Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

How so? His claims that "We could call notch out and prove that he's a total incompetent in a bunch of areas but we want to be nice to him" manages to deeply insult notch without actually making any technical claims that could be disproven by a third party. It's a total weasel move.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

The way the author posted the picture (used in a much earlier Euclideon article talking about how badly polygon engines render complex organic shapes) of a polygon tree and a PHOTOGRAPH of a real tree and passed it off as the Unlimited Detail Engine makes me question his bias.

The way he used "Kuda" when talking about CUDA makes me question his technical competency.

Until there's a demo I can download and run on my PC it's a load of baseless claims as far as I'm concerned.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

The revelation you're dancing around is that advertising, at least 98% of it, is based on a fundamentally broken concept: trying to sell something to someone who would probably be better off not buying it.

Advertising currently works by slapping the largest number of random people and making them decide whether buying the product is a good decision. "Evil" advertisers try to deceive potential customers and be intrusive, while "good" advertisers try to selectively target and give potential customers tools and info to accurately judge the product. Those are steps, but the system is still broken.

What Jason is hovering around is that the producer has as much theoretical responsibility in the customer-business interaction as the customer does. All human interaction must in principle be voluntary, and the winners are those businesses who take the basic interaction between two people and scale it upwards. YOU are just as responsible for finding the customers as the customers are for finding the product. That is the model the industry must adapt to, because people, especially intelligent people, are resistant to advertisements. And why shouldn't they be? Someone who tries to convince you to make a bad financial decision deserves an equal amount of scorn regardless of whether they know enough about you to judge whether you should buy it. If they do know, then they're malicious liars. If they don't, they're insulting you by saying their time is worth more than yours.

Advertising is broken. You fix it by taking equal responsibility by only attempting to sell to people for whom you expect the sale to be mutually beneficial. It may be uncomfortable to think about, but looked at objectively, advertising as a whole is a long stream of invitations for people to screw themselves over and the unsaid assumption that it's the buyer's responsibility to make sure the raft they get on isn't the one going over the cliff. That is broken. Fix it.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

Good in principle, but largely pointless in the real world. Someone with enough motivation to learn to program but no money for professional books is just going to torrent them.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

American here. I get it too. In fact I get a login page on every single NY Times article that gets posted on HN. Seeing that five times a day when I expect to be seeing an interesting article is making me loathe the New York Times.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

Seven major releases and yet there's not one single compelling reason for me to stop using 3.6. Mozilla can get back to me when it un-cripples the interface.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

I like wolfram but except for a few circumstances it isn't the fastest way of doing anything, for me. It doesn't make the connection that if it has to throw away 90% of the input because it doesn't understand it, then giving a definition of and some charts related to the one word it did understand is not useful. This is especially painful when I'm waiting 30 seconds for the page to load over a slow 3G connection. An "I didn't understand what you asked" box that pops up almost instantly would make wolfram orders of magnitude better, for me at least.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

Back in the PDA days, there wasn't any switching involved. When you pulled the device out of your pocket or off your hip, you popped the stylus out. Maybe you'd put it back if you were reading an ebook or watching a movie, but it still only took a fraction of a second either way.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

The article was good, but it got a couple of things wrong. Fingers work perfectly well on resistive screens, even better than they do on capacitive ones which having gloves on doesn't matter. The reason styli were standard during the years of resistive screens was that the screens were too small and the resolutions too low to waste five hundred pixels and a square inch on a Yes button. Not only that, but a stylus is so much faster than a finger at almost anything that there's almost no comparison. Give me a three inch 160x160 screen, an onscreen keyboard composing less than half of that resolution, and a stylus, and I can type twice as fast as a teenager with a thumbboard. That, and people who paid three hundred bucks for their PDA aren't fond of seeing it covered in fringerprints, despite how hard today's manufacturer's have been insisting that it's normal.

Having a list composed of five items which is 600 pixels tall, and having to scroll down to see the six item would make an ex-Palm developer shoot blood from his eye sockets.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

All real-world probabilities are like that, though. Outside the quantum world, ALL randomness is just an illusion based on human ignorance of current conditions.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

Handmade knives are for people with more money than sense. If you actually USE knives in the field, then you know that the best knives are made by people who came up with brilliant designs and techniques and used them to start small companies that combine the best of both worlds, like Busse and RAT. A knife from a small, semi-automated company will cost half of what this guy charges and last ten times as long because it's built on genius and not an irrational attachment to handmade items. You can watch Joel whinge on about his life story and then pay five hundred dollars for a kitchen knife, or can spend half the money on a Scrap Yard Scrapper you could literally pound through three of these knives stacked together, assuming you had a sledgehammer.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

Good. I'm sick of paying for the same thing over, and over, and over.

1. Government taxes me. Some of that tax money funds research.

2. That research is published in a journal, which I have to pay (exorbitantly) for.

3. Professor reads the journal, and includes some of its information in a textbook, which I have to pay, again exorbitantly, for if I want to take class X.

I'm slightly amazed that it's even legal to charge three hundred dollars for fifty cents worth of paper containing nothing but four hundred year old math principles and a handful of groan-inducing word problems.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

Let me get this straight. I buy a phone. Carrier locks my phone, that I bought, to restrict me from doing certain things, many of which the carrier wants me to pay an extra fee for, all of which are actually built into the phone.

Now this company wants me to pay THEM the fee instead, with the difference being that although I only have to pay the fee once, they aren't going to cover anything if I brick the phone in the process of using what I just bought.

This is like buying a DVD and then paying somebody else nine dollars to sit at your desk and torrent it for you.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

Bill Gates? Bah, how can this be relevant when we've seen tribute pages from only two of the three children Steve Jobs bought lemonade from last summer?

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

Exactly. Reading that whole page of specialized economic arguments while they ignore the major fact brings to mind the image of The Coneheads debating why people don't drive cars with their feet to leave their hands free, debating whether absolute foot comfort is of paramount importance to humans vs humans having a religious law against touching their feet with wheels.

Missing the forest for the trees.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

Are there really people that walk around with their phone GPS switched on all day? Security concerns aside, what a drain on battery life that must be.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

How long did you spend staring at your screen in slackjawed disbelief after selecting the zoom tool and finding that instead of zooming out, right-clicking does nothing?

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

Modern smartphones aren't so good at it either. Think of the last time you just wanted to listen to the audio from a video file while you browsed the internet.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

I am an irregular Linux user and am not deeply involved in the Ubuntu community, but over the past several months I have seen the general attitude of "random geeks" change dramatically with regards to Ubuntu. A year ago the standard response to a new user inquiring about Linux was "install Ubuntu, it's easy, there's lots of help available. Go get 'em tiger." Now, Ubuntu is usually spoken of with a kind of regretful contempt. I didn't much care for it myself, but Ubuntu used to be the public face of Linux, the thing 95% of the Windows/OSX users hit if they get interested in Linux. As far as I can tell, it's fallen out of the good graces of the power user community. It appears as if Ubuntu has decided to forsake the early adopters and power users in favor of the newbies and average Joes. That may be well and good on principle but I don't see it as a strategy capable of sustaining an OS ecosystem that doesn't come preinstalled on Dick and jane's new laptop.

Causification

15 лет назадdiscuss

Agreed. Unless it's supported by a legal framework, racism is a self-defeating phenomenon. Racist individuals deprive themselves of the benefits offered by the group toward which they are racist, therefore making themselves less likely to succeed. If anything, a person or group of people being racist should alert you, the observant seizer of the day, to an under-utilized resource and/or market niche.

So long as big brother isn't enforcing it; another person's stupidity can always be turned to your advantage.

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