thunk

It seems to me that making research more open and searchable would mitigate some of these problems. The system-gaming and badly calibrated incentives smell like the kind of distortions closed social systems tend to introduce.

There's one he forgot: if you drink enough of it you get drunk.

You even had to run unapproved software on the 2000 iMac! How far we've come.

Gotcha. And an influx of new and experimental Lisps is always welcome.

It's odd that he dismisses most existing Lisps, then advises the reader to create their own. I wasn't sure if he meant it pedagogically or pragmatically or both.

I don't know. OnLive can't scale very well as is. A liberal estimate would be four game instances per server, which means 250,000 servers for a million players. But if you're spreading that around, especially on players' machines that aren't being used at the time and may be fewer hops from the destination, it may be worth it. Plus, it'd be a good first step towards a mostly decentralized gaming infrastructure.

You should try having "a few" ideas and "whipping them up". It's changed my whole perspective.

He could be arguing in his spare time.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that it's a little disingenuous to publicly call someone out without providing your methods or your results.

> I think the record speaks for itself.

There's something about the way you phrased this that makes me think you were gunning for pg. It would be nice if you included the complete breakdown, as well as your criteria for determining tech vs. finance. Since you had to manually go through the entire list, I can't imagine it would have been difficult to record your results.

I wonder if you could eventually sell cycles back to OnLive, since you aren't doing the heavy lifting on your machine ... Maybe offset the cost of the service? Or maybe OnLive could do an ElectricSheep-like screensaver for distributed processing. That could mitigate some of the latency issues as well, for those near you. Social rendering, comrade!

Edit: The more I think about this, the more it seems this is precisely (or at least should be) where they're going with this.

Oh yeah, that's why the phrase "irreducibly complex" popped into my mind. Whoops.

Just to be clear, I definitely wasn't referring to the intelligent design argument. I meant the phrase strictly in the "make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler" sense. The simplest possible correct explanation of some things is still extremely complicated.

> But the larger consequence is that if you’re smart the world doesn’t seem very complicated. This might seem obvious, but the obvious thought is rather different. The obvious thought is: The world doesn’t seem complicated to smart people. But this isn’t what smart people actually think. They think the world isn’t complicated, period.

Woah, woah, woah. "The world" is a very large thing indeed. You'd have to be pretty stupid to think "it isn't complicated, period." Simplifying insight is often hard won. And some things are just irreducibly complex. To think otherwise smells like Dunning-Krueger.

Now that's thinking outside the ... oh, wait.

Original emacs manual cover: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/its-cover.png

"Hacker News - Hovering Over the Shark"

That's all wrong. It's an ethics-free [1] arms race right now. If they want us to see their ads, they have to make us want to see their ads. That's all there is to it. Pleas to ethics'll work about as well as file-sharing lawsuits.

[1] "Ethics-free" because we won't have enough perspective to judge until ten or twenty years from now.

I'm wondering if there's a way to crowdsource this with cellphones. I realize it's a little out there, but there are thousands and thousands of microphones already blanketing every urban area ...

edit: Google informs me of http://www.noisetube.net/

_Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X_[1] by Aaron Hillegass is really great. It's not an iPhone book, but there's enough similarity that it'd still be a really valuable read.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-COCOA-PROGRAMMIN...

Then how come the difference between the shasum's of "feedburner" and "flotilla" contains the date of JFK's death on Numa's Calendar? Huh? We're on to you, Twitterati!

You should become a Segway gang and wear black hoodies that say "Hacker Angels" in green Terminus.

It's fascinating and inspiring and exciting to watch this "hackers all the way down" ecosystem grow. What'll it be like in five years? In ten?

Well, that and toxoplasmosis.

> It's easy enough to buy into a reduction of the basic singularity tenants ...

I don't even get that far. It may be the case that it's impossible to model the brain to a sufficient level of detail to manufacture conciousness. It may even be the case that our brains are doing something non-computable to produce consciousness, in which case we have to give up on Turing-equivalent machines entirely and move to something that more closely resembles our physical brains. At that point Singularity-scale intelligence depends on the creation of some big-brained biotech Frankenstein, which doesn't scale nearly as well, and seems different enough to require a new name. We just don't know.

Secrets about secrets?

There's nothing I'd put past a true believer of any stripe.

The thing that scares me about the Singularity is that it's such potent kool-aid for tech geeks. I talk to Singularitarians and there's this fire in their eyes like they've been reborn. They become so certain. They remind me of fundamentalists. If there's one thing more dangerous than a true believer it's a crowd of really smart true believers. I'm afraid, perhaps unnecessarily, of what might be done in the name of "ushering in the singularity".

I don't think we can know whether a singularity is possible until it's upon us, which could be never. I'm singularity agnostic. That doesn't mean we don't think hard about it. That doesn't mean we don't guard ourselves against its perceived dangers. It does mean that we keep our heads and stay skeptical and put out the fires that are already burning.

> The Incal may be a little hard to find these days

It may take a Bit, but its Torrent of insight is worth it.

I agree. The future that seems likely to me is one in which most things exist both locally and in the cloud. Syncing and redundancy. Web apps that are also native. It's not "cloud xor desktop". We can have both.