With that out of the way, the Pope is right. Knowledge should be used for the benefit of humanity and I don't think any of the big AI companies have our best interests in mind.

Sometimes, the only thing I find by doing exploration is that a particular dataset is absolute garbage and shouldn't be used for any purpose. The only way I find stuff like that out is if I explore the dataset.

[Citation Needed]

In a private company, like Andreessen Horowitz, they are effectively spending their own money. If they choose to invest in a company founded by one of their partners, I do not see the conflict of interest. From the outside we may question whether or not the startup is really worthy of being funded, but it really isn't our call to make.

But what if it was our call to make? Did they make a bad decision by funding one of their own? Looking at his track record he already has experience as a co-founder and a CTO. On top of having prior experience, he has worked as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz for over a year. The people making the decision whether or not to fund his startup have experience working with him. They probably have a good idea of whether this person can or cannot deliver.

I think most people object to this, because they imagine a situation where a better startup is not funded because the partners decided to fund their buddy instead. Let us say that is true. For the sake of argument, assume this guy is incompetent and should not be given funding. Imagine this guy worked at Andreessen Horowitz for over a year and everyone knew he was incompetent, but decided to fund him anyways just because they were BFFs.

I guess it is possible something like this happened, but I doubt it. I recently finished reading Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing about Hard Things and he doesn’t seem like the type of person who keeps incompetent people around just because likes them.

The only valid objection I see is if they are using information provided to them under a non-disclosure agreement to gain unfair advantage. But is this a valid concern? As others have pointed out, most ideas are cheap. Even if that information provides some short-term advantage, it won’t help in the long-term as the market changes.

If there is an employee an employee who is constantly leaving early, coming in late, and not working, management needs to deal with this directly. An open office plan is not a good replacement for good management.

I don't understand the connection between YouTube revenue splitting and Bitcoin replacing traditional currencies. I guess this is supposed to be an example of intermediaries providing value added, but can we at least provide an example in the payment processing space? What does a credit card company provide that is not provided by Bitcoin?

Overall, I am on the fence on Bitcoin. I get the feeling cryptocurrencies will drastically change the world economy in the future, but I don't think anyone really knows how and to what extent.

> Some of our Services allow you to upload, submit, store, send or receive content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

Do you have any proof of this ever happening? Do you have any legal case that support your claim? Can you please point to the text in their TOS that leads you to believe this?

This is the exact opposite of YC and other startup incubators. Their approach is to invest in newer companies with great potential, but also great risk of failure. The business models of these companies are not always clear.

From a personal level (I live in Omaha), I find it interesting to contrast Berkshire Hathaway and YC from a cultural perspective. YC is located in Silicon Valley, while Berkshire has its headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. When asked about why he stays in Omaha, Buffett said "It's very easy to think clearly here. You're undisturbed by irrelevant factors and the noise generally of business investments."

Silicon Valley’s culture is the opposite of Omaha in many respects. Companies are concerned about chasing the latest and greatest trends even if many founders don’t complete understand those trends. Startups aren’t thinking about the next 10 or 20 years, they are more concerned about their next round of funding.

The success of Berkshire Hathaway demonstrates a valuable point: Silicon Valley isn’t the center of the world. Plenty of successful companies thrive in backwoods locations like Omaha. This isn’t meant to say Omaha’s culture is superior to Silicon Valley’s, they are just different. Diversity is a good thing.

While I agree companies like Uber and Sony need to invest more time and energy into security, real people are hurt when these types of things happen. It isn’t the executive-level “fat cats” who are hurt the most. It is normal, everyday people. They did not ask for their personal information to be stolen. Their only crime was working for a company with poor information security.

Furthermore, the fact Uber issued a subpoena for information from Github does not make Uber the bad guy for requesting the information and Github the good guy for withholding the information. A crime was committed and this is part of the investigation. The information requested by Uber is not unreasonable. They are basically requesting log files for that specific Gist.

Channeling my inner Matthew McConaughey from A Time to Kill, imagine this happening to an organization that is more likeable than Uber or Sony (shouldn’t be that hard). What if this happened to an organization responsible for helping rape victims and this person leaked the private information of rape victims to the Internet? Would people be so willing to support the criminal? Would people be so eager to praise Github for not cooperating?

Just because Uber is a horrible, unethical company does not mean it isn’t protected under the law. We shouldn’t condone crime just because we don’t like the victims.

From a security perspective, most issues with modern computer security have absolutely nothing with the TCP/IP protocol. If you take a look at top 10 vulnerabilties (https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2013-Table_of_Content...), none of them are directly related to TCP/IP.

It is always easier to look back in hindsight and criticize something knowing what we know today. Saying we should leave design to "grown-ups" is not a fair assessment of TCP/IP and its designers. Engineering is difficult and every design comes with trade-offs.

P.S. If you want to see truly bad protocols, look to ones designed by "professional", "grown-up", organizations. CORBA and anything WS-* are a few that come to mind.

Very briefly, pointer events has 3 main drawbacks relative to the alternative:

1) Mobile-first web: Pointer events would likely never supplant touch events on the web (especially without support from Safari). Since touch events are here to stay, supporting another largely redundant input model has a high long-term complexity cost on the web platform.

2) Performance: The hit testing model required by pointer events imposes a non-trivial performance penalty (hit test on every movement event) that neither Android, iOS or touch events has. We're not willing to add any feature that increases the web's performance disadvantage relative to native mobile platforms.

3) Richness: Pointer events requires that scrolling and event handling are mutually exclusive. This precludes some UI effects which are common on on mobile platforms (eg. pull to refresh). Recently strong developer feedback has lead us to change Chrome in the opposite direction here - enabling event handling while scrolling (see issue 293467 ).

Since then, I have switched over to Markdown for most of writing. There are still ways to embed LaTeX when needed for equations, but without the added complexity of full LaTeX.

The only exception I can think of to this rule is for highly visual medium like graphic novels. In this case, typesetting and layout are inseparable from the medium. That being said, I don't think Medium is designed for that type of use case

There may be other cases where creative choices in typesetting and layout may enhance the writing, but this usually isn't the case. Normally, when an author tries to "spice up" their writing this way it ends up looking like a crappy MySpace or GeoCities page.

As an aside, George RR Martin apparently uses WordStar 4.0 to write his books. I don't know if this proves or disproves the argument. Maybe if he had more control over the typesetting and layout, he would be done with Winds of Winter by now.

Think of it is lazy evaluation. The rules are all known, but they are not evaluated until needed. If we have one single person, how hard would it be to simulate every single input to that one person? You wouldn't need to simulate an entire universe to do that.

Going back to what the author had to say, you wouldn't have to simulate the state of every atom at every time. You only need to simulate when it is measured. Interestingly, this syncs up with what we know about the quantum world where measurement causes the state of the wave function to collapse.

Additionally, the author seems to assume the universe exists outside of himself. He seems to trust the measurements and insights of scientific facts I doubt that he has confirmed via his own observation. Even if he did confirm all of them, this still doesn't prove the universe exists outside of what he directly observes with his own senses.

By analogy, imagine you are a character in a video game. The video game doesn't render the entire universe of the game. Only the portion of the game the character is in at that moment. From the character's point of view, the laws are consistent. The character could even try to postulate some universal laws. Try to determine the size of their universe.

I am not saying the philosophers are right or wrong. I'm just saying there is a lot more to the philosophy than the article covers.

In the case of South Africa, it seems IBM aided in the creation of South Africa's national ID system. What I can't tell from the evidence presented is if this aid was illegal or unethical at the time it took place. As a reminder, the United States didn't officially outlaw segregation until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I really haven't made up my mind one way or another about this, but I do think people have a tendency to interpret historical events using the knowledge and ideology of the present day.

Also, to say that software engineers care nothing for standardization, rules and responsibility is unfair. Software engineers use standardized languages such as C and Java. We often use standards from the IEEE, IETF, and ISO. Depending upon the industry we support, we are often bound by very strict rules and regulations. Examples include software engineers in the defense, aerospace, banking, and health industries.

Bottomline is software engineering is just as valid as any other form of engineering.