_Adam

Is anyone else having issues with the site? I'm using Chrome, and some of the text blocks are truncated on the left side.

This was obviously fake because measuring blood pressure isn't something you can do via the ear canal in a non-intrusive way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_pressure#Measurement

Kind of sad that even a single person believed this. Why is everyone so willing to forego scepticism?

That depends how you define happiness. For some people, simply pursuing their dream makes them the happiest. It may be painful, miserable, and ultimately end in failure, but for a certain set of people that's the only way they can live.

"No Exit makes it very clear that the life of a startup founder is a miserable one, and that engineers are invariably happier when they’re working for a big company."

Any book that tries to tell me how I'm supposed to be happy is automatically placed in the same category as religious texts.

Great story, but there's one part of it that bothers me.

I really don't like how it portrays humanity as a race where only a tiny percentage have the ability to innovate. All humans have this ability! Not all may use it, but we all have it.

Yes.. I know I'm pointing out factual inaccuracies from a science fiction story written 55 years ago, but because he used the term "human" explicitly I feel the need to do so.

I don't remember the source, read this over six years ago, but there was a case where a women born with stereo blindness just suddenly regained depth perception.

I can imagine someone proposing this at some meeting with managers. "For our next product, we're going to use FUCKING SHELL SCRIPTS for configuration and deployment". What would the managers' faces look like...

I wonder if this is what you guys had in mind when you came up with the name

Wolfram Language has much more functionality than what existed in Mathematica, so it remains to be seen if it will have applicability outside of toy problems. So, it isn't fair to judge it solely on the merits of Mathematica.

Also, social conventions are exactly that - conventions implicitly or explicitly chosen by a group of people. That group of people does not encompass the entire population of the planet. Hence, there is no reason to assume that your either your or Linus Torvalds' social conventions apply to anyone outside of you or him. I see no reason why he shouldn't name is work after himself. Is it bad marketing? I don't think so - Wolfram's name is a strong brand.

I don't think it's laziness. That can be part of it, but I believe the core issue is a specific mentality these type of people have. They see the world in a black and white. "Us" and "them". Their view of the world has these two (or more) sides always in conflict. So, they effectively view Google as an enemy to fight against.

My theory as to why people act this way is that they do so to give their lives meaning. That, or there is something that makes their life meaningful they believe the "enemy" will take away. For instance "Google spying on my children" -> "Google is the enemy". They see Google, the NSA, Microsoft, etc, as a cohesive group that is "after them".

But in absence of this conflict, or the external meaning that is the cause of the (perceived) conflict, they wouldn't know what to do with their own existence. Religion, alcohol, and hedonism may end up filling this gap.

In contrast, those who have a self-defined objective see the world as a massive system of problems to solve (or not solve). There's no singular "enemy", just a huge number of people who all have their own motivations and ideals. "Google" is nothing more than a tightly-bound collection of humans.

What I find actually amazing isn't your ignorance, your misunderstanding of Objectivism, Libertarianism, and Silk Road denizens. Nor do I find amazing your inability to separate the individual from the collective.

No, what I find actually amazing is that despite all that you still believed you could make a meaningful comment.

I wonder if they want to use their experience with the "curse" as proof of their intelligence? I'm sure anyone here could find some example of it. But I can think of way better things to do than talk about being smart on HN.

You're probably trying to think about it in spatial terms. But it's impossible to understand a 4D object with 3D spatial reasoning. I would say ALL humans are too "dumb" to grasp this concept. Of course the math is fairly simple, but there's a difference between understanding the math and truly understanding what a world with 4 spatial dimensions would be like.

This is an interesting study, but I'd like to see it with four control groups: Exercise + mental stimulation, Exercise with no mental stimulation, no exercise + no stimulation, and no exercise + stimulation.

That remains to be determined; with sufficient control transmission is less likely to occur. From:http://ragoninstitute.org/hivcontrollers/patients/about/

  Studies have also shown that people with higher viral loads are more likely to transmit HIV to others. Lower levels of virus are thus beneficial to the individual, because they predict longer AIDS-free survival, and to overall public health, because they may reduce the rate of transmission. Some HIV controllers are able to maintain levels of virus that are so low that they are termed “undetectable,” these individuals have been described in the literature as elite controllers or elite suppressors.

HIV is already non-fatal due to antiretroviral therapies. So, this vaccine won't necessarily result in an increase in the number of HIV+ people (who are alive). But even if it does, I still believe it's better than no vaccine at all. Curing HIV (as in, eliminating it completely) from a controller is no harder than curing it in a non-controller. Right now both are impossible, but that may change.

While our market may not be as free as I would like it to be, the lack of USB cable selection is separate from the issue of market freedom.

I like the cable you're describing. If you start selling them, I might buy one.

You might know this already, but I'll mention it anyways because I was looking at it recently: there exists something called "ultra flexible wire" that has a very high strand count compared to normal stranded wire. For example, standard 28 AWG wire has 7 strands of 36 AWG, but ultraflexible 28 AWG has 41 strands of 44 AWG. This makes it considerably more flexible.

http://www.daburn.com/2671ultraflexiblesub-miniaturewire-u/l...

USB/headphone cables made from this wire could be quite a compelling product.

How to build a good robot, you mean.

If you want to be a robot, you need a lot of practice. Walking that way is surprisingly hard.

Of course - freeing humans from their jobs reduces their economic power. But that's expected. Remember that humans aren't entitled to economic power by default. We need to earn it. If a machine has more economic power than a human, then that human needs to gain the skills and knowledge in order to regain their relevance in the economy.

I'm not saying this like this is how things "should be". This is how things are today, and how they have been since the dawn of the industrial revolution. The only difference is that today we have even better machines, so it's harder for humans to compete.

If anyone is interested in the actual technical details, check out the docs here: http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/

There's a 37.7MB zip and the USB PD specification (328 pages) is packaged within.

In order to ensure shit doesn't melt, they'll have detectable cables for >5V and >1.5A operation. I'm reading the spec to find out how they plan to do cable detection. IC based, or electrical connections, or maybe something else?

You call it "eliminating jobs", I call it "freeing up humans from doing pointless work"

The point of life isn't employment. There are so many incredible problems to solve in this universe. Humans are very smart and creative, and having them do any task that doesn't fully leverage their intelligence and creativity is a waste. That's why we automate.

You may not gain anything correcting your sixth grade teacher, but by not correcting her, something can be lost. A world where teachers can spout bullshit without any opposition is not one I want to live in. And given we only have one world...

Perhaps it was irrelevant in your case. Or perhaps your skepticism inspired a fellow student to become an engineer. Who knows?

Sad to hear, this was one of my favorite places in Akihabara. They have really good selection in tools and parts, I got some mini-XLR connectors and inductors. The first few guys I asked didn't have them, but they pointed me to the stall that did. They didn't speak English, so I wrote "18 uH" on my phone and they knew what I meant.

It's not like those parts would be hard to find online. But they had all that stuff in stock, in their tiny stalls.

Google is blocked. How do they get anything done?

I've seen some explanations that make it seem like subjective recognition of a quantum system in superposition is what caused it to decohere. The word "observed" doesn't imply interaction (to the lay-person, at least), so a term like "interacted with" would make things much clearer.

How do you define 'white collar'? To me, it's any job that can be done at a computer.

I believe these positions are a percentage of all white collar positions, and that this percentage hasn't changed much in the last few years.

Technologically, there's been no major advance that makes working from home any better than it was in 2008. The only thing I can think of is the increased prevalence of video chat. But, I can't imagine that the former lack of free, reliable and high quality video chat is what was keeping employees in the office.

Telepresence robots are little more than a novelty right now (imagine trying to lead a whiteboarding session with one of those...). To completely eliminate the handicap of working from home full time, we would need some very convincing virtual reality.

Interesting. My understanding is that office space is a function of the number of white collar workers in the economy.

I expect this number to increase slowly over time. But perhaps we're approaching a point where a sort of equilibrium exists. Further societal and technological changes will need to occur to significantly shift it.

It's certainly possible that one day we'll have desktop genome-printers. Any technology can (and often is) abused, and that would be no exception. Hopefully, there will be a Kaspserky for this era. A "Gene Kaspersky", if you will.

But as I said, they are ultimately bound by the laws of nature. Evolution can only happen so quickly; they can only evolve their genome so much in a given period of time.

What you're suggesting is they'll evolve to look like human cells. But that doesn't make sense. They would need to evolve that way in a single generation. Something that's "almost like" a human cell would just be wiped out.

Just consider how long it took for the last common ancestor (of humans and bacteria) to evolve into a single celled organism.

>I suspect bacteria can, and will, evolve around almost any mitigating technique we develop.

That's a baseless suspicion. Bacteria are ultimately bound by physical laws, and while they've proven resilient, there's no reason to suggest we will be unable to develop the means to annihilate them at will. Humans are creative - bacteria just evolve fast.

I agree about the importance of the biofilm claim, but what they don't explain is how they actually achieve this. Their method of disabling that particular protein doesn't directly address the problem of the biofilms having a less-permeable extracellular matrix.

No, not really. The actual answer is more complex.

Camera:

The high data rate required for imaging module means that it doesn't run on a shared bus. There's a number of standards, some proprietary and others loosely defined, but they all use direct connections to the image processor (which is in many cases part of the SoC).

Microphone:

Probably not going to access this one, because microphone wouldn't be on any sort of bus. They'll have a direct connection to a ADC, which would have a direct connection to an audio signal processor in the SoC.

Other sensors:

This depends on the implementation. If they use I2C, there's a good chance they'll be on a shared bus on which the baseband processor is also located. However, accessing that data requires details about the specific sensor. If a particular model of phone is being targeted, this isn't too hard. For example, I know the iPhone 4 uses the LIS331DLH Accelerometer. I can find the datasheet for that part, and then write a simple driver to access it's data. If they use SPI, which isn't a bus-based protocol, there's little chance of accessing the information directly. SPI devices can be daisy chained or separately selected to put more than one on a single port, but in such a configuration there's only ever one master (which would be the CPU).