I'm actually curious as to how many HN users find The New Yorker useful or insightful. It's always struck me as rather middlebrow and perhaps couched in the would-be-elitism of the east coast.
Most of my reading and thinking since childhood has been around technology. The New Yorker is, for me, a gentle tour around "the arts" as I have no education in that area (hence 'highbrow' art/literary writing goes right over my head).
It's like a conversation with an older, smarter, slightly pretentious friend who went off to theater school while you stayed up writing code all night.
The web is full of snack-size bites of information, but lacks context. The New Yorker (and The Economist) are great for providing deeper insight and creating links between stories, or leading you to thoughts that you wouldn't normally have clicking hundreds of links on Google News, HNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch etc.
It's good to read as much as you can, especially things that are outside your normal horizons.
Middlebrow is precisely what it aspires to be. It's not a scholarly (highbrow) publication. It's not USA Today (lowbrow). It executes specific conventions capably and asks only that inexpert readers concentrate and enjoy.
The majority of the cypherpunks behind the development of the crypto in Bitcoin are libertarians, that's just the unavoidable fact. Hal Finny, Nick Szabo, you name any of the heavy hitters of the original cypherpunks list.
Then, if you move on to look at the Bitcoin Talk forums, you'll see they're infested not only by libertarians, but crazy right wing gold-bug types.
Maybe as bitcoin goes more mainstream, you can claim it outgrew these sensibilities, but you can't ignore the disproportionate number of rabid anti-government types who are the early adopters.
Some of the community is like that, sure. But it doesn't follow that the technology as a whole was created as a political vehicle, nor does it follow that it will necessarily serve as one.
A technology cannot possess sensibilities.
But there are plenty of people willing to assert otherwise.
The core people who worked on the algorithmic components that form the basis of Bitcoin, are not only sympathetic to Libertarianism, but are sympathetic to anarcho-capitalism.
I used to be heavily involved in cypherpunks myself (search for "cromwell" in the cyphernomicon, see my Anonymous Remailer stuff http://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=85281458701690&w=2 or search Cromwell here http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/privacy-compcon97-www... to see my note on the Decense Project, one of the very first anonymizing web proxies), and I used to be a rabid libertarian myself and I can tell you from personal experience it's not an exaggeration to say where the sympathies of the creators are.
I personally developed cryptotools for anonymous double blind mailing lists (neither the recipients of the list nor the list itself know each other's addresses), shamir sharing, and distributed publishing, on the basis I believed I was defeating government surveillance and censorship. At the time, there was a vague notion that untraceable anonymity, absolutely secure communication, and digital cash would permit the creation of an online world which was 100% free of government.
That's lovely for you, but not terribly relevant to anything I've stated.
An appeal to personal experience does not constitute a refutation of the assertion that a technology cannot possess sensibilities. Nor does it provide evidence that the majority of the present Bitcoin community shares such beliefs -- asserting otherwise constitutes a fallacy of improper generalization.
It's quite possible that the views most frequently articulated on Bitcoin Talk, etc. are those of a vocal minority.
Unless you have a statistical survey of the bitcoin community, all we have is the anecdotal evidence. And the anecdotal evidence, both from my personal experience, as well as _objective sampling of the celebrities of the community_ is that libertarianism is disproportionately represented compared to the populace in general.
And since the early adopters and pioneers of a community often mirror the philosophy of their founders, it is highly probable that the bitcoin community is overrepresented with libertarians.
That this seems surprising to you or you're so defensive over it seems strange. It seems pretty self evident. As if you found a community of gun owners producing crypto-guns, and were shocked to find they were NRA members too.
> Unless you have a statistical survey of the bitcoin community
I don't, and I don't think it's appropriate to make generalizations unless one has access to a sufficient body of empirical evidence. So I'm not making generalizations.
With that in mind, none of your opinions strike me as self-evident in an objective/empirical sense. Perhaps they're self-evident to you, but that doesn't make them the basis for sound argumentation.
It's unclear to me how I might have come across as defensive with respect to your comments; I merely don't find what you're saying to be convincing.
I disagree that there is a disproportionate number of crazy ultra-libertarian members of the Bitcoin community and it seems more likely that the more fringe members of the community are also the most vocal and they tend to drown out the more reasonable and level headed members of the community.
Well, if you say "crazy ultra libertarian", it's hard to quibble, but if you say "more libertarian than Rand Paul or Ron Paul", I think that would be more accurate.
There's a key difference: Elon Musk is delivering results.
The scientific method enables one to deliver results because its models are predictive, not merely explanatory. The engineering and science we do today is also predictive because it relies on models cultivated within this methodology.
Equating today's "best guesses" with those in medieval or ancient times is absolutely inane.
Bitcoin is an interesting environment in which one might discuss the gender ratio.
On one hand, crypto-currency in general is a relatively new phenomenon -- it seems unlikely that there could be a well-established gender bias in the community, given its youth.
On the other hand, perhaps Bitcoin, etc. have inherited the apparent male-dominated attributes of the tech scene from which they emerged?
It seems that the author is articulating the idea that developing for slower connections and using older technologies requires a different skill set than developing using the "state-of-the-art" in the Valley.
Isn't this self-evident? It's unclear why this should necessarily equate to greater respect for developers in the developing world, as a general assertion.
The internet, heaps of computing technology advances, several trips to the moon, space stations, and a shuttle program all have been done by the government "for the last several decades."
It is undeniably government funded, backed, and run research that has fostered the technological "magic" we see today. I wrote "undeniable" because it is a fact--not a conjecture, opinion, or item subject to debate. Government funded and government run research programs created our space-age technology (literally) and the internet, and fueled a great percentage of the other developments that have advanced our technology so rapidly in the last several decades.
Private companies (whether held privately or publicly traded) are mainly creatures of fear and risk aversion--even the ones that are relatively less so than others. There's nothing especially "bleeding edge" about SpaceX or Tesla, or just about anything else Musk has been involved with. Historically, it has usually taken a great thrust by the government to make big advances, whether through subsidies (i.e. corporate welfare) or direct involvement (NASA/DARPA).
And yet the US government was never able -- nor did they try -- to develop a fully-reusable rocket, which is something SpaceX is currently doing.
Saying that corporations are risk-averse followers is inane. Governments broadly fund a great deal of seed-level research. Sometimes they develop applications based upon it. Sometimes corporations get there first.
We're seeing an instance of the latter with SpaceX, I think.
What is inane about the statement regarding corporations? Generally speaking, unless there is a significant level of government backing or subsidy for the research, corporations just don't engage in it. There are of course exceptions here and there, but most of even that research is hardly bleeding edge. It's mostly very conservative iterations on the original research done by the government (or with government backing). This is true in medicine, space, computer, and just about any other human endeavor one can think of.
Aside from that, your statement about a fully-reusable rocket may technically be true (I suspect that NASA actually has investigated a 100%-reusable rocket, but don't know for sure), but it is trivial and unsupportive of your point, since the concept isn't ground-breaking (the shuttle was completely reusable, even if the delivery system was only partially reusable) or even very risky, given the decades of research and engineering that the government has put into space rocket technology. That was, in fact my point. "Being conservative and risk-averse" is not synonymous with "never does anything new."
I'm not sure about the US, but USSR developed one, the Energia II. It was AFAIK never built, it shared the destiny of the rest of the Energia/Buran programme, but they were certainly able and did try. I can't find any references ATM, but I'm pretty sure the US also had plans for a fully reusable Shuttle complex, before the whole thing got ridiculous in planning stages.
EDIT: And what's with the fixation on reusable rockets? It might lower some cost but it's hardly an amazing feat of science and engineering.
Is it worth living if you're locked inside a tunnel in a place where you can't even go outside, where you're only with a handful of people who will hit a genetic bottleneck in short order, where you're unable to then move from your extraordinarily fragile location to another one? It's not like we're going to have the variety of heavy industries required for creating spacecraft available on the near-atmosphereless planet where you basically need to stay inside all the time.
If something wipes out Earth, we're screwed. It was nice being here, but it's over. Whatever made Earth so uninhabitable that it makes a colony on a barren planet the only remaining splinter of humanity, isn't going to leave Earth in a recolonisable state.
It's not to say we shouldn't reach for the stars, just that I think the justification "save the species!" is massively overblown. If you really do want to "save the species!", then you're going to be far more effective in spending that space travel money in other areas: identifying events that cause global catastrophes and working on technologies to subvert them. Sending a person to another planet is amazingly expensive; setting up a self-sufficient colony even moreso; and setting up a colony that is capable of self-sufficiently colonising other planets more expensive again.
Not to mention that the social elites that will get sent to these colonies (shipping people is expensive, so you want to front-load skilled people) are also going to have to want to rear the number of children required to repopulate - and if you're not significantly expanding the population with each generation in such a case, you're making another extinction even all the more easy.
You're looking too narrowly at the potential here.
What might begin as an underground colony full of social elites or skilled professionals required to run the infrastructure could result in a fully-habitable environment.
But if you don't plant the seeds and experiment with this, then it certainly won't get anywhere. Elon Musk is planting the seeds.
When he says "back-up the species" (not /save/, one would note), he's referring to planting the seeds for a long-term habitation which very well could be self-sufficient and continue progressing in the event of an extinction-level occurrence here on Earth.
>A major point of SpaceX is distributing humankind so that such a thing wouldn't wipe us all out.
No amount of innovation is going to allow the private space industry to terraform and colonize another planet, ever. I'm sorry but that's just techno-utopian babble.
"Ever" is a very strong word for a technological project which doesn't contradict any known natural laws. Do you honestly not see the possibility that we might be able to build a self-sustaining, comfortable colony on Mars in 100 years? 500? 1000?
I honestly do not, for the reason that the cost of such a venture is simply too high. If we cannot even manage to bear the minimal costs of stopping catastrophic climate change on our own planet, then what makes you think we will ever have the will, much less the ability, to undertake the terraforming of a lifeless planet millions of miles away?
The basic point is, perhaps that money would be better spent addressing the potential causes of such an event.
Rather than treating it as an inevitability. And fantasizing about what we can do to help the 0.001% who will be rich enough to buy themselves a way out.
I'm not certain that assumption is necessarily correct.
Elon Musk seems more focused on affecting meaningful change and driving technology forward. He's using corporations as a vehicle to do that and making money is an incidental side-effect.
If profit was his primary motive, there would have been many other ways to invest his fortune from PayPal which entailed far lower risk and potentially significant gain.
It's particularly frightening to me because it appears that GitHub is attempting to do the right thing here -- investigate the allegations without the influence of potentially involved parties.
Yet, if such a thing is construed as an admission of guilt in the greater "court of public opinion" then there's an incentive to actively avoid any attempt at transparency.
