DavidWanjiru

Lately, HN down-votes seem to me have a very "boo boy" thing about them. There's nothing in the original comment that would warrant a down-vote.

It seems to me like the biggest things are impossible to see with a "normal" outlook. It's as if you either can't see the big thing, or you see it in a fantasy world, a fiction of some kind (science or otherwise).

Take connecting the entire world. Even after the technology existed and had been deployed (the very early system that gave rise to the internet as we know it), people didn't look at that early version connecting a handful of places and think, "Wow, this could connect EVERYONE!" They didn't stand there, looking at the terminals of two connected computers, and imagine a connected world like the one we live in today. They didn't talk about ecommerce and social media global events being reported on in near real time. No one had to roll their eyes, because no one was making these grand claims.

I can't find the link now, but I read somewhere that it took YEARS after the Wright brothers had achieved first flight to get the attention of the world. People didn't see how transformative that thing could become, yet the proof of concept was there.

When you look at all the big tech moments in (recent-ish) history, the car, modern computation, the PC, aviation, you don't see people coming out with these grand declarations before the fact. And it's not for lack of intelligent, visionary people.

So it makes me wonder, whenever a person makes such grandiose plans, and they're not fiction writers, what's so different about them that they'd be able to see so far ahead?

Maybe they're different. How would I know? But history makes me skeptical.

>Some of the dark races were described as deceived more than evil. I would argue the larger point still stands if the light skinned races aren't depicted as falling for similar deception, because a tendency to fall for deception is equally unedifying. I haven't read the books, so I wouldn't know how other races are portrayed.

This comment reminds me of high school physics, when we were learning about interference and those double slit experiments. The teacher would give different scenarios and ask us to predict what patterns would be observed. In one, the pattern was alternating bands of dark and light. I was the only kid who could figure it out, and the physics teacher was so visibly impressed, he to started calling me the thinker. That thing, visualizing something given to you in mathematical form, feels very good indeed.

How do you get transcripts done? In house,outsourced to a transcription service,voice recognition software?

Is "auto" in autopilot short for automatic or automobile? It's just occurred to me it could be either if you want to be strict or pedantic. I automatically assume it's short for automatic pilot, which most people would assume means "it drives - pilots - itself," and that may be reason people assume the technology is more like a chauffeur. But if by autopilot Tesla mean automobile pilot (I admittedly don't think that's the case), then the meaning would probably change.

I'm browsing from a dumb phone, so searching is too much work, but there was a guy who got into an argument with Colin Percival (spelling might be wrong), and the guy aske Colin a supposedly dismissite question along the lines of "Have you won (major math prize)?" As it happens, Colin had actually won the thing. That was amusing. In my mother tongue, we call such an event "being thrown back to the bottom of the gourd."

Instead of being indignant that we can be "mentored" by a person half our age, let's rephrase the question and ask, "What could I possibly LEARN from a person half my age?"

Well, almost everything. Your typical grandparent was probably taught how to use the new technology of their day by their grand kids. People not half their age, but something like a fifth or even a tenth their age.

I've read about a guy, I think his name is Tao and I'm sure HNers are familiar with him, who got his math PhD at 21 and was teching undergrads while a young teen. Could you be twice his age and learn from him? Is that a trick question?

I think the reason this is even a talking point at all is that the word mentor implies imparting knowledge gained from experience, and since experience correlates to age, we inevitably wonder how a person younger than you could be more experienced than you. But really, the thing we are after is knowledge regardless of how it was acquired. When you look at it like that, the age of your source of knowledge becomes a complete non issue.

I find this interesting because I've ever thought of it conceptually, the idea of a scanner that instantly scans closed books (instantly because one pulse of whatever EM wave you're using suffices). I thought about it after reading about the Timbuktu manuscripts that were saved from Boko Haram in Mali. I hear many of them are too delicate to open. I hope this works. It'd be awesome for so many use cases.

I can't find the link now, but I remember reading an article stating there are three levels to this thing.

One, the obviously visible and known features, such that metallic strip many notes have. Know to both the users and would be counterfeiters.

The know but not obviously features, such as micro text or the things that become visible when seen under those purple lights (UV?).

Secret features only known to a very small select group of people in the money printing business. These are last resort identifiers of fakes.

"Many Kenyans refusing basic income."

I'm not sure how representative this project is. I mean, if someone tried a pilot project in San Antonio, would the results of that project be taken as a representative outcome for Texas or the United States? Remember, this "sampling," such as it is, is different from the kind of sampling they do on opinion polls, why they query a small but representative sample of the population.

My guess as to why they're failing is that they're not clearly elucidating their purposes and intentions. For instance, I can confirm to you that if you came to Kenya where you gave, say, high milk-production breeds of cows to dairy farmers, or any other similar thing with a clear quid (if not pro quo), then the uptake would probably overwhelm you.

But with free basic income, it's a very counter-intuitive idea. What do you mean you're giving me free money? Where is it coming from? What's your intention? What do I have to do for it?

If they were to explain that they're conducting an experiment (I bet they're not clear on that point) where they want to see what people would do with their lives if they had a certain basic income guaranteed by someone (say, government), then Kenyans would take you up on the offer, I'm sure. After all, many Kenyans expect and often call upon the government to help in all kinds of areas, so if you took that basic-income-provided-by-government angle as your ultimate goal, I think people would listen.

That lack of clarity is what is most likely causing people to shun the money.

It's not that Kenyans don't want free money. We probably do. After all,we seem to be very keen, for example, on these churches where you "plant a seed" (give money to the church in exchange for "blessings"), and money given out during political campaign seasons (we have one coming up next year) always seems to be taken up very well. But in these cases, the financial logic is not clear.

Where is the logic with free basic income? If you don't clearly and understandably explain that to people, you're going to fail. Especially if when they ask you to explain and your response is something along the lines of "Why do you care? It's free money, you sucker living below the poverty line." (I'm not saying that's what happened. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was).

PS: Just because I'm Kenyan doesn't make me an expert, or even basic informed, on Kenya. Just because you live in a country doesn't necessarily mean you understand it. Exhibit A: Trump supporters. Exhibit B: Brexit.

Edit: typo.

I would argue advancement ultimately begets happiness, eg, you cure cancer, you save lives, which makes those lives, and the lives that love them, happy.

If the advancement does not serve a purpose that brings happiness, what's the point of advancing?

I hadn't thought of that to be honest, and I've never used one either, but from review videos, it seems that the phone detects when you pull the S pen out, so I'd guess there's some kind of connection.

The Galaxy Note 7's S pen is considerably bigger than a head phone jack, yet the phone is water proof even with the pen removed from it's slot, so my guess is that can't be it. Assuming, of course, that anything Samsung can do to water proof a phone, Apple can too.

"Why are you wanting to learn mathematics?"

The author is called Michael Halls-Moore. Why would a person called Michael Halls-Moore write a sentence like this? I'm genuinely curious, coz I'd assume this is a native English speaker.

People in the industry should realize that by windmill, we mean that big rotating thing. What it does with the rotation is not visible to us for us to need to make a distinction, and for the majority of their existence, those big rotating things were just windmills.

Hmm, could there be something in the analytics that could be used to claim, in aggregate as opposed to you personally, that the ads influenced your buying decision, hence demanding a higher price, perhaps for future ads? Coz it doesn't make sense why they'd do that.

The worst ads are the ones that advertise the very thing I've recently browsed. Say I browse some shoes (not google them, browse the site selling the shoes), that's when I start seeing tons of ads for that very site. What's the point? I thought ads are supposed to tell me something I don't know?

I'm curious if this has to do with their generally broken English, as I read on what I think was their blog post. Does English proficiency affect coding "fluency", seeing as you are coding in English?

I don't know how these things work, but I'd have thought showcasing your prior work goes a long way in determining if someone wants to hire you. A bit similar to how, if I wanted you to create an ad campaign for my product, I'd more interested in seeing other campaigns you'd done, more than anything else. To see how you quantified the problem and the solution you came up with. Isn't that what front end dev is?

When you talk about two people plotting to kill hundreds, do you mean any two people or do you mean two people who are otherwise physically apart but are brought close together by technology? Coz if the medium of communication used by your two would be mass murderers is VoTA (0), that technology is as old as human beings.

0. Voice over The Air. :-)

But a military contractor type of company has lots of obfuscation leeway with "top secret" type of things, doesn't it? And I'd imagine a defence contractor is the type of company that would be interested in the kind of info this kind of malware can gather.

I'd love to hear more about how this is done. Care to share links, websites, etc? Or to write me, dwanjiru at Google's email service about it?

What criteria is used to determine that malware could only possibly have been made by a nation state? If all it takes is specialist teams and a budget in the millions of dollars (presumably, had it been 10s or 100s of millions, that's what they'd call it), lot's of private entities can pull that together, can't they?

The fact that there are others who have it much worse than you does not invalidate your grievances or limit the language you can use to speak to those grievances. If we start that kind of comparison, then I'd argue the people you describe have it pretty good, compared to people to Nazi concentration camps, who got shot dead (!) for giving their supervisor sound technical advice (assuming Schindler's List is an acceptable source of Nazi anecdotes).

>chief executive of Uber wrote in a blogpost obtained by Bloomberg.

You mean obtained it, like it isn't available to the general public or something? Did they let you make a copy or was it FYEO?

So what was that thing about wanting to add artificial noise to electric cars for safety reasons because you normally can't hear them coming? Was that just bogus stuff from someone?

Right now, Amazon tells me that customers who viewed a-given-book-on-this-list also viewed other books on this list. Is that the effect of being on this list? Interesting.

The problem with trying to get rid of skeuomorphism is that skeuomorphism is built on the idea that human beings use single tools for single tasks. A pen to write, and only write. An old school phone to call, and only to call. A clock to tell time, and only to tell time. A camera to take pictures, and only to take pictures. For this reason, skeuomorphism works coz we associate the icon with the task. Hence message icons are envelopes, coz envelopes hold messages and nothing else, more or less. We've seen erase icons on software that look like pencil erasers. The camera icon? Of course it's a camera. And so on.

Enter the smartphone.

The smartphone does everything. It makes calls, takes pictures, receives messages, tells time, shows TV shows (we'll have to stop calling them TV shows, won't we?), etc. Since icons resemble the tools used to carry out given tasks, what are we to do when one tool does all tasks?

That's the problem for skeuomorphism. What are we to do for icons when one tool does everything? Create icons depicting people doing those different things, a bit like emoji? A selfie icon for the camera, a person talking on the phone for voice functions, a message bubbles icon that mimics message interfaces for messages?

I don't know. I guess a language to replace the skeuomorphism language will emerge.

Does using Google products qualify my relationship with them as an association? In the same way that me buying you a cup of coffee is association?

I realize that I'm suggesting calls that are difficult to make, but my wider contention is that the current status quo, legal and valid as it is, is missing something that we are going to have to address at some point.