blastrat

what you say is true, but what I said is also truly what I wanted to say, so to clarify:

NYC has widespread ignoring of many traffic laws, and that does not bother me. I am talking about, in the context of widespread violations, what does bother me: the electric bikes. You could accept that there is some validity in what I say without agreeing with me.

Given the choice, I would not be in favor of pedestrians and bikers being forced to follow all traffic laws. However, I would be in favor of electric bikes being forced to follow all traffic laws, especially the one that bans them! :)

most electric bikes I see are ridden dangerously to pedestrians; by NYC deliverymen (doubt I've ever seen a woman on one), swiftly and silently sneaking up to run you down on sidewalks or the wrong way on one way streets.

I would vote hard in favor of limiting speed and or requiring them to make artificial noise, unless we could get some other type of pervasive and privacy intrusive monitoring of riders' behavior.

I sometimes ride my pedal bike the wrong way, and sometimes on sidewalks (two avenue blocks out of your way in NYC to get around the block is quite a long distance) but I always do it "respectfully": slowly and yielding the right of way. Till there is a system in place to effectively educate the constant churn of the class of people who deliver goods, I am soooo anti.

electic bikes are technically illegal in NYC; it's a law that is never enforced.

edit, addition: the mix of cars vs pedestrians works as well as it traditionally has worked and I and many other people don't have a problem with it; due to various types of complexity theory, adding bikes to the mix does not work as well, it particularly degrades the pedestrian experience, and is quite dangerous for bikers.

I find electric bikes even more destabilizing and most objectionable, because they are faster and quieter, and I think because they are favored by a statistical sample that skews toward more selfish/self-interested.

Why is it so hard for discussion groups to accept that somebody has an opinion with muddying it up? What I said originally should not require so much refinement for people to grasp that it's my one little opinion and it doesn't threaten your worldview more than your worldview needs to be shaken up.

make it a "shopping trip" to an old store, virtual time travel :)

what I wrote was also about academics, taught by academics who also write academic papers. They're the same people. You don't have to read them

I agree the manipulation of, or it's hyper perception, is a good direction to take; the point I'm making here is that, that doesn't mean "in the stock market"; the stock market is a faceless buy/sell with a lot of savvy players. I think a more direct facing manipulable buy/sell is a better choice, like used cars, insurance, real estate, gold, etc.

the stock market is one of our most efficient markets, that's why it attracts big money, the money is safe; if you are manipulating the stock market to make it unsafe, you're going to attract attention. Better to manipulate as a rug merchant in a bazaar.

well, winning the world series of poker is the way to make a lot at poker, otherwise you aren't make a lot at poker. And etc. for a lot of other endeavors.

The fun of the question is to engage in the speculation. The question didn't identify how much it was necessary to earn, and all the people saying "gambling" aren't saying how much is being talked about, etc.

Even if you are a "lucky phenom kid" in baseball, you aren't all that famous till you establish a bit of a track record; plenty of journeymen players remain completely unkown, and our people-smart robot could calibrate his goodness (he's not even stronger than a human, he just has fast reaction times)

I'm not trying to weasel out of your point, it's a good point, I'm trying to weasel into this thing being an interesting question, and find some parameters that would find an interesting answer.

I'm still looking for the answer to, what does our economy recognize quickly and reward greatly, and how quick are we talking, and how greatly are we suggesting, and ok, how obscure can you remain?

I think "super smart high end real estate broker" is lucrative and not that "famousy", and perhaps within the easy win range of this robot, but it's deathly dull so what would actually be a good, robust, and fun answer?

I'm not being a smartaleck, but "you shouldn't be writing code" with your attitude/approach. "NEVER trust user input" is an important security mantra to learn all on its own, like "wipe your butt/wash your hands" is in another context.

The guy is writing a valid point on Hacker(!) News. People writing comments on HN (especially to summarize a takeaway from a longer form article) are not required to accurately recapitulate entire dossiers of how to process input. It is completely valid to say "you should never trust user input". Somebody who is looking to make that "actionable" or "clear and pretty useful" can very very easily google the phrase and will turn up a lot of useful answers and information.

This is what is meant by the idea that the simplicity of the iPhone UI and/or automated IDEs has created a generation of helplessness and entitlement.

The good advice remains good advice: you should never trust user input. If you can't turn that into sound advice from Hacker News, your options become limited to, nobody should trust the code you write, you shouldn't write code, or you shouldn't read hacker news for advice.

But the idea that people need to write what you personally need to hear or they shouldn't write comments? that's nuts. Could I have written a more useful comment to you and to the community? I'll tell you this, I did think about it, and this my best shot at what I thought you and the community could benefit from!

There used to be a guy on usenet news who posted all sorts of stuff, and had the name of his company in his .sig line, and he included the phrase "these ARE the opinions of my company" instead of that boring old boilerplate "none of the opinions I express are..."

I understand what you are saying, but to inform other people it would be better if you indicated that you know what I'm saying. Refute the point? I disagree.

if this robot could do approximately what Renaissance has been already doing, that would not create wealth, that would take Renaissance's milkshake and share it for two, or worse, by creating competition, dry up Renaissance's milkshake for both. i.e. the money that Renaissance is making is not "lying around to be taken", it's already being wrung out of the market, and is being picked up and put in somebody's pocket, Renaissance's.

And for perspective, what Renaissance has been doing for all the time it has existed (65 billion in 25 years is your unicorn) is less than what Apple did, less than what Microsoft did before that, less than Berkshire Hathaway, etc. Facebook... Google... Uber is already closing in on Renaissance's value in a fraction of the time and in terms of trendline will blow past it. "Money lying on the floor of the stock exchange" is nothing compared to actual value creation.

Still, Renaissance is a pretty good gig for some uber mathnerds who realize they don't actually have other ways to create value (as our robot does) so I'd give it a bump for low opportunity cost.

Finance Theory, the study of stock markets and related matters and which is recognized as an academically rigorous subfield of economics, does not offer the conclusion that being smarter is enough to win in the stock market.

I suppose you could say you could subscribe to and read all the news tickers more quickly? but you'd still have the problem of knowing what to do with the info, like you'd still have to realize how a 1 degree warmer temperature someplace would affect the banana crop, along with you'd have to know everything single thing everybody else in the world knows about their local industry, which the description didn't really say you could do.

To put it another way, IBM didn't conclude that they should plug their Jeopardy winning supercomputer into the market and let it trade stocks. To put it another nother way, the "perfect market hypothesis" says the best you are going to do is what the market is already doing, which is a good thing, it stops you from falling behind, but it doesn't put you ahead.

Now, you might say "what about Warren Buffett", but that's probably more along the lines of the robot's buy and sell people skills, like maybe go into real estate and be a super good salesman coaxing people to buy where there is a lot of sloppy money on the table. There is not a lot of money lying around the stockmarket; while we hear of winners, they are always balanced by losers, and nobody yet knows if the two can be separated in advance.

I felt like a lot of the answers people suggested were assuming it was actually more superhuman than we know it to be from the description.

The intriguing part for me was simply the question "assuming you could win/succeed at any endeavor, what endeavors deliver how much reward how quickly?" i.e. not about the robot at all, but what will our economy quickly discover and reward, because "building a better Amazon than Amazon" or a better Microsoft or IKEA would still take decades to pay off.

can you control getting onto Jeopardy quickly? And then there is no evidence that by being smart and informed that you can be smarter and better informed than the crowd-sourced stock market.

why isn't the answer "hang around outside Yankee Stadium hitting balls, running, and catching them, till you get discovered and signed"? or something athletic like that. Seems a lot better than the "super productive web designer" answer that was getting love over on stackexchange.

I considered boxing, but you probably have to pay too many dues (timewise) first. But you can be signed and stuck out on a baseball field pretty quick; signing bonuses, etc. Tennis? Basketball? Soccer (in one of the places that calls it football)? Golf?

Where can you get a signing bonus and start hauling in the big money right away?

Also worth mention, I have heard recently that there is a way to break PHP, hack Pornhub and earn $20k!

edit: just out of curiosity, why was this answer disliked by somebody? cuz I said Yankees? soccer? athletics rather than nerd dreams? Cu-uz, I still think this is the best answer I have seen.

stop and think for a minute about what you are saying. Did you go to college, and did you learn anything? High school? Those books are all written by academics; very few of the smarter better informed people you're reading could write a single textbook without spending a stupid amout of time studying the field first.

Nothing wrong with you being interested in reading what smart, well-informed people have to say on a variety of topics, and nothing wrong with being interested in everyday practical stuff over the edges of academia... but there is a little something wrong with thinking that your preferences indicate something "interesting" about academic writing; I read a lot of blogs too, but get a grip, man!

um, pretty secure even against dedicated thieves.

a four digit PIN is pretty secure when you have centralized authentication (the one bank) and get very very few tries before account lock-out, which is how Debit cards work.

If you had 3000 stolen debit cards, you'd have a shot at guessing a few of them while locking out 2990+ other ones, and I'm kinda thinking the bank might notice you doing that.

have you heard that thieves are guessing PINs someplace in the world? I haven't, and the world is full of dedicated thieves.

and even then, do you know how long that would take versus what you get when you guess one? $500? you might actually make more money panhandling or flipping burgers; of course you've got to trade that off against free meals and healthcare in prison :)

for various historical reasons, the US economy is among the largest, "most advanced" (not referring to products, but to services, financial markets, meta-stuff), and "most global" economies in the world. The US is among the most important trading partners for most other countries, most countries that export wish to export here.

In order to trade, you need to sign treaties, and that's not even including bi-directional extradition treaties that most countries are also willing to sign.

So yes, a young website operator in the UK got caught up in the web (spiderweb, not world-wide-web) of treaties that are meant to allow for largescale trade of goods including intellectual property consisting of popular entertainments that are owned by giant bloodsucking megacompanies.

Definitely sucks to be him; but Aaron Swartz, Kim dotcom, Napster... these all came before, and I doubt the kid "didn't know what he was doing". Kids lack the capacity to make good judgments about what they are doing even with knowledge, and many people benefit in small ways that seem harmless from downloading content so they sympathize with him, but you are leaving out the part where most teenagers don't manage to get caught up in these legal entanglements from activities conducted on such a large scale. Maybe there is something exceptional about his overachieving on the scale of "these stupid rules don't apply to me, I'm the gingerbread man"

I just read the story in the news this week about the Taliban taking advantage to the "tradition" of "boy play" in Afghanistan (essentially cops molesting children) to train boys to assassinate cops. Thinking about how much of the world lives in those types of culture, I just don't feel the need to shed a tear or rail against the extradition of criminals between civilized countries.

I call him a criminal because he is a criminal; at the same time and same probably as you, I also would like to see legalization or decriminalization or deregulating of many of the things the bloodsuckers make money from, but I don't find myself going to jail while I wait, nor do most people. I also don't litter even though it would sometimes be convenient for me to do so.

People who flout rules are not generally altruists, and I don't think he is an altruist.

pure speculation, because i don't know the interior history of python:

1. perl has always prided itself that "there's more than one way to do it" including repeated, prominent use of an acronym for that. see timtowtdi.

2. there is a theoretical idea kicking around out there that, if a language allowed for only one way to express any idea, then that language would be a better language (all else being equal) because if you and I always write the same code for the same task, we could easily maintain each other's work. see for example "egoless programming" or the ideas that led to Simonyi's "metaprogramming" (whether or not you agree)

3. perl is a mess

therefore, it might, given the history, make sense to say that about python as a way of trying to point out a salient difference from perl

but who will bust the busters?

guy got busted by some people who turned around and helped him.

now he's returning the favor?

look, I am in favor of open systems, right to repair, right to modify, etc. Hell, I'm in favor of the GPLv3 which puts me way to the free-open-copyleft side of 90% of HN. So yes, I am against the DMCA.

What I am objecting to in this thread is the tone of everybody that this one little anecdote concerning the bad luck of one guy with a copy protected system is somehow egregiously bad behavior on the part of one little company. It's not. It is further evidence that we could have a better system without the DMCA etc.

What I'm saying is, when I drive a car, sometimes I speed, and if I get caught, I take my ticket like a grownup, I don't start pissing and moaning about cops, The Man, how I was treated, "we shouldn't have speed limits" etc. which many people I know do. Even though I've seen a lot of bad behavior by cops, I see a lot of bad behavior by a lot of people, many of whom have jobs that I don't want myself.

This thread should be a celebration of somebody's diligent hack around some arbitrary rules. It's not a poster child for the evils of corporate ethics.

People whose blood is boiling over what happened here? I hope they don't own guns or feel like I sped past them too fast on the highway, because I think they're *.ragers, is the argument in favor of rationality I'm trying to make.

I don't recall when/where it came from, but for example the unix mount command uses "path ::= name colon path" delimiting for things like NFS and other "protocol based rather than physical disk" filesystems. And along the lines of what you say, yes it could have been borrowed, but probably from PIP even if it was indirectly via CP/M, Amiga or whatever.

I want to use Uber's software, just like this guy wants to use the software that came with the hardware that broke.

Look, I agree that I don't like what this company is doing. But I don't like what the unicorns are doing either. I'm arguing for consistency of viewpoint; and in terms of damage, what this company is doing is far less damaging to the economy (and I'm not referring to the damage Uber is doing to taxis, I'm in favor of that, I'm just in favor of a herd of Uber's competing, rather than a single player monopoly run by a sleazebag)

wow, thanks! that is an incredibly interesting article, and way to learn trig, I think I would have gained more insights had that been part of my introduction.

I'm sort of wondering if that terminolgy sounded more natural then because in "older" English, closer to Germanic roots, it was natural to create new words by pasting together morphemes.

this company has not taken action to enforce DMCA or any other licensing gripe with the guy, so as yet he hasn't forced to pay obeisance to anything, and he didn't, so that issue is not really on the table.

you are essentially taking the position that the company should be forced to sell its software unbundled with hardware because you would prefer it that way.

Under your logic, the unicorn Uber could be forced to provide their software independently too, why should I have to use Uber's cars if I just want to use their software for scheduling and other market clearing tasks that I want to undertake, including scheduling competitive ride sharing. My headphone broke; I didn't like my Uber driver; how dare they bundle them together.

Now, I actually believe that Uber and other unicorns should not be allowed to become unicorns the way they do because I think we could achieve the same level of innovation in the public interest without monopoly prices. But I don't attempt to get my way by sneering at people and downvoting them.

his "above statement" is not at all absurd, it reflects the thinking of somebody who is drawing a parallel because they are clearly educated in the Nobel prize attracting (i.e. hardly obscure) field of microeconomics; if you can't see that, am I right in guessing you have not studied micro? Cuz if you did, you missed a chunk of it.

| HN is a weird place to bemoan prices when many here are seeking unicorn valuations while disrupting industry

HN is a place where many seek unicorn valuations which are only achievable from monopoly rents. Monopoly rents are what the headphone USB trick is attempting to collect (see bundling). That's what makes it pertinent to state "weird place to take this side" especially so vociferously... well, weird side to take unless you are not educated about econ and are unable to decode what's actually happening.

If the software producer did not try to enforce copy protection through the USB scheme, they would presumably face the problem of people copying the software and buying aftermarket headphones. In a large scale industry like operating systems (Microsoft Windows) such rent seeking behavior is to be deplored because prices of individual copies of the software should approach their very-inexpensive marginal cost. But the marginal cost of a niche piece of software such as this ADA software is complicated by the difficulty in earning back the development costs. This is the justification for patents, etc. whether you believe in it strongly or less strongly or not. I am less strongly a believer, but I'm not a pussy who downvotes people who disagree with me.

you were downvoted because HN is not the friendly place it pretends to be: they don't like what you said. You only get to sneer at people if you drink the KoolAid. They hide behind the "it was the way you said it" excuse when they don't share your POV.

I don't share your POV btw, but I got downvoted because they don't like that I defended your right speak because your POV is unacceptable here. And this, to move the topic further afield, is why codes of conduct don't work: it's just another flavor of Turkish Pres Recep Erdoğanian "thin skin to disagreement", or "I don't like your opinion in one area, so you'd better shut up about everything else"

thanks for that, interesting article! but your quotes are a little selective and tell only one side of the story of that more nuanced article, I think leaving a deep misimpression for readers here on HN.

another quote from the article says "a Home Office-commissioned independent review...found the US had not refused any extradition requests since the treaty came into force. A total of seven US requests were refused by the UK in that time."

that asymmetry in the treaty is not the result of a disparity of negotiating power nor clearly unfair-to-one-side. It's because the US has "untreatyable" constitutional rights that UK does not grant its own subjects, so for due process to grant an extradition request, the UK must submit that evidence. Since the US and UK are such close allies, that treaty may reflect the UK's desire not to slow down the process in either direction. Perhaps (this is pure speculation, we don't have the data) if the US complied in the other direction as the UK does, the UK courts would grant more of the extradition requests.

I'm not meaning to argue that the asymmetry works out fairly for every single defendant, clearly individuals will suffer more in one direction than the other, I'm saying that "the People" on both sides are not necessarily disadvantaged if we "presume evidence of guilt" and a symmetric desire to punish.

and this is for another topic, but the presumption of guilt is how the system is designed to work, otherwise, how could they even compel you to show up in court, or hold an axe murderer while awaiting trial? the commonly quoted "presumption of innocence" applies when you are in court in front of judge and jury; the entire rest of the system from arrest thru the trial is based on a necessary presumption of high probability of guilt.

yes I agree, and also, what? why should PP's question be downvoted-to-hell?: He's entitled to defend the other side here.

Not saying you did it, but I had to comment someplace.

extradition treaties are reciprocal, no country is going to extradite its citizens if the other country won't extradite theirs in return.

the numbers don't necessarily balance: probably a lot more Mexicans commit crimes in the US and flee to Mexico than the other way around.

Usually, I would think, extradition entails countries extraditing their own citizens back to face charges at home; people will tend to commit crimes where they are, and run away after to escape; most people are citizens where they live. Countries with higher rates of immigration will have more foreignors around who have a natural place to escape to if they commit a crime.

Peripheral Interchange Program.

Gary Kildall recreated PIP for CP/M because he had come from using Digital/DEC systems. It wasn't just RSX-11, it was in a bunch of PDP stuff going back.

It was a pretty "revolutionary" feature of Unix that device I/O was just in the filesystem along with everything else so all software could access devices. (Not claiming revolutionary as in invented, revolutionary as in one of the things that helped unix achieve ubiquity and would be the first place most people saw it. Maybe it came from Multics, I don't recall.) Without filesystem mapped I/O, you need to create peripheral interchange programs to do ordinary things like copy files and print. Once you get used to PIP style file specification on command lines, it's a next step to push it into the OS API, so CON: will always mean the console, rather than only to software like PIP. This is the origin of MS-DOS having those special names too.

And colon as a special character in a file specification (I didn't say filename) is not just Windows, it's also in Unix (that's where it came from in http:), that's why I'm astonished to hear that people are naming files with colons in them. It used to be, there were more experienced people you worked with who would teach you very quickly that you don't put colons in filenames. Those days are gone, it's emojis all the way down, including some very sad emojis.

The big list of collective nouns for animals is just a made up thing, sort of like a book of poetry.

There are a small number of ye olde Englishe words for some types of groups (like school of fish) and some of the fanciful names from the book have moved into common usage, but the dramatically expanded version is not known to have ever been actually used

some info here https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/resources/view/resour...

this is one old source https://archive.org/details/cu31924031031184

good opsec also involves logging access to the internet and seeing who sent bomb threats... oh wait, whose side am I on?