seats

I think of somewhere like DEKA as a small scale modern bell labs.

You could design a two balloon system with a secondary balloon that is nearly initially empty that will take over lift after the first bursts.

At the Alamo Drafthouse in San Antonio, they play a slightly modified version of this before every movie I've seen -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo9v_GIuDBk

Definitely a good place to watch a movie, and I think Ebert is spot on.

I wonder how possible it would be both technically and legally to use the audio from the various angles as inputs into an audio processing step where you distill just the true music audio and clean it up. Ideally you'd have one 'cleaned' version of the audio playing and switching views just switches video.

This may be more legally grey than just piping through audio since you are actually producing a derivative work (even if it is mechanically produced), but the net effect would be awesome. You'd end up with better audio than any one person could record, and the more angles you get the higher quality you can make the audio.

Definitely a great idea and very well done for the first cut. You just need some Wilco on there.

15 year old discussion, unfortunately. Makes it pretty likely this didn't stand up to scrutiny.

This is awesome, and I totally agree-

"It’s like everyone fantasizes about… whatever… but once their fantasies start to become reality, they piss their pants and self-sabotage."

I once worked somewhere where we had a need to store and transmit lots of camera created jpegs in as efficient a manner as possible.

When working on this problem, I noticed that all digital cameras create jpeg with 422 sampling. This might be a religious topic for some, but I cannot see any visual difference between 4:2:2 and 4:2:0, even with high magnification or on physical prints as large as 30 inch height. Simply sub-sampling to 4:2:0 along with subtle tweaks to quantization tables and with little effort we'd bring a typical jpeg from 1-2MB down to 300-400KB.

We even did a series of experiments with people who look at photo prints all day and they could not reliably pick the 'recompressed' images.

The only reason I think people really hold on to 422 or even 444 is that when subsampling you can get nasty amplified errors if you are using two tools that sampling with different algorithms or from different siting (i.e. imaging if one tool picked odd lines and one picked even). Although the spec specifies siting, I think there are still people who do it wrong, not to mention there is still leeway for interpretation on how pixels are averaged for siting that is not on a pixel boundary.

Bottom line is that if you know exactly what you are going to do with the photo in the future you can compress a lot and quite easily with little risk. If you have a lot of unknown processing in the future, things can get dicey.

>> The realm of human knowledge is simply too vast for anyone to have a broad command of, so we specialize.

This statement could actually be used just as easily against voting for representatives as we do today. The real question is do you trust public at large to make a better or worse opinion than <name your representative> on some issue you are deeply informed on? In other words the comparison should be versus the existing system as a whole, not versus an expert on a single topic.

My perception of the demagogue is that their power comes from railing against the current authority. So while I can agree that it seems likely that a 'true democracy' would instantly prop up the Becks and Palins of the country, who do they blame when a majority of people vote that they are wrong? Or maybe even more extreme who do they blame when their views and proposals are voted for but still fail?

There is no longer a 'bad guy' to blame and arguments put forth by a demagogue will have to deal with two new realities-

1- They can no longer claim they are part of the majority opinion in an effort to gain further support. It'd be hard for Sarah Palin to keep up her 'regular joe' persona and reconcile it with being in major disagreement with a majority of the country

2- They can no longer claim obstruction by some authority steam rolling them in legislature. It would become pointless to argue about which pundit supported which policy or law in the past, because every individual would have their personal voting record.

>> there are many unimaginable things that can happen in 5,000 years and I can think of a few

You must use a different definition of 'unimaginable' than I'm familiar with.

Sorry, just thought that was funny phrasing. First thing I thought of was that xkcd as well. It is interesting to talk about instantaneous population trends, which is what the extrapolation is based on. It's a shame they couldn't have just done that and stopped there without trying to extrapolate into something that can be viewed as 'prediction' by a casual reader. But hey, at least they admitted they used the backs of envelopes for the calculation.

I thought Buffett was very clear -

"But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate."

Only if you call it a donation instead of an investment.

Even better, sometimes google instant answers my question before I even see search results.

The pyramid in this case is that the people getting acquisition exits are becoming angels. Not really that different from your example of Sun/Oracle/Yahoo profitability help drive the tech bubble.

Right, but that's why I'd say it is a modern take on it. It actually makes the program more like an opportunistic specialized VC/investment bank combo.

>> If you want to create jobs, how about companies under 10 years pay zero taxes. Zero costs to incorporate, and all licenses are free. No costs to access secondary equity markets, and access to an entrepreneurship courses. I don't think they want that many jobs tho, might shake things up.

Actually Mark Cuban suggested this as well -

http://blogmaverick.com/2008/07/28/how-to-jumpstart-the-econ...

Seems like a modern equivalent of the FDR work programs. What did it take for him to pull it off?

EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

Looks like the executive branch should have enough power to do this on its own.

Maybe a slow night on HN, but still you were on top of all the answers, so it was worth it to me to get your take. Thanks for the answer.

When talking about edge cases I could come up with ones that don't involve the cloud. And in those cases maybe I don't need to replicate a server, but instead I just need to represent a very small amount of data in an encrypted form that can be operated on homomorphically.

While I don't have a fleshed out idea on how to apply it, the one area that I'm interested in thinking about homomorphic encryption being applied is POS financial transactions. My gut (and this is just a gut, not backed by in depth thought by any means) is that homomorphic encryption as a building a block could allow you to design a secure and significantly better replacement for the existing credit card (or even chip and pin) system.

djcapelis,

Seems empirically like you are the most knowledgeable on the thread on this topic. Maybe you can help me understand the current state of this research a little better.

I understand that there are reference implementations that show fully homomorphic encryption in action but there is an efficiency issue, but just how severe is the inefficiency? To me practicality comes down to whether or not any application given current algorithms is worth that inefficiency and if it works at all it seems like there must be some edge use case where even the most severely inefficient implementation still meets a need.

So two questions for you-

What is the definition of 'practicality' at this point (i.e. how efficient does this need to be)?

What is the current efficiency (and how is it being measured, big O notation per key length?, something else) ?

Reminded me of this PZ Myers post that really rips into Kurzweil. There are problems with too simplistically thinking of DNA as a program.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does...

Best answer I'd say. I wonder how many people think they are running a 'startup' when it is actually just a 'company'?

My example is my own company, slicehost. I don't believe that we needed to find and/or prove the business model. It was a simple hosting model, we just thought we could do it more efficiently. Granted along the way new models arose from the automation inherent to the efficiency, but we already had profitability and traction at that point, it wasn't a requisite to 'making it'.

Now is efficiency gain (or conversely quality improvement) alone enough to make it qualify as a brand new business model? I'd argue that it is not.

My anecdotal support for my theory here is that we felt initially that we were taking very little risk in starting the business. It was clear and obvious to us that we could survive on the implied margins of other providers and acquiring customers in hosting at that point in time was relatively non-competitive.

Then perhaps we agree at the margins. It all depends on what you consider to be a 'slight change' in the model. We also probably disagree slightly on what businesses you are willing to claim as startups. Is a new restaurant a startup? How about a consignment store? A dev consulting shop?

Even in the most commoditized industries with extreme competition, there is often a built in profit margin that is essentially accepted by the businesses in that industry, because it would be mutually destructive for it disappear entirely.

I'd wager that most of the small business economic activity in the US comes from sole proprietors repeating business models verbatim and collecting that additional margin above and beyond their built in salary expense.

Franchise to me implies licensing branding and/or materials from a franchiser, and while that certainly covers one case, it is not all-inclusive of possible answers to the question.

What would you call a company that from its start uses a well-known scalable and repeatable business model?

Flying cars do exist and can be bought (pre-order) today.

http://www.terrafugia.com/

Unrelated, except to the sub-title. I also posted deeper in the comments, but I think it's a pretty cool project and thought it's worth trying to repost in a more visible spot. The price tag is a few 100k and you only need the lowest level pilot's license to fly it.

Actually flying cars exist now and have been approved for use by all requisite governmental agencies.

http://www.terrafugia.com/

PG, clearly you are an apologist for YC and that's totally fine, but his post is broader than YC. I disagree that any angel 'who is paying attention' can narrow the field. In fact I would say any angels who want to have skin in the game have to just get in line, and the line is long, especially to invest in any YC company.

Bottom line is that there is too much risk capital at play right now. Valuations are high and by definition returns on average are going to be low. For the mediocre and lower funds and investors they may be worse than low.

YC will do just fine. The good YC startups will do just fine, but the marginal angel investor is probably not making smart investments right now. Good time to be a startup raising seed and early stage but a bad time to be on the other side of that equation.

I'll own up to that. Talking over people is probably one of my worst tendencies, but I think it was a little exaggerated by the editing. It was necessarily to do a bit of chronological editing to get the tangents we covered into a better flow.

Pickled Onion, aka Paul Tomes is still working at Rackspace, however not directly with slicehost.