beyondcompute

Google-Google, what are you doing? Another embarrassing episode on how users are being treated.

Not about medieval but somewhat related example. There are no visible speech bubbles but the characters nevertheless “talk” to each other: http://notetoself.typepad.com/.a/6a0115705a75a1970b0120a66db... (Ancient Greek amphora by Exekias from the museums of Vatican).

Thanks!

> Bitcoin. Ubiquitous news reporting (death of newspapers). Privatized space industry. Twitter. Netflix. Gene sequencing for pennies. Working from home. 3D printing. Its easy to list whole categories of innovation, and say "Anything else?" Aren't those enough?

What qualitatively new capability Bitcoin gives me? What's Twitter? Online movies? Well, yes! It does not improve our lives radically but still.

> Privatized space industry.

You get the point here. Nice!

> Gene sequencing for pennies.

We need faster/wider adoption of it. Article mentions it. Right now I cannot benefit from it in everyday hospital.

> Working from home.

Was possible before. Only quantitative improvement. Although awesome.

> 3D printing

Is a good counter-example. It's been around for years. And still I didn't hear about someone who uses it on a daily basis to improve their lives. Amazing applications in medicine is the only exclusion so far. Expensive industrial 3D-printers for prototyping etc. are well expensive and not wide-spread.

It is not "Innovation is dead" article. It is "Innovation adoption/spreading is unnecessarily slow" article.

Thank you, you are right. But do you get my idea? That the number of qualitatively new things (that give us entirely new capabilities like "not dying from smallpox" or "flying over Atlantic") is suspiciously low in past 20 years. Yes, miniaturization. Yes, GPS. Yes, communication/information access anytime anywhere. Yes, low-clost airlines. Anything else? My computer today can not do many things which Pentium-166 couldn't do. Navigation on iPhone 3G was as good as one on iPhone 5S (New versions of the apps are only getting slower so we're forced to buy new phone every year. But my old one was fast two years ago!)

Where is my "built atom-by-atom" computer? Where is the nanotechnology? Are you talking about the water-repelling coating on my pants which died away after several washes? Where are my 3D-printed organs? That's exactly the point of the article! We see thousands of amazing things in labs every year. When I will be able to buy any of them in a regular shop? The pace at which things get from labs to end consumers is baffling! We saw DNA-made nano-robots that could deliver drugs to tumors four years ago (in a TED talk). So why all the governments didn't rush to pour billions into that project? We could've seen first results in hospitals by now.

And as I understand the article, that's what would happen had we lived in the Golden Quarter. And now we are too doubtful because we're conservative about financial risks and unfocused because we have so many advancements and we cannot fund them all.

The author is right. Only amazing (indeed spectacular, jaw-dropping!) things that I've seen in my hands or on the streets in past 20 years are miniaturized electronics (including cameras) and ubiquitous communication (internet). And GPS is cool, by the way.

And quite expensive for that sake. As people seemingly charge travelers much more than what locals are paying for renting the same level apartments.

I actually like this blog. There are some other reasonably sounding posts there: like “Bedrock of Abstraction” (http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55) or “On Formats War” (http://www.loper-os.org/?p=309)

TextMate 2

Incandescence (and Diaspora) by Greg Egan. After you read those all other SF seems ordinary and conservative in terms of ideas. Just for cultural reference it's also good to read Vernor Vinge's “A Fire Upon the Deep”. It's more for adventure than ideas. And then there is the great story about mind amplification: Ted Chiang's “Understand”.

Thank you for sharing! So good to know that I'm not alone. :)

> ...you should make it your friend No. You shouldn't. Javascript has enough problems and obscure parts without people making their code look arcane. You should write your code as straightforward as possible. Imagine that you are writing in Pascal for your school project or something. Your code should be obvious, dull, completely boring. I want to look at your code and see that "user gets a bonus every 10th click", not that you used some "hackerish" operator to swap values in two lines of code instead of three but now there is a doubt whether it will work for all corner cases.

Awesome game!

Amazing!

When will people stop building map apps that are reacting to gestures or the device position in a confusing manner? I love my paper map so much! When it lays on the table I can touch it with my finger and it won't wiggle or wobble. I can just use it without fear that one subtle movement from my side will obscure everything I see and I'll have to search the place I were looking for from the beginning.

----- Thank you for sharing! Believe me: even for people that are reasonably ok with strangers, it can be hard to find friends in adult age. I think, I have the same kind of a problem. So I wouldn't concentrate on introversion or something. In my opinion, reading books and reflecting won't help you much either, so I wouldn't devote too much time to it. Excessive introversion is not the most pleasant thing, but please don't be obsessed with it. Just be yourself! ^__^

About meeting and finding friends. First thing that comes to mind is participating in some group activity: take Salsa classes (a good way of overcoming shyness, BTW). Buy a bicycle and get in touch with local biking community (via forum or app like www.meetup.com). If you prefer running do the same with running. Or horseback riding, or whatever. Or take cooking classes! Just remember that it must be group activity and your task is not to learn, for example, to cook but to participate in activity with a group of other people. So if you did not find friends in current group for, say, 3 months, move on to the next activity. Also, I would avoid IT-related activities as IT-people in general are "not very social", mildly speaking (I am programmer myself). Good luck!

Well, me neither. :) Although it looks a little bit suspicious in the text. But what's the relation between 'not throwing crucial design principles out of the window this time' (by not creating opaque, contrived and state-hiding system because tradition seems to approve it) and 'Live Coding' (where people see process of writing code in real-time as a part of artistic performance)?

Yeah, that's all good. But why call people who understand that programming environments should not be opaque (and not violate elementary laws of design by obscuring readings of system's state) "livecoding nerds"? Really, why? :)

Yes, the Google's response (if it is real) to this problem is embarrassing. "It is not our problem that we practically post your credentials to open access at some occasions" [as this post shows using voicemail is akin to doing this in case of significant number of providers]. That's so disregarding to customers.

That's interesting!

Which one you end up using more while you are on the go?

alias Addams='(cd /users/xxxx/Downloads/Addams\ Family\ 1/ && open "$(ls | selecta)")'

When will Microsoft launch it's own iPad (or a product as good as it). "Launching something for concurrents' successful platform". That's weird.

It depends on a domain you are interested in. For visuals it's probably Processing. For server side web it's PHP. For console utilities it's Python. And so on. JS is widely used but it's the worst programming languages in existence.

When there will be an Android smartphone which is not ugly?

And who doubted?

Another poorly designed web-site. Why the product is different? Because it's site is black and white and has video with boys and girls? Why tiny crumbs of valuable information are _written_? Is this information not _visual_ in nature? Can you show me how the thing operates? Screenshots? Animated gifs? Fancy CSS3 demos (animated gifs are better)? Schematically shown workflow?

Strangely designed web-site. When you open it you don't understand what they provide. Is it a service, app, or idea? Device or standard? Then while clicking through sections you see some clipartish generic-looking pictures of people and ipad screens. Only the small vial with blood promises some useful information but no descriptive text or images provide any detail (why this small vial is better and experience is less painful than generic tests?). So after skimming the site reveals nothing you get irritated and leave. There's so much interesting things on Hacker News. Maybe those guys are changing the world but their web-site does not convey it.

I thought it would be about programming languages :) But it's awesome nevertheless!