jakobe

TLDR: Players are more likely to pick the move that just won.

To exploit that, the best strategy would probably be to always pick the move that wasn't played. Should give you an edge until your opponent notices your pattern :)

Apple never showed the path prominently in the first place. Since System 7 you can Cmd-Click the title bar to show a menu with the path, and you can use Cmd-I to show the path in the Info panel.

Not including a path bar by default doesn't mean they "try to hide the information", it's just a different UI design.

No one said love was without risks!

Joking aside, I think you are misunderstanding me.

I don't suggest anybody should be fired for asking someone for a date. I'm saying that company policy can give you an easy way to say "no" to a date: "Sorry, I don't want to jeopardize my career, you know company policy.". Ideally, the person asking you out will accept your rejection, and there's no need to fire anyone.

I assume it's about setting expectations. If you meet your true love at work, company policy isn't going to stop you.

But company policy might give you an easy way out when someone is hitting on you (and you aren't interested), without hurt feelings.

Also, this isn't just about men hitting on women; it also goes the other way.

But information can not be transferred as we please. I believe that our consciousness arises from the information stored in the material structure of our brain. But there is no reason to believe we have any way of extracting or transferring this information to another place.

If you assume this step is a "small leap" you are entering the realm of science fiction. And that's okay, I greatly enjoy reading science fiction. But if you tell people that this might actually become reality in the future, they will rightfully be skeptical.

The argument with the trash I was trying to make was that we don't need magic to make things that are beyond our understanding. I do believe that our conscious derives from the physical structure of our brain, but that doesn't mean it is possible to "upload" it.

Yes, part of the impossibility stems from the impossibility of reading a brain. Non-destructive measurements aren't possible because the amount of energy required to scan the tiny structures in the brain would destroy it. Destructive measurements would destroy the brain while we read it, and we can only read a subset of the information before the whole brain is destroyed.

But even if it was possible to scan a brain, I think you are underestimating the task of creating an artificial brain. Storage is the least of our troubles. To actually simulate the neural net, each of these two thousand hard drives must be connected to every other one, requiring millions of interconnects, and then you need millions of processors, and every simulation step touches every byte of every hard drive. This is so many orders of magnitude beyond what we can do now that I doubt it is ever possible.

I think the only feasible way of uploading a brain will be to create a program that can convince everyone that the uploaded person is actually living inside the computer, similar to the Turing test. You'd configure the program by telling it anecdotes from your life and taking psychological tests, rather than "scan your brain". However, I consider even this variant unlikely, because it would basically require something similar to an AI.

your business failed because nobody signed up

Why? Almost all websites require email confirmation; sending someone a login-URL via email actually has less friction because the password-choosing step is removed!

it's perfectly possible to store passwords in a secure format

But it's very hard to do so. Even if you use scrypt, it is very hard to make sure your whole system is actually secure against password leakage.

The simple truth is that letting your users choose their own passwords is a liability; and I've decided to avoid this liability.

The biggest issue here is that users are allowed to pick their own passwords in the first place. Sure, you can require them to use passwords with a capital letter and with a number and with a punctuation character, but that will just make them pick "Password1."

Better: Use one time passwords sent via SMS. Or send a one-time-login URL via email.

If you do have to use a password, just generate a 10 digit numeric code. Sure, some of your customers might complain, but at least you aren't responsible for disclosing people's ebay password when your site gets hacked.

relies on the assumption that there is something special about the mechanisms behind the human brain's function

Imagine someone spilled the contents of a large trash in a pile on the floor. Now it is your task to create an exact replica of this pile.

There was absolutely nothing special going on when that pile of trash was generated, and yet it is impossible to replicate.

Sure, you can create similar piles of trash by spilling other trash cans on the floor, or you can carefully arrange banana peels an half-filled soda cans to create a pile that looks similar from the surface. But generate an exact copy? No way.

It doesn't take much of a leap...

Do you have any clue about the current state of neuroscientific research? Scientists are struggling to understand a single neuron, there are no models that reliably predict networks of more than two neurons, and the current state of the art is recording partial signals from a few dozen neurons.

"Brain upload" is just the modern day version of the philosophers' stone. As more knowledge about the human brain will be taught in schools, and the current state of the art will become public knowledge, people will look back at the idea of "brain uploads" just like we look back on the idea of "turn lead into gold".

Here, I fixed the graphs for you: http://imgur.com/xi2nhgx

If it's just about target audience, then I wonder why all these companies seem to target detergents / toothpaste / toilet paper exclusively to 25 year olds...

Losening your grip just as the axe hits the wood also works for normal axes. Makes chopping a lot easier on the wrist.

I find it odd that the only moral issue people seem to find with procedures like this is whether it is okay to kill an egg cell, or an early stage embryo.

These egg cells don't grow on trees. They must be harvested from human beings. Egg cell harvesting is a complex process, requiring the donors (young women) to take experimental drugs with possibly harmful long term sideeffects.

If we are using human egg cells for experiments, or at some point in the future, for curing old people, aren't we exploiting the young woman we take those egg cells from?

Mac OS X has something similar to this "Software HSM": the Keychain. You can put private keys in your keychain, and apps can use them for signing or encrypting, but they can't extract them. It's quite nicely implemented; when an app tries to access a key the first time, a dialog will pop up saying something like "Mail is trying to use key xyz for decryption. Do you want to allow?".

Of course, this requires using Apple's APIs, which are poorly documented and a pain in the neck even compared to OpenSSL. It's also not suitable for servers.

I don't like how every single post on unicornfree tells you that the conventional wisdom is wrong, and to learn the truth you have to sign up for their online seminar.

Reducing the number of includes in the header is very much not premature optimisation. On a phone with poor connectivity, a single blocking Javascript in the header might cause a one second delay (or longer).

The problem with reset.css is that people often use reset files made by other people without understanding what they do. For example, lot's of people use https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css, without realising that it will turn off automatic text size adjustment on the iPhone. That's fine if you actually test on the iPhone and make a mobile specific stylesheet, but if you don't, this will make the experience worse for iPhone users.

So if you are going to use a reset.css file, you should do some research. Check on google what other people are writing about reset.css files, read comparisons of different reset.css files, test different reset.css files on different browsers, etc. But then you've wasted an afternoon NOT BUILDING YOUR PRODUCT.

If you just accept that your website is going to look slightly different in different browsers, you will realise that you don't need a reset.css file, and you will save a lot of time.

In my experience you don't need to know much about tax laws to run a small business. Find a cheap accountant* , and he'll tell you everything you need to know about taxes in two hours.

* When you are just starting out, it makes a difference if you pay someone 300€ a year to do your taxes, or if you have to pay 1000€. Stay away from the big companies. They will charge you for every phone call. Ask other small business owners for references.

It's also odd that the patients had to pay for the experimental surgery. This doesn't sound like a serious clinical trial, it sounds like a hack performed by some back-alley doc in a dystopic science fiction story...

I'd be happy if my GPS just stopped sending me on detours through residential areas...

Shader is a good name, because it implies what one of the main purposes of the code is: to apply lighting (shading) to the stuff.

How do you shade a vertex? Read about Gouraud shading. The idea is to do the expensive lighting calculation only at the vertices, and interpolate in-between. The "vertex shader" would calculate the shading at the vertices.

Obviously, you can use a vertex shader to do things other than shading, but "shader" is just a name, not a definition of all things this program can do.

This is probably more important towards the end of your undergraduate studies.

At least in Austria it's quite common to receive a stipend for your masters' thesis (in science/engineering). It's not always enough to fully cover living expenses, but it sure helps a lot (eg. I got 400€ a month while working on my master's thesis).

After that, PhD positions are almost all paid normal wages.

Why is it out of your reach? Because they are too expensive?

If you want to study at a better college, look for professors in your field, find someone that does something interesting, and ask them if they will take you as a student. If you are good, some institutions will actually pay you for studying there.

This is easiest if you already have at least a bachelors degree, and want to go to grad school. At least in Europe, most grad schools pay PhD students (in science/engineering), and if you are smart, it's not that hard to get accepted.

One compelling use case I've heard for schemas is versioning.

Say you want to upgrade a stored function in your database. You need to make sure that both the new and the old version of the function are available until all application code that uses the stored procedure has been updated.

Without schemas, you'd have to add a version identifier to each function, like get_customer_5(), get_customer_6() etc.

With schemas, you can just put different versions of the functions into different schemas, and just change the search_path in your application code to use functions from the new schema. When all application code has been updated, you can drop the old schema.

and "Kurzweil" means "amusedness" (as opposed to "Langeweile", which means "boredness")

That also means the the brain could be copied

Unfortunately, no, it doesn't, because there is no way we can "read" a brain. "Reading" tiny parts of a brain is possible, but requires destruction of a lot of other parts.

We have billions of neurons, and each neuron has connections to thousands of other neurons, and all of that is mashed together in a lump of gray mass.

Scientists today can map the structure of a handful of neurons in a single brain. A typical procedure might involve perfusing the organism with a chemical that plastifies the brain, and then cutting slices out of the brain.

Besides the fact that these mappings are just tiny 2D recordings of a tiny sliver of the full 3D brain, they are not precise enough to actually simulate the neurons. The connections between Neurons, the synapses, are so tiny that you need extremely complicated microscopes to see them, and you have to be fast because the light from the microscope actually destroys what you are looking at...

And, of course, the mice these brains come from will have some genetic modification that makes their cells phosporescent so you can see parts of them better.

30 percent of all fatal accidents are "speed related"

Almost all accidents are "speed related". Very few accidents happen with cars standing still.

Also, I couldn't select any text to copy and paste.

Seems to be a Safari bug. I had the same thing, after loading the website I couldn't even select text on HN anymore. Restarting Safari fixed it.

That is a pretty bold statement. Pretty much all fatal accidents I've heard about involved speeding in some way. Now, anecdotes aren't reliable, so do you have some numbers to back up your claim?