gasbag

Their FAQ seems to disagree with you:

Is Dynamicland open source?

Dynamicland shares many core values with the open source movement and in some ways goes beyond them.

A primary design principle at Dynamicland is that all running code must be visible, physically printed on paper. Thus whenever a program is running, its source code is right there for anybody to see and modify. Likewise the operating system itself is implemented as pages of code, and members of the community constantly modify and improve it.

That said, the pages of code physically in Dynamicland are not in a git repository. The community organizes code spatially — laying it out on tables and walls, storing it in folders, binders, and bookshelves.

https://dynamicland.org/faq/

Aren't Nest Protect alarms also linked? This harrowing video leads me to believe they are. It's a couple years old at this point though. (Turn your sound down, video is a poor soul trying to deactivate them.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY

I drive a Scion xB, which has the aerodynamic efficiency of a toaster. When I bought it in 2005, the huge amount of bugs that the windshield caught was one of the few things I didn't like about the car.

I'd estimate conservatively that during the past few summers, driving in the same areas, I see at least one third fewer splats than I did a decade ago. However, the area I live in has also had a big growth in sprawl, with lots of new housing developments especially, and that is almost certainly a factor.

This seems like something we ought to be able to do electronically. I should be able to encrypt a message with recipient's pubkey and a verified timestamp from NIST (for example) in addition to my digital signature, with a requirement for decryption to result in a second call to NIST from the recipient and a record available to me of when it was decrypted.

Awesome! I'm curious to try out your implementation. When I first stumbled upon Lucid early this year it seemed fascinating, but hard to wrap my head around by just reading the examples. I searched for a version that would work on today's machines but came up short.

I was reading up on streams as found in RxJS at the time, and though I am not yet an accomplished stream-wrangler their power is clear. Streams (or something like them, since Lucid's dataflows are different) be a core part of a language struck me as a good idea, and having only heard about Reactive Extensions in the past couple years it was surprising that the first example of first-class streams I encountered was 30 years old.

Your last sentence also sounds a lot like Economics 2.0 (and some other things) from Charles Stross's magnificent book Accelerando.

Violence always shapes political discussion. When someone commits a terrorist act, there must always be a decision made on how to respond to it.

Understanding what drives a terrorist does not necessarily negate any punishment for the act of terror. It does give you the opportunity to decide whether the grievance that led them to act is one that you agree is legitimate, or if not, perhaps it is one that you want to address anyway in the interest of lowering the risk of other terrorist acts. All of this can be done without excusing in any way the act itself.

User acjohnson55 mentions below a Radiolab episode in which a debate team does exactly what you suggest. They had a lot of success with their strategy, but ultimately even as the community paid lip service to all of the issues they raised, no great change came out of it. The format hasn't changed. The content isn't any better.

I don't think the US would stop trading with Puerto Rico, so I suppose the question is if the increased trade with Caribbean nations would offset however much trade with the US mainland would diminish. I don't know the answer to that, but it could probably be found by looking at how Caribbean nations' trade compares with Puerto Rico's trade today.

The act says that anytime a non-US ship carries goods that are from a US port, including Puerto Rico, it cannot take those goods to any other US port. So instead of being able to do a sequence of [Barbados, Puerto Rico, Florida, Barbados], a ship would have to instead follow [Barbados, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Florida, Barbados]. It doesn't eliminate trade entirely, but it definitely increases costs--especially in PR itself, which has to rely only on US ships for US goods, creating a monopoly.

The Puerto Rican economy, at least on the coasts, is highly intermingled with the US economy

In large part due to the Jones act, which discourages trade between PR and its Caribbean neighbors.

The Senate wasn’t designed to represent “the people” anyway, it was designed to represent the interests of the sovereign states — of which DC is not. The House of Representatives is what represents “the people.”

This was how it was designed, and if state congresses still elected federal senators, this argument against DC having senate representation would hold water. Once the 17th Amendment changed it to direct election of senators, the chamber no longer represented the interests of the state, it now just gives the people in less populous states a lot more influence over the law.

State is the wrong entity here. A population tends to create a culture, and a culture's interplay of ideas runs on its human network. Which is not to say that a culture is conscious either, and in all likelihood if it does have a kind of consciousness it's one that we will not be able to understand.

This is tangential to the article, but one of the more interesting and less-discussed aspects of Seveneves is the ubiquitous surveillance that everyone is living under. Most characters hardly give it a thought most of the time. The way that this later becomes essentially an epic myth composed of original footage, and how it has tangible effects on subsequent cultures, is kind of fascinating.

I haven't heard anything since the announcement. IMDB's last update was in January. It's not just Ron Howard though--it's also a bunch of the people who worked on the Apollo 13 film, which seems like a very good fit.

Unlike a lot of folks, I liked the second part of Seveneves, but I won't miss it if they cut it from the film. I don't even know how they'll fit the whole first part in without a 3.5 hour running time.

Less useful to most people, sure, but most people also use their desktop computers for only those same things.

I make music, and for the past several years, I've been pretty much exclusively using my phone and iPad to do it. The touchscreen works very well for my use case, and the audio pipeline is quite flexible with the right apps--in many cases outshining the workflow available on a full PC. I'm working exclusively on the device and using no external services after downloading the apps themselves. That takes far more computing power than a dumb terminal.

The reason for the phenomenon is that some large percentage of how you hear your own voice comes from bone conduction. In addition, the higher harmonics of your voice are more directional, which is to say "aimed away from your ears", and tend to be diminished when reflected back to you by the objects around you.

The end result of this is that your own voice, when recorded and played back to you, will generally sound less bassy and more harmonically rich than you expect it to.

If you're going to play the weighing game of pleasure versus suffering of domesticated animals, I would bet that factory farming far outweighs pets/animal helpers/more humane farms. The numbers are pretty incredible.

no matter how effective you can implement your tax measures, at the end of the day people can move to other countries and your own country starts to suffer more than it benefits from the increased taxes.

The first half of this--that rich people can move to other countries if they think they are being taxed too much--is certainly true, but I have doubts about the second half.

There are people who have as part of their drive a desire to see humanity as a whole better off than we were before, and there are people whose primary drive is "eff you, I got mine." That's the kind of rich person who will be the first to abandon a high-tax country in droves, and in my opinion we are better off without them: they are the profiteers who make life for those working under them hellish, who feel no responsibility for polluting and underpaying and ignoring externalities and racing to the bottom. What we want, who we should hope to see become successful, are principled people who understand that the riches which come their way are only possible within the context of a healthy society, and who are willing to part with a larger share of their fantastic revenues to ensure its continued improvement (while of course still being able to enjoy the fruits of their labor).

To argue otherwise, as it looks to me at least, is to argue that (1) the only way to make a lot of money is to be selfish and unethical, and (2) we still need that money in taxes (at a lower tax rate) to maintain a healthy society. I am sure I'm simplifying things.

It's probably worth mentioning that Manna represents the dystopian path of development. The second half of the story is devoted to The Australia Project, a technologically-advanced utopia where people are free to pursue their own interests and everyone is able to live a life of luxury.

At a far more macro level, perhaps one of our biggest forms of "progress" in human history has simply been our shift away from the need to constantly spend all day, every day, hunting for sustenance to get thru the day and the next day and so on.

This is probably a myth. Studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies likely spent between 20 and 40 hours per week obtaining food. They are still believed to have been plagued by high infant mortality, disease, and warfare, so they were still leading relatively unstable lives when compared with today. But the average hunter-gatherer may have largely been better off (healthier, with more leisure time) than the average worker during the Industrial Revolution.

While we're near the topic, the five-day work week itself is something that a lot of us take for granted, but it has only been adopted nationwide in America for 80 years.

If you don't think the risk is much higher for a woman to walk alone, especially at night, you are not paying attention.

There are several videos of women walking alone in city streets while being discreetly filmed by an assistant walking in front of them. The men who approach them range from bold to aggressive to creepy. It's not the majority of men they pass--but it is way more focused attention than I would get as a man walking down the street, and all of it is unwanted.

In one video, a guy starts silently walking next to the woman for three blocks. That's nerve-wracking behavior, and this is in broad daylight. Given low light and an otherwise empty street, some of those same men would have no qualms about using force. The danger that an unknown man presents to a woman is much greater than the danger that he presents to a man.

You might be interested in the Luna programming language/dev environment. It's designed to have a 1:1 correspondence between the visual, node-based environment and the written forms of the code. I haven't been able to try it yet since it's still in closed alpha, but it looks very intriguing! Given your experience with a similar visual language and later interest in more conventional programming, you could make a good case for getting into the alpha. There's a signup form on their site (one for the alpha and one for their newsletter, depending on your level of interest).

http://www.luna-lang.org/

Last HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14612680

That's a lot of accounts and a lot of passwords. You'd probably want to use a password manager. These kinds of passwords still have the advantage of being easy to hold in short-term memory, so when your password manager is on a different device than the service you're trying to use, you can look it up once and type it in rather than having to look back and forth between the two for that 16-digit number.

There is a Radiolab episode about this too. They talk about all of the things that we don't know about that happen between days 14 and ~30 (working from memory), and also how the person who came up with the 14 day rule chose that number at least in part because, at the time, it was way out of reach and did not seem like it would ever be achievable.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/primitive-streak/

I'm curious to see some of the historical examples in America, especially if there are TONS of them. Because when I think of "American capitalism at scale" in the old days the only thing I picture are the robber barons.

I'd like to see these cars' behavior when they encounter a road work crew with a closed lane and flaggers directing traffic.

You're right, I'm sure it's possible. And it would definitely be the more visually stunning of the two: the variety of places and buildings and artifacts and creatures that we'd get to see would unquestionably outstrip those of Long Sun.

I hadn't thought about who would be good to produce/direct it, but either pair of brothers would be a great choice. They'd certainly have enough material to work with.

That's a good list. I'm curious about what you're referring to in 6. The only thing I can think of is beneath Nessus, but I can't for the life of me recall how it plays into what Severian writes (or perhaps rather what he doesn't). It's been a few long years since I was last there though.

Yes, this tetralogy* is spellbinding. The world is vast and cannot be fully comprehended. As you said, it feels quite real, and everything that happens around Severian hints at so much more. This book ought to be at the top of every SF aficionado's reading list. It's that good. I'm glad yours is the top comment right now.

I have been thinking about how the trend in long-form television would be very favorable for translating some of Wolfe's books into film and exposing them to a broader audience. There are so many things in New Sun that would make for compelling television, and we have the technology to do the special effects right--that is, not a CG-fest, but (mostly) subtle and in service of the story. His fuligin cloak alone I would love to see in motion. Though I think the way the story is told would have to change drastically, unless they were to keep the narration--which is a tricky prospect. Part of the book's charm is that you never know if what you are imagining based on what the narrator says really happened that way, and people put enough faith in what they see to lose that aspect.

For that reason, and because a film translation would have to expose a number of the puzzles that Gene put into New Sun for us, I've latched onto the idea of a TV series for Book of the Long Sun instead. It is just as imaginative, the world (or should I say the whorl) just as vast, and the book follows almost as grand an adventure. Patera Silk, in my opinion, makes for an even more compelling protagonist than Severian, and the other characters are even more human than those in New Sun. On the surface it is not as dramatic, or fantastic, but the interactions of the gods of the Whorl with the humans gets at one of those central philosophical and technological questions, as does Silk's enlightenment (which happens on page one, so I'm not giving anything away) among other things.

So if anyone here happens to be a producer, or knows one, get the first book of either series into their hands. They'll get the rest on their own. And hurry up, please--Gene's getting up there in age and you'll want his help.

* though of course there is Urth of the New Sun...