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casual_slacker

213 karma · joined June 18, 2013

if you removed all clocks from computers, replacing it would be quite the time
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casual_slacker··on What Gravitational Waves Can Say About Dark Matter
Perhaps tangential, but is there a frequency of a gravity wave high enough to "cusp" due to one of the quantization limits?
casual_slacker··on The cortex is a neural network of neural networks
Not sure if I understand, but it seems the dendrites are "grouped" in a way, and their influence on the output is a function of the group?

Is this functionally equivalent to having a two layer mini-network (that represents one brain neuron), with one neuron on top, and "child" neurons on bottom that mimic the grouping behavior? If this is true, then I would suspect our networks are already doing something like this automatically.

casual_slacker··on The Bitter Lesson
> Early methods conceived of vision as searching for edges, or generalized cylinders, or in terms of SIFT features. But today all this is discarded.

These aren't discarded, they are part of ML vision networks today. Edges are one of the 3x3 convolutions that a network can learn, SIFT/etc are the dense / clustering nets, I'll admit I just googled Generalized Cylinders (very interesting). There are others like SLAM as well.

casual_slacker··on Continuations in Natural Language (2004) [pdf]
I think I understand this. In "he only drinks soda", The token "only" opens the opportunity for "fcontrol" (like yield in a generator) to be resolved at a yet-to-be-determined position in the sentence. So if you "run" the function of `only { f(drink) soda }` or `only { drink f(soda) }`, `drink soda` is an independent construction by itself, but this pitch accent allows an additional information channel to be threaded through it.

I imagine generalizing this, not just "fcontrol" but other information-awaiters, it would be like functions wrapped in decorators of the various yield-channels they can emit to. Probably someone already does this.

casual_slacker··on Berkshire Hathaway 2018 Annual Shareholder Letter [pdf]
But when you pay a dividend, you lose a small % in tax, or the delay between receiving the dividend and reinvesting it. That % loss adds over time and makes dividend structures less efficient than direct reinvestment. You are correct when the business cannot grow using the money, but BRK is an capital investment company, so I don't think that's an issue for them.
casual_slacker··on Show HN: GitNews Web – Trending Repositories from GitHub, HackerNews and Reddit
To be fair, critical parts of modern day "version control", like pull requests and code review, are part of GitHub but not git.
casual_slacker··on Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
It could also break pages that rely on full control over the hash, having targetText= injected unexpectedly would break a lot of crude params parsers.
casual_slacker··on Visa, Mastercard mull increasing fees for processing transactions: WSJ
Seems like game theory? If everyone else is playing, then it's better to play than abstain.

Also I'm not sure about "higher prices", in my town there's two convenience stores across from each other, one with CC fee and one with no fee, same prices otherwise, so I just go to the no fee one. Maybe it gets worked in somewhere but it's not as fair/efficient as it could be.

casual_slacker··on Money Machines – An Interview with an Anonymous Algorithmic Trader
The python library Backtrader is popular and has good intro docs.

https://www.backtrader.com/docu/quickstart/quickstart.html

casual_slacker··on CCPA Will Hit Dev Teams Harder Than GDPR
We used a similar trick, not for testing, but the ability to download the prod database and debug things locally. We hit scaling issues before PII, so coworker built a system to generate real-ish DBs with only one customer's data. And then in a future version, sensitive fields were filtered or replaced with mock data. Not sure if there are better, less engineering effort ways of doing this, but it was a great tool when debugging.
casual_slacker··on America Pushes Allies to Fight Huawei in New Arms Race with China
It concerns me how 5G has a huge PR push behind it, while academic papers seem to be in a state of confusion and uncertainty, particularly around the 50GHz line (most 5G standards, including the current EU standard, is only up to 27GHz, but the US allows up to 86GHz)

The most reputable papers I'm aware of are

> Frequency and Irradiation Time-dependant Antiproliferative Effect of Low-power Millimeter Waves on RPMI 7932 Human Melanoma Cell Line (2005)

> Effects of Millimeter Wave Exposure on Termite Behavior (2011)

casual_slacker··on Genode OS: A tool kit for highly secure special-purpose operating systems
There might be license issues between AGPLv3 of GenodeOS and the Apache 2.0 or GPLv2 that Android components use.
casual_slacker··on World's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam
It's an interesting point seldom discussed: governments use money in boring safe ways, eccentric rich people "waste" money in unique and unpredictable ways. Both seem essential to the equation of production, just maybe not in the current proportions.
casual_slacker··on Paris Will Make Public Transportation Free for Kids
Taxing real estate at large causes a supply-side pressure, driving up market prices. If you only "tax" very specific land around a train station, you limit the effect on the greater market. In theory a government could pass such location-specific tax law, but I've only see that done via property taxes.
casual_slacker··on CNC milling with open source software
At first glance, it looks like an assembly language. Does anything compile to it?
casual_slacker··on WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality
Amzn (adjusted for splits/etc) had a peak value of $107 in 2000 and a low of $7 in 2001.
casual_slacker··on SageDB: A Learned Database System [pdf]
The learned scheduling result is particularly impressive, 19% speedup of average over the "Fair" (state of the art?) algorithm.
casual_slacker··on Software Engineering at Google (2017)
I know this is a battle as old as time, but the other extreme does exist: a system so complex that it directly attributes to attrition and decay, but too business-critical to get rid of. Yes, it's a "serious issue", and yes, it's common at many overgrown startups.
casual_slacker··on IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
It exists, but I see those as edge cases. Compared to when someone is asking "am I smart enough", they are really asking if they can move from where they are now, to just a bit higher, the answer is usually "yes". At that level, innateness is irrelevant to those who succeed, and a self-fulfilling prophecy (at least in part) for those who don't.
casual_slacker··on Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)
Here is the paper the article attempted to cite [1] (article link is 404ing right now)

[1] https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=108...

I believe the article mentions this, but the paper only studies urban-area VKT, the paper mentions that the same effects do not apply to interstate highway system or a number of other categories.

casual_slacker··on Ask HN: What is a secure way to allow 2FA resets?
Another example is WA state DoL, which does not automatically reissue (nor require) a new license when you update your address.
casual_slacker··on Hospital prices are about to go public in the U.S.
I'm not sure this is the case. Since medical insurance companies are heavily regulated on margins, their primary way of making money is investing the "pool" that's used to pay out claims. The size of this pool is determined by actuaries, so it can't be increased arbitrarily. But it grows in two ways: more patients, or more required reserve per-patient. In this way, insurance companies actually benefit from higher hospital prices.
casual_slacker··on Migration trends in U.S. metro areas
Maybe this is a form of NIMBYism? If the issue is primarily housing prices, then it seems the new homeowners start benefiting from the policies they previously suffered from as renters, so it's not hypocrisy, but rather a change of circumstance.

Also, it can be difficult to isolate the will of voters per-issue, given the limited number of representatives on the ballot.

casual_slacker··on PG&E falsified gas pipeline records for years after deadly explosion
California SB901 makes suing PGE a bit more complicated.
casual_slacker··on Group led by Thomas Piketty presents plan for ‘a fairer Europe’
Not only the industry or workers, but CO2 taxes, when implemented as petrol or electricity taxes, end up increasing the cost to users who don't control their own usage: petrol is required to commute to work, electricity is required for home necessity, etc.

And the other side of the imbalance: the only way to mitigate these taxes is a large depreciating capital investment in an electric car or home battery. Those who can't afford the investment suffer the worst of the tax.

casual_slacker··on TSA’s Roadmap for Airport Surveillance Moves in a Dangerous Direction
Another angle is where the initial push for these new programs is coming from.
casual_slacker··on Hiroshima (1946)
I agree, max damage was the wrong term. I was envisioning the temperatures to melt steel structures that exist closer to the detonation.
casual_slacker··on Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses
Population correlates directly with some economies: food, housing, etc. I think most of our measures of an economy (GDP? VTI?) aim to get as many people in as many human-only productive jobs as possible. (I apologize for leaving "productive" open-ended)
casual_slacker··on Hiroshima (1946)
They were air-detonated, I believe 200 meters above ground level, so the damage was less than the maximum potential of the bombs.

Nagasaki is more solemn, the ground zero area has rubble visible in a glass display area, and ruins of a brick pillar covered with scorch marks from the historic Urakami Christian Church

casual_slacker··on How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request
There are cases in history where records offices were held in rebellion for political purposes. A blockchain would change means of control of records from violence to compute power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Archive_War

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