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Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

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Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#21

Post by BigCanOfTuna »

ugh wrote: post #11
BigCanOfTuna wrote: post #8

Probably one of the most promising ideas that has lost much of its meaning....We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Do you really believe that? Are you really so blind to all the progress since 1788?

Of course I see progress, but the question was "what idea hasn't been taken far enough."

Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#23

Post by jrockway »

Functional programming.

I really like it when my computer crashes because someone decided that checking whether or not "-5435" was a valid array index was "too time consuming". Wait, I hate that. I have 4 cores that are idle 99% of the time. Let the computer do some self-checks that will keep my data intact.

(Read the ext3 source code some time and tell yourself that you trust important data to it. The only reason it works at all is because everyone has already been burned by the most obvious bugs.)

Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#24

Post by byrneseyeview »

_bfhp wrote: post #18
patio11 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not guaranteed anywhere in the Constitution. Those three are a rhetorical flourish in the Declaration of Independence, and do not create enforceable legal rights for Americans. The Constitution guarantees enforceable negative rights, for example, it forbids the government from killing (or otherwise punishing) you without due process of law. The Constitution, by design,…

Nice comment; though, I think the OP was just comedically endorsing Net Neutrality, which, iirc, asserts a negative right.

Net Neutrality isn't a negative right. If you own a network, net neutrality takes away from your ability to use it as you see fit; if you want, for whatever reason, to dick around with your customers and block Craigslist, you should be able to do so -- just like a newspaper can refuse to run an ad, or even refuse to write about a story.

Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#25

Post by iamwil »

patio11 wrote: post #16
iamwil wrote: post #10

Bandwidth as a constitutional right in addition to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not guaranteed anywhere in the Constitution. Those three are a rhetorical flourish in the Declaration of Independence, and do not create enforceable legal rights for Americans. The Constitution guarantees enforceable negative rights, for example, it forbids the government from killing (or otherwise punishing) you without due process of law. The Constitution, by design,…

It's not HN until someone corrects you with facts.

I admit I wasn't clear that L,L,PofH was guaranteed anywhere in the constitution.

But with my one-liner, the point I hoped to get across was that I do think that it should be extended to access to the web and its information, as it becomes more ubiquitous and integrated in our lives. I named it "bandwidth" mostly as a remark to how I wished I had more of it.

Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#27

Post by [deleted] »

human_v2 wrote: post #19
shrughes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is math not intuitive? Where is it needlessly complex? How is math not already "naturally recursive"? (What does that mean?) How is the universe naturally recursive? What does it mean to "build math off itself"? Are we not doing that already? I think you are complaining about math and then proposing that we build math back up exactly as it is now.

Math isn't NOT intuitive as far as math itself goes. It happens to be a very nice language. I tend to think that relativity and quantum mechanics do not mesh well because of the language we use to describe them. While standard maths is NP complete, it does not seem to inherently describe the universe without getting all crazy complex. I encourage you to try and comprehend even some of the simplest M-Theory equations.…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#29

Post by patio11 »

I think all of the test & measure stuff we talk about so much in the web context -- A/B testing, analytics, etc -- would revolutionize the world if it were applied with one tenth the dedication by human institutions which are not teeny little web startups.

This isn't to say that we have the patent on The Scientific Method. However, there are darn few organizations which seem to have it written into their DNA. Toyota does, famously. Imagine what would happen if your typical big-city school system did. ("First order of business: we had 37 A/B tests running in first grade classrooms last week. 31 of them did not lead to substantial results. Let's hear from our lead statistician about one promising innovation, which improved vocabulary retention among our lowest performing quartile of black students by 15%...")

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