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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?

#61

Post by roundsquare »

shrughes wrote: post #51
nopinsight wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a good possibility though that the universe is inherently complex in certain aspects for our brains. Human brains are evolved to survive in the part of the physical world observable by human organs, not to comprehend the essential forms of the universe. E=MC^2 could be just an aspect of reality that happens to coincide with the way observable physical world works. Maybe a different math for describing the un…

E=MC^2 could be just an aspect of reality that happens to coincide with the way observable physical world works. All aspects of reality coincide with the way the physical world works. Or, what does that sentence mean? Maybe a different math for describing the universe written by an alien intelligence with different sensory organs could be simple for them, not still incomprehensible for us. I think there is a strong a…

All aspects of reality coincide with the way the physical world works.

I think observable is the keyword here... we happened to be able to observe enough that we can conclude that E = mc^2

As for your second point... I don't think I agree. The fact of the matter is that as humans, we are essentially unable to reason about how beings with a different set of senses would think. With respect to cosmology, we basically react to how light moves around and that forms the basis of our science (our other senses don't really come into the picture). Its very difficult to think about an intelligence based on some other source of information and impossible to know what sort of data would be present (since we don't have access to the information).

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

#62

Post by roundsquare »

wlievens wrote: post #59
paraschopra wrote: post #31

Regional conflicts. And the idea of countries, in the first place.

The idea of countries is not taken far enough?

And/or the idea of regional conflicts? :)

Actually, paraschopra probably means the opposite, that is, these ideas are taken too far... or at least, thats my read.

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

#63

Post by roundsquare »

netcharmer wrote: post #54
byrneseyeview wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my opinion, newspaper is not a right analogy. Newspapers provide content, ISPs don't. I can understand if, say, National Geographic puts some restriction on the online content but why should my ISP decides if I can access National Geographic or not. Telephone networks is the right analogy here - will you allow your telephone provider to control whom you can call?

will you allow your telephone provider to control whom you can call?

Not now I won't, because that would be changing the service I'm getting to something I didn't sign up for.

If I got an offer tomorrow for a "limited" phone service I would turn it down, but I wouldn't consider it immoral or bad or something that shouldn't exist.

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

#64

Post by Isomer »

* The network is the computer.

I want processes that migrate with me. When I login at work, I should be able to grab my webbrowser from home and continue it executing on my work machine. Or perhaps on my cellphone (although the UI probably would be horrible). When I reboot my laptop, processes get migrated onto another machine I have permissions for (my desktop?), and come back when the reboot completes.

* Distributed Storage.

I have a string of PC's I have own and/or have (legitimate!) access to, but I have problems storing data. Eg my desktop at home has gigs of local storage, but my home directory is mounted off the file server which is running out of space. Why can't I easily merge those two file stores?

* Augmented Reality.

* Mesh based Free Space Optics.

To be able to set up a wireless AP that has line of sight to another AP, that then sets up a mesh using FSO. FSO is near interference free.

* FPGA's for accelerating computation and reducing power consumption.

* Location/Situational awareness in cellphones.

Guessing better if it should be a loud ringtone based on ambient noise? Guessing who I'm going to call given that I always call this person at this time at this location?

* Better internet file distribution.

Knowing/Guessing something about network topology and doing something smart about it w.r.t choosing who to download from. (TCP_INFO to get TCP's estimated RTT for a link? Measuring how long it takes an IP address to download from you/to you and remembering that for your current network, and biasing which peer/server you use in future based on this). Using Source Specific Multicast when available to get network multiplier effects.

* End to End Encryption of communications.

* Natural Language Parsing

We know that computers have problems with ambiguous sentences, but a search engine where you give it a natural language query, and it parses it, and then asks for which parsing is correct, or asks you to resubmit your query in a less ambiguous way. People seem quite happy to iteratively query a search engine to get an answer they want, having a NLP guess the wrong meaning is easily rectified with a more specific query. Wolfram Alpha tries this. It however doesn't seem to provide you any obvious way to improve your query, variations on a theme tend to result in the same parse.

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

#65

Post by keenerd »

_bfhp wrote: post #4

Pocket touch screen devices. I want cheap, low-functionality touch screen devices. Like, an iPhone, but with only a calculator, a dictionary/thesaurus, and some other useful but simple applications (text reader/editor, todo list, etc). Or how about an open-development touch screen device? Where programmers can create their own applications for it easily?

Sounds like you want any Palm or Windows CE device made in the last decade. I am not kidding, you described 90% of what I do on the 2003 PDA I picked up for $15. (The remaining 10% is gmail, skype, and an NES emulator.) Did I mention it is easy to program for? I've got every language from Scheme to J on board.

Welcome to the past, your dreams may be found at any yard sale.

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

#66

Post by Hexstream »

jrockway wrote: post #23

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…

?... Automatic array-bounds checking doesn't require functional programming.

Besides, functional programming is not The One True Paradigm To Rule Them All either. Dataflow, for example, is an example of another superb paradigm.

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

#68

Post by BigCanOfTuna »

ugh wrote: post #33
BigCanOfTuna wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ok. “… has lost all its meaning …” just sounded to me like it was all downhill since 1788.

Of course I said " lost much of its meaning" not "all of its meaning".

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

#69

Post by cmelbye »

raintrees wrote: post #37

One vote per registered person for elections, alleviating the need for the Electoral College. And maybe even representative government?

I think that every election year when the local polling place is packed to the brim with people waiting to get registered by slow, old people. Register every citizen centrally and put voting kiosks (that could double as places to pay taxes, etc maybe?) in grocery stores, gas stations, etc.

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

#70

Post by jrockway »

Hexstream wrote: post #66
jrockway wrote: post #23

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…

?... Automatic array-bounds checking doesn't require functional programming. Besides, functional programming is not The One True Paradigm To Rule Them All either. Dataflow, for example, is an example of another superb paradigm.

The general argument is against "it's too slow". People avoid FP because "it's too slow" in favor of languges like C that get you the wrong answer really quickly. (Functional programming is not "too slow", of course; consider the popularity of Ruby and realize that SBCL, OCaml, GHC, ... are often 50x faster. Of course, those are all 3x slower than C, so clearly should be avoided...)
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