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I remember reading this brilliant piece of reporting when it first came out. The author, Sarah Zhang, since wrote two more pieces for The Atlantic:

May 2025: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/screwwor...

June 2026: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/06/screwworm-proble...

> Many of the world’s leading researchers believe that A.I. will soon be powerful enough to improve itself with little or no help from human developers.

> “A.I. is code. And now, A.I. can code,” a veteran researcher, Richard Socher, said. “The ingredients are there.”

> Dr. Socher recently founded, with seven other researchers, a company to pursue this mind-bending goal, which is often called “recursive self-improvement.”

> His start-up, Recursive Superintelligence, has raised more than $650 million from venture capital firms including Google Ventures and Greycroft and the chip-making giants Nvidia and AMD. The six-month-old company, which has offices in San Francisco and London, has fewer than 30 employees. But it is now valued at more than $4 billion.

Marc Andreessen would beg to differ :)

On a recent a16z podcast, Andreessen said:

“It's possible that [being a VC] is quite literally timeless, and when the AIs are doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing."

Interestingly, his justification is not that VCs are measurably good at what they do, but rather that they appear to be so bad at what they do:

“Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation... if it was a science, you could eventually dial it in and have somebody who gets 8 out of 10 [right]. There's an intangibility to it, there's a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology — by the way a lot of it is psychological analysis."

The podcast in question: https://youtu.be/qpBDB2NjaWY

(Personally, I’m not quite sure he actually believes this - but watching him is a certain kind of masterclass in using spicy takes to generate publicity / awareness / buzz. And by talking about him I’m participating in his clever scheme.)

The author is Leif Wenar, Professor of Philosophy (as well as Humanities, Political Science, and Law) at Stanford.

He’s the author of the book Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World (about which Peter Singer wrote: “Philosophers rarely write big books that could change the world, but Blood Oil is such a book.”)

Wenar studied philosophy at Harvard with John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and was Karl Popper’s research assistant.

(2015)

According to web.archive.org this is from Nov 2015:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151108010026/https://playbook....

If you're on a Mac, you can find the exact processor model number by opening Terminal.app and entering

  sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string

this will return something like

  Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4650U CPU @ 1.70GHz

(Found on http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/15/get-cpu-info-via-command-line... )

Don Stewart has given possibly the best answer to this question on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6398996/good-haskell-sour...

@liuliu - in the last graph, there's quite a jump from epoch 26 to 27. I'm curious to find out what might be causing this.

According to the reporter, this abandoned theme park is a harbinger of doom for China's economy. But couldn't it instead be viewed as evidence of entrepreneurial risk-taking activity? Taking risks, by definition, involves projects that don't pan out.

Imagine if, every time a silicon valley startup abandoned 100k lines of code to pursue a better idea, reporters swooped in and pointed this out as evidence of impending doom.

(Note that I'm not addressing, and certainly not condoning, China's societal/governance problems, e.g. whether the land was taken unfairly from the farmers, etc. That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.)

The threat of prison is supposed to make people more likely to pay back their debts.

Steelcase makes motorized desks. Joel Spolsky uses them at Fog Creek. His article on them is here (with links to steelcase)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/06/06.html

Is it just me, or does this look uncomfortably similar to the celebrated iA3 template for wordpress, designed by Information Architects?

http://store.informationarchitects.jp/product/ia³-template http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/100e2r/

Yes!

1. Steve Jobs studied calligraphy. At the Stanford commencement address he said:

"I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

(Reference http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html )

2. Paul Graham studied painting at RISD

(He writes about art here: http://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html )

3. And, closer to home for me: my co-founder's first degree was in economics, but he still felt something missing, so he got a second degree which started in painting but ended up in design. He ended up with a completely unique ability to think in a both left- and right-brained way simultaneously.

So, if you feel that both programming and painting reside within you, then you are rare, and my evidence strongly suggests that you find some way to nurture these parts of yourself.

I vote to remedy imbalances:

  valuable && low points => upvote
  valuable && high points => read, no need to upvote

Does anyone else do this?

I love seeing what other people in the community find interesting. Points let me see not just the comment, but how others felt about it.

Anyone who has disdain for real lambadas just doesn't know what they're missing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AfTl5Vg73A

Original paper available here: http://arXiv.org/pdf/1005.4915

The "Australia/New Zealand" link seems broken - it prompts a refresh back to "World" when I select it.

This beautifully illustrates Thomas Schelling's racial segregation model, for which he coined the term "Tipping Point" 30 years before Malcolm Gladwell popularized it:

Schelling, T. (1969). Models of segregation. The American Economic Review, 59(2), 488-493

(Schelling won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2005)

A recent New Yorker article "The Truth Wears Off" is based on the same mathematical fact - that statistical tests are being used wrongly in psychology experiments and (more worryingly) in clinical trials. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_...

Would anyone else like sentiment controls in google's search tools sidebar? Three settings I'd use would be: • Show more results about which people talk positively • Show more results about which people talk negatively • Show results which generate strong opinions, both positive and negative

Alternatively, a "show sentiment for this search" which added a small indicator next to the search results might do the trick. (Just to be clear, I'm not proposing adjusting the ranking of pages based on the sentiment on the page itself, interesting though that might be, but rather based on the sentiment in the text surrounding links to that page.)

From Google's blog: As it turns out, Google has a world-class sentiment analysis system (Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs). But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying.

Steve Jobs: "The problem with innovation in the TV industry is the go-to-market strategy. The TV industry has a subsidized model that gives everyone a set top box for free. So no one wants to buy a box. Ask TiVo, ask Roku, ask us… ask Google in a few months. The television industry fundamentally has a subsidized business model that gives everyone a set-top box, and that pretty much undermines innovation in the sector. The only way this is going to change is if you start from scratch, tear up the box, redesign and get it to the consumer in a way that they want to buy it. But right now, there’s no way to do that….The TV is going to lose until there’s a viable go-to-market strategy. That’s the fundamental problem with the industry. It’s not a problem with the technology, it’s a problem with the go-to-market strategy….I’m sure smarter people than us will figure this out, but that’s why we say Apple TV is a hobby." - at D8 conference earlier this year. http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/

Exercise also grows neurons, according to many recent studies (so the effect is more than just short-term). See e.g. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/what-sort-of-exerci...

$1.5 million, according to Steve Newcomb (co-founder of Powerset):

"At that time we knew that a talented engineer in a tough to get tech was worth about $1.5 million per head. Thus, I knew with relative assurance that since we were going to hire at least 70 people with our Series A money, that our worst case scenario was about a $100 million exit.

If anyone is paying attention, you are now saying, wait a minute! Didn't Powerset sell for $100 million to MSFT? .... Yup, we nailed our worse case scenario!" (from http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-cr...)

Spending egregiously on fresh fruit, vegetables, and bread of the highest quality. As soon as I had a little money as a grad student, I decided to allocate an unlimited budget to spend on these particular items.

If you have unlimited budget to spend on fruit, you will find amazing blueberries, mangoes, etc. Or vine-grown tomatoes with sea salt and italian mozzarella. These healthy foods became for me such a great source of pleasure that they effectively crowded out junk food.

Counterintuitively, even with an unlimited budget, it's really hard to spend very much on these items, because there's a limit on how much you can eat. But the feeling of being supposed to spend egregiously made a big difference for me.

A question for C++ coders (I'm not one myself): how much of what he says about the hidden costs of C++ ring true? (I know this is a parody, but successful humor is often rooted in some element of truth.)

I suspect because writing memoization means controlling memoization, and controlling memoization in Haskell means either hacking the compiler, or dealing with state, and state means monads, and nobody likes monads. (Except those people who love monads, of course).

Haskell code: (explanation below)

    import Data.Array
    
    f :: Integer -> Integer
    f n = sum [0..n]
    
    largeNumber = round 2e6 :: Integer
    
    memo_f :: Array Integer Integer
    memo_f = listArray (0,largeNumber) [ (f n) | n <- [0..largeNumber] ] 
    
    
    main = do
        putStrLn (show (memo_f!largeNumber))     -- slow
        putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-1))) -- slow
        putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber)))   -- fast
        putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-1))) -- fast
        putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-2))) -- slow
        putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-3))) -- slow
        putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber)))   -- fast
        putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-2))) -- fast
        putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-4))) -- slow
        putStrLn (show (memo_f!(largeNumber-5))) -- slow

When I run this, I see nothing for about 3 seconds (that's the time spent setting up the array). Then the numbers commented '-- slow' take about 1/3 second to print, while the numbers commented '--fast' print instantaneously, because they were calculated previously. (I'm on a recent macbook air, in case anyone's curious about the timings). Obviously to calculate the entire array of values would take far too long (like a week or so).

Actually, arrays in Haskell are automatically memoized and lazily evaluated. So in most practical situations you get memoization for free.

For example, imagine you need to calculate a function f(n) for various values of n (let's say for n ranging from 0 to N). You simply define an array memo_f such that memo_f!n = f(n). ('!' is the array selection operator in Haskell).

Because Haskell evaluates lazily (i.e. not until it absolutely has to), it simply stores a link to the definition of the function for each array element. But once a particular array element is used, that link is replaced by the calculated answer.

I'll post some actual code to demonstrate this in a minute, just in case anyone's interested.

Seems really bizarre to me. What do they offer that, in your experience, is so much better than google analytics?