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I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that the debate about whether or not "quantum is deterministic" centers around what your interpretation is of the wave function. I think most physicists, who Penrose would probably criticize, believe the "Copenhagen Interpretation," which says that the wave function of a system is literally the function that, when you take the inner product with its conjugate, gives you the probability distribution of the state of the system, and hence, the state is non-deterministic.

The uncertainty principle arises from quantum. Specifically, it's a statement about the commutativity of operators that act on the wave function, which, going by the Copenhagen interpretation of physics, means it's a consequence of the non-determinism of the universe. I think this is a philosophically satisfying explanation for why getting the state of the universe is impossible.

Re 2: There should be an obvious qualitative difference between being able to predict where a ball will land if I throw it, and predicting who the passengers riding a particular train in 15 years will be.

Re 3: I was commenting on Roger Penrose's assumption that quantum must be "wrong" because it's "unintuitive" by expressing my opinion that I think quantum is more intuitive than deterministic theories. Indeed, Dr. Penrose and I are both using "wishful thinking," as did Einstein when he hypothesized that the speed of light is "constant in a vacuum." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light#Special_relativi...

You make a good point. In my earlier post, replace "universe" with "solar system." Then, I can represent the states of the solar system in some subset of the universe, and I'll place this computer sufficiently far from the solar system so it doesn't interfere. Now I should be able to predict what happens on earth, unless you think that variables outside of our solar system significantly affect activities on earth, right?

Due to the inconsistency between quantum and relativity, I'm more inclined to believe that the problem is with relativity. The idea that physics is fundamentally non-deterministic satisfies me philosophically. If physics were deterministic, than I should be able to theoretically build a computer, input the state of the universe, and then be able to know what will happen in your life (assuming I don't tell anyone the computer output, because that would perturb the dynamics). I find that prospect far more unsettling than having to account for a superposition of states until I obtain more information in the future.

My advice would be to network with other students interested in startups, and build stuff with them. Twice a semester, there is a business pitch competition called "Pitch Dingman," and there's an annual business plan competition through MTECH. Make it a goal to enter them at some point with friends you make! You'll learn a lot in the process and meet other aspiring entrepreneurs. The Pitch Dingman events are open to the public, so I'd encourage you to check them out and see what UMD entrepreneurs are up to.

I can't speak for other schools, but the University of Maryland is working hard to become a "startup school." A few examples:

At least five professors in our electrical engineering department have companies.

The business school has successful entrepreneurs that can meet with students (in any major) trying to start companies.

There's a whole institute at the university called MTECH which has successful entrepreneurs and investors who help startups get off the ground. They have office hours once a month so if you impress them they can help introduce you to the right people.

A lot of startups "like" Instagram already exist, but ONLY Instagram has 40+ million users, that's the difference. Just because 100 more startups get created in this space doesn't mean any of them will acquire a sufficient userbase to threaten Facebook.

The problem with the analogy between music and math is the free-will aspect. Everyone is FORCED to take math, whereas most people are NOT forced to play an instrument (at least in the US). Everyone knew a couple of math wizzes who usually were not the one's asking "why do I need to learn this?" These kids would probably do math even if they weren't forced to, and indeed, many of them go on to pursue a higher education in mathematics, completely voluntarily. On the other hand, many kids whose parents force them to play an instrument often complain and ask "why do I need to play an instrument?"

tl;dr: If you force someone to do something, and you don't want to make them resent the thing you're forcing them to do, you should explain to them why you're forcing them to do it, i.e., why it's in their best interest, whether it's math, music, learning a language, etc.

I have a question for the more experienced HN users: is the author correct in asserting that in the "real world," being a co-founder of a startup is considered unemployed if there isn't a successful exit? I always thought that building a product from start to finish that has users is considered good experience to employers, even if it turns out not to be a sustainable business.

I don't think the hacker news / stackoverflow model will work for research papers. People read hacker news articles because they want to keep up with what's going on in the tech community, even if it's not super related to their particular job. Researchers generally don't just read research papers for fun. Rather, they are working on their own research, and they are looking for relevant papers whose results they can use. Hence, it's critical that when they read a paper, they know they can trust the results.

I can skim an article posted on hacker news in 30 seconds and have a general idea of what the content was. I can also skim a research paper, but only if I know that the research was done well (e.g. all the proofs are correct, or the assumptions in the model made sense, or all correct variables were properly controlled in the experiment). If that stuff isn't guaranteed, the paper is useless because I don't know if I can use it for my research. And to figure out all that stuff myself would take a few days literally out of my research. Just because 10 people skimmed it, thought it sounded cool, and up-voted it does not mean the results in the paper are correct.

Other than this review aspect, I really like this product. If they can figure out a good incentivized review system, I think it will be a big hit.

My understanding is that most publications are not heavily cited, and address very specific problems. I'm curious as to how you plan on creating incentives for qualified people to review the papers in their field which focus on problems outside of their present research interests.

To give a personal example: I used to work in a research group that applied techniques of a field called geometric control theory to the problem of modeling flocks of birds. There are not that many geometric control theorists in the world, and their interests range from robotics, to circuits, to modelings schools of fish. Right now, there are journals of control theory that force their reviewers to review all submissions, regardless of their personal interests.

How do you plan on emulating that? In other words, there need to be incentives for geometric control theorists who work on modeling schools of fish to spend a few days of their time grinding through the proofs of some grad student's paper in modeling bird flocks, which he needs for his thesis.