innino

What is Bitcoin's deeper significance? I don't know much, but here are some sketches.

1) Bitcoin has the potential to destroy the tools of monetary policy. 2) Bitcoin has the potential to hide taxable income from governments. 3) Governments with dwindling tax bases may react by printing traditional currency, hastening the flight to Bitcoin in a vicious cycle. 4) Traditional currencies may collapse as people rush to convert them into Bitcoin. 5) Unable to tax coercively, traditional governments may collapse.

What might replace them? Toll roads and kickstarter philanthropy in Randian democracies?

(Is this in the ballpark for Bitcoin's potential impact or not?)

He thinks Silicon Valley is cool AND made a geeky reference to a cult film? BURN HIM!!

Christ, the problems of a princess. Sell the Pro and buy the XPS.

Yeesh, what sensationalist garbage.

That's what I always think when I read about these sorts of problems in Japan and Korea. There's a tremendous amount of pressure generated by the overwhelming influence of the big companies, and the shame felt by those who aren't given validation in this system must be acute (or at least it sounds like that for Korea, I don't know as much about Japan.)

Anyway the most common reaction may be to accept the judgement that you feel has been passed on you - that you are worthless - but at some point someone has to come along who refuses to accept that, and realises that the whole system is founded on narrow-minded bullshit. Then that person can build a challenger to the chaebol - one fueled by fresh thinking and real inspiration.

I mean look at LG and Samsung. Where's the passion and love in their products? Raw technical competence and business acumen might lead to limited success, but these companies seem completely soulless. At the end of the day, the world will never love a Samsung like they do an Apple. No matter how big they get, they'll never be able to make it to the next stage, where they actually inspire people and have devoted, passionate fans. So the space for alternative approaches within Korean culture seems (from an outside perspective) huge, even if the first steps are going to be very hard.

The fair policy is to take the most competent candidates, regardless of gender.

I like what Apple is doing, but I hope Microsoft can build a viable competitor ecosystem. I do think Apple is good at beautiful, approachable products, but I think they make so many sacrifices in terms of power and usability to achieve it that we need a strong alternative from Microsoft.

The iPad Air looks amazing for example, but compared to the OS-level features offered by tablet Windows 8.1, I think it's lacking.

I'm pretty sure it's much simpler; HN is anti-everything.

The author's been reviewing OS X like this since 10.0. Probably involved with Apple's OSes since even further back. It's clearly become something dearer to him than a child.

I wouldn't describe Microsoft or Nokia's tablets as high-volume, low-margin...

Looks lovely. I would be really interested to own one of these if I had the money to buy surplus devices at the moment. Trying to see how using it solely vs an iPad would be interesting, 8.1 is clearly a more capable mobile OS but I wonder whether the iPad's superior app store would clinch it regardless. Versus an Android tablet would also be interesting.

my impression of nexus devices is that you are tied to the package of google services. is this so, or can a nexus-user break free from google's domain and enjoy the benefits of a quality low-cost device without being beholden to the google ecosystem?

Thanks for that. I do hope you're right. The prospect of eternal isolation is not a pretty one.

That photo of the Hubble Deep Field really messes with me... in fact any photo like that. You have to realise: somewhere out there, in fact, most likely, many, many places out there, are planets where everything we have and will experience has already happened. Whatever end-point human evolution is driving towards (massive environmental degradation, simulacrum-building, rise of a superhuman elite, space-travel, true self-knowledge, total mastery over the physical world, whatever) - its already happened. Over and over again. By people/things we will never meet and never know about.

Feels very disheartening.

News guys getting desperate. How many times can you run the story "finely-calibrated update to world's most popular phone still insanely popular"?

Maybe now that the early phases of globalisation have settled down and all the frontiers have dried up, the global culture of movement has died down. It's a lot harder to think of moving as a possibility, let alone a good possibility, when it isn't part of the zeitgeist. People used to do it a lot in the 1800s especially, and it was something you could get swept along in - and there was an excitement of going to a fresh place where most people were new as well, economic opportunities and social relations were still up in the air.

Now you can trade a grind in one settled area for a slightly more profitable grind in another. With the tradeoff of losing contact with your whole social milieu and having to start a lot of things from scratch in the new place, while you're surrounded by people who have a lot more than you because they've been grinding in that place for years.

Not appealing, so it's no surprise that it's mainly the highly-educated who can a) seek high value economic opportunities and b) are guaranteed a welcoming social reception from university or work colleagues :)

People like us should be more generous about the incentives governing the lives of the new post-mobility local cultures.

High-tech ergonomic chair

Macbook Pro on a flat desk - no mouse, no external keyboard, no keyboard tray, no eye-level monitor.

Apple approaches similar crisis, strangely soon. I predict the company also won't respond fast enough to Google and the shift from touch to touchless computing. CEO Tim Cook focuses too much on preserving revenues streams, rather than disrupt them as predecessor Steve Jobs risked so many times.

Stuff like this makes me think this guy is a jackass. Steve Jobs never "disrupted an established revenue stream" - in 1999 he started with nothing, and built everything from scratch. He died with the company in full throttle, and that's that. Never had the need or the chance to do what this author is suggesting.

Furthermore, how exactly can you fault Apple/Cook's performance post-2011? Their releases have all been solid improvements which have sold like hotcakes. Their products still command global consumer consciousness like no other brand. The iPhone and iPad stand as the centre of gravity of the mobile market, and the confusion and noise of the myriad products churned out by Apple's ertswhile competition only further cements their stature. Other than a few small exceptions (screen size in particular), they still control the focus of consumer desire - the average consumer only knows and cares about a particular feature once Apple has pointed to it. Watch what happens post-5s - if other phone manufacturers release a spree of devices with novel unlocking mechanisms, you can guess why.

Everything Apple has done has been profitable and popular. They're playing from a position of incredible strength, so why should they rush out and reinvent the wheel? They have time, their current position is stable, and it would only advantage competitors to reveal their next plans before Apple is ready or it is even necessary to do so.

I think the mistake people make here is in confusing what happened to Microsoft with what might hypothetically happen to Apple. But Apple isn't Microsoft. There's no indication whatsoever that Apple is taking their current strength for granted - moves like the new campus suggest a firm focus on and faith in a very long-term future. The only people who are dissatisfied with Apple's performance are impatient, ignorant tech commentators, who seem to depend for their sense of self-worth on a deluge of new gadgets to critique. It's a serious cognitive failure to imagine that just because Apple overturned incumbents, Apple must be equally vulnerable to being overturned, as if the marketplace just cycles through the same rough dynamic with little to no variation. Apple blew the competition out of the water because it was better, and in so doing it set a new bar for product and ecosystem execution that until now no other device manufacturer could equal - a bar which it has only maintained and even raised.

We're only now starting to see the market rebalance with Google and Amazon emerging as real competitors, with Microsoft a big question mark about when and if they will ever rise to the occasion. But the ball is thoroughly in the competition's court, so right now Apple can watch, analyse, and plot its next move. We don't have even close to enough data to evaluate Apple's "performance" yet because we haven't seen it.

Never heard of special stenographic keyboards or typing techniques before.

"Senator Whitehouse shed some optimism with the audience"

Sorry but the savvier religious strategists do this stuff all the time: a friendly message about how the medieval Church "wasn't all that bad," a little chuckle about how modern science isn't as epistemologically pure as it wants to be - the basic message is hey, we're not all that different after all...

It's not that I think they have any real chance of success with these tactics, but I do find this behaviour insulting. No good historian thinks such simplistic nonsense about the Galilean episode. Any good historian is well aware of the progressive simplification of the past. It's not that these specific points aren't all true, it's way they're used, the subtle insinuations, that I find slimy.

As for Feyeraband, well, again he's a favourite of the religious pundits - doesn't matter that none of his critiques of science really had an impact - again the suggestion is that hey, knowledge is limited, so all these scientists who like to think they're purveying ultimate truth are so silly, and maybe hey this religious stuff isn't all bad? Again it's insulting - any good scientist is highly aware of the limits of reliable knowledge - and anyway, just because there are some limits on the reliability of knowledge, doesn't mean we can't at least try and distinguish between more and less reliable knowledge. The religious pundits don't want us to do so, of course, they would rather that we get shocked over the hubris of prideful scientists, and walk around "knowing" that everything is relative, nothing is really knowable... Helps them out.

This is all textbook religious propaganda to me, the more so because it's so benignly packaged.

Trojan horse for rehabilitating religion.

I'm sorry if I lost my temper, I've tried to understand your position here and respond calmly and reasonably to you but clearly I've failed.

No, I don't see your point at all. You don't seem to have any point - just anger and empty cynicism. In fact, to me you seem to embody everything bad that I was trying to describe in my original post, so thanks for providing an excellent illustration of one of the worst styles of Hackernews participation.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree with you at all that smoke alarms are irrelevant or not relevant enough or whatever it is you seem to be trying to say here. I don't spend my life working on them but I've installed them for student tenants, thinking I was doing a great thing and maybe preventing them from killing themselves with an unattended cooking fire, and you know what, two months later when I went around every single one, every single flat I manage, had knocked their alarms down. Every single one. I wanted to slap the stupid fucks, but then I realised that hey, most people really are kinda lazy and stupid and you will get nowhere getting angry over that fact, you have to accept that and adapt as best you can.

At the time I imagined something very similar to Nest - an alarm over your oven which turns it off if it detects sudden heat. An alarm which sends me, the property manager, a text if it goes off. An alarm that can distinguish too between "a little smoke" and "a shitload of smoke and heat." I imagined that, and I talked to the local fire service, and they laughed and shrugged and said it'd be great but who's gunna do that.

And now guess what, here's a company that's actually made and prepping to sell something even better than what I thought about. It's a beautiful looking object, for starters. It talks to you in intelligent language - "there's carbon monoxide in the living room". It distinguishes between potentially dangerous and critically dangerous situations. It can send push notifications to your phone when something goes wrong or when batteries are about to go out. It can be silenced with an elegant hand gesture. And it gets better: it lights up a room when it sees you walking through it at night. It can turn off your furnace if CO levels rise, if its connected to Nest's Thermostat. And it will help your Thermostat get smarter about power usage by detecting your activity.

And this is just a version one product. Keep in mind - the name is "Protect", not "Smoke Detector." What's to stop them making v2 smarter, and maybe it can sense when people in a house become panicked and call emergency services? Maybe it detects unusual activity when burglars enter? Whatever - use your imagination - the possibilities are huge. And don't forget, this is only the second product that Nest has produced. And already with two they've made them better together. This is the Internet of Things man. It's happening, and it's going to be massive.

If you're not seeing the breakthrough yet, then I just don't know what to say to you. What, are you angry because they made such a good product? Because they're selling it for a fraction of what it's worth? Because they're smarter than any of the unimaginative companies making crappy smoke alarms we had to put up with up until today? Are you angry because it's "not enough"? Because the whole world's not going to run out and buy this one product tomorrow, and so therefore for some weird reasons we shouldn't bothered being excited about it, because obviously it's gunna go nowhere?

Get over yourself man. The world is about to explode with companies like Nest - and new products and opportunities will emerge to improve every single facet of our life. And people like you are going to look like the worst kind of assholes when the transformation becomes obvious. If the false binary choice you seem to offer is between a chorus of blind praise and your brand of negative bullshit, thanks but no thanks, I'd rather take the former.

I'm sorry that you found my writing so objectionable.

I wasn't, for the record, advocate that life should be easy in the sense that you seem to be thinking I mean it. Maybe we should distinguish between hard as in unnecessarily complicated and poorly designed, and hard as in challenging. I'm teaching myself how computers work at the moment, I really enjoy it. That's challenging, and I like challenging things. Current smoke alarm design, on the other hand, is not challenging in an enjoyable way. They're poorly designed and annoying, and that's a type of hard that I think anyone really likes.

Hi there, thanks for doing due diligence and checking out my record. But I don't accept that my criticism of Microsoft's business moves are hypocritical. It would have been hypocritical if my reaction to Surface was "pfft, just a glorified iPad, and who wants a stylus and a kickstand? ipad already has styli" and so on.

Instead my criticism was, boiled down, that I like a lot of what Microsoft is doing but I don't think they've addressed certain basic problems with their communication style and general corporate culture. I feel especially frustrated because I like so much of what Microsoft is doing and want them to succeed, I think the world will be a better place if they are genuinely competitive against Google, Apple and Amazon. I didn't hesitate to express that frustration but in my opinion frustration is far from narrow-minded dismissiveness.

I see my comments on that article as constructive. If I let my frustration override my sense of balance then I apologise.

Thank you, that's very kind of you :)

Sorry, I'm not an expert on nutrition. Soylent is just an idea I found very compelling.

Hi, thanks for the comment. I'm not trying to say people shouldn't critique other people's ideas. Constructive criticism is great, and HN is an absolutely incredible source for it.

I suppose I wanted to distinguish between an overwhelmingly negative, weakness-focussed attitude, and a more generous, restrained approach. Taking the time to restrain yourself and evaluate your initial reaction isn't always easy, especially in the fast-paced snap-response mindset that I think internet reading tends to put you in.

I was already aware of a lot of this, didn't mean to appear like I was doubting the claim - I mostly wanted to hear this stuff from a fresh mouth.