phantarch

Valid point, I hadn't considered that the amount of data they're trying to send you may end up costing you more money than you were willing to allot to their site. However, I don't think that makes the entirety of the analogy invalid. They still think about their website differently than you, regardless of how you're being charged to view it.

It could also be argued that once you're in a store, there is a very real disrespect of your personal finances placed on you by the burden of advertising and product placement. An abuse of consumer psychology in a physical space is just as bad as an abuse of your phone data. Both cost you time and money. While it still stands that you couldn't have seen the video advertising coming ahead of time, you also can't see the psychological tricks that get you to purchase more coming ahead of time either. In both cases I think it's up to us to not get fooled again.

I think the difficulty comes in when the two parties (us vs the site owners) come into the situation with different views about what the website IS.

You're viewing it, quite correctly, as a technical request that's made and some data that's passed back that you can use at your discretion.

They're viewing it as you entering a digital storefront where they need to take every opportunity to convert you into a customer.

In your mind, you're staying right where you are and the data you're getting back is just that: yours. In their mind, you're entering into their space and so they have certain expectations of you and your experience. You telling them what kind of advertising they are allowed to have is, in their minds, tantamount to walking in to one of their stores and telling them to change the displays they have out. Not saying that it justifies any claims about what should be legal, illegal, etc. but it does make sense why each party would have the opinions they do.

This article makes me wonder if what the author is calling for is even possible. The web, to me, seems subject to exactly the same phenomenons of growth as all other human enterprises. It starts off with auspicious beginnings where everyone involved knows almost everyone else involved. It grows slowly and retains that old familiar feeling during the honeymoon of its existence. Then, when it really catches steam and starts growing, everyone from the original cohort gets excited about how it's going to change the lives of all the newcomers in the same way it changed theirs. In actuality, there's a saturation point that gets reached where there's so many people using this system that structure inevitably grows out of it/gets applied to it.

It's the difference between the city hall in a town of 200 versus the US Congress presiding over 300+ million. When things grow, they become systemic.

I like how Pliny starts out with valid emotional perceptions of dolphins, transitions to a few believable factoids about them, and by the end of the article is basically just spreading myths and rumors.

Goes to show that nothing under the sun is new, not even Buzzfeed.

This kind of technology is amazingly promising for being able to play games anywhere on any hardware.

However, the thing that worries me the most is not latency or graphical fidelity, but the way this will affect the actual design of AAA games. If I as a developer/studio know that my AAA title is going to be remotely controlled, possibly accessible only via subscription, and the end user's progression monitorable at any point, the opportunities for monitization skyrocket. You think DLC now is bad? Try playing Skyrim and being able to buy in-game gold at any point via browser pop-up. Just died in Dark Souls? Respawn with no lost souls and kill all enemies in the vicinity for only $1!

I'm not saying that all games will end up being this way, but a certain amount of AAA titles may end up going with more mobile-oriented pricing models if this sort of remote gameplay becomes mainstream.

I went ahead and read his post about the actual process of getting the surgery and I think that's scared me off of it forever. It's not an invasive procedure, but just the thought of being strapped down and having my eyes mechanically restrained so a miniature band saw can slice pieces of them off is absolutely terrifying. I'm sure the doctors are all qualified for the most part and it's well within reasonable safety parameters, but even with sedation I would be incredibly anxious.

Is there a similar procedure to LASIK where they can put you completely under? Or can they do that with LASIK too?

What kind of resolution is possible with direct imaging at 1400 ly away? I would imagine that it's probably milliseconds of arc within the field of vision of any telescope, so how close could we actually look at the planet?

Even if it only took them 100 years to get to a star system 5 ly away, I would be amazed and impressed by a society that would be okay with investing in and working on at minimum a 105 year mission. Perhaps they live much much longer than we do :)

As a counter point, it's always possible that a civilization that developed past where we are now would have been masterful at space travel, but not advanced enough to completely figure out a 1400 light year long journey. We're still having hard times figuring how to get squishy meat sacks to Mars without being irradiated to death or creating a launch vehicle made of lead. Besides the engineering problems there's the social cost of a venture like that. Unless their societies would be structured in a wholly different way (which is likely) then there is significant political and social momentum that would need to go behind a project like a mission where the minimum acknowledgement time of success is 2800 years away. There's plenty of time to go extinct or make yourself die off.

At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.

Cortex [1] is a case study of the workflow of CGP Grey, who makes really great YouTube videos that the HN community would probably enjoy. It's slated for 10 episodes, and currently episode 5 has just been released.

I also really like Hello Internet [2], which is done by a couple of guys who make YouTube videos for a living. Usually not super tech-oriented, but they almost always have interesting discussions. It's a fun podcast.

[1] https://www.relay.fm/cortex

[2] http://www.hellointernet.fm/

Sherlock (or Doyle) says it best. "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

Petzold does a really good job of debunking the original claim that the US is not statistically significant when it comes to the number of mass shootings. However, all of the effort he goes through only points to one conclusion: the number of shootings we have in the US isn't statistically random. All this means is that there's something causing the rate of shootings to be higher here than is expected by random influences. It doesn't point to what that cause is.

It's odd to see how statistics are abused by interest groups/media. Intuition is usually a pretty good yardstick for the validity of a statistic, insofar as knowing what kinds of conclusions should be able to be drawn from what kinds of data. If you've got a bunch of data about who likes what flavor of ice cream, it's not likely that data says anything about /why/ each person likes what they like. In the same way, it doesn't matter if you say that the US is normal when it comes to number of shootings or to say that it's abnormal as Petzold does, when you try to say /why/ this is the case, you better be drawing direct conclusions from your data.

Funnily enough, I notice confirmation bias quite a bit in a D&D game I am currently DM of. I'm playing with a group of friends who are big into video games, and as a result they consistently seek resolutions to conflicts in D&D by way of what they know from shooters: kill everything in sight. Yes, it's at times a valid answer, but it's not the only one and it's certainly not the most interesting one. The best way that I've seen the confirmation bias dissipate from their thinking is to put them into situations where their bias just doesn't help at all.