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NickMon If There Is Such a Thing as Economic ‘Good Times,’ These Are They

My example is a bit contrived, but it's a well-studied phenomenon that natural disasters tend to cause a net boost to GDP because of all the extra work needed to repair/rebuild/replace stuff.

We can write this kind of thing off as a statistical quirk, but if we actually attempt to increase GDP via policy changes, then there are definitely some perverse incentives that arise.

NickMon If There Is Such a Thing as Economic ‘Good Times,’ These Are They

GDP is a pretty terrible measure of the economy, even if you're trying to look at the big picture and ignore the day-to-day impact on individuals, because it only measures creation of value and not consumption/destruction of it.

If you destroy a city, GDP is not affected, but then if you rebuild it GDP gets a huge boost. In the end you're back where you started, but the numbers look great.

NickMon The US has spent $1.5 trillion on war since Sept 11 attacks

Yeah but this argument I always hear that "our economy needs the military to survive" is utterly ridiculous; if you take it down to the simplest possible alternative, we could just keep paying all the same military employees and contractors the same amounts but tell them to do nothing, and if they "sure did need to get paid that day" well then fine, at least now we've solved that problem without causing a bunch of pointless death and destruction.

Now take it a step further. Imagine if instead of paying all those people to do nothing, you paid them to do useful jobs that actually help the world instead of attacking it. We could all be so much better off than we are now.

NickMon Mercedes Readies First Tesla Rival in $12B Attack

Oh I don't think we need to wait, pretty sure it's already sunk in, and the effects are measurable: https://electrek.co/2018/05/21/electric-car-adoption-decepti...

NickMon Bull Market Hits a Milestone: 3,453 Days – Most Americans Aren’t at the Party

I think you're both right and wrong. In our current system, yes, a lot of success comes down to luck. However, that doesn't mean that it's impossible to remove a lot of the luck from the equation.

For just one example, if you look at the average person's level of financial literacy today, the situation is appallingly bad. So statistically, it's true that you have to be lucky to be financially literate, but that doesn't mean it inherently requires luck to be able to learn these things. It's just not stuff that most people are even aware of, because nobody is teaching them. It's not an unfixable problem.

At the extreme end of the spectrum, yes, it requires a lot of luck to become as rich as Gates or Buffett, but I don't think that's what OP is trying to achieve. Helping everyday people achieve better financial outcomes is a very different goal from trying to break into the top 0.1%, and is much more achievable IMO.

NickMon After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

They could do public offerings, but that comes with a lot of legal and regulatory requirements and expenses, accounting rules, disclosure rules, etc. etc. Not all of those things are necessarily bad; ostensibly they are there to protect public investors, but they do sometimes discourage companies from going public that might otherwise want to do so.

But sure, maybe Uber and SpaceX aren't the best examples. Not sure if I'd even necessarily invest in either of them myself, but I thought they made for relatable examples. For a more real-world case, I'd love to be able to invest some money with the solar funds run by Wunder Capital, and that seems a lot safer than crypto, but that's off-limits to people like me as well.

NickMon After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors

Isn't this kind of thing the whole reason we have accredited investor laws? This might be an unpopular opinion, but if we want to protect people from themselves, maybe we should stop banning people from investing in private equity and start worrying more about exotic stuff like crypto. It seems utterly absurd to me that I'm not allowed to buy a single share of Uber or SpaceX, while sinking my life savings into whatever obscure cryptocurrency I choose is perfectly legal.

NickMon Twenty-two states ask appeals court to bring back net neutrality

Vermont recently legalized it via the legislature, though I think your main point still stands.

NickMon “Natural” birth-control app dogged by unwanted pregnancies gets FDA approval

Great points. I think it's also important to consider the statistics when you combine multiple approaches to contraception. It may not be a good idea to solely rely on natural methods, but natural methods can be combined with other contraceptives to yield a much, much greater effectiveness than most contraceptives can provide by themselves.

Since failure rates are typically stated as odds of getting pregnant within an entire year of usage, combining two methods that each have only 90% effectiveness can potentially yield an extremely high level of effectiveness: it's already unlikely that both methods will fail in the same year, but when you consider that both have to fail at the same time in the same year then the odds start to look pretty good, despite neither method being that great on its own.

NickMon EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

The electoral college and equal Senate representation acts as a tempering force on said mob.

So rather than tyranny of the majority, now we have tyranny of an arbitrary minority. I fail to see how that improves things.

As others have pointed out, the constitution and the court system are the features that are supposed to counteract tyranny of the majority, not the EC or the Senate. The EC and the Senate aren't there because they make the system better or more democratic, they're there because they were part of the necessary compromises that were made hundreds of years ago to convince all the independent states to band together into the United States.

NickMon The fightback against the Bitcoin energy guzzlers has begun

This is back of the napkin stuff, it doesnt need to be perfect.

It doesn't need to be perfect, but if the result is off by an order of magnitude or more than it's pretty useless.

If you have a better method, I'd love to see it.

I'm not saying I have a better way of answering the same question, but that doesn't make your analysis more valid.

As noted in the original post, its based on 5 kWh per GB of data transferred

Yes, I believe that if you take the entire amount of data transferred by the Internet, then divide it by the total amount of power used by all internet-connected devices, then you get 5 kWh per GB (or at least you do if you base it off of the data available in 2012 when that paper was written). But that doesn't mean that if I download an extra GB of data that it took anywhere near 5 kWh to do that.

That paper you linked includes things like "total power consumed by all connected desktop computers" as part of the power budget, but this is obviously flawed reasoning. There are many things that computers do besides transferring data, and even if a computer is sitting idle it consumes a good deal of power as long as it's switched on. If I spend 1 kWh of electricity playing an offline computer game for an hour, then download a 1kB file, that doesn't mean that it costs me 1kWh/kB to download data.

NickMon The fightback against the Bitcoin energy guzzlers has begun

The Reddit analysis is pretty suspect - you can't assume that power usage scales anywhere close to linearly with data usage. If you look at all the devices connected to the Internet, I would bet that a huge majority of the power consumption stems from time that desktop computers/servers/switches/etc are either idle or underutilized.

NickMon The fightback against the Bitcoin energy guzzlers has begun

Air conditioners actually create value though, in the form of making people comfortable. Most people do not see Bitcoin mining as something that creates real value in the world, so it's a bit more understandable that people might be upset about a huge amount of electricity being consumed by something they see as pointless.

NickMon The fightback against the Bitcoin energy guzzlers has begun

That may not be nuanced enough for the desired results. Sounds like a lot of these places would like to still provide plentiful cheap power to industrial companies that actually create jobs and generate useful output that stimulates the local economy.

NickMon Ask HN: What would you work on, if you had enough free time?

I’d start with studying more math. So many other interesting doors open up as a result of better math skills. Plus it’s just gratifying for its own sake; feels like getting a deeper glimpse into the structure of the universe....

NickMon Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness

"Subjective experience exists" doesn't imply there's a single, uniform fabric of experience, nor does it imply anything about how subjective experience relates to an accurate perception of the world. Even if I hallucinate something that doesn't exist, there's still a subjective experience that I have of that perception.

I have no idea if anyone else subjectively experiences anything; everyone else might just be philosophical zombies. I still want to know why I have any subjective awareness of the world, though, and I don't see any way that that question can be answered via any sort of objective measurement or scientific process. You can study my eyes and my brain to explain why I can accurately perceive the color blue, but nobody can truly explain what it's like to see the color blue.

NickMon Librarian wins surprise judgement against Equifax in small claims court

I wouldn't be so sure about that. The phrase "too big to fail" referred to the idea that certain banks are so big that their failure would severely damage the economy, to the point that it was worth propping them up at all costs. Equifax is just a credit reporting agency though, and they're not the only big one that exists, so I doubt the loss of Equifax would cause enough collateral damage to justify a government intervention.

NickMon Vermont will cover $10K of expenses for people who move there and work remotely

I've been waiting to see programs like this pop up for a while. Remote workers are an economic dream for whatever region they end up in. They bring in large amounts of money from outside the area, spend it locally, pay local taxes, leave local jobs available for other residents, and generally put less strain on the local infrastructure since they're not commuting.

It's basically a win from every angle, and I'm surprised more cities and states don't already have programs like this one.

NickMon Read first pages of novels, and reveal the author and title if you're hooked

It's interesting to think what might happen if something like this became really popular. I'd imagine many novels might start adding super oddball stuff in the first page, just to stand out from the crowd and pique peoples' curiosity. Kind of the literary equivalent to clickbait headlines.

NickMon California Votes to Require Rooftop Solar Power on New Homes

If the cost of the PV is now baked into the mortgage, then depending on payback periods, interest rates, etc., the reductions in utility costs may meet or exceed the increase in your typical monthly home payment. This could effectively make housing more affordable via lower electrical bills.

Without knowing the numbers, I'm really just speculating, though; my point is just that it's not a given that this will increase everyone's cost of living.

NickMon Yes it's a bubble, so what?

Come on, I'm trying to be scientific about this and you're just going to swing in with a rude, ad hominem argument about "Tesla fanboys"? Claiming that Tesla having bad QC is "common knowledge" doesn't somehow insulate you and your friends from stuff like confirmation bias.

And to address your other point, if you search the web for panel alignment issues on Honda or Toyota cars there seem to be plenty of those out there as well.

NickMon Tesla's Autopilot Chief Keller Steps Down After Two Years

I didn't say it was safer than humans. I said that the study results suggest that either humans are fine with taking over and driving manually when required or if humans are not taking over when they should then autosteer might just be safer than humans. I don't claim to know exactly why autosteer would reduce accident rates, and neither does the study, but there must be some explanation and the last bit of my comment was simply speculating as to what that explanation might be.

NickMon Yes it's a bubble, so what?

Well of course you're going to see people post about issues they're having if you look on forums. Nobody goes out of their way to look on forums and make posts sharing their frustration over the lack of problems they have with their car.

NickMon Tesla's Autopilot Chief Keller Steps Down After Two Years

As these accidents demonstrate drivers can’t be relied upon to ‘monitor’ the autopilot and react if something goes wrong.

We don't know how many other accidents have been prevented by autopilot. A safety system should not be judged by whether it's perfect, but by whether having it is better than not having it.

The NHTSA did a study on exactly this issue by looking at accident rates in cars with autopilot hardware before and after autopilot was actually enabled via a software update. They found that accident rates went down by about 40% after autosteer was enabled.

This seems to suggest that either people are fine with monitoring and taking over when needed, or else autosteer was already so good in 2016 that it made fewer mistakes than humans.

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.pdf

NickMon Tesla's Autopilot Chief Keller Steps Down After Two Years

This "kind of autonomous driving" is absolutely deadly, by definition. It's never going to work well.

Instead of just speculating, the NHTSA did an actual study on this, and they reached the opposite conclusion. They investigated crash rates in Tesla vehicles that had the original autopilot hardware installed, both before and after autosteer was enabled via a software update, and found that autosteer reduced accident rates by 40%.

When Tesla talks about how much lower their accident rate per mile is compared to other cars, that's kind of statistical bullshit, since there are plenty of other uncontrolled variables that are in play that could affect this besides the cars themselves. But in the case of the NHTSA study, they were looking at the same drivers in the same cars, and the only difference was that one day a software update came out and enabled autosteer, and suddenly accident rates went way down. That's pretty damn convincing if you ask me.

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.pdf

NickMon Microsoft makes AI training courses available to the public

Sorry, which Coursera intro course?

NickMon Microsoft makes AI training courses available to the public

This looks really cool, and kudos to them making it free. However, this seems very much applied, and I'd really like a course that dives more into the math and theory of AI, neural networks, deep learning, etc. etc. Anyone have any recommendations for any video lecture series, MOOCs, or anything like that?

NickMon Ask HN: What do you nerds spend your money on?

Have you considered investing in assets that are less speculative and risky than cryptocurrency? I would strongly recommend you think about diversifying your portfolio so that you don't lose everything if it turns out we're in a crypto bubble and it all comes crashing down.

NickMon Herman Miller Cosm Chair

Maybe that would've helped for the Mirra, though I did tend to keep it at its minimum setting anyway, since I also found it rather uncomfortable. But the Embody and Freedom chairs have no removable lumbar support to begin with....

NickMon Non-profit’s $300 hepatitis C cure as effective as $84k alternative

Lieberman singlehandedly killed the public option, though. Obamacare would have looked very different if that had survived.