mikk0j

This is true, but not even close to being the smallest of problems. Due to the Apps / Accounts forced migration, I have now lost access to Reader (happened 4 months ago), YouTube (last week) and AdWords (two months ago). The latter is the worst - the AdWords ads keep running with my credit card on file, but I can't access the account. That must be illegal, taking your customer's payment info hostage. The AdWords support team has not answered any of the 5 emails I have sent them.

Well, Higgs Boson is aptly named the "God particle" - it seems likelier and likelier that it doesn't exist.

Same exact prob. The 25-minute counter is there on the desktop. I just haven't pressed play yet. Instead, there is HN to go through.

Do proofread everything you put in <h1> tags. Even for a softlaunch.

Can't even click +1. Gives me the error "Oops... you need a Google profile to use this feature. Google Profiles is not available for your organization." since I am logged into a Google Apps account. Google itself force-merged my personal account into the Apps account, so there's an indication of how well they get 'social' in people's lives. And yes I worked there for many years.

The reason there is that until very recently the only way to make a believable alien in the TV was to dress up a human in a costume.

My summary: collaboration between individuals is a strong Darwinian driver of competitive advantage between species (or other large groups). Homo sapiens individuals were more efficient at collaboration due to language and other social cognition. And yes, we (likely) killed the others off, like we have (possibly) killed off other large mammals (american giant ground sloth, perhaps).

"-But even scientists admit that they can't explain everything. -There probably are questions that science cannot answer..."

I would love to get rid of this intellectual appeasement of supernaturalists. It is only there to avoid accusations of scientism so I find it an argumentative cop-out.

Sure, science can't answer some questions. Like: "what hair colour is bald?", "where does god live?" and "what is the meaning of life?".

But is the problem with science or with the question? Always challenge the question, especially if it contains assumptions.

I like what your pet theory states. For me, it highlights the bigger question: _why_ do we have this propensity to "trust without doubt"?

My pet theory for that is based on risk-avoidance and (behavioural) rational choice theory. When we try to figure out the world in order to effectively interact with it, uncertainty is a huge problem. It is primarily a cognitive processing problem: if you don't know what it going on and what you should or can do about it, you are cognitively stuck and cannot take action. This increases our perception of risk, and possibly real risk too due to our cognitive machinery being engaged and confused.

Unconditional belief to the rescue! If there is something that we can trust without doubt, whatever the rationale behind it might be, it sounds appealing - even if the belief is mistaken, it frees up the cognitive machinery. The more abstract or unfalsifiable a belief, the easier it is to completely trust it and believe in it.

<troll>Cue religion, UFOs, nationalism, horoscopes, communism, homeopathy, libertarianism, rational choice theory, karma.</troll>

You would need a threshold of course. But having that would also mean there would be a fringe demand for people who are above the threshold.

Thus, if this is done, there could be demand for a job board where non-threshold-meeting HN members can employ threshold-meeting HN members to post their job ads. Ok, partly kidding.

The article isn't so much about the company as about the network. Fair enough, some accounts have been taken over by their "official" owners in the case of trademarked names etc. But this is a far cry from turning dull & corporate -- developers are still making great fun accounts and apps on Twitter.

Twitter's real problem, like all open communications platforms, is and will be spam. Boring is a neutral. Spam is a negative, and needs to be fought against.

I know many people who say that when they search for an app and find two alternatives, out of which one is paid and one is free, they go for the paid app. We all have limited, crippled or badly designed apps lying unused on our smartphones. Of course you should charge for an app if you make a good one!

Besides, why does the (anonymous) author think that word of mouth is somehow stronger with free apps? Instead with paid apps, people are more likely to recommend it onwards, since they have an emotional investment (as a result of their monetary investment!) in the app, too.

That was one trolling article.

Finally, we have a viable business for Nokia. And NOK +2% in the OMX Helsinki at the time of writing. Any not-bad news is good news for NOK.

This one is gold:

"As Bruce Sterling has put it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live."

My favorite, #469: "A YouTube VC firm, that will invest money in people who are willing to do stupid stuff on video in hopes that the video will go viral and they will make a profit."

Could happen, in today's angel investment climate...

A program, just like human intelligence, is always means to an end. Whether it passes the Turing Test or not does not change this.

Thanks for clarification. I missed that completely at first. Even if the marketing dept. wants the logo in small caps, human-readable text has proper names capitalized. That's the way it should be.

Should be of "mobile developers", upon reading the article. But nonetheless, the numbers are a bit pointless since they don't indicate overlap (gosh, you can develop both iOS and Android?). What would be interesting is to know the share of "original" development (not "just" porting - but apologies for the generalization) on platforms, or if it is done multi-platform from the start.

Love the implicit dualism in the title. How come is it that our brains are misled? As if we or our "minds" were somehow less susceptible.

Dunbar's number continues to be misunderstood. It is not so much a measure of individuals as a measure of relations between individuals that are important for us to track. It is not the node that is important, it is the connections that the node has.

I am through to page 20 now of the 67 page report #1, and the more I read the more lack of novelty there seems to be. An example:

"We attempt to provide that evidence for the existence of the Marmer Stages intwo ways:1) The Marmer Stages correlate with traditional indicators of progress. 2) Startups that don't move through the stages consistently, show less progress."

How does that prove the existence of something new if it correlates with traditional progress indicators (which themselves are validated by #2)? This sounds like repackaging more than discovery.

There might be something here. Will continue reading.