aklein

Kudos to the person who wrote the job description

I have stuff to say about JIT.

Makes me think of The Expanse (tv version)

You can buy CDs from a Vanguard brokerage account that are yielding about 50% more than the equivalent durations offered at gsbank/Marcus: https://personal.vanguard.com/us/FixedIncomeHome

Same, sometimes circles won’t reappear from the opposite edge boundary

> What the Internet seems to do best is make commonly available enormously vast resources of mis-information that we never knew existed.

Wow - so prescient

Not to mention Sasha Baron Cohen passing out from wine and waking up in character as Ali G - at least anecdotally

Right, but unlike TCP/IP, which is a stateless protocol, the validation of an NFT requires a specific blockchain. While Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to be “here to stay”, they both seem under constant competitive pressure from other blockchains.

Only in this case the value is stored in “digital gold”. Unlike gold, which is chemically stable, I’m far from convinced the digital format itself will end up sticking around long term.

Cannot prove some program is correct, in general, because that’s effectively the halting problem. But in practice it is sufficient to enforce (prove) the absence of behaviors via constraints like types or contracts.

Does anyone else notice that, after staring at this for a minute or so and then coming back to HN, that you experience a lingering (reverse) zoom optical illusion effect?

leptosphere

lep·to·sphere

the space beyond the earth's crust which is about 2.8 billion miles (4.8 km) across and includes the oceans and Mars, Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter and beyond

"the space between the earth's crust and the leptosphere"

I remember reading that some people, especially those under 40, don’t develop observable antibodies. Or, could’ve just been the flu. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/health/coronavirus-antibo...

I truly enjoy all of Kevin Hartnett’s articles. He’s a great science writer. He shines a light on some really impenetrable ideas.

Another book I'm enjoying is "Einstein's Unfinished Revolution" [1] by Lee Smolin, which also has a deep dive into foundations of QM.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Unfinished-Revolution-Searc...

This whole article rests on the premise "The longer you play the long game, the easier it is to play and the greater the rewards."

This is a version of the "time diversification fallacy" in finance.

The debate over time diversification has been longrunning and remains unresolved. However, there is little empirical evidence to support the claim that time moderates the risks inherent in risky assets. In actuality, a longer investment horizon increases the magnitude of potential outcomes, both negative and positive. That being said, other factors may warrant the consideration of an investment time horizon in the asset-allocation process. [1]

Also, the article suggests "doing what everyone else is doing pretty much ensures that you’re going to be average." Math check. In the case of the stock market, the "average" return of the S&P 500 index outperforms 95% of active managers' returns. Turns out ensembling informed opinions is a pretty powerful tool. Who would have thought?

[1] conclusion of https://www.vanguard.com/pdf/icrtd.pdf?2210045172

It seems all participants in the study were recruited from within Hong Kong. I wonder if being speakers of tonal languages has any effect. I'd be interested in seeing if the study could be reproduced with speakers of non-tonal languages.

The majority of credit is due Wes, no doubt, for bringing pandas to life, but it's a glaring omission not to mention the huge contributions from the wider community toward pandas (shout-out to Jeff Reback!) https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/graphs/contributors

Worth a read: https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-larr...

In particular:

"SUMMERS: Not enough people are innovating enough in higher education. The place to start is, General Electric looks nothing like it looked in 1975. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford look a lot like they looked in 1975. They’re about the same size to within a factor of two, they’re about the same number of buildings, they operate on about the same calendar, they have many of the same people or some number of the same people in significant positions. The main thing to say is that, for something that’s all about ideas and for something that’s all about young people, the pace of innovation in higher education is stunningly slow. We’re still on a system where the break is in the summer. The reason we’re on that system is that when everybody went to pick the plants, that was the natural way to organize school, and it’s still going that way. The potential action in higher education is probably heavily through distance learning and artificial intelligence in learning technologies of various kinds because, if you think about it, the unique capacity that online education has is that, on the one hand, they’re huge economies of scale. Once the lecture’s filmed, 100,000 people can watch it at the same cost as 100 people watching it."

Not a favorable trend for the subjects of this article.

My interpretation is: it's exponential in running time, although slightly faster than 2^n (exponent specifically is 0.86n). However, it uses polynomial space, which hadn't been done before. Prior approaches used an exponential-size lookup table. So there is no implication of P=NP.

I would love to see a real-time bebop improvisation generator in the style of Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, et. al. - bebop is definitely a musical (jazz) language that I bet would be well suited to RNNs.

The movie suggests that the central government directly manufactures an initial amount of money to be put into circulation by issuing debt that is bought by the central bank. The proceeds are deposited at commercial banks, who then lend money out to the maximum extent allowed under fractional bank lending requirements.

This paper argues that in reality, the relationship is exactly the reverse: most money (=debt) creation starts as loans between private commercial banks. Loans become deposits in other bank accounts. If a bank finds itself short on a reserve requirement, it can just borrow reserves from other banks to meet its reserves, or from the central bank.

In sum, at least in the United States and England, most money creation stems from loans within the private sector, as opposed to what the movie and textbooks typically suggest.

This is explained in the paper:

" For the [money multiplier] theory to hold, the amount of reserves must be a binding constraint on lending, and the central bank must directly determine the amount of reserves. While the money multiplier theory can be a useful way of introducing money and banking in economic textbooks, it is not an accurate description of how money is created in reality. Rather than controlling the quantity of reserves, central banks today typically implement monetary policy by setting the price of reserves — that is, interest rates. In reality, neither are reserves a binding constraint on lending, nor does the central bank fix the amount of reserves that are available. As with the relationship between deposits and loans, the relationship between reserves and loans typically operates in the reverse way to that described in some economics textbooks. Banks first decide how much to lend depending on the profitable lending opportunities available to them — which will, crucially, depend on the interest rate set by the Bank of England. It is these lending decisions that determine how many bank deposits are created by the banking system. The amount of bank deposits in turn influences how much central bank money banks want to hold in reserve (to meet withdrawals by the public, make payments to other banks, or meet regulatory liquidity requirements), which is then, in normal times, supplied on demand by the Bank of England. The rest of this article discusses these practices in more detail."

Reminds me in a weird way of the potato paradox, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox

The numerical accuracy and calculations needed for getting the spacecraft so close to Pluto must be pretty awesome. Does anyone know what the precision is on calculations like these?

Also, anyone know why the spacecraft has to do a flyby, as opposed to, say, going into orbit around Pluto? Is it because the fuel involved in slowing down the spacecraft would be forbiddingly heavy?

Going to a "prestigious" college - say, one of the Ivy League schools - has a huge positive network effect on your career, if you want to capitalize on it. It's valuable social proof, at least for the first decade after you graduate, and counts for at least as much as merit and hard work, however frustrating that may be for the hard-working and meritorious high school grad determined not to go to college. You are going to get to know people and walk through doors that you just couldn't if you never went. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, but he still went, and happened to make a critical set of connections there.

The essay has quotes like this: "The market thus oscillates asymptotically around the attractor of zero information friction in an incomputably random orbit" which sound so mathematical as to invite a proof...

... and then quotes like this: "Algorithmic hordes of parasitic vampire squids and zombie capitalists compulsively gorge on blood and brains, their exhausted victims lie all around, twitching to the non-periodic outbursts of transient code – the singularity turns out to be just another accelerating extension of exploitation" ... which is so over the top that it works against whatever point the article is trying to make...

... which is completely obscured by pseudo-scientific technobabble. A big WTF here.

My 18 month old daughter has a full time nanny who has spoken to her only in Spanish (at our request) since she was 3 months old; my wife and I speak to her only in English, and we don't speak any Spanish. It's been really fascinating to see what my daughter chooses to say in Spanish instead of English: always agua (her first word), siéntate ("sit"), mas ("more"), wacala (spanish slang for "yucky" - for poop)... other words, she can interchange depending on who she speaks to. Sometimes I can't understand her, and can't tell if she's trying to tell me something in Spanish, or her diction just isn't good enough yet. I suspect it's the latter, I think she's already adept enough at recognizing mommy and daddy don't speak Spanish...

This is especially egregious.

http://www.stopvaw.org/quid_pro_quo_sexual_harassment

They distribute back all profits and keep the total capitalization of the fund constant. Yes, it really has returned that amount for 20+ years.

I think everyone should know some basic macroeconomics, which elaborates some of these points. I just finished [1] and it fundamentally changed how I think of wealth. I used to think only of current value, but the key insight is that assets derive value as claims on future output. Money is not only a medium of exchange, it's also a (temporary!) store of value, and a unit of account as well. It is a tool, but certainly not an end in itself.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Concise-Guide-Macroeconomics-Managers-...