ippisl

>> just one is from the past ten years

It takes time for innovations to affect society. I bet that in 10/15 years we'll see that quantum computing and deep learning would be very important.

I wonder if we could connect more innovators to environments and communities with real problems, in some interesting way , and by this connection enable those innovators to gain perspective, knowledge and connections to work on the problem ?

Something that's built in such a way that a community create a lot of knowledge about the problem and context(general situation, current solutions and their limitations) , but maybe not the solution, so people could be more motivated to implement their invented solutions?

What's missing for the kindle is a decent RSS reader. hopefully with the closure of google reader something will come up.

Data sent by wifi is free , data sent by cellular isn't.

It's possible for nvidia to replace the resistors with one-time-programable memory ,and program it at factory. And it's cheap, it's being used in $1 FPGA from silicon blue.

And they'll probably do this in their next chip.

There's a similar observation at the book the spirit level,by richard wilkinson who show the link between income inequality and bad results in numerous health and social attributes. And it really moves the political inequality debate to a more scientific field , which is nice.

One supposed reason for the link is that inequality(and low status) causes stress. Which hurts health, causes depression, etc.

The problem with gsm is that it eats batteries. For many "internet of things" applications , a long range , low speed, low power network might be a better match.

For example [1].

[1]http://www.coronis.com/en/key_features.html

What prevents a game developer to offer such services , computed in the cloud and streamed to home displays ? the streaming speed wouldn't need to be that great, and the latency manageable, like onlive have shown us.

And the economics will be quite nice for the game developer since they pay per use for onlive servers. Said economics would also be nice (at least in the beginning) , for users who wouldn't need to purchase an expensive machine.

I don't think mbit/sec are necessary. Today's telepresence for example can be done at less than 15mbit/sec , maybe even 6 mbit/sec.

And if we look at local desktop just as a dumb terminal and using the cloud as the PC , offering compressed display doesn't take that much bandwidth.

And i hadn't seen any really interesting apps in 50/100 mbps networks available around the world.

You're neurosurgeon scenario is interesting because healthcare is the one industry where there are proven models where we can deskill jobs and by this create many good jobs for people with less training.

One example is that of minute clinics where nurses + computers are doing the job of a physician.It's cheaper , it's a good job and the nurses can afford more time per patient , so this creates more jobs. And the u.s. don't steal doctors from the this world this way , which is nice.

There is/could be plenty of stuff like that in healthcare.

relevant HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4968452

You can add to that the repeated refusal of the allies to accept hitler's offers to take jews out of german territory, even while there was some knowledge or at least rumors about the holocaust.

Selling chips for mobile phones doesn't cannibalizes intel's business. Selling chips for tablets might, but at this point in time it would be very risky to think in such a way, and they know this very well.

So why hasn't they given their top game for this fight, i.e. offering 22nm mobile/tablet chips ? I think it's because their 22nm is expensive and not very fit to manufacture cheap chips. From what i read, their 22nm tech costs 30%-40% more than using TSMC 28nm (for manufacturing the same parts). Maybe their rising investment in fabs is due to this problem.

Another explanation would be that they are planning a coordinated attack: better atom and an LTE chip using a 14nm process. That combination might let them seriously decrease power over competitors. And doing that in bang has strategic value of creating pressure/fear over mobile handset makers and carriers to accept their new design, or be left out.

With 400K-580K restaurants and more than $600 billion revenue and 2.5% fees, and the barriers to entry are not throughout network effects , but through data lockout and habits , you don't need to gain a lot of market share to have a pretty good business.

I think wall-mart , did,in some areas, jack up the prices after killing their main street competitors.

Diagnosing some diseases , detecting landmines , detecting food safety, detecting tracks(like dogs), analysis of biocompatiblity of couples(through pheromons),improved robotic chefs can all achieved by smelling.

In general , smelling , i.e. analyzing the volatile compounds materials emit can teach us some things about those materials and what processes they are going through.Those seem like usefull capabilities for many industries.

Pronutria is working on bacteria/algae that converts sunlight into protein. They talk about 10x reduction in the cost of protein, i.e. meat.

Another company(forgot it's name) is working on algae that manufactures sugar as an input for the biofuel industry. Their target is 4x cost reduction vs plant grown sugar.

If they succeed it would be interesting to see the dirsuption to the food industry.

I think it's possible to change the speed at the server, after you generate the file/s[1].

[1]http://superuser.com/questions/519649/tool-to-bulk-speed-up-...

One interesting question that i haven't seen mentioned too much regarding creativity, is:How can we use computers to increase our creativity ?

Because definetly they can help with creativity. Just looking at a discussion threads around a subjects can expose one to various mental models. And searching google for interesting stuff(not directly related) is also very helpfull.

I wonder though, are there other useful techniques ?

Another language popularity survey[1] puts c in the fifth place. It uses data on people who searched tutorials on a certain language, so this result do seem interesting.

Another interesting benchmark would be:lines of code written each year in each language, anybody knows such benchmark ?

[1]https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY...

The display as a vector seems natural to me too.

I wonder though: with the new mini android pc's(starting at $35)[1] that you can connect to your HDMI, even just a simple bundle and some marketing and maybe some playing with the software could be parts of interesting experiments by display vendors or some other company.

And then part of scaling this process , it might make sense to integrate android into the display.

[1]http://9to5google.com/2013/01/01/mk802-mini-android-pc-for-3...

Here's a link to someone's flash card for learning web-dev(variety of subjects, 6000 cards) :

http://www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk/other/web_development_flashca...

Here's a link to a blog post by him describing the technique for programming:

http://www.jackkinsella.ie/2011/12/05/janki-method.html

I switched to sweeteners due to too many trips to the dentist and loving sweet things. I started by changing my coffee from sugar. There are many types of sweetener to choose from , so i've experimented until i found something i liked.

But you do have to have a strong enough reason to switch, not something abstract that will happen in 20-40 years.

At least according to the wikipedia , there's not much scientific basis for the controversy. And there are many other artificial sweeteners.

But again, compare this to the possible harms of sugar and especially fructose. It might look quite good.

From the little i know(mostly from lustig's youtube video ,and from some googling) sugar is composed of glucose and fructose ,and fructose is the main culprit in metabolic syndrome(which causes/increases diabetes, heart disease, hypertension) and also increases cancer risk and creates liver inflammation and fatty liver disease. Glucose generally is much more harmless than fructose.

And carbohydrates are broken to glucose.

There's an easy fix for that: a shift from sugar to artificial sweeteners. Same as there's an easy fix for cigarettes: move to electronic cigarettes.

But i guess we're more afraid of the unknown chemicals(although limited tests have shown they are much safer) than the original poisons, And we're stuck on trying to teach ideals than implement practicalities.

Such a shame.

Generally moving from monarchies to democracies could be considered a "golden" age of human history. Or maybe the rise of rationality and decline of religion.

I don't see any recent big social change that big that happened recently, except the social impact of the web. But i'm not sure i'd considered it as a big positive social change.

What would you say are the big societal changes that happened in the last decade or two ?

Michael , you say we're already in "robot utopia" in terms of tech but there already new jobs. If i look at it from the position of capabilities, not specific jobs, it doesn't seem that this is the case.

For example if you look at agriculture from the point of capabilities(physical repetitive labor), you see machines replacing humans. You see same powers in manufacturing.

But what about eye sight, coordination, adaptivity, ability to offer good enough human service, retaining and sorting large knowledge bases, intelligence and other capabilities ? Computers are improving in all those capabilities, and contionously replace people.

The "robot utopia" will be when machines can do those things better/cheaper than us. Then maybe the only capability that will be left is being an authentic human, for jobs that people prefer authentic humans would do.

Whether humans have this advantage over machine replicas, how many jobs like this would be available and what form this jobs would take(maybe being humiliated as servants like so common in India today?) are interesting questions.

Yes, the rich invest their money. But if we accept the guess that the economy is becoming less labor intensive and more global, their investment does do less to create american jobs, because it makes more sense to invest in such places.

Also, even for the same investment: financing a construction of a house, a 100K dollar paid by someone to buy a house, gives more social value than rich guy saving 100K that are being lent as a mortgage.

And of course there's the problem of concentration of power via money , vs distributed power.

Claiming that "there's no real rhyme or reason to amazon's strategy" doesn't seem right, since amazon is considered great at strategy(and yglesias is the wrong guy to claim it, he's not a business expert and he's been criticized before about being out of his depth).

As i see it , their strategy is simple: identify the points along e-commerce where monopolies/quasi-monopolies can be formed and control them.

So they try to control the customer, the data, the warehouses, the marketing(the digital experience), the volume and now the financing.

My guess is, due to all those, e-commerce's end-game is a winner takes most market.

If they'll have monopoly powers, destroying everybody's profits(and everybody) wouldn't matter much. At that point amazon could increase prices and profits.