adamgravitis's comments

Other than the opportunity for a misplaced pun on the term “spiral”, why would you take an otherwise linear-in-time graph and make it radial? Why would age 0 to 50 be somehow cyclical?

I'd rather they be able to run mail servers. SMTP lends itself to intermittent delivery.

Orig article has lowercase ‘n’ in ‘next’, which makes more sense…

Because it was perfect…

The author is displeased with the sort of discussions present on networks built on a couple different technologies. Unclear how the third technology magically makes them “happy.”

I concur. The term obviously refers to another sort of thing entirely.

"In short: this author is endorsing a funding model focused on low initial investment and faster profitability."

-> so basically, Canadian "venture" capital. They don't even want to talk to you unless profitability is there or within a few months. So, basically, it distills to a barely riskier than usual bank loan, except you pay the loan with equity.

This is the furthest thing from the truth. That a human has a certain capability does not in the slightest imply that “DNA”, at least as commonly understood, encodes that capability, at all.

A bunch of molecular recipes encoded in a few gigs of nucleotides with some crude feedback loops do not a human make.

Quite apart from epigenetics as it’s commonly presented (methylation, and all sorts of histone antics), you might recall that DNA itself doesn’t magically grow up: you do need a cell.

It’s somewhat (and only poorly) analogous to being handed the source code to a C compiler written in C, without knowing C. Does the C code really encode C? Well, not without the compiler it doesn’t....

There’s then a very interesting discussion around how it’s even possible for a mammalian nervous system to bootstrap itself. Figuring out walking seems perhaps emergent: it’s a learnable technique based on not falling. But how do dog breeds retain intrinsic high-level behaviours even if they’ve never observed them? What makes a Shepherd so concerned when his assumed flock becomes dispersed?

We are a tremendously long way from answering these questions, but I would caution anyone who thinks it just “in the DNA”.

I would just point out that HN does this in the title of every link posted, and has been doing this for years.

Toronto’s tech talent is keen... but relatively green. Since few companies have had to deal with scaling networks, users and data to the same magnitude as is common with Valley companies, it’s almost impossible to find senior engineers worthy of the title. Plenty of options for junior and intermediate, though.

I agree this is an abysmal article.

A much much more rigorous proposal was put forward by an American mathematician several years ago regarding the geometry of trajectories of computer programs, which holds considerably more promise than whatever flimflam this author was going on about:

https://rd.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2FBF00046564.pdf

Are you guys going to release something describing your concept of "category oriented programming" any time soon?

To be fair, I do insist on calling Deloitte "Deloitte Dot".

Reducing the number, length and complexity of regulation is a valid goal, and that hasn't changed in thousands of years:

"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government." - Tacitus

The main computationally intractable problems around drug discovery surround protein folding and identifying macromolecule shapes. This is necessary to infer receptor sites for potential drug targets.

The problem is massively intractable. QC could revolutionize the space.

Basic income is absolutely one route, but I can think of a few others. A startup could thrive in a smaller city where their employees could achieve a high quality of life without extraordinary expense. You'd still have to solve the recruiting problem, however, and employees would be wary of lock-in effects.

Cities are largely about people, and people are largely about the difficult-to-describe sense of 'opportunity'.

Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in population.

Because of this, our generation is stuck on the wrong side of the supply/demand bit for property. Property in uninteresting cities is very cheap, because nobody wants to be there. Property in Silicon Valley or Toronto is on fire because it's the place to be.

I think there's a critical mass kind of problem. In many ways, my quality of life in a smaller (or even very small) city could be several times higher than it currently is -- except for the people. And, for better or worse, it's the people that matter. I don't have any real desire to be the best educated, or most creative, or most entrepreneurial person in a city: I want to be surrounded by them and call them my friends.

So perhaps there's some kind of Kickstarter-like critical mass sort of system that could be put into place to kickstart small cities whereby 50 or 100 mutually interesting people committed to moving to a more remote city iff their compatriots did as well.

Of course, to make that work, there would be have to be some kind of "opportunity", which is why I'm happy to see yC-folks looking into the problem.

Hi Alan,

I've heard you frequently compare the OOP paradigm to microbiology and molecules. It seems like even Smalltalk-like object interactions are very different from, say, protein-protein interactions.

How do you think this current paradigm of message-sending could be improved upon to enable more powerful, perhaps protein-like composition?

Then there'll definitely be ads.

...with just really bad inter-node bandwidth.