Viewing profile — Astrohacker

Thanks. This looks right up my alley.

Thanks for the response. I believe many forms of AI will be huge industries (of course, they already are, but they will be bigger in the coming decades): * consumer products * AI a…

Dear HN, I'm a physicist who will be getting a PhD in about a year. I've basically lost interest in pursuing a career in academia. I believe AI will be an enormous industry in the …

Things have gotten better for most people because of moral advances and technological advances. But government has gotten worse and has slowed down progress.

You wouldn't replace it with anything. You'd need a cultural change where people recognized that stealing is always wrong, even if they call it taxes and declare it legal. Police a…

Government isn't effective, democratic or otherwise. But I'm not a cynic. I have high hopes for humanity, long term. The sooner we get rid of the institutionalized use of force (go…

Politicians created the problem by creating IP laws. If they "solve" it, they will undoubtedly just introduce some new problem.

Or maybe governments should just not take on ludicrous amounts of debt.

Agreed. Children and young animals play because they learn from it. This is why evolution has programmed them to enjoy it. Play=self-improvement.

The next big thing will start out looking like a toy = bitcoin

Funny. I just disabled my account this week and don't have plans to go back. Facebook never made much of an impact on my life and I've finally decided the loss of privacy is no lon…

But inflating the money supply doesn't take away everyone's purchasing power. It redistributes it to the people who get the new money.

Krugman thinks deflation makes things worse. So if bitcoin ends up making things better, that proves Krugman wrong.

Krugman prefers the dollar, which has a supply that is constantly inflated by the central bank. But if the dollar is so good, why do people have to be forced to use it? (You have t…

Public services would be provided by businesses like everything else. "Law and order" would be maintained primarily the way it is now, which is through social custom. But since the…

> Immoral does not equal illegal. I meant criminal as in immoral, not as in illegal. Obviously the government is going to declare its taxes legal. > I'm not even going to get into …

Agreed. I find it disturbing that other commenters in this thread would evidently use this program if they had a chance. I can sense the downvotes already... but let me explain why…

There are tons of free textbooks available. Google for physics or math textbooks. There are also tons of free lectures available on YouTube and Khan Academy.

There is an enormous amount of information about science readily accessible to anyone who wants to learn it. Perhaps many people just don't care about science. If that's true, forc…

Not all uses of cryptography are for encrypting information sent over a channel. Consider bitcoin, which uses public/private keys and hashing functions to create a digital currency…

YouTube is good, but it isn't really designed for education. How can you give out assignments with YouTube? What about paying teachers? A YouTube-for-education would be explicitly …

I don't think credentials are very meaningful. An alternative is to let students simply display all their work on the internet. Employers can check out their work to determine thei…

Cool. But is the future of education really having professors give lectures, except now it's online? Here are some brainstorm ideas for alternatives: * Allow anyone, not just exist…

I'll handle my own identity, thanks.

Patent laws should be ignored. Run your company pseudonymously, and violate patents all you want. No one will be able to stop you.