thelogos

It is not about how big the brain is. It is about the number of neurons, latency, signal reliability and number of connections.

Voltage-gated ion channels are non-deterministic. Meaning they don't always open (or not open) when they should. In order to stuff more neurons into the same volume of space, you have to shrink them. The problem is, those ion-channels become more and more unreliable as the size decreases. I would argue that they're already too unreliable in many humans.

Second problem, as the size of the axon and myelin sheath decrease, signal reliability and latency will suffer. Yes, the current can die out part-way to its destination. As the brain is less globally connected due to the sheer lack of space, poor signal reliability and increased latency, it will begin to favor local connections over global ones. In other words, specialization and usage of signal superhighways to compensate, just like a crowded city. The problem with a crowded city is, even with great public transport, many people never leave their neighborhoods.

So what to do about it? You can leave neurons the same size and make more room instead of trying to shrink them.

First problem with this, difficulty of childbirth due to skull size. Second, increased development time, it's already too long as it is. Third, latency and signal reliability will still suffer due to increased distance. Fourth, increased use of resource. You also need to support those neurons and that support system will eat up more and more space.

If you try to blow up the size of the axon and myelin sheath to fix the latency and reliability problems, it will eat up even more space. In other words, less room for neurons and you're back to square one. Another problem is, you need a bigger body to support that huge brain. More neurons will be dedicated to processing touch instead of higher-level abstract thoughts.

One last thing you can try is, decrease body size, increase brain volume slightly. The lower level of violence, abundance of food, modern healthcare (c-section) and longer lifespan (more time to mature) in modern human societies allow us to do this already. Dedicate more resource to higher levels of the brain associated with abstract thoughts, planning, reasoning, etc. Over-myelinate those areas to increase signal speed and reliability.

At the end of the day, there's not much more mother nature can do without deep structural and material change. Reengineer the myelin materials to increase their insulating property and decrease the size. Make the ion-channels more reliable so you can shrink neurons even more, although you still have to worry about quantum tunneling. Or better yet, do away with ions completely and switch to photonic computing.

Personally, the hardest part for me was keeping track of the size of everything. Coming from a higher level language, keeping track of the bits and bytes takes some getting used to. Working with arrays in C is much tougher especially when the compiler will compile almost anything you give it, and even a small mistake is catastrophic.

Before C, I was pampered and took everything for granted. Now I appreciated my life more after C and feel blessed every time my IDE gives me a warning.

We'll never really know. I would love to watch that movie though.

Also I didn't mean to use "nobody" as an insult. There's nothing wrong with being a nobody. The majority of people who lived were nobody but without them we would have nothing today.

I don't think this is true. It's narrative nice people tell themselves to find reason in a world that has none.

Yea, they suffer sometimes from poor planning and bad luck, but more often than not, they'll get away with it. And they won't feel bad about it, not even a little bit.

Just see how some people cheat on their spouse and then get a sweet settlement and fat paycheck every month by order of the court. Maybe those people are secretly miserable but I doubt it. It's actually pretty clever if you think about it and nature rewards cleverness.

It's not about American or European. Assuming these jerks are of higher rank, few people have the balls to stand up to their boss short of quitting. If they're lower or equal rank, then we don't have much to talk about unless the person is just a masochist that enjoys being a doormat.

In the West, we have some laws to deal with these problems.

In Japan and Korea, it wasn't that long ago that it was totally acceptable for your boss to smack you in the face. And you have to take it because no company will hire you if you quit.

It's still pretty bad in South Korea and China, just look up Korea Airline nut rage scandal.

The strong always oppress the weak. The weak gets angry and revolt, then they become the strong and proceed to oppress those weaker than them. This is the summary of human society and history.

Why can't you be nice but firm at the same time?

I know people who tries to be stubborn to cover up their lack of knowledge.

Usually, those people are smarter than the majority but not quite smart enough to realize that they're not always right.

One thing I don't understand is why Steve Jobs took credit for some of the stuff that Jony Ive did (assumming this is true). He's already the CEO, so unless he was worried about Ive usurping his position, there was absolutely no point.

People talk behind your back and the truth will usually get out. It's just miscalculated and ego-driven with absolutely no gain, monetarily and socially.

Then we have the story of him scamming Wozniak over his fair share of the Atari bonus. Maybe Jobs thought they wouldn't have a long friendship left?

Forget nice or jerk for a moment, but would you sell your friendship with a genius for that small amount of money?

At this point in his life, Jobs was a nobody and without Wozniak, he would probably still be a nobody.

Imagine if Wozniak found out earlier. Imagine if Ive went over to a rival company.

Some of these jerks do not realize how long people hold grudges and what an angry person is capable of. A lot of it is just childish like a bully beating up some small kid for no reason.

It's not smart or assertive, just short-sighted. Look at how many revolutions were started by hunger and poverty. Millions of Irish people starved to death during the Potato Famine and evicted from their land while their landlords happily dined on lobster soup. The Irish Republican Army is still running around today.

It's people like this that breeds problem in the world. Today most of us are not dying from hunger in the first world but just go back in time a little bit and you can watch these "jerks" dining on abalones, shark fins, caviar while riding inside their cozy palanquin.

They do leave some scrap left for the peasants though, enough to stay alive, work and pay tax. But they see it as theirs to begin with, so it's ok. All that generosity "trickling down".

Being a jerk pays, until it doesn't.

The part on being enforced by a central government, yes.

But my last line still applies to all money.

That's why when someone mentions the phrase "intrinsic value", they are not seeing the core truth of money.

It's interesting that money is misunderstood by so many people while representing the fundamental fabric of human society.

There is no intrinsic value to anything in this universe, not one that applies to every single organism.

For humans and most life forms, the closest thing that I can think of is food/water/(oxygen for aerobic organism), force of violence, pleasure and time.

Today, most money aren't even in physical circulation. Most of the gold in the world sits in some cold dark vault.

It's literally a video game and the funny thing is, we have enough food and water for everyone in the world already.

Money is a piece of token that represents favor or debt the world owns to you, or at least, anyone who takes money as payment.

This whole premise is enforced by central governments in modern times.

When we buy or sell goods, give away our time and labor for a salary, we're simply exchanging favors.

That's all money is, a system for keeping track of "favors" owed to any individual.

FileVault is completely transparent for me here. I can hardly notice any performance hit.

Now, if only Apple can fix the incessant graphics freezing...

What exactly does seizing a laptop even do anymore with the ubiquity of cloud storage?

Simply make an encrypted backup and wipe everything before traveling through airports and borders.

I'm job-hunting currently and most companies demand you know Objective-C with Swift as the icing. Many don't even care about Swift at all.

Many frameworks are written in Objective-C and have not been ported over.

I think you'll find it very frustrating if you only know Swift because there's just so much Objective-C out there and they're by no mean deprecated.

You should learn the basics of Objective-C at the very least.

Edit:One thing I forgot to mention, knowing just Swift means you have next to no experience with iOS comparatively speaking since Swift hasn't been around that long. There are companies that expect us to know pre-ARC Objective-C just to let you know where the bars are in this game.

Get your hormones level tested first, specifically testosterone.

I'm not sure what you're shooting for but self-help books don't really work. It's like teaching a blind man to see.

Being social is much more about what -not- to say than what to say.

Some guys have low testosterone and struggle with chronic anxiety. It's nerve-wracking talking to people in this state and you end up with a messed rhythm.

On the topic of talking to strangers, it's really important to not come off as having an agenda.

It's too easy to make the mistake of coming off as needy (creepy is the derogatory term that Millennials use) and it makes the other person feel awkward or "embarrassed to be talking to this weird person".

There's a constant stream of physical cues that has to be processed real-time during a conversation, it's not easy.

One mistake I see often is a person offering up too little or too much during an interaction.

Someone offers a few words and they respond by showering this person with too much attention.

Or, they barely respond at all, which comes off as anti-social and extremely unlikeable. Not saying this is a good or bad thing, but a lot of intellectuals act this way and that's OK if they don't care about everyone disliking them.

I think depression may stem from the feeling of helplessness.

Being forced to perform meaningless tasks (because that's high school), having absolutely no power and control over your own life, and probably vitamin D deficient too from being cooped up inside all the time studying.

You could say many teenagers are already predispose to depression during these turbulent years. Their mind isn't completely prepared quite yet and having tyrants run your life doesn't help.

This trend of overemphasis on STEM education and grueling test prep in an effort to game the system started with Asian societies and it's slowly spreading to upper-middle class in western society.

I don't think the true upper class ever cared much for STEM education (legacy admission, "donation", MBA, ...).

This is not really a good path to go down. Not all of us were meant to be engineers and doctors.

Just look East and you will catch a glimpse of the future. Massive youth unemployment, many of them overeducated. Japan is dominated with contract workers. Korea has their "880000 Won generation".

Yea, their suicide rate is high. The problem is, everyone wants a piece of the dream and we can't all have it (or maybe we can?). They import manual labor from SE Asia just like we do with illegal immigrants here in the States.

With no hope of moving out on such meager wages, you'll have resentment and withdrawal from society. Is it any wonder that their birthrate is going down?

I feel like any technological advancement we come up with would still not be enough to overcome this problem. Mainly because the people with the power to make the change have every incentive not to do so.

Humans are imperfect. Human society will always be imperfect. The rift is a part of our genetic and the majority of humans will always be chained to indenture servitude. In a way, all this madness will always be a part of us.

Some people may find this surprising, but you shouldn't. It's simply how the world works. It's repugnant but life is not fair.

Racial discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also legacy admission and athletes grade fixing. It's also not uncommon for rich parents to hire a professional ghostwriter for the admission essay. College admission as a whole is extremely subjective even if they try to pretend it isn't. After that there's the rampant grade inflation. We can go on and on.

Make no mistakes though, these aren't just inefficiency that happens by oversight. Someone __always__ benefit. They certainly don't feel sorry for you. They may use fancy euphemism to justify their decisions, but we're all adults here. Nobody really believes that bullshit.

College is a business and the only thing you can do is take your money somewhere else. Until society is ruled by some AI, we'll always have these kinds of problem.

Some things I would recommend if people really want to give away their money and support these evil institutions, 1. Change your name, first and last 2. Check a different box when they ask for your race (or any other bullshit like religion, etc.)

Changing your name has _massive_ implications besides college applications. Humans love to judge especially when they have nothing at stake. If you don't believe me, just apply to a few jobs with different names.

My point is, the allegory is a farce that trivialize reality.

The simple life is not simple. No life is ever simple.

The allegory masquerades as false wisdom.

I know quite a few guys that went back to their home country and attempted to live that "simple life".

Now they're all coming back, most usually do it around the time their first child enters grade school.

All this despite that fact that they have significantly more money than the local population. Just imagine if they didn't.

There's a very good reason why there's so many illegal immigrants in first world countries.

You can't support a family catching 2-5 fishes a day. This is not prehistory. You need to catch extra to sell so you can afford to take your kid to the doctor and buy them medicine when they get sick.

You need to buy clothes unless you plan on leaving yourself and your family naked. You need to buy school supplies for your kid. These things do not come for free my friend.

The life of a fisherman is a harsh one and none, not even the poorest fisherman can live on 2-5 fish a day. You need money to buy a fridge to preserve your catch because some days or even weeks, you will catch absolutely nothing. There are fishing seasons. At the very least, you need to buy salt to dry and preserve the fish.

Have you ever watched a family wept when the rain came down while they were laying out their fishes to dry?

I think some people on HN have a tendency to romanticize poverty, and that might be because they've never been without money. Backpacking around India and SE Asia does not give you a true experience of poverty.

Sure, you'll take some pictures to show off on Fb, instagram, twitter and then eventually hop back on a plane to fly home. Try living like those people for decades. Watch your wife die from childbirth. How are you going to afford a trip to the hospital on 2-5 fish a day? People routinely give birth without an ultrasound beforehand and they do it at home. Watch your precious kid die from malaria because you can't afford proper treatment.

I speak from experience here. There is nothing, nothing noble about poverty.

If you've ever fished for a living, the argument seems ludicrous.

Fishing can be treacherous work. You might get rich with a big haul or die when the whether turns bad.

There are many factors, enviromental pollution, ecosystem changing, etc. It's not unusual for these small local fishermen to have very very bad years. And it's not just small outfits that hit tough times, do some research on the tuna industry and decline in tuna population.

Reality doesn't always go along with our cozy zen story. We haven't even mentioned the fact that turning your hobby into a job is quite often a very bad idea.

SEEKING WORK

Location: Charlotte, NC

Remote: Yes

github.com/auto234875 You can find my email in my profile.

Language: Proficient in Objc-C, familiar with C and Swift

I'm an iOS developer with a BS in Chemistry, creator of Hakka News (over 1000 users and avg 4 stars review on Apple app store).

Specialty: UX and UI design, Core Animation

It boils my blood every time that I come across an interesting topic on SO just to see it locked. Something is wrong with the site when you see more topics locked than open.

There's really no hard rule. It's based on the feeling of whoever is reviewing your account transactions. Even if you deposit $2-3k every month, your account could still be under suspicion.

You'll be surprised at all the people making "large" cash deposit, seemingly oblivious to the law. FinCEN is already bombarded with tons of information.

In the process, some criminals slide under the radar and innocent people get caught up in the net.

The $10,000 limit is not a hard boundary. Banks can and often do report people for making much smaller deposit than this, just to cover their ass. With inflation going higher, $10k is not that big of amount as it used to be.

And we're not just talking about cash deposits here, everything is monitored including money order, wire transfer, checks. For example, if you have regular incoming wire transfer, and it doesn't even have to be international, you better have all the documents and explanation prepared when the IRS knocks on the door.

In this scenario, if the bank is feeling generous, it will refuse to service your account and ask you to go somewhere else. Often times though, there won't be a warning. Your account will just get frozen, "pending reviews from our security department."

Basically, once your asset has been frozen, the game is nearly over. Even without any charge being pressed, it takes years to get back the seized asset/property, if it's given back at all, that is.

If you were charge with a crime and this gets dismissed later for whatever reason, things get even tougher.

Additionally, if you even get arrested, you won't have any money for bond (a good time to call up the rich relatives), and you could be in jail for a long time.

This has been the case for a long time. The IRS works on a guilty-until-proven-innocent basis. Take the case of collectible gain tax, if you do not have evidence to prove the value of the item on the date it was acquired, then the IRS calculates the tax based on the total value of the item, not just the profit. So if you buy something that might increased in value at a later date, you better keep the receipt.

And of course, anytime the government freezes your asset and property, it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to get it back. Meanwhile, you won't have any means to hire a good lawyer.

I'm curious how much experience the author had at the time of hiring.

While I'm not familiar with the hiring requirements for web dev, in the iOS development world in particular, it's quite easy to learn how to build basic apps with storyboard. But to master Core Foundation, GCD, Core Data, Core Animation, building good API, laying out UI in code, that takes a tremendous amount of time. And what I've heard from dev who've been through interviews, employers are very demanding. One person in particular was asked to build an app from scratch in one day without using ARC.

What platform are you aiming at? I usually browse through dribbble and try out apps produced by well-funded startups to find new ideas.

App store search and ranking is completely broken. My app for HN was updated 3 months ago, another one is getting push out this week. There are 3 other apps above mine that hasn't been updated in over 3 years. Some of them don't even work on retina devices.

The second problem is feedback, but this is with all software in general. Out of 1000 happy users, maybe one will bother taking their time to leave a feedback. Actually I'm just BSing here, I don't actually know the stat of happy users. I've included a contact button, but most never contact me first about problems. They just leave a 1 star review and it stays there -forever-, even though it's because HN changed their markup, even though I scramble to push out an update the next day.

Fortunately, I didn't develop this app with other people's reviews in mind or to get rich. It's serves mostly as an advertisement to attract potential clients and for personal use.

The app store today is mostly a playground for big dev shop. A lot of apps are free and serves as advertisement piece for big corporation. Either that or they work on the zero revenue model like snapchat. So, develop an app, make it free, get buy up by facebook, profit.

Edit: One other problem I didn't mention is the lack of refund policy. This is a serious deterrent to potential buyers that no app preview video will fix.

I think the buy-sell spread would definitely be a problem, unless the company has money in bitcoin already and you don't plan on selling it immediately. It's just not viable until bitcoin usage is more widespread and selling btc for cash becomes a thing of the past.

I haven't been able to get any linux distro working on rmbp. It just boots up to a black screen.

I can't really relate to how these guys feel because I've never been that rich but I can definitely relate to some of that guilt that they're speaking of, watching my own mother wake up every morning to slave away in a factory.

Just travel around, go to SE Asia for example and look around. You'll see little 6 years old kids selling chewing gum and bottled water at the bus station. I really can't tell you how I feel seeing this day after day.

Little kids should be happy. They should be playing with their friends and going to school. Not selling lottery tickets and chewing gum at a bus stop.

When I was young, I went to school with many kids like this. Most of them drop out because their parents couldn't pay for tution and books.

While I'm not anywhere close to rich, I might as well be Bill Gates compared to these kids.

So I wonder to myself, why should I have all this while they have nothing? The guilt plays itself on many levels. When I feel like I'm slacking off, I think about my mother. I think about all those poor kids.

I've been given so much, yet I'm still not good enough to take full advantage of it.

I hope that one day if I ever become rich, I won't be so delusional as to think that that a huge part of success isn't just luck.

For some reason, the older I get, the more I keep dwelling on the fact that life is incredibly shitty and unfair to 99% of the people out there. Strange, whereas many people I know instead look at their richer peers and wonder, why shouldn't I have more?

Just in my experience, it's quite easy to get an app published on the app store.

I actually wish Apple's reviews were more stringent. As it is, many low quality apps still make it to the app store.