Questions • Hacker News Board

Re: Questions

#271

Post by chubot » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

alexpetralia wrote: post #108

kylecordes wrote: post #102

> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? This is a great question, and I echo many of the sentiments here and elsewhere around general complacency, slowing rate of change (even as bits of technology get better faster), and so on. But... One of the reasons that big projects used to happen so fast, is that the interests of people negatively affected by th…

Louis C.K. has a joke exactly about this called "Of Course, But Maybe": "Of course, of course slavery is the worst thing that ever happened. Of course it is, every time it’s happened. Black people in America, Jews in Egypt, every time a whole race of people has been enslaved, it’s a terrible, horrible thing, of course, but maybe. Maybe every incredible human achievement in history was done with slaves. Every single t…

I'm reading "Sapiens" right now and the author makes a similar point about empires (Roman, Chinese, British, etc.). Yes empires subjugated and killed lots of people, but they also brought them cultural innovation like money, rule of law, trade, standardization, etc.

And the centers of the empires were wealthy enough to developer what we call culture -- architecture, art, music, etc.

Re: Questions

#272

Post by allannienhuis » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

_ea1k wrote: post #256

XorNot wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the argument you want to plant your stake in the ground on as absurd? Because the modern debate in the tech community is "should people be allowed to operate motor vehicles at all?"

lol, I hear people frame the self driving car discussion that way regularly, but it is just wrong. Noone is going to be making human driven vehicles illegal. They may be more like classic cars than regular vehicles at some point, though.

I wouldn't be surprised to see an increasing number of (express-type) roads or perhaps dedicated lanes where human drivers were not allowed on though, after self-driving capabilities become the norm. (yes I realise that's an assumption).

I think people underestimate the cultural impact that self-driving vehicles will have - imagine a whole generation or two after self-driving vehicles are generally available - how many people will bother learning to drive? I think it might become more of a job-specific skill than a general 'adult life' skill as it is now in most places.

Re: Questions

#273

Post by tsmarsh » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

throwawaybbqed wrote: post #80

tsmarsh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst your core point about books aging is absolutely true I think thats mostly the mass market publications designed to ease entry than actual papers. Similarly, anything writen about an implementation is short lived. The Idiots Guide to Windows 98 is less useful today than it was in 1998 and is getting less useful with time. Lovelace, Babbage, Turing, McCarthy et al are still seminal. But these are academic papers…

As an aside, what would be today's ideal intro to design patterns? Now .. on topic ... I had a roomful of books collected from my youth. I cleaned out my room at my parents house some years ago ... and pretty much everything got chucked. The only books that I kept were seminal books like Knuth, Cormen, Gang of Four, TCP/IP series (v6 kinda makes them out-of-date too). All my MFC books ... java books .. pretty much al…

I miss walking in a room of books.

My parents had bookshelves that filled walls that I built with my Dad before they moved. I, and most other people that visited the house, would spend a fair amount of time just looking at the books on the shelf. Comparing notes on what they'd read, and asking to borrow books. Looking at the books, and being reminded of the experience you had with them or wanted to have with them was a vitally important part of the process that I fear we've lost.

Re: Questions

#274

Post by chubot » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

Why doesn't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have solved?

I'm working on writing a shell with autocompletion now [1], and something like crowdsourcing completions in the style of Google query completion has occurred to me.

But privacy seems to be a dealbreaker in this case, and probably with many of the applications that Collison is thinking of.

If anyone has any ideas, let me know :) I know (and have worked on) about differential privacy but I'm not sure it helps here.

[1] http://www.oilshell.org/

Re: Questions

#275

Post by Koshkin » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

BlackFingolfin wrote: post #43

shawn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like PDFs might still work in a hundred years. Just like zip files. Fun fact: HN's been around for 10% of a century. That makes Arc one of the longer-lived programming languages. Re: the ability to take books off the shelf and read it, Library Genesis has made a lot of progress in that area. http://libgen.io/

PDFs might still work - but will the storage devices they are on? There are good reasons to doubt this: tapes, CDs and DVDs age and degrade over time; plus devices to read them only last so long, and may not be produced anymore at some point. Classic "spinning" hard drives degrade, too; and even ignoring this, will there still be conputers supporting, say, SATA, in 50 years? And then there is a trend to switch to onb…

The cloud-based storage will never die. (And if it does, we'll have bigger problems on our hands than lost PDFs.)

Re: Questions

#276

Post by twtw » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

beachy wrote: post #6

> While a lot happened in the US during World War II, it's easy to forget how short the period in question was: American involvement lasted 3 years 8 months and 23 days. How does this stack up against US involvement in other"good" wars, where the foe is the unambiguously bad? I.e not a Vietnam style ideologically motivated confrontation.

WWII is a bit of a fluke in terms of being clear what was "good".

Re: Questions

#277

Post by gameswithgo » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

JauntTrooper wrote: post #233

qaq wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will sound horrible but is it rational? E.g. say you are building a huge hospital and due to the above it will take 4 years longer at 2x the cost so basically you could loose X lives due to hospital not being there and due to increased cost of care.

Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there ar…

> We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0.

No, but that should be the ideal which you should strive to move towards, when practicable. But you can't ever actually get there, and shouldn't try infinitely hard either.

Re: Questions

#278

Post by twtw » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #63

nextstep wrote: post #61

I wish I could be this uniformed on so many subjects and be considered a thought leader.

At the level of those questions it's not that difficult. Read books (not just summaries of seminal works, the seminal works themselves, and not just non-fiction) and follow some quality discussion and news sources for a decade or so. A background in a science, history, etc, also helps. Also start a blog or write small essays with your observations (even if they're trite at first -- they'll get better over time, espec…

I suspect you misread the comment you responded to...

Re: Questions

#279

Post by blablabla123 » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

Rising costs: inflation. Assume a rate of a little more than 3.5% per year and you're at 9x after 60. That's pretty much the same reason why college cost rose up.

In fact inflation is necessary in our current economics. Imagine there was no inflation. Then very wealthy people could put all their money on a savings account, live of the interest rate and still accumulate more money. Thus the economy would eventually stagnate because of no investments. Inflation kind of stops that, also the central bank can control it by setting the interest rates for credits.

There are attempts to make inflation unnecessary like currency that loses value over time (and you need to frequently put stamps on it). But that's very far away from any widely used currency.

Re: Questions

#280

Post by mapgrep » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

cryptozeus wrote: post #223

unixhero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of…

Then how do you explain Silicon Valley? Outdoor life is great here. You have good point but may not be as important as you think.

Because when Silicon Valley established its dominance, access to computing resources, digital networks, tech talent, and venture capital were by far the crucial factors. All those things were much rarer back then, and startups more costly, especially to get off the ground. Given today’s low costs and ubiquitous computing and internet access — and the trends in this direction even 20 years ago - it makes sense other, softer factors can now come into play.