_dps

Russia provides something like 20% of global wheat supply, something like 15% of global agricultural supplement input, and something like 12.5% of global oil/gas. They also have an enormous intellectual human capital history — the soviet era physicists and mathematicians were definitely peers to their western counterparts, which is to say nothing of their literature. And finally, they have top-tier homegrown armaments in nuclear, submarines, ICBMs, fighter aircraft, and so on.

I think any metric (e.g. GDP) that reduces this multidimensional situation to "mostly irrelevant" is probably saying more about the metric than about the reality on the ground.

You raise an important distinction, but one thing I've always found to be troublesome with K-H is that I've never seen a discussion of whether the winners would have undertaken their profitable behavior but-for the high level of profit. Perhaps if the gentrifiers (as just one example) faced a gentrification tax to fund the lives of people displaced they would not have considered the deal good enough to gentrify in the first place.

I'm not saying this is necessarily true, but it seems like a major problem with K-H as a concept that I personally don't see discussed (I imagine it is discussed in academic journals somewhere).

Two likely contributors:

1) due to population effects, academic positions are much more competitive now than they were in say 1970; if you figure that the top 50 research universities are not generally expanding the number of professors, and that new professors generally also come from those top 50 research universities, then on average a top-50-research-university professor will generate one new such professor in a career, despite having 10-100x as many graduate students (this was different in the 70s when the university system was rapidly expanding).

2) the increasing desire for fairness in hiring and promotion (by itself, a good thing) means that you need to be able to resolve hiring and promotion disputes with something both objective and external to the university (in the same way some undergraduate institutions put more admissions weight on external and objective metrics like standardized tests compared to more easily game-able internal metrics like high school class grades)

It was implemented by Bismarck but it was an explicit plan to outmaneuver the left wing by taking a popular part of their platform, which I've seen translated as "stealing socialism's thunder". Good details from a US-left perspective here

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/12/otto-von-bismarck-germany-soc...

and from a US-centerish perspective here

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/bismarck-tried-end-so...

As mainly a bottom-up person, I completely agree with your analysis but I wonder if you might be using "top-down architecture" here in an overloaded way?

My personal style is bottom up, maximally direct code, aiming for monolithic modules under 10kloc, combined with module coupling over very narrow interfaces. Generally the narrow interfaces emerge from finding the "natural grain" of the module after writing it, not from some a priori top-down idea of how the communication pathways should be shaped.

Edit: an example of a narrow interface might be having a 10kloc quantitative trading strategy module that communicates with some larger system only by reading off a queue of things that might need to be traded, and writing to a queue of desired actions.

I think you've misunderstood what I meant; I mean incentives for businesses to pay their people more (or to offer something like apprenticeships).

As for status not being lowered by words, we'll have to agree to disagree. No one in practice (in the US) calls medical school "vocational school" precisely because it is a phrase associated with lower status work in the trades.

I worry that believing the jobs are not coming back is a self-fulfilling prophecy – one with dangerous consequences of locking its believers into perpetual dependence on supply from places that act essentially as sin externalization depots.

If $2/hr vs $10/hr is indeed the thing preventing repair being economical , that seems like it can be fixed with a mixture of incentives, apprenticeship contracts, and elevating the social status of "vocational education" (the name exists IMO only to serve as status-lowering). Or if not one of those, then some other untried thing.

Edit: as sibling comments mention, if in fact the main limitation is not labor prices but exclusive-supply agreements for certain consumable parts, then this seems easily within the scope of Antitrust to address.

In the three European countries I've lived in (2 in EU + UK), licensed engineers must sign off on new building construction plans, and take responsibility for the suitability of the design.

I don't know what kind of latency vs throughput tradeoff you're facing, but given these constraints (and being on windows) I might try running multiple python processes each with the C++ structure in shared memory, and then broker any inter-python shared state through something like Redis on localhost (so as long as the inter-python shared state is small and rarely updated, you only pay a small IPC cost to get it from Redis instead of having it in-process).

I don't know if Kelley would agree with my characterization, but I don't see comptime as metaprogramming. Instead it opens the very interesting possibility of having types as values, as long as those values are resolvable at compile time. This lets you do things that feel like metaprogramming (e.g. making a generic container structure) but it seems a better conceptual fit to me that you're programming with types as values rather than generating code from a template or macro.

This is a very large gap, but as someone who has recently had four appraisals done in the space of 6 months (long story), I have had a swing of 40% from the highest to the lowest (in all cases house was unchanged, and appraiser saw me in person each time).

Appraisal is very difficult to do well, and different appraisers have different ideas about market trends (part of the reason for my wildly differing appraisals were different expectations for property appreciation in the neighborhood).

This kind of flexibility is one of the advantages of consulting/freelancing. Obviously the career security aspect is different, but in a hot hiring market there isn't a shortage of opportunities. I know several people who, as they got to more senior levels, decided to work 50% of the time for roughly 60% of their previous salary.

Money under the mattress does affect the economy, by changing its owner's willingness to part with a marginal dollar.

If I have $1k under the mattress I probably won't risk $100 on a share of CORP. If I have $100k under a mattress, I'm more willing to take a swing.

I think a very large number of people (myself included) would rather drive a 1990 Rolls Royce than a 2021 Accord, all else equal. I drove a 1990 BMW well into 2010 and I would very certainly take that car (in new condition) over a 2021 Accord today.

This model circulates a lot but I haven't understood why; it literally treats them as the same thing. The model is

outcome = idea x execution

So both are "multipliers" in the language of the model. The formula is completely symmetric in the two quantities.

Unity famously hired Mike Acton (a minor hero in parts of the C++ world, and a major hero if you restrict to games). I am quite certain they pay people like him, doing infrastructure engine work that scales across all users of Unity, something in the ballpark of what he could make at a tech company. But most game programmers are not doing anything with that kind of leverage, and I think that's largely contributing to the business' ability to pay them substantially less than they could at a FAANG.

I'll confess my bias up front: pairing has never worked for me, and I really just can't write serious code unless I'm in my own head.

Having said that, let me now ask pairing proponents: can you give me a rough idea of what you believe the economics to be? Because from my perspective the two people working together on the same program need to deliver value twice as quickly as a solo programmer merely to break even. Based on what I've seen my median estimate for how much quicker things go is ballpark 1.25x, and then throw in some amortized benefit for knowledge transfer and camaraderie. But in my biased opinion find it a stretch that you even hit break-even with high probability.

So, I would love to hear from pairing proponents how they think about the development economics and the size of the win.

I like this video a lot, both because it shows the lion in peril against the pack of hyenas but also because it shows that it only takes one additional lion to change the balance completely. When the second lion shows up around 2:50 the hyenas just disperse and don't even bother fighting.

I only meant to comment on the article's neutrality with regard to evaluating the meta aspect of the headline quality. I personally think that the kinds of measures proposed here are counterproductive (I am, among other things, a mathematics educator) — but my opinion on that isn't really relevant to the question of helping keep HN submissions at the desired level of quality.

Indeed this headline is editorialized against HN guidelines. The original headline is:

"To Promote Equality, California Proposes a Ban on Advanced Math Classes"

and it seems, at least upon quick inspection, to be factually accurate (although the article content itself is far from neutral).

@dang if you get a moment this headline could benefit from reverting to the source headline.

EDIT: Actually after digging another layer down in the linked sources, I'm not sure even the "proposes a ban" is factually substantiated though it's hard to tell for sure without going one layer yet deeper and scanning through a 300 page report.

I'm with you re: "pay more if you want more applicants" but this does not sound like a situation where the jobs are economically unviable.

When I was a student in LA in the mid-2000s I lived on basically this amount of money, inflation adjusted. I couldn't afford a one-bedroom, so I split the cost of a three-bedroom with two friends. This was a very common arrangement for people well into their late 20s, especially people in creative professions like writing.

I share your view of what working mathematicians think like on this subject. I summarize it thus: how many interesting theorems are there in Category Theory? And the answer you get from proponents varies, but it seems to be like 1-3 with some being kind of a stretch. I would love to learn of a body of theorems like those of analysis or topology or algebra, but by comparison there seems to be very little "there" there. I would be happy to be proven incorrect on this!

In the right position, excellent SWEs have enormous leverage. A median SWE might maintain some line-of-business app for an insurance company, and an excellent one might create software that is used by an entire industry (say, Redis just as an example).

By comparison, given the physical and time constraints of the job, an excellent nurse might be able to spread their expertise to 2x as many patients as a median? 3x? I think even 3x is a stretch. Maybe they can make a life-saving catch in the hardest 5% of cases (definitionally, very rare opportunity to apply this level of skill)?

I take no position on talent or wisdom, but yes the kinds of people capable of being F500 CEOs are mostly already in this category of richness.

Many people with the skills to be CEOs of important companies would consider $1M a rounding error. It makes no difference to their economic outlook.

Also, there are many ways to make $1M without the risk and responsibility of being a CEO (among other things, just making low-risk investments with a $20M portfolio).

So between the comparative ease of making $1M elsewhere, and the low impact of $1M (to someone with tens of millions in the bank), it's not surprising why such people cannot be had for that price.

Video games have this as well — interactive cinematography and participatory narrative.

As just one of many excellent essays exploring these subjects, may I suggest Noah Caldwell Gervais on Kentucky Route Zero through the lens of participatory theater (spoilers, 1+ hr).

https://youtu.be/pW3qZfF6JfI

> Currencies have to be less valuable over time, otherwise no one would ever spend the currency.

I don't have an opinion on BTC (or gold for that matter) but this widely-distributed meme is simply untrue.

1) If I have a bar of gold, and it will buy me 1% more bread loaves in a year's time, but I can invest it in something that will trade for 2% more bread loaves next year, then I will spend it because despite appreciation it is not my best source of appreciation.

2) I have living/operating expenses that I consider to supersede my need for financial return. If I don't pay for shelter and food, I won't be around in a year to enjoy the 1% more bread loaves I would get from appreciation.

3) Empirically/historically, over long time frames, gold appreciates in real terms (slowly). And yet people spent gold coins and gold-backed notes regularly.

Now, if a currency is appreciating much faster than anything else in the economy I agree you can have a deflationary spiral and a liquidity problem. But this is because the economy is collapsing — ordinary sources of growth have disappeared or reversed. This is a very special situation, and is not a general argument that currencies must depreciate.

There is a large generational gradient here which may be relevant. As of 2016 non-hispanic white is just slightly less than 50% of births [0]. The 1 in 3 number is a good estimate for the entire US population, but the school age population is trending toward the 1:1 we see in births.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/23/its-officia...

Indeed this is all of utilitarianism debunked in a nutshell. Even the concept of aggregate utility is incoherent, because it requires unjustifiable assumptions about intersubjective utility comparisons. It's not surprising that it leads to perverse conclusions if you dial the framework to 11, because it doesn't make much sense even in the small. The only thing aggregate utility does is put a veneer of objectivity over the subjective social preferences of the person doing the supposed aggregate utility calculation (one way you can view this is as a manifestation of Arrow's theorem).

This is not a reasonable summary of Progressivism. It has 100+ years of history and has a thoroughly developed ideological, political, and moral framework. It's not just "we'd like things to progress", because "progress" (vs "regress") is subjective. Pick whatever controversial topic you care most about, and the people on the other side(s) also want things to be better — perhaps by enacting the policies you hate!