trekker7

Also if you take the University Ave. exit off of 80 east, take Hearst to campus instead of University. It's one block to the north.

what you've sold in the past, and how much of it.

Check out Castro in the 50s: http://www.mv-pa.org/mvcentury/1950s.htm

seemed a lot wider back then

"Back then, the Valley lay in the shadow of San Francisco. If you wanted culture, glamor, or riches, you headed to the City."

2/3 things don't change!

http://pics.drugstore.com/prodimg/89257/200.jpg :-)

It is, but some things need teachers, or at least slides and tutorials, instead of encyclopedia articles. If I had to learn linear algebra from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_algebra, I wouldn't have gotten nearly as far as I did with Math 54 in college.

I'd love to see more posts like this directly on HN.

Posted at ~1 AM in the Valley... would love for this to be bumped up during the daytime here. Then again the kinds of people who would comment are probably wide awake right now.

Nonfiction, but thought Fire in the Valley was worth mentioning. Pirates of the Silicon Valley is the movie based on it. Antitrust is also good.

marginal value-add over 3G modem

I want to believe!

Live near UC Berkeley instead, and take BART to SF whenever you want.

Thought it might be interesting to see how a site is launched on Reddit, in case there are any interesting comparisons to launching on Hacker News.

Do they believe that only Earth-like planets can support life? Or is it that Earth-like planets are one type of planet that supports life, with many other possibilities? I would think the first assertion to be short-sighted.

yes, unless it's an actual headache, i.e. Tylenol

Just a thought in addition to the physics lectures (which are definitely important) - programming, or maybe even simple data entry, is probably the easiest way to earn money during spare time while still gaining knowledge and experience. If these kids could learn how to program and had access to computers with Internet access, I think there could be a way for them to earn some money and gain early job experience. And if the programming/computer lessons are related to physics, you could teach both at the same time.

I know some people would find this controversial since this is a high school classroom and not a vocational/trade school - that the kids need to focus on learning and building a strong educational foundation. But I'm from India and know how bad the situation can get... these kids are probably under a lot of pressure to earn for their families. Besides, I'm guessing there are people in the US with PhDs that are struggling to find jobs in this economy... if one benefit of a strong, pure educational foundation is some guarantee of job security in the future, it certainly isn't always the case.

Can anyone think of realistic ways that kids in this situation could make money by coding, or doing something computer related, on the Web? Amazon Mechanical Turk comes to mind, but I don't know much about it, or if the tasks involved will teach you anything significant.

What kinds of computer concepts will you be teaching to the kids (Word/Excel, basic programming, data structures and algorithms)? Do they have access to any computers outside of class, like in an Internet cafe, or even on a cell phone that can be hacked to accept code?

$199 instead of $399 might be a valid argument, if you were poor and just wanted a phone to talk to people and didn't care about lock-in.

maybe there are applications for enhanced training within companies, or even to sell on the cheap to college students themselves that want a better group-study environment for when they can't meet up. you don't have to sell bulk licenses.

I'd be interested to know about some of the cooler pages that are indexed by Cuill, but not Google.

why not?

i think the OP wasn't stating a fact, but rather making an emphatic plea to the community.

PG, agree/disagree? i ask because this is an interesting contrast to what you've said about writing a crappy v1.0, then iterating on and improving it. but the two concepts aren't mutually exclusive, because maybe "crappy v1.0" can simply mean a well-engineered subset of your eventual goal.

I half-agree that this isn't HN material. Half, because I'd really like to hear about HN users' views and opinions about politics.

Oh man... who wants to bet that Microsoft will be alive in 200 years? Seriously, how many companies have they gone head to head with in the past 30 years or so... Apple, Lotus, Oracle, Netscape, Nintendo/Sony, Tivo, Google...

Regardless of your opinions about Microsoft, you have to admit that this is one hell of a resilient company. Even if they fail in some markets they just keep going and going.

I don't know if this new advertising model will work or not, but I think in 20 years when the NBT comes out from some new startup, MS will be there to fight against it in the marketplace.

Is there really anything that is truly random? I've always wondered about this. If you define random as meaning "when rand() is called many times in a row, you will most probably get a different number each time" then both the Perl function and random.org are random, but to different extents.

But if you define random to mean something like "caused by unexplained or mysterious forces" or "non-deterministic", then how can anything in the universe be truly random? Even atmospheric noise is created by a sequence of deterministic events, right?

A dice roll is too (brain fires synapse, I move my hand forward and release the dice, dice interact with air in certain way, dice hit table and F=ma predicts their movements, etc...). Maybe since we don't have the facilities yet to watch a person throw some dice and predict what the outcome will be, this process is non-deterministic simply because we lack the technology to sketch it out. But with sufficient technology to scan the situation and chart the end result of the dice roll based on the initial conditions, doesn't the process become completely deterministic, and not random?

But maybe I'm just stretching the definition of random to mean something that it was never meant to mean.

I liked this part:

"In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress."

Yeah but even biological computers have to observe the physical laws of nature right? The hardware of my brain is basically a parallel computer with electricity flowing through it. Maybe hardware should be influenced by physics, and software (neural networks, machine learning, etc.) by biology/cognitive science.

I'm far from an expert, or even a semi-amateur with computer design, but I think Hillis is arguing that physical realities/constraints should deeply influence the theoretical computational process itself, regardless of implementation details. I don't see this as tainting or complicating the pure, theoretical aspects of Computer Science with messy implementation details that are going to change in 2 years anyway (presumably, hard realities observed through Physics will stick around for a long, long time, until/unless we discover them to be different). Rather, I see this as another place where we can use Nature as a design guide.

I think the techniques the writer suggests are on the right track. If you feel lazy about doing something, don't brute force yourself into getting it done; there are more clever ways to hack the situation. Transform the task you have to do into one that is much more fun, or figure out a way to accomplish your goal without doing the task.

To add on to that, both those posts are many days old. I've seen this before and I still voted up this post, just because I like it so much. I think there might be a need to relax rules about duplicates, when they appear many days apart.