Comment by mmphosis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmphosis | Hacker News Reader

0. free internet

   - as in beer and as in liberty

1. a new search engine

   http://duckduckgo.com/

2. replace email - with a todo list?

   - as I look at that old Palm IIIxe sitting in the cradle on my desk,

my mind swims in the ideas of all the databases on all of the devices everywhere all being in sync

3. replace universities

   - yup, and recreate the free university of olde

4. internet drama

   - indie drama titles (movies/shows/etc) on netflix / apple
   - or just read the comments ;)

5. the next steve jobs - but I am still impressed by the iPad3 rollout and it's screen

   - raspberry pi

6. bring back moore's law

   - easy parallelism in software
   - it's a compiler -- that's the hard part
   - a compiler on the web as a web "service"
   - an optimization marketplace: people in the machine doling out smart answers

7. ongoing diagnosis

   - how about ongoing prevention? because cancer is a symptom too
   - why limit yourself to 1000 years of ?barbaric? western medicine?
   - why not look at all of humanity's history of medicine from all cultures?

8. tactics

   - remember that columbus was a tyrant, and he didn't "discover" anything.
   - start small

yup, the best plan is not to have one, and never make one, when it's a fait accompli then you announce the plan

> - why limit yourself to 1000 years of ?barbaric? western medicine? > - why not look at all of humanity's history of medicine from all cultures?

Western medicine is nothing more than medicine being tested scientifically before being accepted. If you know anything better than the scientific method to test medicine than please do tell. How would you prove to people your medicine work, because "it is so"? Nonsense. If by "medicine from all cultures" you mean medicine who refuse to be tested scientifically, then thanks but no thanks.

I also bend on rationalist side, but the first rational step is to know the limits of reason. Here there are limits of medicine testing. For instance, I have heard aspirin, which is a great medicine, would not pass the tests, were it invented today...

I don't really think this is the characterization of wester medicine. What you're calling for, "Evidence-based medicine", or "Evidence-based practice", is actually new. Bayesian probability theory is still nowhere near the dominant method of measuring certainty in the field.

I hope mmphosis clarifies what he means by "western medicine", because I'm confused by that term myself. It's not about the modern issue where the US FDA mandates that "only a drug can cure, prevent, treat, or diagnose a disease" (so if you try and sell oranges under the claim that they prevent scurvy you can be thrown in jail), since he mentioned 1000 years. I don't think he meant that western medicine has any less a desire than non-western medicine to "make people better".

I hope he doesn't mean homeopathy since I hope we can all agree that's a silly enterprise good only for making its proponents more money. But I suspect the "western medicine" refers to alternative treatments that don't have to be homeopathic. I think his overall meaning is that for current medical research, the memory of the field only goes back 1000 years or so, which may or may not be true. (I'd argue it's closer to 100 years.) It may be a call for more testing of what old societies used to do for various things, such as the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Persians, and Chinese, and whether any valid techniques are there that we should bring back. I seem to recall off-hand that St. John's Wort historically has a use for depression, and in some study had about the same effectiveness as some other depression drug (though neither were much better than a placebo); if this is really the case then we need more studies on St. John's Wort to confirm and in the US particularly we need some new FDA rules and reduction of power (or just get rid of them). A similar point is made when people say "stop destroying rainforests, there may be a cure for cancer there!" There probably isn't, but it's not like we were looking very hard anyway, and maybe we should.

Western medicine is nothing more than medicine being tested scientifically before being accepted. If you know anything better than the scientific method to test medicine than please do tell.

There is no such thing as the scientific method. What you're thinking of (presumably something Popperian) is not how science is really done. A lot of science is pig-headedly ignoring evidence which tells you a theory is wrong. Sometimes that works itself out and you get a better theory (see Einstein). Other times it doesn't.

Look, the purpose of medicine is to make people healthy. Definitions of 'healthy' are different for different cultures and social groups at different times. Western scientific medicine is only one approach for one kind of culture, and it often does more harm than good.

Furthermore, western scientific medicine often ignores procedures and knowledge coming from non-western sources which, when translated into scientific language, turn out to be correct within the WSM framework.

edit: formatting

DDG isn't the answer - not yet, anyway

I find that ~50% of my results I re-attempt with a !g, !w or !wo before it

I know the guy behind the site reads threads here, so i'd ask him to check his logs for the number of instances a user has re-run a search query but with Google or Bing and then work out why his results for those queries are not working.

I think the 'new google' will be built around a PageRank that takes into account online social networks rather than links

A sidenote, but it's interesting that your comment drifts into the 'fallacy of the now' which is the antithesis of the essay.

You posit Raspberry Pi (flippantly or not is not clear) as the 'next Steve Jobs' response... I love what Upton's trying to achieve, Braben is a hero of mine and I cut my chops on the BBC Micro in the early 80s, but it still stands that this is just the latest in a long line of interesting forays into the minicomputing sphere.

Jobs' post-NeXT vision was fascinating in that no steps were widely anticipated. No betas, no early release, just pure visionary product. I'm a linux guy, no Apple fanboyism here, but I see what pg is trying to reference. From nowhere, blow away your competition _and_ create new markets with singular product vision. The Anti-Lean. There's a Jedi aspect to this - the next one will arrive, we just have to hope (s)he doesn't turn to the dark side.

Huh? Free Internet is ipso facto not a business idea.

What about free email? Or free search engines? I'm not really suggesting that ad-supported Internet is a great idea, but it's at least a possibility.

No, it's better than that.

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