2468ben's comments

This isn't the pay gap "at Uber", no info on corporate pay here. More like this: "Gender Pay Gap for Uber Drivers Not Caused by Gender Discrimination."

I did some heavy research in various forms of machine learning and AI in grad school 10 years ago, and the more experiments and tools I created, the more I saw this "digital nuclear arms race" and didn't want to be part of it.

We don't know how many other people aren't working on this because of moral/ethical reasons. Of course, 99.9% of the world could be wary of genetic engineering, but that remaining 0.01% is enough to pursue research, get VC investment and drag the rest of us into that uncertain future.

To continue the nuclear analogy, the Manhattan project was probably the most impressive engineering program in the history of the world, but it was driven by survival in a World War. They didn't build and drop the atomic bombs for fun. You'd think that working on a limitless virtual brain should have similarly serious motivations, not just the examples of "how do I drive to X but also shop for Y?" or "is that a monkey?".

I know there are much grander societal goals with A.I. and the world really could become a "better place", but please sell society those goals, not the usual first-world problems. We already have enough people trying to destroy the world without these extra tools.

About a year ago I wrote an extension for finding & replacing whatever spelling/grammar people wanted to change on the WWW: http://www.ityms.com/. It's a poor man's version of the Github PR for typos.

I get the same red "hotspot" from moving my mouse around, or scrolling with my cursor in one place. Is there a way to tell the difference with this?

Almost $4,000,000 a year on "sidewalk falls". Does anyone know what % on average an injury lawyer makes from those settlements?

Can someone just write a script that crawls this page for updates, then sends the users an email telling them what they did?

Those features are the madness of standards enforced under penalty of law. CSS is a recommendation, and the only penalty is a competitive disadvantage. Back when the Internet was a graphically simpler place with a browser monopoly, there was little disadvantage to implement CSS however they damn felt. If Ford sold 90% of cars and a consortium recommended they add 12 new safety features, imagine how they'd respond.

(I don't think they're good reasons, just reasons)

1. Unlike print layout, the dimensions of a webpage can change, and so we slowly invented an evolving layout framework for something without fixed dimensions. I've done typesetting since it was exacto knives and hot wax, and if you told me then to imagine a stretchable paper for news I would have cried in the corner.

2. The layout framework was independently built by a bunch of separate companies, who by nature of competition weren't going to agree on everything (see every browser).

3. The agreements that WERE made were done by committee, including the reluctant inputs of competing companies. This method of design will guarantee that they end up with something weird.

4. Make it backwards compatible with all the previous ghosts of architects past.

Imagine if Ford, GM and Chrysler had to build a joint car every few years.

Also, try designing a page in Flash and using (or just reading about) their graphics/layout/text frameworks. Some things are much harder than HTML/CSS, some are much easier, but it offers a great comparison on a completely different way of solving layout. I've implemented a spec like CSS for customizing Flash app appearances, and compared to what existed before, it made everything better.

Exactly. "We're now beginning our descent, which..." (scroll scroll scroll) "...was 20,000 feet before now"

Please Both. You need to be able to see real-time and long-term.

All Dashboards should show goals you set or something that's unusual compared to your past data. THAT is the reason why everyone's confused by most dashboards - they're visualization for the sake of looking good first. When they're done right they let you see the state of things, whereas feeds are like alarms - too many or too few can make you stop giving a damn.

Be like a scientist - ask every question you can think of. Then try to answer it with data and if that answer changes over time, keep it on a dashboard. Then set alerts and snapshots to the feed, so only what's really important will bother you.

What we need to work on is how deep you can ask questions of an external service. Giving me my choice of 12 pre-baked table columns or API endpoints isn't going to answer my real goals. 12 pre-designed draggable widgets aren't either. I want to ask big questions first instead of combining little answers.

I made a tutorial in grad school for people who give (mostly technical) presentations: http://www.rustyandfriends.com/powertothepoint

It owns French Guiana, so that's why that part of South America's highlighted. Also some of the country names are based on what the country actually calls itself, which is why Spain (Espana) shows up in the E section. Why the alphabetical name and the displayed name are different? That's weird.

I've been researching and trying to plan out how this will all happen for about 5 years now, and it's amazing how far away we still are in many senses. Ponoko is a huge step forward, but I would love to work on making the "Napster of Forks".