I wish they'd teach with modern English translations of Shakespeare in high schools. Maybe then kids would like it a lot more. But it seems like it's taboo to read Shakespeare in anything but the original.

Even if you were certain that AI would take over virtually everything, the problem is deciding which AI companies to invest in. Thinking back to 1996, just when this new thing called "the web" was gaining tracking and assuming you were certain it was going to be huge, what companies would be the best investment? A lot of the companies doing web stuff went nowhere. Many of the biggest successes didn't even exist in 1996. It's not obvious which (if any) AI companies are worth investing in even if you're positive that AI is the future; the current companies might be massively overvalued; the best AI companies might not even exist yet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

      username    words       karma
  1.  tptacek     4,310,896   416351
  2.  jacquesm    3,841,209   237961
  3.  ingve       2,273       215283

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46571368

Points: 11

# Comments: 2

I consulted the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator:

$600 in 1925 would be $11,264 today

$600 in 1935 would be $14,329 today

A lot of money, but I've heard that it can easily cost $10-20K today to erect a couple of poles to bring power a hundred feet to your property in a rural area these days. Do you know what distance was being covered to bring power to your grandfather?

A ten-fold productivity gain in legal services sounds simply awful for society. Imagine the time and money sink if everyone can sue you for every frivolous thing because AI can prepare and file the paperwork instantly without needing a lawyer. You'll need your own AI to defend against the onslaught of legal disputes.

Every contract for jobs and every terms & conditions for services will be 10x longer because AI has a much higher complexity threshold compared to a human. My belief is that one reason tax returns became much more complicated in the last ~30 years is because of tax preparation software. In the era of paper tax returns, there was a limit to the complexity that an individual or even an accountant could handle, so there was a limit on how complicated the government could make it.

Most normal people rarely need a lawyer in their lives. With AI's productivity explosion in the legal services, you're going to need legal services every day. Your neighbor wants to borrow your chainsaw? Your AI legal agent will negotiate a liability waiver with his AI agent.

0 to 800,000,000 in 3 years?

The fastest adoption of a product or service in human history?

I can accept a facial scan, but I draw the line at fingerprints and more invasive biometrics.

Two questions jump to mind:

Why isn't this the default in Firefox?

What is the downside? I.e., what can break by enabling this parameter?

Remember the really old days when air miles were awarded solely by distance flown rather than by dollars paid? This made no business sense. It meant that someone who flew the cheapest tickets could rack up as many points as a last-minute first class business traveller who spent massively more ticket.

With the airlines I’m familiar with, it seems that pricing anomaly has been corrected. Air miles are much more correlated with the price of the ticket these days. Eg., you don’t even get air miles on the cheapest tickets on one airline I know.

But I still wonder why the airline industry created an air miles formula so disconnected from the value of the passenger in the early days.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43511775

Points: 10

# Comments: 5

[1] I've verified this for myself with careful record keeping over long periods of starting/stopping different BP meds, but I'm not entirely sure it's true for everyone.

Maybe it should have been titled, "How to model the right battery choice for your application" or "Understanding trade-offs in battery design".

Didn't Apple make a great deal of their revenue in the early days (1976-1985) by selling to schools? I seem to recall that schools were their main focus. A $3000 Apple II in 1980 would be $12,000 in today's money, and schools often bought many units. Is Karpathy's product really that different from an Apple Computer in how it would be marketed to schools?

> From the linked article: First, the hackers were able to record a conversation between Dubé in his office on Parliament Hill and our Radio-Canada colleague Brigitte Bureau, who was sitting at a café in Berlin.

So many questions! Does this still work? On any phone using SS7? Including landlines and mobile phones? From anywhere in the world? To anywhere in the world? What are the limitations of the attack? Why isn't this a vastly bigger problem if anyone can listen in on anyone's calls?