skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Consider two individuals. One is a 65 year old Puerto Rican government worker who repeatedly voted for politicans who made promises that were mathematically impossible to keep. If anyone is responsible for the current mess, it's him.

The second is a 24 year old software engineer in California. He never had the opportunity to vote in any election prior to 2010 (when the mistakes were deliberately made) and never got to vote in PR.

A bailout would be a hugely immoral transfer of wealth from the second person to the first.

Puerto Rico and Illinois need to be made an example of. As the rest of the country watches PR and Illinois collapse they might demand that their politicians engage in some degree of fiscal responsibility.
That all depends on how long the payback is, which isn't clear from that reference. Farmers are businessmen, aren't going to do something if it doesn't make financial sense.
For some reason I'm reminded of the old joke: a Keynesian and a rat-ex theorist are walking down the street. "Look," says the Keynesian, "A twenty dollar bill!" "Can't be," says the other economist. "If it were there, someone would have picked it up already."

Here's the thing: being a slumlord is profitable. Yes, your tenants don't pay much, but if you don't improve your property, ignore complaints, refuse basic maintenance and throw everyone on the street if they're a day late on the rent, your margins are excellent, far better than you'll make with decent apartments where people demand things like legally-conformant housing and nonabusive contracts.

These are tenants who don't have recourse, or at least not easy recourse, to the legal system, so cold water flats, no A/C or furnaces, black mold, and rats and roaches are part and parcel of the slumlord experience. Of course, all this is illegal, but slumlords tend to have a lot of free cash to throw at local politicians and attorneys, and if they own a large number of single-family dwelling it's hard to track down and deal with every nonconformant property.
A leaked copy of the Harry Potter novel is not a national security threat in any way, shape or form.

True. Good thing that GCHQ's mission is (and has always been) much broader than national security. For example, they have an arm which provides Information Security advice[1].

GCHQ are not there to enforce copyright.

Fire departments aren't there cats out of trees. This is a cat.

[1] http://www.gchq.gov.uk/what_we_do/Information_Security/Pages...
Neoreactionaries promote a return to monarchy or corporate rule as a solution to this.

I'm not particularly onboard with their solutions, but they are the only group of people I can see who fully recognize the problem: democracies are fundamentally short term focused and unable to do complex planning. They are certainly well worth reading (obviously skeptically).
Well, we talked about using cross-validation and the bootstrap/bagging methods. I was surprised that he hadn't heard of these ideas, much less using.

Deep learning variants are definitely farther out; I think the current lack of interpretability makes for a real strenous case wrt economic applications.

I don't really want to draw conclusions from n=1 convos but a couple other links had piqued my curiosity towards this relationship: https://www.quora.com/How-will-Machine-Learning-affect-econo..., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11460412
So, a Qt package manager written in Go :-) Why not C++ ?
Thanks! It's an expensive hobby :)
Kinda amazing that they can fit 2 Power9's as well as 2 FHFL PCIEx16 slots, along with 15 drives and 2TB of memory in 1 rack unit.
I'm not sure whether this is more ridiculous overstatement or personal attack, but it contains enough of the latter not to be ok here. Please post civilly and substantively or not at all.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11468051 and marked it off-topic.
You mean in a country where birth control is not free and where you can have to drive 500 miles to get an abortion if you live in retarded states like Alabama or Texas ? Yeah, sure, blame the poor.
Wow, this is an awesome idea! I'm a very casual sci-fi fan (don't make too much time to read any more) but this appeals to me a lot. I like how you've structured everything as well.

I'm going to try to read the first issue on my phone, if they're good stories, I'll probably subscribe.
I think we're already past that point, if we define "provide for all humans" as "provide shelter, food, and clean water." However, "provide for humans" is a moving target which is actually interpreted as "provide a living standards not significantly worse than average." These days that includes providing running hot/cold water, range of healthy food, air conditioning, electricity, TV, internet, some form of motorized transport, health care, clothing, etc. etc."
Sadly, you illustrate a lesson that must be first documented and then learned from. Some, who find the hard realities of this arithmetic a bit too at odds with their ideology, will fail to do either. Unfortunately, a lot of these folks are in the media, academia, and government.

It's like the Great Leap Forward, but just replace homemade steel with public service, and massive starvation with massive debt.
Lets look at this in terms of resources. For years, Germans worked hard making things and Greeks reaped the benefits of German labor via imports.

Now Greece is unable to make enough things for themselves, and Germans are bailing them out. The bailout results in Germans making more things which then get shipped to Greece.

How is this not a gift from Germany to Greece? Will the Greeks ever provide goods and services to Germany which exceed what the Germans gave them? If so, when?
Tale of the Slave
Please don't post uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11468952 and marked it off-topic.
I lived in an old house, in a rural area, where the previous owner had painted some concrete bright green. I was surprised by the amount of air traffic I saw, being as deep into the sticks as I was, until I actually started watching the aircraft. They were using my property as a landmark to turn on for final approach to a municipal airport several miles away. But I can see how that pattern could cause someone to jump to the conclusion that they are the subject of an incredibly expensive revolving tail.
AWAKENET
Whether or not you agree with it - the fact of the matter is that Steve Jobs inspired many more people than Dennis Ritchie did. This comment is not meant as an affront to Ritchie, but simply as an explanation for why you should not be "bothered." Get bothered over poverty and disease, not pop culture.
I think perhaps the point that the others in this thread are making should be rephrased: you execute untrusted code in the browser, and giving that untrusted code effectively direct access to the USB peripherals is frightening. If you trust some website with "webUSB permissions", and that website has a cross-site scripting vulnerability, you've given a remote actor the ability to manipulate some USB device(s).

That being said, I'm a little confused about your definition of "remote" access. If I have a jetty server with a remotely exploitable hole in it, someone who exploits that hole is depending on me running a local client, but I would still consider it a "remote" exploit. In the same vein, someone running a browser that I can compromise with purely code on external websites is still being "remotely exploited." The attack vector requires the client to visit a specific page or click a specific link, but I didn't have to walk up to their computer and insert a USB stick. That's what makes the attack a "remote" attack for me.
Wasn't Google at one point all about commodity/consumer level hardware for their servers? Seems a huge turnaround.
You have every right to be skeptical and, to be honest, I prefer to be naive when coming up with these types of hypothesis so that I dont lose hope too easily.

With physics this is somewhat easier to do as I am able to calculate position in time, gravity and collisions (so long as they are easily solvable. I actually tried to rebuild a verlet physics engine to do this with, some success but ultimately failure.

For a game such as yours there is no floating point physics. It seems to be based off AI mostly which involves far less equations and far more 'what the hell is going on and what do I do'. As a result, you probably dont have the liberty thT I did.

I actually am interested in your game because its ambitious and yet you have the hunger and cleverness to pull it off.
I can't give you statistical evidence, but it's well known (or often said, at least) that using the right tool for the job makes the odds of success a lot higher.

That being said, "right" is very different from pg's "powerful", especially as he says:

> Lisp is so great not because of some magic quality visible only to devotees, but because it is simply the most powerful language available.

In my opinion (and this person's[1]), Lisp is "powerful" in that it lets you express anything quickly and easily in a way that makes sense to you.

That doesn't mean it makes sense to anyone, nor does that mean it's compatible with anything else.

And where he says:

> What's less often understood is that there is a more general principle here: that if you have a choice of several languages, it is, all other things being equal, a mistake to program in anything but the most powerful one.

I feel he is sorely mistaken. The best programming language for the job is the one that most easily and quickly fits the requirements, given your experience level and the intrinsic attributes of the languages in question. That may be less true when you're working on a personal project rather than one for work... but from an engineering standpoint, development speed is very important.

PHP may be near-universally reviled as a language, but I won't contest the fact that it runs anywhere, quickly. If you needed to quickly put up a blog at least some time ago, the answer was almost always "use Wordpress and PHP".

Python is slow. Painfully slow. Slow as in "it stores the entire AST at runtime and lets you modify it while the program runs" slow. But it's also great at numerical computation with numpy. And it's enormously flexible (which is what makes it slow). And it's clean. It writes really well. For a quick mathematical processing program or website whose code needs to be legible, it's great.

This goes on for just about any language. There are reasons to, and not to, use a programming language. It's not just "power" that's important, it's a number of factors. I hate many languages with a passion, but I'll agree that those languages still have their uses. So I disagree with pg here.

1: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm
The story is pretty vague. For all we know, they spotted it in a public forum or something.
Read the date on those essays. You'll note that they were all written prior to YC building momentum.

I think it's fair to say they are based on PG's early experiences, but it didn't appear to generalize.

You'll note he stopped writing about it, and YC funded plenty of companies that used many, many different languages.
I think you should use whatever you're best with. There are so many risks in a startup that you might as well not add another technical risk. PG was a lisp expert so it made sense for him to use it.
Aw, I thought this was some kind of colorful Conway's game of life and spent a while looking for a play button after drawing a bunch of gliders and such.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11465477 and marked it off-topic.
Obligatory Pun on the Chinese restaurant names:

https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/31/45-asian-fusion-...
Browser Progress Bar Is an Anti-Pattern
You are correct, I was mistaken.
I appreciate the compliment, I've spent many weekends on this. There is plenty of room for improvement, so please email me at joe@compellingsciencefiction.com if you have suggestions!
I'm not against it or anything, I'm just wondering if it is a personal interest or if there is some niche usage I am unaware of.
"shared memory" and "other process" quite hints at the frequent use of volatile where fences and other synchronization primitives are needed.
(Note: I didn't down-vote anything)
Autonomous Weapons and Wars of Attrition
Paul's Online Math Notes
Ungit: A better way to use Git
The voltage is high enough. The way Facebook's solution is, is you have triplets of racks: left, right racks hold computers, middle rack holds network, power distribution, and UPS.

The computers have extremely simplistic power supplies that basically can't fail, and just DC->DC transform from 48v to 12, 5, and 3.3; and the large scale power supplies that convert three phase 240v (or whatever you're supplying it with) from the datacenter to 48V are much higher efficiency than the ones that would have been in the server (which you would have fed them, usually, something like single phase 208v).

Redundancy is supplied by just hooking multiple transformers in the middle rack to the + and - terminals on each PSU, instead of a convoluted multi-module redundant PSU (which always uses a single backplane, and backplanes in redundant PSUs fail surprisingly frequently).

The total round trip efficiency of this system is about as high as you can realistically get. 80Plus Titanium is 90-95% efficient (depending on load), but has efficiency losses in rack level distribution which 48V tries to correct.

However, 48V DC can be very dangerous to work with, and a lot of tech workers refuse to work with it. Now, if you believe it is dangerous or not (I've seen arguments stating that it is no more dangerous than single phase 208v) is immaterial, this is the opinion of a lot of workers.

The cost of 48V gear is expensive if you're not in a datacenter already setup to handle it. Facebook obviously doesn't have this problem because they build entire datacenters from scratch.

I personally don't believe in it because it doesn't buy me anything that single phase 208v doesn't give me, I do not pay enough in electricity to have the overhead of dealing with it.
> There is an old saying that "if you took all the money away from all the rich people, and spread it around evenly to everyone else, within 2 or 3 years, all the formerly rich would be rich again having taken advantage of the poor who don't know how to make and keep money".

What a silly saying. Of course, if you redistribute all the MONEY to everyone, but leave all the means of production in the hands of a few, it's easy to predict that those few would be the ones rich again in 2 or 3 years.
Is that a bug or a feature, that Eve checks your wealth to open a buy order, but not to keep it open?
It still doesn't make any sense. Who that's not intimidated with soldering irons and wiring circuits up that can literally burst into flames if you do it wrong, is going to say, "Heavens to Betsy! I have to click an installer! My word, I'm comin' down with the vapors!"?
Taken from this Reddit thread with many other fine mathematics resources: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4e6cim/what_is_t...
I'm not commenting pro or con on any politician. What I'm saying is that, _if_ someone wants to do what they can to fight climate change, voting for politicians who share their goals would be one thing they could do that would help. And it is, actually, a pretty important thing. That's just common sense.
Howard Marks obituary: 'Britain's most charming drug smuggler'
>"I was thinking of hacking the networking stack this weekend to use it – care to join in?"

I love a weekend hack as much as anyone, but I'm assuming this is unpaid and uncompensated... for FOSS that might be fine but for a multi-million dollar project? No way.
It isn't about rack depth, but rack width. They are deep, but not unusually so.

Datacenters are not "built" with racks. They are not permanently affixed to the floor. Most datacenters do not keep empty racks on the datacenter floor, and keep the floor open.

If you are renting by the rack, no, most datacenters won't swap racks for you. You'd need to be renting entire cages for them to consider it.

Open Rack isn't really useful for small scale providers, it's more use to hyperscale companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. I don't think anyone we'd consider "medium scale" has adopted it (if I'm wrong, I'd love to see a story hit the front page about it).

Only one of those companies have adopted it, the others have considered it and, although they manufacture custom hardware and thus could take advantage of it easily, they have not done it.
Then make them more fair with better payouts. They don't need to be completely exploitative.
These methods are not usually taught in economics courses.
Why?
Not enough data.
In most cases economists are dealing with survey data, time series data and panel data. The benefits of cross validation and bootstrap/bagging grow with data size. When you're dealing with minimal amounts of messy/misbehaving data these methods lose their power.

Other methods become more important ie: Instrumental Variable estimation, Probit and Tobit models, Vector Autoregressions, Vector Error Correction models. Im sure your econ PhD student friend would know what these are.

A different tool-kit to solve different problems.
They're currently merging old forks. https://github.com/qmlweb/qmlweb/issues/134
No specific questions about your blog post but want to echo the sentiment that Scala is incredibly easy for refactoring. With Python (or even C++) it can be quite the chore, but as you said, building simple and using the compiler to guide you has great benefits. I'm currently going through the process right now with an AWS database backup utility I've been writing.

Since you're here, on another subject, I've been toying with using Scala.js with Duktape to integrate Scala into a C++ project as a scripting language. Have you seen or heard anyone who has successfully done this or any pointers you may have?

p.s. Thank you for all you've contributed to the Scala community. Your posts are always enlightening and your projects incredibly forward thinking!
No, it was spun off. AMD initially retained a minority stake, but sold their remaining shares a few years ago.
44 Min between NY and SF?!!!
Interesting note is the distance between it is much greater then i thought, 4100 Km! Considering some part of Asia like HongKong to London is only 9600Km. For what i think is an inland distance flight this is very far apart.

I also wonder how much more speed can we get? 5000 Miles per hour possible? Making Anywhere around the world possibly within 2 hours flight.

Also wonder on the bottleneck being inland transport and Check in.
Time to promote my project `securefs` again (https://github.com/netheril96/securefs). Written specifically to address that XTS issue.
Noticing that something has been "posted on the internet" isn't an exercise of power. Plucking it out of private correspondence, or offering to help take it down, sure, but intelligence agencies are entitled to access public information, same as everyone else.
I should have clarified, my statement was with tongue planted firmly in cheek. A sibling post described it best when they said it was flippant. It's up there with the Google wiretap post-it note smileys.
Hardware Security Conference and Training
Tax policy is not something John Public understands. It is much easier to discuss, focus on and sell sound bites.
You made a huge leap from "running a trailer park" to "being a slumlord", and you also implied but haven't answered the question of who is to pay for mold remediation etc when the tenants can't afford to make it profitable. Surely landlords can't be compelled into their own poverty , forced to rent units below cost. Such a price has to be paid by society/government overall, or not at all.
Strawman. I can teach an Arduino class with no soldering at all.
It's difficult to compare amounts between different cultures/countries/times because money is an abstraction. To the extent people spend on the same things, you can compare how much each costs, but many of the things previous generations spent on are either viewed as useless by us, or are considerably cheaper. (Although even "cheaper" is subjective: we can point to abundance, or marginal cost to produce in labor or similar more objective metrics to get around that).

I tend to consider all such statements spanning a sufficiently large time as guesses.

(For other countries, you need to consider different cost of goods even when money can be directly converted; you need to consider what's provided by the government as a cost-of-living deduction, and plenty of other stuff. It's like comparing interest rates without mentioning the money float or gold standard when they differ among the two periods you're comparing.)

/rant
Apparently the distinction isn't so clear.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
The rights are mentioned on their website [1]. It states that: 'Our contract follows the lead of SFWA's Model Magazine Contract.' [2]

[1] [ http://compellingsciencefiction.com/submit.html ]

[2] (PDF) [ http://www.sfwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ModelMagazine... ]
Fantasy or not, free to not, landlords don't control the Fed.
Embracing the sharing economy for growth in China
Fantastic resource for learning and as a quick reference. Coincidentally was browsing it before I stumbled upon this post.
Thanks, that's a bit surprising, but definitely helped me make up my mind on what I'll teach in the last few weeks of my class next year. The bootstrap is a weird omission, but economists usually only see it for variance estimation and inference, not in other contexts.
Digia Qt demerger
Cleaner, Safer Ruby API Clients with Kleisli
Wealth inequality is the intended effect of that incentive structure though, not a negative one. The idea being that those who provide more to society - more unique skills, better creations, etc should be more wealthy. If you put wealth inequality in these terms, I think you'll find most people - especially those who've been exposed to other systems are fairly accepting of it.

> Personally, I think the extent of inequality we permit is far far more than is necessary to incentivise wealth creation. People would still want to be rich even if the alternative didn't suck.

I see where you're coming from but I think there's definitely a fine line to tread here - if you push this too far you could argue that what you're doing is actually just serving to slow down the march of progress in society and make those poorer individuals lives much worse.

Think about it like this - would you rather be upper class, one of the richest people in the world just 200 years ago or middle class today? The medical and technological advances are so enormous. To hamper them in any way would arguably make many lives much worse. And what you're suggesting poses that risk. We could lose out on many such advances.

To use an extreme example: Sure, maybe you don't feel that medical company shouldn't be raking in so much from a unique patented drug - but what if their next creation with that money is a cure for cancer. These are the risks you take when putting such limits on this system.

Now, that's not to say I'm strictly anti-regulation or anything, just that it's a lot more of a delicate balance than many people make it out to be. You need to be careful to keep those top performers extremely motivated to do more. And if you do things like have a 90% tax rate on the uppermost bracket like some places have, well, don't be surprised when you wind up killing off that kind of thing.