ExactoKnight

The James Webb Space Telescope, nicknamed the telescope that ate astronomy, has cost an enormous amount of money due to the need to get everything aligned absolutely perfect before launching because there will be no chance for repair.

In comparison, with adaptive optics ground based telescopes have a lot more leeway to be fixed and corrected.

(That said, if astronomical interferometry can achieve the same result as a 100Metre telescope, then let's do it that way! How is less important than making sure we have something in our pipeline within the next decade that can be capable of directly measuring the spectra of exoplanets.)

It depends wouldn't it? If the biology and chemistry of those organisms prove to be completely different (e.g, by not being carbon based), then couldn't their bacteria prove to be utterly inert in relation to our bodies?

Finding the existence of life on another planet holds MAJOR implications for many organized and unorganized religions. It would tell us whether abiogenesis and life is common, or something truly unique.

So while discovering life on another planet wouldn't answer exactly "why we are here", it would go a hell of a long way in shaping our answers to that question.

Could the Square Kilometre Array, by measuring in the radio frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum, actually be capable of directly imaging the nearby spectroscopic signatures of exoplanets?

I thought you needed to be capable of directly imaging the light of an exoplanet in other wavelengths in order to do that.

The other project that needs to become a reality FAST is the construction of a telescope large enough to measure the spectra of exoplanets. Because once you find a habitable planet with oxygen in its atmosphere, you now have an irrefutable and pressing case to move fast with Breakthrough Starshot.

Sadly it's going to likely a require 100metre telescope mirror or larger, and current science funding only has a 30metre telescope mirror in the works. The 100 metre telescope was cancelled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope

The answer is at our fingertips, yet the science community can't get the money to build something that would be a fraction of what F-35 fighter jets cost.

What the !@#$ are we doing as a human race...

I am flabbergasted that as a society we aren't rushing to build a 100 metre wide telescope mirror large enough for us to directly image the spectra of the potentially habitable exoplanets around us.

A telescope this large could tell us whether any of these potentially habitable planets contain oxygen, and thus, biological processes.

Yet thanks to funding cuts in science the biggest telescope we have in the pipeline right now is one with a 30 metre mirror. This telescope won't be big enough, and as a result, our failure to push now for bigger sizes is almost certainly going to push back for decades humanity's ability to answer one of the most important questions we face:

Why are we here, and are we alone.

Crowdfunding is a HORRIBLE financing model for real estate.

Real estate is a long term investment, where risk is best reduced by diversifying risk across many real estate assets. Any crowdfunding model for real estate that seeks to raise funds in a non-diversified way is scammy and almost certainly going to harm retail investors who get sucked into it.

The block chain offers the following unique benefits for asset transfer:

- Assets move directly between entities — transfer and settlement are one-and-the-same — eliminating counterparty risk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_risk#Counterparty_risk)

- Assets move instantly, and settlement time is ~10 minutes (settlement can also be instant if the parties trust the other won’t “double spend”)

- The transfer mechanism is public infrastructure and is always improving — everyone has a shared incentive to make it better, similar to Internet protocols like email and http

- Assets and end-user data are privately controlled, and strong security for assets can be achieved by using multiple signing keys across several parties

- Policy rules about the movement of assets can be enforced programmatically — whether those are “terms and conditions” or regulatory requirements

- Assets are fungible and play nice together — e.g., you can use reward points to buy mobile minutes

- A single transaction can include multiple entities and assets, on both sides of the transaction — e.g., you could execute a merger of two companies in a single transaction, with the inputs to the transaction being all stockholders across all share classes for both companies, and the outputs being all the newco shares going to all the new stockholders (again, no escrow service needed)

- Every transaction is added to an immutable record which, while anonymous, can be used to construct a perfect audit trail of an asset’s movement when combined with the private data held by the entities using the system — this defends against fraud, and also gives issuers transparency into asset movements

- It’s easy to integrate new parties

- Like the Internet itself, it’s a global system

Worth a read: https://blog.chain.com/wall-street-meet-block-chain-b2747909...

Sorry, but I don't like Hacker News turning into reddit threads where unproven speculation gets read as truth.

Care to provide some substance to your claims with examples of precisely what kinds of funding supports (in $$$) the Canadian government actually gives to new migrants?

There's a common meme out there that refugees get more money than welfare recipients, and it's outright false. (Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/do-government-assisted-refug...)

It's a huge leap. AlphaGo used data to train itself well against a game with extremely clear rules and outputs.

So while impressive, it's an example again of specialized AI. Real life is not at all like this, nor is what Google achieved clear that it can be a roadmap to anything like General AI.

No, it doesn't.

Have you ever thought to consider that we are unable to understand our own brains due to being constrained exactly because of it?!

But how is that even possible? The best "AI" we have now are essentially just impressive exercises in data science, telling us in a surprisingly accurate ways things about the world that we already know.

Give it something completely strange, foreign and unknown, and it will acts orders of magnitude more irrational than the dumbest human.

You nailed it.

I do agree with this. One of the clearest inequalities emerging in A.I.-driven machine learning is how useless those techniques are unless you have access to a monstrously large amount of well categorized data. Currently you need to be one of the big four to have that access, and this is highly monopolistic.

No, it's Elon Musk whose understanding of AI is limited.

I doubt Musk has ever actually built a neural network, or got close to coding one... because if he did, he would realize just how fragile and hard to generalize they are.

Stacking a ton of data together to build predictive models that can produce intelligent-like outputs, is a far, far cry from a robot gaining consciousness or a sense of agency.

Citation needed.

Wikipedia is actually falling victim to the opposite: ideological tyranny imposed by a small cadre of editors.

Some Wikipedia articles now show noticeable bias (e.g. compare the "Men's Rights 'movement'" article to "Women's Rights"). On many pages, particularly gender related articles, there is a band of aggressive editors who will fight reasonable efforts to balance the tone of articles. Outside contributors who try to improve these pages will get dogpiled on. Unless you are an expert at wiki-lawyering, you won't survive even a couple edits before you are banned or restricted from editing. They enforce/investigate multiple accounts, VPN & proxy usage vigorously, so once you are out, you are effectively purged. If you are ambitious and make edits similar to what others have tried (often because all of them are trying to fix the same biased statement), expect to be accused of being a "sockpuppet" or of being a "meatpuppet." If that fails, you will be accused of "tendentious editing". Of course responding to these accusations takes extraordinary amounts of time -- which is the point. These tactics are used (very successfully) to reduce people's resolve to contribute or fix biased articles.

Wikipedia's ideological hijacking is a serious problem and arguably represents the biggest threat to Wikipedia's longterm legitimacy. Those engaging in ideological hijackings have (very rightly) realized that if they can define what is written about a movement on Wikipedia, they can control what society thinks about it.

Did he actually succeed in getting a dual share class structure?!

It's the iron law of oligarchy at work. I struggle to find many tech companies outside of the big four that didn't begin to decline long term post-IPO.

This was a really good article that shifted my thinking away from simplistic Econ 101 thinking about real estate: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commen...

Amazon Subscribe and Save gives you 15% off on your order if you schedule 6 or more items.

Economies of scale to drive prices down by 15% over what you would normally pay do exist. E.g. Amazon can save money individual per-unit shipping costs by sending the entire shipment over in one go every month. The promise (and likelihood) of continual recurring revenue means the net margin made per transaction can be lower yet still sustainable for Amazon, while benefitting the consumer.

Is there any way they can survive the lawsuit?!

The core of this paper's claim seems to be that 0-mixin transactions leave user's exposed, however Monero has since prohibited these types of transactions. So yes, these types of transactions going backwards are exposed, but moving forward they will not be.

This appears to be the Monero's team main response. Am I missing any other substantive arguments from the paper?

Would love to be told why the law says this defence wouldn't work.

How many programmers could write a functional machine code?

The wrong question is being asked. Modern programming techniques work because they have successfully abstracted this complexity.

This reflects a failure of modern corporate structures to empower engineering to the role it should and (ought) to be having.

Thankfully, this is changing rapidly and the valley is leading the way.

Part of this comes from an inability in the early years to truly respect engineering as both a craft and as a form.

I know your startup mindset well and I carry with it with me too. I came into a legacy fintech company the same way and pushed for faster decision making processes.

I didn't realize the cause for conservatism until I was given a story about how the company needed to manually call and refund thousands of customers... all because one developer fucked up and double charged people.

When you deal with MONEY and you experience getting burned like that... you realize how mantra's like "move fast and break things" only work as convenient motto's for startups who have nothing to lose.

At a certain point you reach a point where continuing to try to move elephants around is going to get you no where.

Death is a necessary component of change. In fact, renewal could not come without death.

Existing legacy systems bring with them assumptions about how things ought to work, and debt about expectations -- expectations that slow down your ability to change away from existing paradigms.

True innovation requires this breakaway.

So honestly, IMO the best move for a bank that is facing this kind of software nightmare is to maintain existing legacy support for the old system, but do a complete breakaway (NOT REWRITE) that is explicitly NOT dependent on the old contracts of functionality that the old system would have imposed. Make the rules change, acknowledge the old system will break with the existing system, and plan for a data migration over where ever possible.

Accepting defeat and moving on is a saner path. Migrating the data will become possible once it's realized that ultimately data is easier to change over than behaviour.

I say this too as someone who is very against rewrites generally. It's a fallacy to believe that old systems can accomodate new.

I'm pretty sure with these kinds of systems, if you can repeat about 10 nouns relevant to working within a mainframe environment like this, you're hired.

Go for it, if you like death marches that will just fail.

The real trick to software consultancy nirvana is to find the big whales paying big money for what are just kiddie apps.

"LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing."

- Alan Perlis