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marksc

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Also, think of how deleterious the abolition of local time would have on communication. Right now I can say something like "I received an urgent call at 3am" and you know immediately what that means. But if I said "I received an urgent call at 17:00Z", a lot of the meaning is lost. You'd have to know where I live, i.e. what my local time zone is, and then do some quick mental math to determine what actual time of day 17:00Z means for me. With local time, that calculation is already done for you! Local time is just too damn useful of a concept. It really truly is better than global time for most uses. Global time is really only useful for scheduling global meetings and computer stuff.

[Well], think of how deleterious the abolition of [global] time would have on communication. Right now I can say something like "I received an urgent call at [17:00Z]" and you know immediately what that means [in reference to everything else happening in the world]. But if I said "I received an urgent call at [3am]", a lot of the meaning is lost. You'd have to know where I live, i.e. what my local time zone is, [where the caller is] and then do some [potentially complicated] math to determine what actual time 3am means. With [global] time, that calculation is already done for you! [Global] time is just too damn useful of a concept. It really truly is better than [local] time for most uses. [Local] time is really only useful for scheduling [local] meetings and [in-person] stuff.

Wired communication at VRAM speeds on a single low (production) cost chip?! This is going to be game changing for AI and super-computing. Wow.

At these speeds clustering and distributed computing will be a thing of the past in supercomputing.

The supercomputer of next year may functionally be an enormous symmetric multiprocessor bottle-necked only by physical space and power.

The same code could be run on a laptop or supercomputer without having to optimize it. This will make development of large scale applications way more accessible.

It actually doesn't make sense. A circle with a 1D point missing from its edge is the same as a sphere with a 2D hole in it. Both have material connected "around" it in another dimension. For a sphere the connection wraps around the hole and for a circle the connection wraps around the point (comprising the entirety of the circle's edge).

DNA is not a 3D molecule. DNA is a molecule which can be represented as 3D. It can just as easily be represented with one or even two fewer dimensions without losing any information.

By the holographic principle, there may be no such thing as "3D" except as a concept for conscious minds to make sense of reality.

For #3 see 'Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where, and Why?'[1] The difference between being thing-oriented and people-oriented is larger than the things we think of as obvious gender differences like physical aggressiveness or attitudes toward casual sex.

"For the people–things dimension of interests, the results in Table 1 are clear, strong, and unambiguous. Men tend to be much more thing-oriented and much less people-oriented than women (mean d = 1.18, a ‘very large’ difference, according to Hyde (2005) verbal designations"

[1] http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

This is like saying the average human body contains twenty to thirty pounds of fat so you should eat 10,000 times more fat than sugar.

You should eat substantially more fat than sugar, yes. But if you don't your body turns excess Sugar into fat.

Their "reasoned" arguments come from their own sensory experience directly and they are aware of that.

Do you think a deaf, blind person, with no feeling, and no awareness of their own body would grow up to be able to make reasoned arguments? Of course not. Why not? Because they had no sense experience.

Good empiricists go further and acknowledge that their reasoning is only as good as their sensory organs, including and especially their brain with all of its cognitive quirks.

A good empiricist will acknowledge, for example, that "healthy" "normal" human minds are terrible at solving certain moral problems while "unhealthy" "psychopathic" minds are demonstrably better. This flies in the face of the rationalist argument that healthy humans are fundamentally rational creatures.

most empiricists believe that mathematicians have knowledge not based on sense experience.

Even the knowledge that 1+1=2 comes from sensing objects in the world. If you'd never seen more than 1 thing ever you would have no sense experience to base your conceptual framework of addition on.

All knowledge -mathematical or otherwise- can be traced back to sense experience. Your ability to reason mathematically comes from your experience of the world and from your experience of your own thoughts. Intuition is fundamentally a sensory experience.

There are no "pure observations". There are only observations as understood and analyzed by reason.

There is no measure of the accuracy of knowledge about what correct "reasoning" is without empirical observation of minds and their physical makeup (e.g. psychology, neuroscience). How do you know you or the whole of humanity isn't mentally "color-blind," so to speak, without empiricism? You can't.

Rationalism pits reason against empiricism. Empiricism says that observation is necessary to build a firm foundation of reason.

They're expensive (beyond a little bit of included data usage) and high-latency. How's SpaceX going to change that?

Very many lower cost lower orbit satellites.

The plan is to double the amount of active satellites in orbit (4425 new satellites) in the next few years, resulting in half of all satellites being SpaceX internet satellites that cost an order of magnitude less than current satellites.

So pessimistic.

We don't need to know how brains work to have useful interactions with them, even pulling out pictures and words from neural activity.

That sensor breakthrough has already happened- and no dangerous intermediate step was necessary. opnwatr can make 8 million 100micron wide scans 120 times per second with what is basically a slightly modified version of cheap commodity/consumer hardware (using IR LEDs).[1] fMRI is slower and lower resolution and can still be used to extract images from brains in real-time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llL62bRsMIs

surely that doesn't make it invisible?

It makes it perfectly visible, to the person who receives your email. After that only your attached resume is printed or passed on to other decision makers.

Putting your "cover letter" in body of an email is anywhere from bad to worse practice, depending on the initial recipient of your email (hiring manager vs low level recruiter).

Engineers are given answers and told to look for places to apply all the answers. Scientists are given answers and told to look for new questions that haven't been answered. These are fundamentally different approaches to life. The former, the engineering approach, I would not call "smart."

I don't think it is a coincidence that engineering students are both far religious than science students, with the exception of software engineers. Last I checked something like 90% of structural engineering students were religious, while only like 10% of physics students were. ISIS claims to have all the answers. Liberal/progressive ideologies readily admit to a world without solid answers. The former appeals to the engineering mindset far more than the latter.

Input is not an approval rating, not even close. That is what Heartbeat is for.

Mozilla Heartbeat is constantly asking for ratings from a random sample of Firefox users.

The Heartbeat rating for Firefox Desktop is currently about 4.3/5- or 86%.

P.s. Despite the amount of negative feedback in Input, the portion of feedback which is positive is about twice what it was in May.

Mark from Mozilla here.

To be clear, by "blocked" Flash we really mean enforced click-to-activate. User choice is always a #1 priority at Mozilla.

We regularly block vulnerable plugins. What made this block different was that we did it before Adobe made an update available. Now that Adobe has released an update, it is no longer true that every version of Flash Player is blocked in Firefox.

However, we're glad to see the conversation this has sparked. Personally I align with Alex Stamos regarding Flash, in the thinking that a formal EOL would be great.

I'd also like to use this space to make a shameless plug for Shumway, a project set on building a faithful an efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code assistance. Ending Flash doesn't need to mean an end for Flash media. http://www.areweflashyet.com/shumway/

Edit: typo

The Agency 11 years ago

I did not know that about the BBG. That is quite interesting.

I would have to agree that the level of media manipulation done by Russia and China is far beyond that done by the US. I think that's pretty clear. Frankly, I don't think any of it is "OK."

But third-world propaganda doesn't excuse first-world media manipulation either. Or maybe it does. I think it's fair to say that we're squarely in the realm of opinion here.

The Agency 11 years ago

That's illegal in the US

WAS illegal in the US.*

Legalized with the enactment of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012. The reform effectively nullifies the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which was amended in 1985 specifically to prohibit U.S. organizations from using information "to influence public opinion in the United States."[1]

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/us-domestic-propaganda-offici...

The fastest growing tech startup in the Midwest in 2013 and 2014 was and is in A2 (Duo Security). We have multiple Google Ventures, True Ventures, Resonant Venture, etc. startups. We have the Tech Brewery, A2 New Tech, SPARK, Tech Arb, etc.

Barracuda Networks was started here. Google's Michigan office is here. One of the top 5 public universities in the world is all around us.

I can't imagine why anyone on HN would drive from Ann Arbor to Detroit for work when there are much better and higher paying prospects right here in A2.