Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?
As an example, I am irritated by evolution not being taken far enough on the net.
Sure, you can view open source as evolution in action, but much of that relies on human intelligence rather than a more direct evolutionary process (e.g., like genetic programming).
One can imagine some sort of evolutionary process that is midway between genetic programming and human intelligence.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-based_computation
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadI sort of feel like the internet is as close as we get to it now, with Twitter and other microblogging services bringing us a step closer. But really, I want full-on instant telepathic communication with anyone. Cell phones don't cut it. Gone would be the days of humming a tune in your head, whose name you do not know, only to realize you cannot emulate those noises with your mouth. Good luck finding out who plays that song. If everyone could read everyone else's thoughts, you'd just hum the tune in your head and the name would come to you right away.
I don't think we're good enough with gen. prog. right now to do anything useful or safe with it. GM crops seems to have negative health and environment effects. When we can open up notepad and write the ooDNA code for my new pet mini-liger, then we could probably start programming our food.
Also, I kind of think we need a new form of math. While maths currently describe our universe well, I think it is overly complex and non-intuitive. This leads me to believe that we could create a simpler language, one that builds off itself -- like a programming language which is built from AND, NOT, OR -- which is naturally recursive like the universe. These days you have to build an entire framework to encompass your latest quantum theory.
(in 'tongue 'cheek)
> t
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)
You know how in science and math people describe certain things as 'elegant' ? For example, E=mc^2 is very elegant. If math were elegant, you could get from here (higgs bosons) to there (atoms) with a simple equation which has been recursed x times to produce a mathematical model of an atom.
Math isn't bad, it's quite useful in fact. It's just not the natural language of the universe like everyone thinks it is.
E=MC^2 could be just an aspect of reality that happens to coincide with the way observable physical world works.
Maybe a different math for describing the universe written by an alien intelligence with different sensory organs could be simple for them, not still incomprehensible for us. And that alien intelligence is just a jackpot hit in the evolutionary possibility space (and the jackpot may well have never been hit).
All aspects of reality coincide with the way the physical world works. Or, what does that sentence mean?
Maybe a different math for describing the universe written by an alien intelligence with different sensory organs could be simple for them, not still incomprehensible for us.
I think there is a strong argument against this. That some alien race is really good at visualizing certain kinds of N-dimensional systems of some weird kind of space is plausible, but to throw all of mathematics out, I think, is not. They would have a mere superset of the mathematics we have.
In particular, take computation. Are aliens never going to deal with strings of units of data? If they do, right there you have the notion of their length, and of natural numbers. You have notions like concatenating strings. And the homomorphism between the two. And we're off on the road to abstract algebra.
It's very unlikely for smart aliens not to develop the same study of discrete math and abstract algebra that we do, unless they were never to use discrete units of information, and were only capable of processing infinite amounts of information at a time. Would they then have no use for the idea of associativity? Of proofs that consist of a finite set of symbols in a finite alphabet? Of proofs that consist of a finite set of symbols in an uncountably infinite alphabet? With any of these they would on the road to having a superset of our mathematical knowledge, rather than something different. We don't know how such a being would be physically possible, in the first place.
I think it would be more correct, and less exciting, to predict that some aliens might be smarter than us in certain ways.
I think observable is the keyword here... we happened to be able to observe enough that we can conclude that E = mc^2
As for your second point... I don't think I agree. The fact of the matter is that as humans, we are essentially unable to reason about how beings with a different set of senses would think. With respect to cosmology, we basically react to how light moves around and that forms the basis of our science (our other senses don't really come into the picture). Its very difficult to think about an intelligence based on some other source of information and impossible to know what sort of data would be present (since we don't have access to the information).
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Bot
So, are you saying that the rote structure of nuanced math is too complicated for it to be accurate or meaningful? I'm sure you're familiar with reductionism (http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Reductionism). Just imagine that mechanical duck as math.
One possible reason that we have not yet found "that one fundamental" thing in math is that our universe itself probably isn't a perpetual machine on its own (or, what we can perceive as our universe). So, there is a good chance that it is physically impossible for us to get to where you want us to be with our understanding of math. We wont know until we reach the singularity. But even then....
Anyway, my criticism of math has been that it has been getting far too philosophical. But, I am an amateur.
I want cheap, low-functionality touch screen devices. Like, an iPhone, but with only a calculator, a dictionary/thesaurus, and some other useful but simple applications (text reader/editor, todo list, etc).
Or how about an open-development touch screen device? Where programmers can create their own applications for it easily?
Welcome to the past, your dreams may be found at any yard sale.
1) Constructive feedback -- I want more, now :)
2) Web UI technologies -- progress, but at a snail's pace
3) Web APIs -- bring down those "walls"
4) Internet-driven TV apps -- why not?
The Constitution, by design, doesn't establish positive rights. An example of a positive right is "You have the right to an education."
Positive rights suffer from implementation issues, expanding government creep as pressure groups suffer rights-envy, and the generic problems associated with state-provided services.
An example of an implementation issue: the Japanese Constitution guarantees that "All people shall have the right to receive an equal education correspondent to their ability, as provided for by law." This has been interpreted as making it unconstitutional to remove students from mainstream classrooms, regardless of behavioral disability or a distressing propensity to stab teachers in the neck.
An example of rights-envy: Once you have one positive right, every pressure group under the sun will want their own mandate. The argument will sound something like this: "The constitution guarantees bandwidth, food to eat is a lot more important than bandwidth, the constitution should guarantee food, too." Other favorites for expansion are health care, education, and sexual services. (Oh, Europe, what a continent.)
The American political consensus is that positive rights are not desirable at the federal constitutional level.
Not now I won't, because that would be changing the service I'm getting to something I didn't sign up for.
If I got an offer tomorrow for a "limited" phone service I would turn it down, but I wouldn't consider it immoral or bad or something that shouldn't exist.
I admit I wasn't clear that L,L,PofH was guaranteed anywhere in the constitution.
But with my one-liner, the point I hoped to get across was that I do think that it should be extended to access to the web and its information, as it becomes more ubiquitous and integrated in our lives. I named it "bandwidth" mostly as a remark to how I wished I had more of it.
Bandwidth: 15/dollars a month.
But all the same, I still stand by my assertion above later in the thread.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-foot_user_interface
I really like it when my computer crashes because someone decided that checking whether or not "-5435" was a valid array index was "too time consuming". Wait, I hate that. I have 4 cores that are idle 99% of the time. Let the computer do some self-checks that will keep my data intact.
(Read the ext3 source code some time and tell yourself that you trust important data to it. The only reason it works at all is because everyone has already been burned by the most obvious bugs.)
Besides, functional programming is not The One True Paradigm To Rule Them All either. Dataflow, for example, is an example of another superb paradigm.
It's really simple really, just stop blowing things up. Stop killing people. If people kill your people, ignore them. Repair the damage and keep going. Eventually, they'll give up.
Federation of micro-blogging.
This isn't to say that we have the patent on The Scientific Method. However, there are darn few organizations which seem to have it written into their DNA. Toyota does, famously. Imagine what would happen if your typical big-city school system did. ("First order of business: we had 37 A/B tests running in first grade classrooms last week. 31 of them did not lead to substantial results. Let's hear from our lead statistician about one promising innovation, which improved vocabulary retention among our lowest performing quartile of black students by 15%...")
I think it's dangerous (but very tempting) to try to apply it too generally. One passionate visionary thinking outside the box can do more than 1,000 statisticians ever could.
Education science never made it into US K-12 education. We Americans have a very fluffy concept of what education's about. We worry more about socialization than education (Neil Postman was right).
For a looooong time there have been US educational research journals with data far ahead of current practice, but many US educators never get much chance to see them. And I've never heard of a US (K-12) school that's doing anything empirical (beyond, oh, statistics anyway).
Actually, paraschopra probably means the opposite, that is, these ideas are taken too far... or at least, thats my read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia
In any event, whats your better solution? Not to say you don't have one, but I'm curious.
Light takes 1.6ms to travel 300 miles, or 3.2ms for a round-trip, which is well below that threshold. To get up to a 100ms round-trip, the two parties would have to be 0.05 light-seconds apart, or just shy of 15000km (9314 miles).
That's plenty to get you North America, Europe and East Asia, but unfortunately Australia is a bit far from North America or Europe.
Obviously, that's assuming the signals are transferred at the speed of light with no other sources of latency, which is an ideal. But still, it's a far cry from "a hundred or few hundred miles".
(Not that I'm not appreciative for being alive at all. I'm fortunate in many ways, but that doesn't stop me from imagining what could have been.)
40 years back, human where more capable of visiting the moon then they are now.
Fundamental discoveries in physics is almost stuck now for 60 years, since discoveries of quantum mechanics.
The only gain we are seeing is in medical science, and information technology (in Engineering, not Science).
That's what I feel.
Of course the world could go to complete shit. If it doesn't though, we'll end up with technology that's unimaginably advanced. Whether that's in 500 years or 50,000 years makes no difference.
(NOT for offices!) I want to tell my wearable to look up facts, do math, remember everything I tell it to remember, and comb through ALL the news keeping my personal preferences in mind. And quick instructions on what I can cook with the food I've got on hand ... which it remembers.