different layers. It's just semantics from here on in.
Yep, the web is a distributed system. Yep, the web offers many services, and many providers offer the same class of service.
However, each and every one of those services are centralised in a technical sense on account of HTTP. Why might an alternative be useful? Consider the solution the Google service we're addressing is putting forward cf. Content Addressable Networking systems[0]. I can't spend any more time explaining, sorry. This might help- note the levels of centralisation in each generation of P2P systems:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/15-440/F12/lectures/p2p-approxim...
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_addressable_network
We're talking about the web as an application layer protocol. By your definition everything that happens on the internet is decentralised. That's not untrue if you look at it from the point of view of TCP/IP, but that's tangential to the conversation we're having.
You seem to be conflating the web with the internet.
That's another way to look at it, but you're using decentralised to indicate there are many large nodes- I would say that's simply distributed. I'm using centralised to indicate that communications are via those large nodes, which mostly don't communicate with each other.
It's client/server on a massive scale. Just because the servers are public, doesn't make it decentralised.
It's distributed, but on the continuum of centralised - decentralised it is definitely centralised. How did my comment get from my computer to yours?
I had a rant about this on Twitter yesterday[0].
Google makes money precisely because the web is centralised. If we moved to P2P systems they could still provide an index, but I'd wager far less data would ultimately pass through them. Not to mention that if people were more in control of their data rather than LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, I bet they'd be less inclined to having it indexed publically simply because they have a choice.
There's all sorts of network effects and shitty incentives at play, and it's a shame.
My twitter rant (not the whole thing even)
though they have their place, centralised systems reinforce the role of the middle man, which is prime for rent-seeking and lopsided value
in reality networks exist on a continuum between centralised/decentralised. The web makes it difficult to choose the correct degree per case
both centralised and decentralised systems have trust issues, but they are different in kind not magnitude
the incentives are wrong for innovation. Google requires centralised, so HTTP is fine. Ubiquity, so HTML is fine
web developers have spent years becoming skilled in their corner and are incentivised to defend and perpetuate the platform
if you think discoverability, zero-install and sandboxes are only possible on the web, I invite you to consult the literature
we could have decentralised, secure, simple, efficient primitives, but network effects and incentives steer us away
tech solutions are moot unless they incentivise behaviour that leads to better returns for everyone. layers on HTML/HTTP will never do that
I'm aware of the difference between residency and citizenship, that's not the issue. I deny what they are offering is typically something requiring residency. Anecdotally- I don't have residency (or citizenship to be clear) in Singapore but have government ID there I use for their services.
If they plan to expand the program to allow things typically afforded to residents of a country then that would be something. I doubt it however.
Calling this e-Residency is a mistake. It's confusing enough that a commenter here was unsure if they were eligible because their country does not allow dual citizenship.
It's a government identity you can apply for and use online that allows you to register companies, among other things- right?
As an electronic resident of Estonia what are you entitled to that you can't do in Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK, etc? The only difference I can see is that in those places you likely need to visit the country to setup the company. Those countries certainly wouldn't call that process airplane-Residency.
Electronic mail is mail that you send electronically. Here, e-Residency is not residency in any definition of the word, even the ephemeral kind. An e-Residency does not afford the bearer any entitlements not offered to a non-bearer, save for not requiring a flight to Estonia.
That said, I appreciate the innovation in an online government ID card for foreigners. The name is a mistake. More accurate would be to call it e-Airplane.
As I haven't read everything about this, I'm willing to admit there's a chance I'm wrong.
In my experience, both with self-study and at university, the best way to gain and retain knowledge is by working problems. To do this you need: demonstrations of the concepts, problems, hints and solutions.
Hints and solutions can be time consuming to obtain at university (office hours) and might be impossible if you can't find instructor manuals for self-study.
Khan Academy makes the most sense to me. You work the problems until you can't, at which point you use the hints or watch the videos. Then continue.
The only lectures that were useful to me at university was the first one, where they discussed how the class would run, and the last one where they discussed the exam.
Labs and tutorials were useful if I wanted to get hints on how to work problems.
I agree with TFA. Videos should by no means be the focus. They can be very helpful demonstrations. If the goal is to be able to solve problems, that's what you should be spending the most time doing.
https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/blob/master/linuxdoom-1....
One thing that's clear when reading game source code is that they hard code a lot more than I would writing system or application software. That's to be expected given the nature of the beast, but it's still one of the first obvious differences.
It's on Audible as well, narrated by Wil Wheaton. I've been doing a lot of driving recently and it was a fantastic listen.
Shane Legg is known for being a co-founder of DeepMind, in a business role (as I understand)
You are quite mistaken. He leads the applied AI team there, and has significant history in research.
I've made about as much of an effort as I'm willing elsewhere in the thread, sorry.
the core idea behind Curtis' work is perhaps simply that ideas can be extremely dangerous or powerful
That's as good a description as I'm likely to come up with. Aside from the delivery, which is at once engaging and completely lacking the nuisance necessary for a topic like this, my issue is that the core idea is a truism and I'm not sure he actually makes an interesting point, much less offers alternatives (he'd have to make that point first).
He does however touch on interesting topics. He then attempts to find causal relationships between events, but I believe doing this to arrive at a conclusion is intellectually dishonest. He must know that, which makes me more frustrated. That's personal preference. If I was trying to convince someone of something, this is not how I'd go about it.
Re NHS: ask anyone who designs incentive programs and they'll tell you that it's a cat and mouse game. I fail to see how hospital managers gaming the system implies "KPI + autonomy about how to achieve it" is a dud idea entirely, and that proponents of such systems are paranoid RAND Corp game theory psychopaths stuck in the Cold War.
Incentives need to be tweaked just like anything else, and the rational agent model need not be a complete description of human behaviour for it be useful. It need only be sufficiently descriptive of portions of workplace behaviour that designing incentives raises KPIs. If those KPIs aren't working you tweak them, using those dreaded numbers Curtis despises so much.
Models are useful until they aren't. But as someone said- they're all wrong. We modify them or replace them as necessary. Sometimes that takes longer than we'd like. We'd still be bashing each other with clubs without them. I'm not sure what Curtis proposes, which is perhaps why I watch these movies over and over again- trying to get the point. Or maybe it's just soothing to hear vague thoughts about economics and systems theory set to music and stock footage.
As others have said, perhaps it's more useful as a conversation starter than a thesis. Don't get me wrong. I love the damn movies.
Yes. I disagree with most of his points of view. Some of his statements are outright incorrect and a majority are at least questionable or wanting for references. In _The Trap_ he constantly uses the phrase "based on numbers" in a negative fashion, as if it were an inferior method of analysis. I find that particularly strange considering that if you just listen to his narrative without the images, there is no analysis and often no cogent argument.
One argument, if I remember correctly, was that game theory should no longer be used as a tool because it was largely developed during the cold war, which is over now.
And yet I'm utterly I'm fascinated by his movies. I probably (re)watch one every 2 months. Go figure.
edit: You can't miss this parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
Ignoring the singularity talk because I think it's become meaningless, but Jürgen Schmidhuber would disagree with the conclusion that machines can't be creative, or at least that it's beyond algorithms.
He has a formal theory of creativity [0] which claims to explain, among other things, music, humour, beauty [1] and fun. It centres around compression and Kolmogorov complexity.
There's a great video in the first link.
These are hard problems, but it's shortsighted to consider it impossible for us to build machines with approximate behaviour. Often with this class of criticism you'll have arguments along the lines of "sure the submarine moves through the water, but is it swimming?" Apologies to Dijkstra.
[0] http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html [1] http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html
Stop saying "awesome".
Google does something like this, apparently:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269038041932531.html#mod=...