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There's a lot of Saudi fear mongering in tech media and it is not undeserved in some ways (MBS is a brutal authoritarian), but I'm not sure what interests people think the Saudis have in tech firms other than getting a return on their investment.

As bad as MBS is, it's not like he has some secret plan to spread Saudi values throughout the world. In fact, he's actually a liberalizing force in SA (economically and socially at least, although not politically). And Saudi Arabia, unlike e.g. China, isn't attempting to remake the world order to revolve around itself (and its authoritarian rulers). So while I understand the sentiment "I don't want to accept money from Saudi Arabia for my start-up because of their human rights violations", I have a hard time understanding why one would fear Saudi Arabian board members would abuse their seats for geopolitical influence purely due to the fact that Saudi Arabia has little to gain in the geopolitics department from tech companies.

This is misleading though because energy projects produce returns over a much longer timescale (i.e. decades) than the typical tech project (a year or two?). In addition, the typical big tech firm is running a lot more projects than the typical large oil company (which maybe operates a count of oil fields in the hundreds). So it's very much expected that the capital investment per project will be higher in oil.

But the fact of the matter is that Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have double the market capitalization of the largest private oil companies. So yes, they're objectively better capitalized taken as a whole -- even if the typical tech project has less investment and consequently working on tech projects as a low- or mid- level employee feels smaller.

She also happens to be the CFO of Huawei who (allegedly) personally lied to international banks to circumvent US export controls?

I'm not familiar with the court system in Canada, but criminal cases in the US take a long time. AFAIK Meng Wanzhou's delay is not unusual.

Without commenting on your larger point, it's doubtful that Yemeni engineers are building these drones.

Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world and presumably their engineering capital is presumably not huge. The Houthis are backed by Iran. Iran (which has far more engineering capital and was accidentally gifted a US military drone several years ago) has military drones.

It sounds far more plausible to me that Iranian support is how the Houthis obtained these drones.

>Monetary and fiscal policy is not the same as us balancing a checkbook at the end of the month.

This is a candidate for most tired meme on the internet and I really don't understand what it even has to do with this discussion as I've never met a household with a printing press (running the press is exactly what GP was referring to).

>I bet even people we would describe as clinically insane probably have reasons that they do things that we simply don't understand.

I'm not sure about this. I've had a head injury in the past that resulted in (thankfully temporary) in anxiety issues. There were spells of anxiety where I sort of had a reason to be anxious (e.g. deadlines), but I simultaneously had a rational awareness during the bout of anxiety that my stress levels (so nervous can't work) were completely incompatible with the consequences of missing said deadline (of which there would be basically no consequences; not even in terms of coworkers' view of me or my skills).

Granted I wasn't close to clinically insane I think, but the point is that the brain is complex and ostensibly there seems to be multiple levels of consciousness and activity going on in the human brain. One can reason something in the abstract, yet emotionally feel completely at odds with their reason.

Disclaimer: Amazon employee, opinions are my own

This claim really doesn't say much on its own. There are millions (billions?) of products on Amazon. This would be potentially a lot more damning if they released how many items they searched through to identify those 4,152.

It would also be nice if they provided some data on how prevalent these problems are at other retailers and marketplaces.

There's reason to believe the problem is probably worse at Amazon (automated approval process, historic emphasis on low cost and selection) but how much worse is it?

But much of the canonical mainland political belief system is incompatible with rational thought and generally shared moral principles. And mainlanders are obviously not any less rational or moral on most topics.

Mainlanders may not like it to hear it, and I'll even go as far as to say the best strategy for discussing politics with mainlanders is to not directly tell them this, but their political canon is anomalously full of holes that are exposed when explored in any significant depth (yes I've been through this process with mainlanders).

Ohohoho that depends very much on who you're talking to about the English language.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription

EDIT: These downvotes confuse me. It is a matter of fact that there exists an entire non-trivial linguistic school of thought which holds a belief completely incompatible with what GP just presented as more or less indisputable. GP's authoritative tone is unjustified, regardless of which camp you happen to agree with.

Any active assimilation efforts will almost certainly backfire and would be a massive civil rights infringement.

All immigrants, not just Chinese, tend to associate with their own ethnic subgroup in the US and always have. Time is the only real assimilator.

That said, the CCP does and will continue to actively attempt to influence Chinese living in America and the US needs to take a look at that.

It's not like mainlanders every really had a choice. Their own protests were crushed with tanks in 1989 and they've been relentlessly propagandized on everything from the papers to the schools to social media since then. I have zero doubts such strong propaganda efforts over decades would yield similar results on the vast majority Americans had it happened here.

>There's good reason to believe tons of sociological theories. The problem is figuring out whether the pro or con factors win out, and figuring out if you've nailed down every single factor. Being simple, clear, and well-reasoned in the realm of people's behavior is not enough to give you very good accuracy.

This is all argument in favor of a weak prior, not to ignore the existence and utility of a prior completely. Ideally, you have solid (relevant) empirical data that informs your prior but if you're seriously evaluating "advice" then I'd venture to say that you're probably lacking such data.

Imo, the critique to be had of what I said above is that there's no clear general way to form good priors and thus the advice is somewhat empty. But that's just life -- there's no magic bullet algorithm to discover truth and one has to use his/her brain to do the best they can. Many who seem to well in this area tend to like the Bayesian framing of beliefs, and personally I've found it useful to guide my own thinking as well.

The difference is the prior.

There's strong prior reason to believe not paying payroll tax is not going to end well. The theoretical basis is simple, clear, well-reasoned, and supported by strong evidence in adjacent realms (i.e. the IRS takes taxes taxes pretty seriously).

Whereas the prior on the validity of something like "early-stage founders should live with their customers" is much weaker.

Even though the advice for each presented example is based on sample size n=1, the resulting belief can and should be quite different depending on your prior.

The real meta-advice is to be able to understand and evaluate your prior for any given piece of advice you receive. This mostly comes down to thinking rationally, being knowledgeable, and critically considering each piece of advice for whether it's worth heeding or not.

Which is not so far from the author's message I think ("figure everything out yourself", "I don't mean to say don't take any advice").

(Obligatory shout-out to Bayes Theorem)

This isn't true at all, at least in the sources I was reading (NYT, WSJ). Entire paragraphs were devoted to protester violence in nearly every article. This weekend's protest was even described as peaceful in contrast to the previous weeks' protest.

The effects of hyperinflating away the debt aren't really much better

You don't seem to understand that if a broke USA can't pay its debts, its biggest problems aren't getting invaded militarily but economic. Even if it defaults on foreign debt, a) new debt is going to be insanely expensive which is bad in the long-term; b) to avoid defaulting on domestic debt (and likely destroying the domestic economy in doing so), taxes would have to go through the roof... which would also be like taking a wrecking ball to economic growth.

Interest on the debt in 2019 is equal to about 60% of the much maligned defense budget, to put it in different terms.

Re: return on debt, that's really not a strong argument when you consider where the budget actually goes. About 75% of the 2019 budget goes to entitlements (of which the majority goes to retired persons who receive more in benefits than they ever paid in) and military, neither of which really seems like they're going to bring in significant returns to justify the debt.

Sure, there are probably some programs where this argument makes sense but my impression is that most large-spending proposals from progressives are more motivated by lofty idealism designed to motivate the voting base than policies where the cost of debt vs ROI is being carefully considered.

That said, irresponsible spending on Washington is definitely a bipartisan sport these days. And as an incumbent politician, why not? You reap the electoral benefits of lavish spending on the voting public, and neither you nor voters in general care much to think any longer-term than the next election cycle.

What does this have to do with anything? The problem with too much US debt is that we have to make interest payments on that debt, which now makes up ~10% of the annual budget (or about $400B/yr). That's expensive and going to get worse if we continue borrowing at unsustainable rates. It's also going to get a lot worse if investors start to worry the US might default on its debts and demand higher yields on return.

I'm not sure why you think it matters whether China or Europe is holding the debt.

I think this is dependent on what someone means when they say "data scientist" (mentioned as Type A vs Type B in the article).

Facebook and Google "data scientists" (meaning those who hold the title) are really more like analysts -- they analyze data to inform decisions and use a lot of SQL. They make prototype models (usually based on less cutting-edge techniques) that get passed to engineering teams if they become worthwhile to scale/formalize. These folks get paid less than SDEs usually.

The other type of "data scientist" is basically an SDE (maybe SDE-lite) with research-level ML skills. These get paid similarly (or higher in some cases) than SDEs. I believe Facebook and Google call these SDEs. Sometimes the term "applied scientist" is used to describe these at other companies as well.

Even this framing is suspect -- China has very publicly been trying to shift from an export-driven economy to a domestic consumption economy recently.

I question how stable the relationship is when that stability rests on the assumption China fails to meet its economic goals.

The CPC would like the world to believe that nobody can tell it what to do (not least of which for domestic political reasons), but it's not really the case. China may be bigger and more powerful now, but the (media) spotlight on it is consummately brighter.

I'm not terribly optimistic about the developed world's response to a hypothetical Tiananmen 2.0, but I also recognize that predicting what will capture the public imagination is an uncertain business. And in the case of actual worldwide widespread outrage (and accompanying economic penalties), you can look to pre-JCPOA Iran to see how that turns out. Even the US would buckle under that sort of pressure.

People en masse are generally not well-informed and in large part irrational.

The West has had decades of support for Israel (whose existence has been detested by most of the ME since pre-inception) and the decades-long struggle for ME countries to obtain ownership of their oil resources while white guys were in the country getting rich off it created has created a powerful and lasting image embedded into the culture (not least aided by lots of opportunistic ME politicians drumming up anti-West sentiment for decades in the same manner Western ones drum up anti-immigrant sentiment).

China is too new, even if they're actually a more appropriate target for wrongs committed in 2018-2019.

To be honest, the developed world hasn't convinced me it cares enough about human rights to risk its economic relationship with China over them. I'm really not sure how political leaders would react to Tiananmen 2.0.

The self-censorship on the part of the Western heads of state thus far has been a testament of the PRC's clout unto itself.

This completely misses the point of a search engine. The ability to game SEO has nothing to with relevance or content quality.

If a random supplement information website's most lucrative monetization path would be to game SEO instead of doing what they're nominally supposed to do (i.e. provide quality content), the problem doesn't lie with the the content owner but rather with the search engine and the incentives it promotes.

The academic math types with no ML experience don't fare much better than the no-math practitioners with experience from what I've seen. They generally have terrible mental models of how the math behaves when applied to real data.

IME the competent data scientist needs to have a high-level understanding of the concepts underlying ML (stats, optimization, central limit theorem) and to be comfortable reading math to understand the low-level details when they are relevant. In addition to actually understanding the ML techniques they're using obviously.

On top of that, I would rather work with someone who can code well than a pure mathematician with a ton of experience proving theorems (and no coding ability). Outside of a few industry research jobs, the cost:benefit ratio of making substantial theoretical breakthroughs in most everyday ML work doesn't justify a lot of time doing theoretical proofs.

1.6 = 8/5

So n miles = 8n / 5 km

And m km = 5m / 8 miles

Fraction multiplication is actually much easier than decimal multiplication imo. I'm surprised so many people seem to avoid it. Keeping track of where the decimal point should be is a significant cognitive load.

The company can't sell shares it doesn't own. Think of it like a startup founder borrowing to buy out someone else's equity. If interest rates are near zero, it may make sense to borrow cheaply now to buy back stock that the company can then sell later when it actually needs an influx of capital (presumably when interest rates are higher and the stock has risen a bit). It's essentially a financial bet on the company's future prospects.

The market isn't perfect but if companies are really mortgaging their future to provide shareholder returns today, that would seem to be something easily noticed when analyzing the company's financials... thus weighing on future profitability and acting as a counterforce to the boost from the buyback.

I honestly haven't seen conclusive evidence that Huawei has spied or been asked to in the past. Alas, imo, that's irrelevant because I'm aware that Huawei would not be able to turn down a spying request and continue to exist as a company.

That Huawei has engaged company-spondored IP theft has been widely reported, as well as the fact that the Chinese government widely disseminates the IP it obtains via forced technology transfers that are required to do business in the country.

This isn't really incompatible with GP's point. It's really hard to be a global telecom spy network when you're nobody wants to buy your equipment because it's overpriced and low-quality...

In fact, that would give the beneficiary government a lot of incentive to advance your interests with something like a state-sponsored IP theft program and massive subsidies

I'm not convinced a race that is vastly more intelligent at an individual-level than humans is necessarily a consummately more advanced race.

It would seem like the age of a civilization and the size of its population (i.e. overall "human" capital) could mitigate a relative weakness in individual intelligence. Or perhaps another race's willingness to cooperate in large numbers. Or perhaps the motivation of civilizations to advance (e.g. a civilization that faces many existential threats may advance faster assuming it survives relatively unscathed; or maybe some other intelligent beings would be more inclined or less inclined to pursue civilizational advancement).

I wonder if the relationship between societal/technological advancement and individual intelligence is not linear or even logarithmic; rather, it's important to have "enough" intelligence to engage in abstract inductive/deductive reasoning (maybe the ability to do mathematics beyond basic arithmetic), and after that level other factors such as those mentioned above are bigger contributors to civilizational advancement.

We humans have far surpassed what a single individual can achieve by breaking problems into smaller and more intellectually manageable parts, which should be particularly evident to those us on HN working on software. It seems possible that the biological (biophysical?) limit for intelligence is far outstripped by the amount of complexity in the universe, making the civilizational utility obtained for marginal gains in individual intelligence rather low (i.e. since heavy abstraction will always be needed, the size of the "abstraction chunks" is just one of many other factors). On the other hand, we on HN are also well-positioned to observe the efficiency lost when systems progress to the point where no single human understands them, so I see the counterargument to my own points as well.

It would be fascinating to live in a time where the answer to this question would be knowable, but I don't have my hopes up :)

This is just false. Both Google and Facebook have been reported as seeking Chinese government authority to get re-enter the Chinese market this year, and neither Facebook, Google, or a large chunk of the rest of the Western internet is accessible in the mainland due to the Great Firewall.