AretNCarlsen's comments

Or even on the first page. (I notice because I always get to HN this way. Today is the first time I have ever seen it below #1 or #2.)

Just like I do when I want a sandwich.

This particular situation is more nuanced than the usual profit-from-the-poor story. Every bank and credit union receives these fees, and in the case of not-for-profit credit unions, the interchange fees truly support[ed] "free checking" accounts. Whereas merchants can lower their prices to pass the money back to the consumers (but won't), banks, conversely, have nowhere to recoup their losses except to charge the debit card users. I would rather see an honest fee like this than watch as overdraft penalties are raised to cover the lost revenue.

In the vein of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", no teacher ever got fired for storing all of their students' data locally, whether on a personal PC or a physical gradebook. I have worked with businesses that do not want to store data in the cloud (Amazon, Salesforce, etc) if the data is at all confidential. They have a point: the risks of local data storage are serious but intuitive, whereas the average person has only your word regarding the safety of the cloud. And teachers, like doctors and bankers, have auditors that they would have to persuade to accept the new technology.

I would not be surprised if the post mortem reveals that some teachers brought this app up with their administrators, who responded, "That app would be handy for you, but if there is theft or corruption of your students' data, how would we defend ourselves in the ensuing lawsuits? 'The developer seemed reliable?'"

I'll bet that you're thinking that this will have to wait a decade or two, until every car on the road has a new generation of computers installed. Look up a Mercedes product called Distronics Plus and a company called Autoliv. These guys are already mounting stereo cameras and long-wavelength IR (heat) cameras on production luxury cars to detect turn signals, pedestrians, and license plates of other cars. When 50% of cars have radars linked to their cruise control, it's a matter of iteration to let them share data, then to characterize the remaining vehicles on the road based on the aggregate observational data.

Your '95 Civic may not be announcing its velocity, but when the car behind you and the car in front of you have both read your license plate and agree on your speed, you may as well be.

What's to stop someone from spoofing your bank site while you're on the free wifi at Starbucks? I can imagine an aftermarket module designed to do just that, so free wifi is clearly not viable.

In practice, they'll implement encryption and authentication, then make it a federal crime to mess with it.

Yes, and "if Captain Sully had been flying an Airbus he would have crashed because they don't allow manual control". The objective is to reduce the total number of crashes, even if that means that you feel like you have less control of when you do crash.

I am extremely surprised that cloud servers did not play a bigger part here. This Is What They're Perfect For: renting the equivalent of enormous datacenters for a brief period without much notice or prior/post capital investment. Password/hash cracking has always struck me as the archetypal use of Amazon/Rackspace/Linode/etc.

To beat the old drum: Email isn't intended to be secure anyway. Relying on email addresses to maintain privacy and authenticity is like relying on Caller ID to verify callers' identities. (See spoofcard.com.)

Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt. Or, encrypt.

If I were the Square founders, and I was expecting conventional credit card processors to go on the offensive, I might offer them a red herring: a simple technical limitation, something on which the competition would focus exclusively. The trick is that I would choose this technical limitation such that I could suddenly correct it at a later date, leaving my competitors without any ammo.

If I were feeling really clever, I might choose this herring such that my initial costs were also reduced. For example, I could make my initial card scanner so simple that it doesn't even require a watch battery or Hijack-style power[1]. Of course, I couldn't encrypt data passing through the jack ... until I decide to send out a new version of the card scanner with an extra $3 worth of microcontrollers and batteries inside. (Wait for it...)

P.S. - I doubt very much that I would have thought of that ahead of time. But, maybe the Square guys are smarter.

[1] http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~prabal/projects/hijack/

> "He's not a scientist"

Ironically, the OP didn't say anything nearly so insulting.

That's true, in the original fable the grapes were inaccessible to the sole character (the fox) and the moral was just that "IT IS EASY TO DESPISE WHAT YOU CANNOT GET." Colloquially, however, "sour grapes" is often repurposed to describe the rationalizations of a sore loser, that is, when someone else CAN get the grapes but you cannot. That is clearly ellyagg's usage, and as in the cognitive dissonance of the original fable, there is an implication that the loser would change his tune if he were to gain access to the "grapes". ANH disagrees, asserting that the grapes are genuinely sour in this case.

From http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/31.html (and it's well into the public domain):

ONE hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. "Just the things to quench my thirst," quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: "I am sure they are sour." "IT IS EASY TO DESPISE WHAT YOU CANNOT GET."

"[I]f you have people imagine the water going into an underground aquifer, for example, and then sitting there for 10 years, the water becomes much more palatable to the public. It budges even those most unwilling to drink the water. ... 'When you do introduce a river or even groundwater ... you run the risk of deteriorating the water that's been treated. You can make the water quality worse.'"

I am singularly amused at the possibility of contaminating treated post-sewage water with river water, resulting in a medically less safe but socially more acceptable water supply. The results of a public vote (as to whether to mix river water with the treated water) would at least tell us who needs to be mailed a printed copy of lesswrong.com.

Replicate each component of the original SNES hardware? That has been somewhat done: you can buy hardware clones of the SNES in many stores.

Logarithmic in both directions (from average), or do we throw away information for either the brightest or the slowest students? Do we not have enough storage bits available for a linear representation?

In the U.S., we call the template spending ballots "primaries".

My impression is that they utilize a second conversion stage that is essentially a conventional solar cell. So the sequence is: heat => light => electricity. The novelty is the design of the first conversion stage, which is specifically tuned to produce wavelengths that can be efficiently converted by the second stage solar cell. As opposed to just burning the butane and running a solar panel off of the firelight.

Certainly, you can get nearly 100% of people to do the right thing most of the time. That is what judicial deterrents accomplish. Those don't work if people are anonymous, however.

The Milgram experiment was not intended to be "extreme". They expected less than 3% of participants to actually torture their (fake) victim to death. The U.S. group was to act as a control, such that they could proceed to compare results in Germany, for instance, where the Holocaust had so recently occurred. Following the unexpected American results, Milgram simply did not bother to perform the actual intended experiment in Germany.

> People are still essentially good.

Experiment indicates that the majority (65%) are not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

I am sorry to be a downer, and I agree that it is nice to pretend that people are essentially good. Ignoring the Milgram results, however, leads us to forget why we have to maintain societies with complex crime deterrent schemes, and why we should not trust anonymous individuals who cannot be located for punishment.

"[H]alf ... were female, and their rate of obedience was virtually identical to that of the male participants." "Where participants had to physically hold the "learner's" arm onto a shock plate, ... 30 percent of participants completed the experiment."

Good idea. The Daily Mail isn't responding to my email. Anybody know how to get ahold of Dmitry Bibikow?