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349 karma · joined April 29, 2009

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_debug_··on Some Indians Find It Tough to Go Home Again
Unfortunately, the generalization is well-deserved. The behaviour of the official named Mr. Brahmachari : feudal, mercurial, inconsistent, authoritative...is the template. If you're lucky, there's often exactly one guy somewhere in there who is sincere, professional, and is literally the one doing all the work, and he sympathizes with your case.

The number of young Indians who, in theory, can transform Indian cities into Silicon Valleys of the East vs. the bureaucracy is like a water and dam situation. The smarter water flows West instead.

_debug_··on If You Want to Catch a Liar, Make Him Draw
Except, such papers forget the power of reflexivity : after the douchebags read the paper, they will start dissimulating very cleverly, rendering the results effectively useless.

It's like that article back in the 90's which said that "gets-things-done"-type of people often folded their shirts up to their elbows, and all the mouths started imitating this.

_debug_··on [dead]
Very true. I think another point that was missed / omitted by the author is that Asians want to assimilate, while Blacks have history of celebrating their separate identity. Asians start with a love for capitalism and hard work and all the Ayn Rand-ish stuff (referred to in a positive sense here).

Minority, hence, refers to those who choose to/really are, quite different from the majority.

(BTW, Kal Penn, whether he realizes it or not, is to brownies what Obama is to Black people, and has a natural career in politics; it's there for him to take.)

_debug_··on Getting Over It
I find these and some other similar high-brow essays repulsive.

Basically, they subtly want to encourage the status quo : the poorer classes of society join the army and get themselves killed while doing horrible things to other people because our Leader said they have WMDs, while the middle classes with a brain go to Uni, and some of them get to write beautiful essays about how one should forget the war. And I'm not even mentioning the subtle connotations in there to forget other negative associations that war has, such as torture and the robbery of the other nation's resources. The beauty of the thing is that the subtle messages are couched in an arguable parable of a soldier who chooses to look forward, not at the past.

What the article actually is, is propaganda.

Fuck you. I will not forget the war, the people who made us go to war unnecessarily, nor the effects it has on everyone, and definitely not the poor fuck soldier veteran who got a raw deal from educated assholes who tricked him into sacrificing his life with propaganda just like this. First they massage you with the anthem and the flag to get you to war, then they massage you with such essays to calm you down from the resulting anger.

_debug_··on Ray Kurzweil: A university for the coming singularity
I understand your reaction, but it doesn't automatically mean that we want to bomb anyone, scientists or professors or others, just because we are discussing his ideas.

So in my case, I am saying that the ideas states by the Unabomber minus the bombing are still quite striking (especially about oversocialization, artificial drives, etc; as I mentioned above).

_debug_··on America’s Secret Innovation Weapon: Immigration
Systems are more powerful than the people caught up in them. The person who is escaping the "cast of poop-cleaners-by-bare-hands" is trying to escape the system that casts him thus. If you (America) ensure that only the best and the brightest are granted entry, then you get to both

a) preserve your system, without dilution of it's core principles

b) allow new entrants into the system who are hungry and desperate to succeed and start a new life

What the article correctly identifies is that someone who is desperate to succeed will go much further than others. This kind of inner motivation is extremely valuable and is what fuels the engine of America's growth.

_debug_··on America’s Secret Innovation Weapon: Immigration
Bollocks

  - me
_debug_··on Ray Kurzweil: A university for the coming singularity
I refer you to this paragraph from the Wikipedia by Mr.Kaczynski, which summarizes what I feel when I see people marching like lemmings towards our collective enslavement, especially those working on projects which directly invade our privacy, such as reading intention, following eye movements, etc; Don't they realize how these will be used by governments?

"...who participate in a powerful social movement to compensate for their lack of personal power. He further claims that leftism as a movement is led by a particular minority of leftists whom he calls "oversocialized":

    The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. [...] Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term "oversocialized" to describe such people.[35]
He goes on to explain how the nature of leftism is determined by the psychological consequences of "oversocialization." Kaczynski "attribute[s] the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier conditions." He further specifies the primary cause of a long list of social and psychological problems in modern society as the disruption of the "power process", which he defines as having four elements:

    The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later.[36] [...] We divide human drives into three groups: (1) those drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort; (2) those that can be satisfied but only at the cost of serious effort; (3) those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one makes. The power process is the process of satisfying the drives of the second group.[37]
Kaczynski goes on to claim that "[i]n modern industrial society natural human drives tend to be pushed into the first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist increasingly of artificially created drives." Among these drives are "surrogate activities", activities "directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the 'fulfillment' that they get from pursuing the goal".[38] He claims that scientific research is a surrogate activity for scientists, and that for this reason "science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research."
_debug_··on Ray Kurzweil: A university for the coming singularity
> It seems like a logical certainty to me. ? What is the alternative? How might The Singularity not occur?

Human intervention and refusal to allow it, as you already mentioned.

It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but not necessarily a logical certainty. For example, if I could convince you (and with the same amplitude of conviction that you have right now towards a "smarter"-computer future) that such a future will inevitably result in the slavery of one man by another, and of ever-more powerful dictatorships (that call themselves democracies), this very thought would be the first step towards the non-conception of the singularity. I believe a person called Theodore Kacinzsky has previously argued along these lines, though he chose a more explosive form of argument than mere words :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski

One alternative is to restrict research to biological advances that benefit humans (stem cell research, for example) rather than trying to create even-more powerful machine learning tools all the time.

Just because "everyone" eats McDonalds, it does not take away the power of choice from you to never ever visit a McDonalds (for whatever reason), for example. Look at how scarily equipped are the police today, what things man has created for war (weapons that boil your invisibly from a remote distance), and you will understand that technology is fun as long it's not. It doesn't take a genius to look at each invention and decide whether it will most probably be used for the good or result in further loss of privacy and freedom. Two headings from today' ACM "TechNews" newsletter in my inbox are, "The Display That Watches You" and "Predictive Powers: A Robot That Reads Your Intention?". My reaction is : "Are you dumb? don't you see where this is leading?"

_debug_··on Ask HN: Reasonable Java editor for heavily CLI-oriented UNIX types who hate bloat?
ablashov, I have to chime in with the others here and let you know that Eclipse does so many things for you, that in direct contradiction to what you assume, it is actually difficult to set up Emacs or Vi to do the same for you. One example is whole-workspace refactoring : Let's say you decide that a function (method) needs to take an extra parameter, a boolean, but actually, that is just to cover some corner cases, i.e., the argument will be false in most cases, but true for 5% of cases. But that method is used in 326 places. Guess what : changing method signature and refactoring ALL the code that uses that method is just a few actions in Eclipse. Eclipse --> Refactor --> Change method signature --> Add new parameter, boolean isCorner, default = false. You're done. It changes all 326 references to your method and rebuilds the project.

Truth be told, Eclipse is a key reason for Java's popularity. It makes working a pleasure and helps you focus on the actual work, not on the mechanics of how-to-get-it-done.

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