clusterfoo

The Economist is a prime example that quality still sells, and always will. Even their new daily newsletters are top-notch.

IMHO they get right what most "old media" are getting wrong: The Economist isn't trying to compete with new media at what new media does best.

I don't need a magazine for opinion pieces, I have blogs for that; I don't need my local newspaper to tell me about Lady Gaga's new acting career, I don't need a magazine to tell me what's new and cool in fashion or music, and I certainly don't need CNN to tell me what's trending on twitter.

Give it up. You can't compete with the masses for that type of content. What I can't get from blogs and twitter is quality journalism: investigation, inside scoops, quality political analysis, etc.

When traditional media realizes that this is the domain where they excel, they will be just fine. Instead of cutting down on their investigative journalism departments, slash the entertainment reporters, slash opinion and talking heads. Cut your content in half, cut your staff, stop wasting resources on a hopeless battle, and focus on the one thing no blog or YouTube channel can do... give me concise, focused, quality journalism.

I don't think that's feasible either on a large scale. How about this strategy:

1. Pick the top three offenders (not in the same industry).

2. For each offender, find their cash cow, or top 3 most profitable products.

3. Make a concerted effort to boycott those products, and those products alone, indefinitely. Make some real damage.

The purpose here is to make an example out of someone. Build morale among protesters that if well organized, they can be effective.

First scenario: One million US/Canadian citizens sporadically decide to buy from company Y instead of company X... nobody notices.

Second scenario: Company Z suddenly loses 100,000 customers for their core product... I'll bet you someone notices.

What a great case for pure research:

"He was a whiz with formulas and I think [his aim was] to construct those near counter-examples to Fermat's last theorem. So he developed a theory to find these near misses, without recognizing that the machine he was building, those formulas that he was writing down, would be useful for anyone, ever, in the future."

So... the Internet.

A growing millionaire class is not mutually exclusive with consolidation of wealth, if growth of millionaire class is less than reduction in middle-income class.

How do I access this from my phone? Same with other open source solutions... the only way to open it on my phone is to trust an unknown app developer to open it for me.

I trust GNU zip, but can I trust MiniKeePass? Can I trust iZip?

It's really turning out to be a beautiful general-purpose language as well.

I've been playing it for a few days now, and it's such a joy to work with. So many great forward-thinking libraries: (Reactive, Compose), excellent, readable code quality even down to the language implementation from very smart people...

If the language stack of the future looks something like Rust for systems, Julia for applications, and Elm for UI, I'll be a pretty happy developer :)

this is great! -- would be nice to add categories / filters.

Also interesting if each story had a 'stats' page with some numbers so it's not so much a black box.

Tangential pet peeve: but this kind of thinking, while noble in principle ("let's not waste resources / brain power on what doesn't matter"), tends to lead to stagnation, not innovation.

Paradigm-shifting discoveries tend to come from unexpected, unexplored territory. By taking away funding from "useless" pursuits (like pure maths, arts, theoretical researchers) and focussing solely on the bottom line (i.e: what matters, what is profitable), we make advances in a given field less likely, not more.

Reminds me of the Louie bit where David Lynch instructs Louie to "Be funny: 3... 2... 1... Go". -- That's not how things work. Achieving that level of mastery of his craft is 90% non-funny related activities (life experiences, personality, self-reflection etc.), and 10% actually focusing on "being funny" in itself.

What if the key to longevity comes from a cancer researcher, what the techniques needed come from an applied mathematician researching complex systems? What if the technology required to even model the problem in order to ask the right question is developed by computer scientists modelling data in a completely different field of research? There's just no way to know.

And who would you trust with manufacturing and programming such a chip?

And security. The biggest problem of course is that this a field ripe with potential for abuse... there's a fine line between a personalized book recommendation service, and a massive, streamlined propaganda machine.

We have the knowhow to build either (very near) futures: one in which we automate all the menial aspects of our day-to-day lives and are left to explore and create... and one in which our desire for convenience is exploited by governments and corporations.

The technical difficulty of achieving either is the same, the only difference between utopia and dystopia in this case is the foundation on top of which it's built:

One is built on openness: open data, neutral networks, open software and standards, all massively available so that anyone with the ingenuity to do so can pitch in and help build this future.

The other is built on a foundation of walled gardens and closed ecosystems: everyone building on top of platforms and technologies that are ultimately controlled by a handful of individuals whose interests we now have to trust align with our own.

Which leads to an unsettling thought:

And culture builds on culture. (...) That cumulative process is what allows for the civilization that we now live in, but it raises a very interesting paradox and it’s interesting that it’s very rarely commented upon.

Here’s the thought experiment: (...) imagine I showed you an Apple II running World of Warcraft. If you knew anything about computers you’d say, “Impossible. Impossible!” (...)

Now, let’s think about human beings. Human beings are hardware that’s about 100,000 years old, but we run string theory, Lie algebra. We’re running 21st-century software! (...)

I happen to be one who believes that the cultural becomes so complicated at a certain point that it won’t run on our brains. And in fact, you could argue that the reason why we’ve generated computational devices is consciously or unconsciously, we’ve come to recognize that our endogenous, organic computing power is not up to the task and we have to recruit machines to represent culture, because we cannot. I think there’s good evidence for that.

I think that that ultimately might be what bounds us; that we’ll reach a point where our memory capacity and inferential power simply cannot accommodate the latest cultural artifact. At that point what happens? Does it become independent of us, or does it just stop? It’s like evolution coming to an end.

---

The whole thing is worth watching really, but that question really hit home for me. Though maybe I'm more optimistic: if we automated away all of the menial -- such as deciding what's for dinner, searching for the next book to read, etc. (unless it's done for pleasure of course) -- and the political -- automate a large portion of how our institutions are run -- all of these things that stifle and fragment our creative energies, so that we could focus all of our brainpower and energy on creative endeavours, how much more could we accomplish?

There's still a cognitive limit, but it seems to me that currently we are mired by so much unnecessary overhead that once we are able to remove it, we'll find that limit is a lot farther away than we expected.

I'd guess that for most of us, well over 50% of our creative energy is instead spent on the unnecessary and menial.

Especially since brains are not Turing machines, and the cost of overhead is not linear (50% overhead might mean more than 50% productivity loss): brains get tired over time, they burn out, they need rest, context switching is hard... that overhead burns you out and is making you less productive even when you're not actively thinking about it (what's for dinner, your personal finances, schedules, meetings, that dentist appointment, am I due for a haricut? did I already book the mechanic? my car is making that weird noise again, oh crap did I miss the new Game of Thrones last night, now I gotta catch up... etc etc etc etc) -- what a relief would it be to automate all of that and only focus on what's fun and what's important!)

It's not just useful for convincing other, but also to notice when you’re being manipulated.

In my experience (having started uni in the humanities), this way of thinking (which is how most people think) actually makes you more susceptible to manipulation, not less, because you're basically trained to think that a convincing argument and a valid argument are the same thing.

Which really is how most people perceive reality: from political debates to the workplace, most people remember how well you "handled yourself" in a disagreement, how charismatic, how well you "stood your ground", etc. Not how sound your logic was. And this is how most of the world operates.

Programmers spend all of our day pointing out flaws in each others' work, we simply do not allow each other to be wrong and correct each other at every turn... this takes time to get used to when you're starting out (or come from a non-tech background), and would drive most people crazy and bruise their fragile egos (If this behavior has ever accidentally bled into your non-tech social life, you know this does drive most people crazy). But we do it because the damn thing has to work at the end of the day.

"Cargo cult programmers" are given a bad name, where in other professions you can make a career off of hopping onto the cargo cult of the day and parroting (or being) a charismatic talking head.

It's a "Sell me this pen" world, vs "Take this pen apart, tell me everything that's wrong with it, and build me a better pen".

It's not that there's no value in the humanities, but without technical training we end up with... well... the world as it is. There's a reason the tech community has been at the forefront of innovation for the past century, moving at light-speed while the rest of the "warm and fuzzy" world (from educational, to medicinal, to political institutions) is trying to catch up, like they're all still in the friggen 19th century communicating via carrier pigeons. And I don't mean only technical innovation: the tech community has been at the forefront of social innovation as well. Ideas like open data, open source, horizontal institutions, fast iteration and experimentation at the institutional level... nobody else does it. All other professions have their little cliques formed, where god forbid anyone question the Big Talking Head at the top or try to shake up things too much, or share too much information with anyone outside the in-group.

Agreed. This is the crux of the problem: if we're worrying about this leading to an "underclass"... does anyone think its illegality will prevent the ultra-wealthy from funding this technology?

And who will be overseeing the research? If it must be conducted in the dark and on a budget, does anyone doubt that human experimentation will take place?

No thanks.

Ethical or not, the cat is out of the bag and the only way is forward.

Only one point to nitpick: let's stop spreading the "RSS is dead" meme. It's not. RSS/Atom are alive and well.

Google reader != RSS.

These standards are open and simple enough for everyone to implement on their site/blog, and they'll only die if we all start acting like they're dead because one company decided to phase out a product that was not even living up to its full potential. I use https://www.newsblur.com/ on a daily basis and it's a far superior piece of software.

Problem is phone manufacturers have a vested interest in making the web experience sub-optimal (and even limit developers' means of building a proper mobile browser, like Apple).

From a discussion in /r/rust. Great overall discussion about the benefits of Haskell-like abstractions. This example almost looks like magic, it really helped me understand the power of these abstractions.

Often people (including myself), will ask "why bother", "why should I get a PhD in abstract math just to write a damn script. They're all turing complete languages after all."

Here is a perfect, down to earth example! So simple even I got it!

p.s: Not being a Haskell guy, I had to use these resources to figure out wtf was going on; they might help you too:

- explains Functor: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/The_Functor_class

- explains Monad: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Understanding_monads

- explains retry: http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000929/ch10.htm...

Be well versed in genetics / molecular biology! - If I had the time to finish school, I'd double in biology / math or CS. Man will that be a killer combo when that kid is 30.

It feels like biotech is where computing was in the 1930's... what's to come, and how it will change the world is both frightening and exciting.

On the "soft" side (whatever that means): ethics, the history of ethics, from every point of view.

Two lecture series I always recommend, and feel like everyone should watch with a gun to their head (as the instructor himself says):

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY -- Harvard course on justice / ethics.

- https://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA -- Robert Saposky (and guests) on the biology of human behavior.

Literary theory. Gaining a deeper understanding of how masters of symbolism, language, and creativity think and put together their work; the history of literature; etc. will open you up to new ways of thinking just like studying pure maths or programming would.

Now to invent a time machine and give myself this advice! Boy I could've used it.

But that could never happen to us, right?

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

And apparently every programmer sees himself as a cunning negotiator, and irreplaceable genius 1000x-er.

We are collectively shooting ourselves in the foot.

It's not a dissenting opinion, it's plain false. What he's thinking of is dissociative drugs.

Even at very high doses of psychedelics, you remain perfectly aware that you are tripping, and if anything, tend to be extra-careful not to do anything that might be foolish in "the real world", which you understand you still physically inhabit.

On the other hand, dissociative drugs, as the name implies, are drugs that make you lose your grip on reality (and even your own personhood). These are the "jump out the window" drugs. They can be dangerous in that sense, and also in the sense that they can be used to cause harm to others - for example, as date rape drugs.

They are not always hallucinogenic, are not the same thing as psychedelics, and they tend to be extremely unpleasant so they're not even particularly popular.

If done responsibly, about the worst thing that a person on LSD will do (assuming no pre-existing mental instability) is lie down, cry, and have a very bad time waiting for the bad trip to be over. No murderous rampage or flight attempts.

Minor pet-peeve. But we should probably refrain from immediately jumping to "drug cartel" examples. It only further perpetuates the meme that privacy is only something criminals and perverts should be concerned with.

Why not "Erotic messages with my wife", "My medical records", "My business plan", "My home videos", or any other number of things most regular people probably don't want anyone snooping around.

Hey, look at the bright side, at least yours didn't turn out to be stage IIIc cancer, after three months and two doctors assuring me "You're young! It's probably nothing." Even with a family history and scans showing an enlarged lymph node.

This is the most common story you'll hear from a cancer patient.

The most upsetting part is how critical early diagnosis is: the difference between stage II and IIIc can be the difference between 80% vs 20% five-year survival.

Good doctors are few and far between, and good diagnosticians... I dunno, me and my family have been in and out of the medical system for a while now, and I'm yet to meet one.

When you go in, do your own research, get a copy of your results, and tell them exactly what to do.

Same, I've had co-workers laugh at my crazy key bindings, but by comparison, whenever I have to code on my Mac (which I've not customized, or someone else's computer, I wonder how I ever managed to get anything done without a highly customized environment.

I use i3 (tiling manager - I find it the easiest to config) and vim, and similar key bindings across both.

I get how it can seem like a lot of trouble for some people, but it's so worth it when you can edit code and move around your environment at basically the speed of thought.

Some would argue that typing / windows-switching speed is not the bottleneck in development, but for me it's not about performance (I'm a rather bad typist), but about reducing mental overhead and minimizing "mental disrupts". One-second distractions of reaching for my mouse, then moving the pointer to the task bar, etc... just add up to a lot of overhead (try reading a dense article while taking one-second breaks to look away from the page after every sentence. Comprehension plummets).

But what happens when physicians' criteria don't align with the priorities of a patient?

Take this hypothetical example: you wake up with a dozen marble-sized tumors in your brain. A combination of BRAF and PD-1 inhibitors has a small chance of curing you. This is backed by science, this is already a known result. Without the treatment you are dead within six months. With the treatment, you have a small chance of being cured.

However, due to potential known complications of PD-1, it is not yet approved as first-line for patients with brain mets. So the doctor says you must first go through whole brain radiation.

Your oncologist's only goal is to extend your life, he doesn't care about what you value and what kind of life you want. Therefore WBR and then immune therapy is the logical choice.

But maybe you don't just care about not dying, maybe you expect a certain quality of life and are willing to take the risk of foregoing whole brain radiation, because life after whole brain radiation is not a life you'd want to live.

What right does anyone have to tell you you are not allowed to take that risk?

These pure theoretical reasons for not giving patients the right to choose are so far removed for the day-to-day reality of someone dying of cancer, it's ridiculous. We're not dealing with abstract data with the goal of reaching some life-expectancy maxima using one-size-fits all treatment. We're dealing with people who have different priorities, and maybe care about more than optimizing for the treatment that is statistically most likely to squeeze an extra month of existence out of them.

The way things currently are, people are dying without access to drugs that are known to work. The approval process is painfully slow.

As a concrete example, there's a new class of immune therapy drugs used in the treatment of melanoma, among them PD-1 inhibitors and Ipilimumab. The data for these has been around for years, they are known to offer some kind of response in about a quarter of patients. In a small percentage of patients, there has been complete response and they've been disease free for years. This is unheard of in metastatic melanoma (stage IV has a 10% 5-year survival rate).

Dying of melanoma, by the way, is not a pretty death, there's nothing dignified or natural about how melanoma kills. It's something out of a horror movie. Dying early of liver failure would is a walk in the park compared to what a terminal patient has to look forward to.

In any case, the point is moot, because not only are PD-1 and its ilk more effective, but the side effects in trial patients have been minimal compared to the destructive known effects of chemo and radiation (or golf-ball sized bleeding tumors cropping up in your intestines).

I invite you to visit any melanoma forum and read the backlogs. You can read through years of people going through horrific treatments, all of which, again, are known to not be effective (biochemo, interferon, surgeries, whole brain radiation once the cancer spreads to the brain), while desperately applying for studies for drugs that are out there and already showing positive results. Then they suffer. A lot. Then they die.

The boards are filled with stories like these: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/dad-pleading-unapproved-cancer-... - "Dad Pleading for Unapproved Cancer Drug Dies".

Trials often have very strict exclusionary criteria, leaving many people out - often those who need it most:

Auden said he was told that in order to be accepted into a clinical trial for the anti-PD-1 drug, he would need to have either no brain tumors or brain tumors that were at least no longer growing.

Even once they are approved, they might not be immediately approved as first-line treatment, meaning you still have to go through the old standard of treatment, wait until it doesn't work (meaning: put your body through the wringer, then wait for the cancer to come back again -- hopefully nowhere important like your brain or your lungs), and only then you have access to the new miracle drugs.

It's easy to make internet comments over some theoretical "gotcha" if you've never been on the receiving end of the stick. But the current system is broken and real people are suffering needlessly.

How in any way does it negate the scientific process to allow people who have nothing but months of pain and suffering ahead of them to give an experimental drug a shot?

To play devil's advocate: could it be that generally curious, risk-taking, meta-thinking individuals tend to make better engineers, which just happens to be a personality type that is naturally drawn to psychedelics?

Really, we can play arm-chair neuroscientist indefinitely, but there is only one way to get to the bottom of this. We must gather more, um, data.

“The `class` keyword will probably be the most harmful feature in JavaScript."

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

One of the reasons Javascript became so popular is that it took many of the properties that Lispers have been extolling for decades (minimal syntax, light-weight, meta-programmable, functional, composable), but wrapped them in a familiar-enough looking package that even beginners can Get Stuff Done. (Which is where Lisps have historically failed.)

I'm hoping the future of Js will continue in this direction, but looking at ES6 and Angular, it looks like too many people are trying to turn Javascript into Java.

The heart of Javascript is simplicity and power. Arrow functions and modules are a great addition. Maybe with enough support from the community, instead of more syntactic sugar and complexity, ES7 will adopt macros (http://sweetjs.org/) and a type system (e.g tcomb ( https://github.com/gcanti/tcomb )).

You're still not focused on the road though, that's just not how the human brain works, and insinuating that this device somehow makes texting while driving safe is hugely irresponsible IMO, considering how many thousands of lives are lost every year to distracted driving.

(I also doubt a commercial pilot is using this tech to send tweets to his mom while landing a plane. The "Pilots use this, so it's gotta be safe, right?" line just made me facepalm.)

Naive question (I know nothing about this stuff):

If mathematical logic is a property of our universe, then aren't we again entering the realm of circular logic? i.e: "Given the logical frameworks that are correct in our universe, our universe is very likely."

Unless math is something that somehow exists independently of our physical universe... but then "where" does it come from?

But under our current economic system, what you can afford is tied to the value of the goods/services you produce. If we find ourselves in a future where 90% of the population produces nothing, then 90% of the population can afford nothing, no matter how cheap.

Obviously there is a utopian solution, where most goods and services are so cheap to produce, that most people have essentially free access to them.

What is worrying is the dystopian alternative (and probably inevitable adjustment period), where only a tiny fraction of the population is "valuable", and therefore has access to all the benefits of cheap automation, while the other 90% have no value (economically speaking).

We also tend to forget that we live in a sort of intellectual bubble. Just by being able to hold a highly technical job, you are probably already in the upper 90% percent of the intelligence spectrum. 80% of the world's population has an IQ of under 115; and half the world's population is under 100 and can barely grasp any form of abstract logical thinking.

If the vast majority of jobs in the future require high technical or intellectual aptitude, then the vast majority of the earth's population will be left with nothing to do.