bh42

Christopher Reeve delivering the line "Truth, Justice and the American Way" as Super Man is one of the defining memories of my childhood.

I worry that once Americans become cynical and scared enough to stop aspiring to that line, it will then be a short trip to a fascist or pseudo-fascist state.

Naive? Perhaps, but if you don't have high and lofty ideals, then what is to be the counter weight to doing everything and anything in the name of safety?

Actually population growth all over the wold is slowing down. China is already at almost neutral and growth is even slowing in India and Africa.

And a static or shrinking population would have an adverse affect on total market cap, however it would also mean a great job market, because even as the economy shrinks the labor pool would shrink faster.

So your investments would not do well, but you'd always be able to get a high paying job.

Cult phenomenon?

When I was a teenager me and my friends called it "rolling in the mud"

Often a lot of us kids were very nervous going to clubs and quite scared to talk to girls. So then the more experienced kids, you know those in their late teens, would give the following advice.

Just get out there and hit on everything that moves, accept rejection just roll in the mud for a few hours, that will get rid of the shakes. And it works. Over time you stop being so nervous and have less need to start the night by rolling the mud.

Now the pick up master movement has re-branded this to something which sounds much more glamorous: "Nexting" They're not rejecting you, you're "nexting" them! This is a brilliant sales strategy if you're in the market of selling advice and therapy to shy and nervous guys.

There was a study which pointed out that this only works if you have self confidence, then you can brainwash yourself with affirmations like those.

But if you are insecure, then affirmations actually make you worse of because it is like poking your vicious inner self-critic with a stick.

I'd love to cite the study but my google-fu fails me today.

... I'm going to go ahead and pretend that was intentional... yeah I totally meant to write ironing, not ironic...

This is a brain chemistry self-hack, and I am not sure it's a good thing.

Also I know a few people who are neither Buddhists nor super smart but have managed to perform this self-hack.

The human brain is plastic enough and if you try hard enough for a long enough time you can cause some very drastic shifts in function.

This might be a good thing, but I doubt it.

Mutters to self: I can't believe I'm explaining jokes on the Internet.. sigh

Unless ojbyrne was being ironing, as in, what about dictatorial rule is un-American?

There are a lot of peoples blogs that are quoted on Hacker News that have a lot better content than Jeff Atwood, but are not as well written or presented as Jeff Atwoods pieces.

I would not say Atwood is a better writer. Better "presentation" is a better description.

I think he writes in a deliberate tabloid headline, slam down, almost troll style. And he very aggressively simplifies his topics, even the ones that should never be simplified like that.

And that makes him more accessible and thus more widely read.

But more popular is not the same thing as better.

I'd guess the percentage of approaches considered "quacky" which are later proven to work, is fairly constant over the ages. I'd also guess 80/20.

eBay is the only on that list not dominated by hackers. Yes even Larry Ellison is a hacker, from Wikipedia:

During the 1970s, Ellison worked for Ampex Corporation. One of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle"."

"Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks".[4] He founded Oracle in 1977, putting up a mere $1400 of his own money, under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL).

And despite a HUGE first mover advantage in a market where size is critical, eBay is floundering.

But I think you and the grandparent are not really disagreeing. A company can succeeded if it is dominated by very competent marketers and sales people... as long as they have something to sell.

The point is competent, passionate people are a great sign of success.

And if you have hackers and sales people, and designers, all of that type in a company... they can STILL be foiled by bureaucracy.

I've never met him person, but from the videos I've seen it is pretty obvious the man is pretty far on the aspie spectrum.

Perhaps with massive intervention early on he could have learned to be almost normal. But at his age, I think we should all keep in mind that as much as he is a geek stereotype we're all trying to overcome, and as much as people like him can be dicks and sexists, and hurt others, it is not easy being him.

This does not excuse his behavior. I think his work is worth of admiration and his social skills of, not scorn, but pity.

Exactly. The grandparent's comment is anything but relevant. While I do agree with it, it is clear it has nothing do with this.

Am I am saddened that I am no longer surprised that this is happening.

Mars has a lot less sun and atmosphere then the Earth, so terraforming it would involve a large investment in greenhouses and nuclear energy.

But Venus has an excess of sun and heat, and parts of its super dense atmosphere could potentially host floating algae, which absorb CO2 and rain down to the surface when they die. (Where they could burn and release all the CO2 again, but maybe a tiny bit stays out of the atmosphere.)

I guess what I'm saying is, we might be able to "seed" Venus and then sit by and watch as a carbon sink is created. And with less CO2 the atmosphere would start to cool off.

Now my very amateur understanding of Venus is that because the greenhouse effect creates super hot temperatures the magma underneath the crust of Venus does not form hot and hold spots like it does on Earth, it does not flow or erupt. There are no volcanoes, the crust is too "baked", too hard and thick.

But over long periods of time the crust still tends to break up: At a massive scale, planet wide, the whole planet surface is then covered with lava, the lava eventually cools and the cycle starts again.

This is why the surface of Venus looks suspiciously smooth except for a very few, very recent craters.

Now imagine we are able to "infect" Venus with life and it does manage to suck CO2 of the atmosphere and cool down Venus to the point where the surface of Venus can support liquid water.

It seems that could either trigger another planet wide cracking of the crust or maybe just huge volcanic eruptions. But I think once life is widely distributed even that could not expunge it. And with a much cooler atmosphere softer elements would not be baked out of the crust and the Venus crust would start to resemble Earth's crust, complete with softer and harder and lighter and heavier components and volcanoes.

And one day we could move in.

I think education, wealth, urbanization, the pill, the boob tube, condoms, all the reasons for below replacement fertility can be seen as a virus which attack the reproductive system.

A few people are partially or fully immune. (You don't have to be Mormon to be well off, educated and absolutely need to have 4+ kids) and over time their numbers will come to dominate.

I hope we've colonized space by then.

It is one of the oldest jokes on the internets. This September will never end.

50 +/- 50 or so years from now, maybe.

I really do believe the next big disruptor (on the scale of something like space travel or the internet) is going to be in our ability to harness brain power to directly manipulate our world.

Can't we already do that? I mean, you might have to work a huge machine using a joystick or something, but would eliminating the joystick be that much better?

I see it more as way to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome for programmers.

What's much more interesting for me is the ability to take a full image of someone's brain. It would be an interesting type of backup...

Instead Universities should also help the student become full rounded

Full roundedness is a financial luxury, of concern only to those who are financial at least relatively well off.

If universities are serious about the love of knowledge, learning for learning's sake, and all that jazz, then they should offer 100% free degrees.

If you have your own place to live, and can do the work, you should be able to get a degree full of well roundedness for absolutely no money.

reddit is tolerable if you unsubscribe from all popular reddits, especially the front page, and subscribe only to niche reddits with a small following. If any one of those sub-reddits gets too popular you move on, i.e. science->hard science.

I trust the people who care already know about distcc on Linux and Incredibuild on Windows, but I thought I'd mention them just in case.

Intel predicted the end of Moore's Law would come with 16 nanometer manufacturing processes and 5 nanometer gates, due to quantum tunnelling.

Well that's exactly my criticism: most of the author's objections boil down to "it's hard"

No, common English use of "it's hard" means something completely different from CS "hard". CS hard means NP-complete which to English translates as impossible. Impossible because of well understood mathematical reasons.

Quantum computers may solve it, indeed real life protein folding may have quantum computer-like properties.

I think his point was that we can't code the fundamentals because those require linear time protein folding. And protein folding is one of those hard CS problems.

I think his point that the genome is not the program but the data was very demonstrative.

If you're a computer guy, you should clearly understand what his fundamental disagreement with Kurzweil is about.

He can't be very insightful. To be that, he would need to know a lot more about human physiology and if he knew that, he could not be as optimistic about his own chances of living to see the singularity. That is why he can not be truly insightful.

It would be pretty sad if someone used the immune cloud to distribute a virus

Yes, that would be horrible. Imagine a deadly virus which specifically infects immune cells to spread. We could call it something like Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

Imagine you hadn't run since you were a little kid. Then one day you realize this isn't healthy and you decide to start jogging. And you then find out you can even jog for 20 minutes at a time! Is something wrong with you? No, you just need A LOT of practice and go slow.

This is exactly the same thing. To repeat an often repeated phrase: Social skills are called skills because they require practice!

Same with learning how to play the guitar.

So just keep doing it, when ever you find yourself with any other humans, open your mouth and say ANYTHING.

Keep doing that, it will get better.

Yes it did increase the risk.

Before the green revolution there were a lot of very different wheat varieties around the world. In fact, if my memory is correct, during the selective breeding for high yields one of the breakthroughs came from a thick and sturdy stalked dwarf wheat from Japan. The stalk genes it had produced a stalk strong enough to carry the new large yields.

The point being, we used to have a large variety of geno and phenotype around the world, and now we don't.

You aren't a luddite if you identify potential risks that we should be aware of.

Ah, but you are not identifying new risks. The risks are obvious.... IF you think that way. It's almost a politicaly argument, where some people are just convinced there is no systemic risk. To others is it obvious. I don't know why this has become such a polarized topic.

But the result is people who talk about systemic risk are often accused of being luddites. As if their view is not based on facts but on politics.

The alternative itself is also obvious, it is to grow a large variety of wheat strains. This however would reduce yields. And it seems that most societies prefer to bear the systemic risk... for now.

The preference for systemic risk might be political. Because there's still a lot of hungry people in the world, because farm lobbies like mono-culture, it may even be a rational preference for all I know.