xophe

Post is a total fail at semantics, because the following two statements differ in meaning.

   "All x is not y"

   "Not all x is y".

..reminds me of https://xkcd.com/927/

Tom Wheeler for president

> The tank filled with hydraulic fluid that powered the fins enabling them to rotate and steer, ran out of fluid before landing.

Nit, but this is the most difficult sentence I've had to parse all year.

Guys aren't really hitting it on the head. It's about the level of behavior that companies release analysis on.

See, there's another company that occasionally releases interesting data analytics: Google.

See: Word frequency over time, Predicting the spread of viruses from searches, etc.

The issue is that Uber is trying to explain motive and behavior at the individual level ("I know something about you!"). This is something that would be a definite no-no for Google. The cheekiness of the language certainly doesn't help either.

This was really touching. Not only a physicist, but a poet as well.

We're all missing the most important point here:

> Bike helmets discourage cycling.

Yes! We should require all CAR drivers to wear helmets. Imagine how less likely drivers are to engage in road rage when they're wearing dorky helmets, not to mention safety on the road.

lol @ 5k a year depreciation, 3.5k maintenance, and 3.6k parking, i.e. the majority of this analysis.

In conclusion, paying someone to take you in their Toyota Prius is less expensive than paying for your own Tesla.

Still, I see sama's point. I own/maintain my own motorcycle and I uber/lyft when I can't do that. Best of both worlds.

You must have missed the main point of this essay, so I'll reiterate here.

"take a deep breath, count to ten"

This is why no one wants to work at [Your Stupid Hedge Fund Here].

A while ago there was an article about how Wall Street was bemoaning the difficulty of recruiting top talent from tech.

Surprise: It isn't the money. There's plenty of money there. It's the total lack of understanding on how programmers create value. And this is the result.

There's so much to expound on here, it's truly amazing.

Yes, exactly this.

If they lose, then there's going to be precedent for when the stakes are high. And I can't see how they can totally escape culpability, since they can't even turn over the source if they wanted to.

The anonymity Tor provides is fundamental from an Internet activist perspective but in the eyes of the law (and the world outside our tech bubble) it's aiding and abetting. There's a reason why we're not allowed to have encrypted landlines.

I don't feel good about this at all.

> Suing a revenge porn site. Fair, next.

Oh wait there's more.

From https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq-abuse.html.en

> Tor aims to provide protection for ordinary people who want to follow the law. Only criminals have privacy right now, and we need to fix that.

True, but distribution has always been the hard part in any kind of scalable criminal activity, and Tor is unwittingly facilitating this.

There's definitely a case here against PinkMeth.com. Revenge porn sites don't really receive protection under fair use.

So here's the sticky part.

Here's Tor's hidden services overview: https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en

Since the hidden services are themselves run over Tor, it looks to me like the only thing Tor can do is refuse to serve PinkMeth.com without identifying the agents. Which might be good for privacy precedent on the one hand, but bad if Tor as a result receives all the flack for all criminal activity run over Tor -- that means Tor relays (who are identifiable) are next.

Ideas to save Tor?

>But the people that had to carry out the scheduled work took a while to get used to the idea, as they didn't like not knowing why they were doing certain things.

There's some real Asimovesque worship of technology here. Without sounding like a Luddite (computers are good at scheduling), this is scientifically scary.

>"I am told that the courts are trying to make a distinction between mathematical algorithms and nonmathematical algorithms."

As Knuth implies, this is a fool's errand, and this is the reason why courts should not award any patents protecting an algorithm at all.

As a thought exercise, is "A website that advertises a series of random beers from a known collection of user preferred beers" mathematical?

No? Then, is a random shuffling algorithm mathematical based on a vector of inputs mathematical? No? How about the following code?

void sort(int *arr, int len) for (int i = 0; i < len; ++i) { r = rand % len; swap(arr + i, arr + r); }

Not mathematical? Then what about a function "s" described as s(x) = f(g(h(x))), where x is a vector, h multiplies the vector by the identity matrix, and g multiplies its input against the set of all possible matrices such that all elements are 1 or 0 and there can be at most 1 non-zero element for a given row and column, and f chooses a random input from its set and returns its multiplication against a vector of 1s?

These are, at their core, all algorithms, and they are all mathematical. The courts have already established that the "Internet of things" is not patentable, which is why the first example transfers to the second. This is admittedly a poor example, but for a better understanding read Knuth's "Fundamental Algorithms."

>Is this right or wrong? Only if rent-seeking is right or wrong. The patent system is working exactly as it should be.

This is a fatal oversimplification hiding in economist jargon. Is making money wrong? As an economist, the answer is "It depends." From a public utility standpoint, the point of patents is to encourage invention by protecting those who would not otherwise invent. Do you honestly believe that without patfents, the software industry will decrease in productivity?

>* stifle innovation? No. Innovation still happens, progress is being made

What? Stifling and dead-stopping are two entirely different things. We're talking about the rate of innovation, not whether it's happening or not. Once again, do you think patents are hindering innovation?

>The patent system is working exactly as it should be.

You can't use this claim as an argument. That's the entire matter at hand.

"Optimism is often dismissed as false hope. But there is also false hopelessness."

A poetic touch from a tech genius of our generation.

1) web design is an engineering discipline because you have to make things fast and fault-tolerant on top of making it look good. there's a lot more moving parts to a website than there is to an InDesign export.

2) any tool sufficiently powerful to render complex websites will make it considerably easier to create simple bland websites

3) the mythical oracle described above would not only be of interest to webdesign, but all of computer engineering. i wish you the best of luck.

No.

Neither the old design nor the design dcurtis mentioned are current.

But the current design is more similar to the old design.

Well, you took a swing at it and you missed. You can give yourself credit for that at least.

Everything else is managing your expectations. There's something about being 22 that's tough -- lots of people are advancing in their careers, and you're just starting out.

So don't drink the Kool-Aid. Forget about the valley. Don't be greedy. Once you learn to enjoy your life again and have confidence that you can be a positive contributing member of society, reconsider the mantle. Emotional stability is like muscle power -- you must build it over time with care. And you need an abnormal amount of emotional stability to handle SV startups.

Good luck.

EDIT for a missing 'to' :)

arent these guys supposed to know a thing about valuation?

Isn't this "Bridgegate" Christie?

"How did the late-Victorian-era British do it? Foresight, humility, compromise for the sake of alliance, and expert diplomacy and statesmanship. [Excuse me for a moment as I wipe the tears off my keyboard in my woe at contemplating what greatness has been lost and despite the fact that loss was not mine, though it was the world's.]"

The unfettered and self-unaware bias towards Western values of statesmanship by this so-called -- do they actually call themselves this? -- political _scientist_ is cringeworthy.

"Watching a bearded man and friends obsess over fat. Bacon fat."

North America's online trend: Watching a bearded guy and his friends eat bacon and amalgamated fast food

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9FRSghXhDM

Incorrect.

This is what happens when you confuse objects in the physical world with those in the information world.

Physical rights don't expire because it entails deprivation of use. But copyright expiration doesn't eliminate your right to create, distribute, or sell -- it simply extends these capabilities to others.

I understand where you're coming from -- there are some truly good engineers out there.

But I think he's right too. He's essentially arguing about the true meaning of the metric. Of course there are engineers who can spot bugs at 1/100th the time as an arbitrary engineer. Or fixes things 10x faster (being familiar with the code base certainly helps).

But to have the literal productive capacity of 10 people? That's much different, and that's what he means. Are you capable of replacing 10 arbitrary engineers with the rockstar? No? Then that's not a 10x engineer, by his definition.

Also inb4 Futurama fans start complaining about the endless "chain" of evolution. It's not that simple -- similarity does not imply inheritance.

Also out of my knowledge, but the hypothesized tree of evolution contains only distinct species AFAIK. A true missing link would be an intermediate stage, like catching the first fish with legs as it adapts to land. Fish with wings aren't interesting because they are an (extant) species in their own right.

It's like catching someone on a layover -- you're very clearly in the middle of two stable (but distinct) spots. But you don't spend much time there -- which is why it's been so tough to find.

This comment is hilariously shortsighted.

Ten years later: >> "Guys were being paid $100/hour to get CRUD working through a web framework."

People weren't being paid to write HTML. They were being paid to publish information on the Internet for the first time ever. Like, before W3 schools and NodeJS. Like, back when you got your morning news from the paperboy.

If typesetters were paid a dime back in the 1700s, anyone who could design a webpage in the 90s was certainly worth their weight in gold.

And with time, one day your job will also be super unflattering to talk about.

Without sarcasm, a great way to prompt cops to start using zip-ties, which is just a lot more dangerous for everyone.