sorbits

As someone who was into programming and electronics in the eighties, I also feel a need to object whenever people say things like “we thought it was AI until we could make a computer do it, and now it’s just math” (paraphrasing).

We (those of us interested in the subject back then) had a pretty good idea about what would be possible in the future (because of faster machines and more storage) and what would not be possible in the future (unless a breakthrough was made in understanding intelligence).

Now, I do think we underestimated how fast things have developed, and especially the resources people have access today via the internet, but none of what I have seen today would have been classified as AI by myself back in the eighties.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_recognition_system#Hist...

What are you basing that on?

The article says that in 2015 they had revenue of $95 million and lost $27 million.

For the first 3 quarters of 2016 the article says they “surpassed last year’s revenue […] with $98 million”, but also that they lost $66 million in that same period.

So while revenue doubled, the loss more than doubled, which does not look like they are on the path to break even.

Of course there are many unknowns, but going by the numbers in the article alone, it does not look like a slam dunk.

Ideally we would have a standardized declarative service description language that “digital assistants” can use to not just answer questions (already possible) but also purchase services and goods.

Although we can’t just trust any “service” discovered on the internet, someone would need to actually vouch for it before it can be used by a digital assistant.

I.e. when you look at a Google map it is using the latest GIS data to construct a “good” representation for your screen resolution using your specified zoom factor and possibly even with dynamic overlays or highlights.

Likewise, when you read an e-book you can read it on many different display sizes, pick your own font, and font size. So where we used to have the book typeset once by a person, it is now done on-the-fly using user and device specific parameters.

The result won’t be as good as when you have a human do it, and even when a human does it, there might be limitations in the e-book markup language, just like with HTML.

This confirms the “machine” is static in one corner of the building site, so it seems limited to non-reinforced builds.

Though it might be possible to interleave it with manual labour to lay and anchor the rebars.

But beyond that episode, I know of no statistics.

Article in Danish: http://ekstrabladet.dk/112/80-aarig-draebt-i-elevator-paa-ax...

I generally ask people to rewrite such PRs, as I’m not going to pull known buggy commits into master, even if they are followed by fixes. That is just noise.

It might also be that some commits in the PR has changed tabs to spaces or vice versa.

Many of those I saw were pretty disgusting, and my travel companion reported that it also applied to the toilets for the opposite sex.

This would only work if they are able to borrow money cheaper than the bond markets on which they are buying debt, which would put them in the business of debt arbitrage.

I don’t think this is the case, they are just parking their money in something better than a bank account.

There was an episode of This American Life about car dealerships that everyone here should really listen to [1].

In that episode they did close deals where they were losing money, but hoping it would make them meet their monthly sales goal (set by the supplier), which would result in a bonus that would put them in the black.

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/1...

Unless you’re very careful, your phone (i.e. Apple) has your identity, so if you add stolen credit cards to Apple Pay, and those cards are flagged as stolen, it should be possible to figure out who tried to use them.

It also seems like a simple one-time password sent to the mobile phone number that the bank has on record, as a mandatory step when adding a credit card to Apple Pay, would effectively make it impossible to add stolen credit cards.

The article makes it sound like it’s up to the bank to accept or deny a credit card, once added, so I would assume the bank can do this even without cooperation from Apple.

It may later seem like it was a loss, so some form of retrospective loss aversion might be more appropriate to apply to this phenomena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

On a general note wrt. failure/success then we actually tend to slightly exaggerate our successes when remembering them, and similarly downplay our failures.

Not the OP but I run a personal server for mail etc., and I do remember one LTS → LTS upgrade of Ubuntu that removed the DKIM milter that my postfix config depended on.

So it happens.

> You might want to look into "DevOps". The idea is that you script your deployments together with automated tests for them

For a personal server the things that in my experience break are related to configuration files.

This can be subtle things, like some new option enabled by default that conflicts in some edge case, it can be upgrade scripts that butcher existing customized configuration files, or it can be a total restructure of how a package has structured its config.

All of this has happened to me, and I don’t think having scripts able to redeploy my server would have been of any help resolving these issues.

In addition to the core framework there are lots of modules to make your life easier (payment integration, multi-user system with admin dashboard, creating PDF invoices, HTML emails, etc.).

Presumably “experience” means having worked long enough with it to know how to quickly roll a solution for these things. Maintaining somebody’s custom CMS written in Rails 3 / Ruby 1.8 for a year would probably not provide you with such experience.

But it is not linear time, we shouldn’t let the existence of other algorithms make us confused about proper analysis of this one.

The call to `sleep(n)` is not a trivial operation, it inserts our task into a priority queue, so we are piggybacking on the OS’ support for sorting tasks based on when they need to be woken up, and thus hide the actual complexity behind the call to `sleep` (which we call `n` times, so if it’s `lg(n)` then the time complexity of the entire algorithm is `O(n lg n)`).

I think you’re confusing zero cost with zero overhead.

What C++ programmers like is that the compiler does not add overhead, for example calling `a[10]` will read the word at address `a + 10` and return that. No bounds checks are inserted, no function call is done to lookup the element in some implementation defined sparse data structure, etc.

But C++ programmers are generally not opposed to using things that has a cost associated with it (basically everything has a cost) — for example `std::map` is quite popular and certainly not “zero cost”, though it has its running time defined, and the implementation is actually using a self-balancing search tree rather than a hash table because we can give guarantees about the running time of the former, not the latter.

Processed food alone does not seem to explain all data (though you do mention “plastics contain hormone-like chemicals”):

- Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades.

- Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented.

Source: http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.ht...

This would be the case for a pure function: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_function

One of the selling points of pure functional languages is the potential optimizations the compiler can theoretically do, including using multiple cores to evaluate a program, without any explicit hints from the programmer.

Inventing a new protocol if the problem can be solved by serving the proper markup, seems misguided.

I would imagine that cross platform software is more likely to use the Carbon APIs because they are procedural and often a bit more low-level than the “modern” Cocoa equivalents.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

"The exception [that] proves the rule" means that the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes ("proves") that a general rule exists. For example, a sign that says "parking prohibited on Sundays" (the exception) "proves" that parking is allowed on the other six days of the week (the rule). A more explicit phrasing might be "The exception that proves the existence of the rule."

Off topic and pedantic but exceptions do not prove rules.

A specific exception like “you are allowed to do X when Y is true” may be used as proof of an (unwritten) rule about X being forbidden.

I.e. here we use the exception (when Y is true we are allowed to do X) to prove that there is a general rule saying that X is forbidden.

This is a misconception and if you think about it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense since the two records are generally generated by a system that gets a single value from the user, so it would be a software error if they did not even out.

Accounting errors are normally human errors, e.g. entering the wrong amount or specifying the wrong account, none of which are errors that double entry accounting will catch.

However, double entry accounting gives us an audit trail because it tracks how assets are moved between accounts, so if the balance of an account is not as we expect, we can go back and see exactly why it is what it is.

Right now enabling https is not a one-time investment, since a new certificate has to be requested and installed each time the old one expires.

Computers are supposed to bring down cost and automate tedious tasks, for https the opposite is the case.

It’s worth mentioning that https://www.startssl.com/ does offer free certificates. But without a paid account they last only a year and cannot be issued to wildcard domains, so you quickly end up with a lot of certificates that has to be manually renewed each year.

IMHO a company should generally not save up large amounts of money unless there is a purpose, for example building up a reserve for worse times, acquisitions, or for a small business, saving up for pension.

In Apple’s case, the shareholders are the owners, and they are paying capital gains tax on the dividends.

I don’t necessarily think the tax laws are good or fair, but comparing your income tax rate with Apple’s effective corporate tax rate is comparing oranges and bananas.

Then I fail to see the advantage of a decentralised system, as we can let the ledger owner sign each transaction, instead of a consensus.

> although, as mentioned in another post, depending on the type of asset it may not be such as issue.

Can you elaborate or point me to that comment?

> Also, we think there is a benefit to payments not being centralised, even while issuance is. For a start, the ledger is signed by multiple parties which increases trust

I would consider the ledger owner’s signature more trustworthy than multiple third party signatures.

> and resilience against faults (malicious or not).

Making it decentralised has a much larger attack (and bug) vector, so I wouldn’t conclude that decentralised in itself is an advantage (which I think is really what you are saying).