jlgray

Who among us hasn't suddenly, in the middle of some mundane task, broken down and started spewing pages of surreal, stream-of-consciousness nonsense?

This is the thing for me. If your company has a fully-stocked kitchen, quality chairs, monitors, adjustable desk, and noise cancelling headphones, it might be a comparable to a good home office setup in terms of comfort. What kills me though is commuting. All told, I spend 3-4 extra hours on days I go to the office, and that time comes out of my free time, effectively turning a 40 hour job into a 60 hour job.

An under-represented argument for a carbon tax is the fact that it would encourage companies to innovate, both with respect to efficiency as well as using renewable energy.

I predict that industries in countries that adopt a carbon tax earlier will end up with a competitive advantage.

I don't think the comparison to cigarette taxes is completely fair. Cigarettes are relatively inelastic w.r.t. price as they are addictive, and have no real competing product.

Electricity and power generated from carbon emitting sources on the other hand have a much more elastic demand curve. E.g. if your energy bill is cheaper with renewables, no one would choose to go with fossil fuels. Likewise with electric vehicles. If the cost of tanking up an EV is significantly lower than an internal combustion vehicle, people will switch for purely economic reasons.

You can look at the lack of a carbon tax as an incentive on fossil fuels which socializes the externalities.

Science and technology are generally agnostic to their usage, and will be used to both positive and negative ends whose magnitude is proportional to the power of the underlying technology.*

AI has the potential for massive positive effects as well as massive negative effects.

What saddens me is that we have systems and incentives in place which encourage governments and corporations to use powerful technologies to negative ends.

* Obviously there is room to quibble about the positive/negative balance of individual technologies, e.g. gunpowder, bio-weapons, etc., however I am sure a circumspect analysis could find positives even in things developed primarily to improve the efficiency of war.

I had a number theory professor who said there are a number of deceptively promising avenues of attack using simpler methods than Wiles, but that end up being dead ends. He said mathematicians are now mostly of the opinion that Fermat was probably onto one of these.

I'm ever so slightly optimistic in this regard. As soon as we see a few GDPR-related penalties assessed, the risk-reward calculation will change drastically.

According to their 2017 annual report [1], Marriot had $22.9bn in worldwide revenue. A 4% penalty on that would be $900M.

[1] https://marriott.gcs-web.com/static-files/057a8e1a-a5c5-4c20...

$50bn/year would be more revenue than fb had in 2017, though of course the majority of their 2.23bn monthly users would disappear if asked for $.01/mo.

It is an interesting thought experiment, though, to consider what facebook would look like if its revenue was derived from convincing users that it was worth a monthly subscription.

Looks like a summer school program at University of Waterloo:

"The Quantum Cryptography School for Young Students (QCSYS) is a unique, eight-day enrichment program for students hosted by the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo. QCSYS will run August 10-17, 2018 with students arriving August 9 and departing August 18.

The school offers an interesting blend of lectures, hands-on experiments and group work focused on quantum cryptography"

https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/program...

I think an important aspect not mentioned in this article is the environment in which the computer and internet wunderkind founders got their starts.

You had a perfect storm of brand new, super powerful tools (the internet providing dirt-cheap distribution, cheap computation, beginner friendly programming languages -- php for facebook, java and python for google, etc.). There was so much low-hanging fruit with relatively little competition.

A very similar thing happened in physics in the early 20th century, and led to the same notion that genius is a fleeting trait concentrated in the young. To quote this BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899

It was like discovering a new toolkit which could quickly yield discoveries. Or, less charitably, as one scientist said: "mediocre physicists could discover great physics".

Zoning requirements and permits for operating hotels are not unreasonable.

Some people rent out a spare room now and again for extra cash, and some people have multiple properties that are occupied exclusively by Airbnb renters, essentially running an unlicensed hotel.

The latter can be extremely obnoxious if its your upstairs neighbor, not to mention the effects that being discovered by Airbnb real estate investors can have on a town or neighborhood.

I always feel like the right solution would be to have a significantly shorter copyright duration, but make it extendable for a large and increasing annual fee.

I don't care if Disney gets to keep the rights to Mickey Mouse. The real problem is all the other stuff that gets swept along in the bargain.

Since they're talking about small publishers having trouble keeping up with google SEO updates, is there a reasonable way to actually break up google search?

I used MiniZinc on the capacitated vehicle routing problem in a combinatorial optimization project course a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed it.

The sweet spot for MiniZinc is in investigating a problem and prototyping a solution. I would say it takes 10-20 hours to get a workable understanding of the language and paradigm, plus or minus your previous experience.

However, MiniZinc is built on backtracking, which scales poorly to real world instances of np-hard problems.

Some of that has a "you get what you pay for" component.

My parents have a Frigidaire Flair double oven from the early 1960s. The thing is amazing, and still works perfectly. I think it cost something like $400 originally, which would be north of $3000 today, however in 1963 the median income was $6200 [1], so that would be closer to $4000 for the median person of today.

For that kind of money, you could definitely get some nicer appliances today. Although the switch from simple analog to complex digital electronics probably puts a more modest ceiling on the lifespan of anything made today.

On the other hand, there is also something to be said for being able to have an oven without taking out a loan!

1. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-043.pdf

Interesting that you bring up autonomy and the military. I wonder if this has anything to do with the US naval piloting incidents of late. Previous HN commentary suggested that the Navy has become a highly bureaucratic organization where all decision making and responsibility are deferred up the command chain as far as possible.

What do we imagine will happen when everybody thinks of themselves as being victimised?

On an individual level, self-pity, even when justified, is not very helpful, and though the two are not exactly the same, one leads to the other pretty easily.

Someone benefits, but it is not "we"

Libertarians did this in New Hampshire:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project

As you said, this is slowly happening to me. I love being able to prototype systems in languages like python and matlab, but at the same time it feels like building on sand, especially when other developers get involved.

Recently while writing some matlab found a great example of the sort of trouble a decent type checking system will save you. The predict method takes a machine learning model, and applies it to some data. The output however, is up to the model, and not all models return the same data type (e.g. column vector of doubles, or cell array of strings), making it a pain in the butt to do any abstraction over models.

I am excited for languages like lbstanza that let you have your cake and eat it too.

You would think that, but I did study abroad years ago in japan, and some guys got deported for shoplifting. Another guy I knew there also had a very liberal attitude toward property ownership (as in, if it wasn't locked up, the original owners must not care about it), but never got caught.

As T-A suggested, arXiv is a great source, especially with the frustration over the profiteering of the publishing industry, although you always have to be aware that arXiv papers are not peer-reviewed.

There is also http://gitxiv.com/, which includes source code.

If you are at a university or a company with deep pockets, you can also use http://dl.acm.org/ or http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp.

I've also heard of certain hubs of science on the internet, but I wouldn't know anything about that.

This is downright friendly. TL;DR: Here are basic norms, laws, and some common scams, please be aware.

If you have mastered the basics (e.g. Norvig's AIMA, Hastie and Tibshirani's Elements of Statistical Learning, Koller's PGM), then I would suggest that the only place to really get a view of the state of the art is by reading papers.

In general, scientific books are an overview of a field, which can only occur with sufficient time for hindsight and synthesis. Even a thousand page book such as Koller's PGM will be littered with references and suggestions of papers to read for a deeper understanding.

One partial exception might be the Deep Learning book by Goodfellow and Bengio, which was made public only a month or so ago. Even this, however, is just an overview. http://www.deeplearningbook.org/

There's been a lot of research lately on the connection between lead, brain impairment, and violence.

One quick example, claiming cities in the 1920s that switched to lead pipes saw ~25% increase in homicides vs those that didn't. http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jfeigenbaum/files/feigenbau...

I agree completely about learning math faster, or maybe easier. My thinking has been that now we have a much better scaffold to construct knowledge on. Calculus, linear algebra, proofs, thinking in arbitrary numbers of dimensions, etc. are all much more ingrained than they were in undergrad, and as a result you don't have to spend as much effort on the details.

I wish I could say I didn't forget things when I was was in university, but I still remember the frustration of coming back from summer vacation and having forgotten half of what we learned last semester.

To quote wikipedia's article on statistics: Statistics is the study of the collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data.

Isn't that more or less what human brains do?

A neural network is just a curve fitting algorithm optimized to fit a bunch of data, that is, a statistical method. NNs are, to the best of my knowledge, a fairly good analogy for what the physical computation process of the brain.

NNs are also very easy to fool. Mislabel the humans in your robot training data as 'kill', and your network will make bad decisions. Garbage in, garbage out.

If you make a probabilistic model and attach a very high confidence to the things that spirits tell little girls down by the river, then sometimes your model will suggest some terrible ideas. Humans are also notoriously bad at sampling data, but that doesn't mean it isn't what they're doing.

Your edit raises a good question, though! I can't say I have a good answer, but would be interested to hear a good idea for such an experiment.

I want to use the phenomenon the inner monologue and the act of convincing oneself of something as a counter example, but on the other hand, language is very easily generated by statistical methods, and the brain apparently will make decisions and then come up with justifications afterward. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/04/27/095679761664...

To quote wikipedia: Germany has several styles of timber framing, but probably the greatest number of half-timbered buildings in the world are to be found in Germany and in Alsace (France) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_framing#German_tradition...)

Not log cabins, but wood framed "Fachwerk" houses are everywhere in Germany, or at least Bavaria.

Authors in Fitzgerald's time made their money off of short stories. He was apparently making $4,000 per story.

http://www.people.vcu.edu/~bmangum/fitzstories.html

I've also heard that all the 19th century novels were so long because originally they were serialized, and the author was basically paid per chapter.

Step 1: Build totally awesome Google reader replacement. Step 2: ???? Step 3: Get acquired by Google.