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charmideson The Stock Market Is Shrinking

Time for some 21st century trustbusting.

charmideson Generating random points inside a sphere

Those results are surprisingly close.

charmideson Generating random points inside a sphere

To add to that comment, importance sampling is also an attempt to reduce the number of rejections and could be interesting here.

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

charmideson Generating random points inside a sphere

It is definitely an interesting problem how to sample uniformly from the set of n-dimensional vectors with an L2-norm smaller or equal to 1. I am sure that it has practical applications, too. Also, nobody said that n has to be huge.

charmideson Generating random points inside a sphere

The graphics are nice, but this article really could have used some complexity analysis and some probability theory.

The author neither discusses the asymptomatic complexity of the algorithms, nor the run-time of his implementation (which is more pertinent here), nor gives any proofs of why some of the algorithms sample uniformly from the unit ball and why some of them don't.

Also, it would have been really nice to generalize this problem to n dimensions. I assume that there is some small value of n where naive rejection sampling is worse in practice than one of the more sophisticated methods.

charmideson Free-range parenting outside the US

Do you all live in Norway?

charmideson Free-range parenting outside the US

I have three kids. I’ve left them home alone since the age of 7 to drop off dry cleaning, grab a coffee or pick up milk at the local store. My only requests were no cooking, fighting or using the iron. Read, play or clean your room. Never a problem. And if one goes missing I still have two left.

This made me laugh.

charmideson Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

I wonder how valuable something like that will be now that there already exists so much online data and documentation about our lives. Maybe traditional memoirs will still provide some insight, considering that they do at least give an organized account.

charmideson Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

Please post a link.

I have a couple of questions:

i) Have you been able to apply the skills you gained for something else? Did it help you career-wise in any way, or do you just feel like it made you a better, more well-rounded person?

ii) Did you have a job at the same time to sustain yourself?

charmideson WeWork Will No Longer Let Employees Expense Any Kind of Meat

Again you are factually wrong. As long as it is not threatening, it is not illegal in the USA to express racism. That's why companies take a stricter stance against racism than the law does.

>It was my attempt to show that other things could equally be considered immoral that perhaps don't align quite as neatly with your militant vegetarianism.

I don't think you know what the word "militant" means.

Also, your argument remains absurd. Just because there is no universal agreement on morality, it does not mean that morality is relative and it certainly does not mean that companies should not have policies based on their morals and their values.

As a matter of fact, your line of argument is so ridiculous that I doubt even you believe in what you are saying. I think that this company's policy made you feel hurt and attacked for visceral reasons (the do-gooder derogation effect) and you are trying to justify that feeling for yourself by dressing it up as a political argument.

>Anyway, I doubt anyone else is actually reading this 2 week old thread so I'll leave it at that. Have a good weekend.

It sounds like a good idea that you leave. I hope that you learned something here and wish you a pleasant week.

charmideson Uber shuts down self-driving trucks unit

Did you know that 1.3 MILLION people die in car accidents on a yearly basis? There are extremely good reasons to believe that a mature, self-driving car industry will lower that figure by orders of magnitude.

It is a shame that there have been a few accidents now that the technology is in its infancy, but it is very short-sighted to wish that Uber halts its experiments and delays the technology from taking off.

charmideson Uber shuts down self-driving trucks unit

I don't think you are looking at the big picture either. New technology is constantly creating new jobs at the cost of old ones. Just like self-driving cars may displace truck drivers, so did new machines displace 19th century factory workers. However, this is such a small problem because the long-term economic benefits are enormous.

charmideson Uber shuts down self-driving trucks unit

This attitude is nothing new. But I don't think people are seeing the big picture. Self-driving cars may cause a temporary spike in unemployment, but the economy and human workers benefits in the long term from the elimination of tedious work.

See how the length of the average working week has been decreasing in the USA:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8A9_5tIWVQY/U5XkaRfB8bI/AAAAAAAAM8...

(Source: Univ of Gröningen and Univ of California, Davis)

This is due to technologal innovations.

charmideson WeWork Will No Longer Let Employees Expense Any Kind of Meat

"I care about companies not making moral judgements on behalf of their employees."

This is absurd. Of course companies need to enforce some form of morality among its employees, for instance by having an anti-murder policy or by firing employees who shout racist epitaphs at quarterly meetings. The question is just where to draw the line.

"What if instead, a company morally objected to halal slaughter and refused to reimburse employees for halal meals? What if they decided coffee production was too likely to have involved child labour and so that's off the list too. Surgery deserts make people fat and can lead to diabities, can't go paying for that either."

Sounds terrifying. One day, those fascist may ask people to quit drinking on the job, enforce a no-drug policy, ask people to adhere to a dress-code, and prohibit them from carrying firearms on their desk job. Or wait, did I just take your slippery slope fallacy in the wrong direction?

"For what it's worth 3 of my sister's are vegan. My mother has been vegetarian since the age of 9. So it's fair to say I've eaten my fair share of meat free meals."

For the sake of your health, I sure hope you have eaten meals without meat every once in a while.

charmideson WeWork Will No Longer Let Employees Expense Any Kind of Meat

You can quit your job if hurting animals and harming the environment is so important to you.

charmideson Autopsy of a deep learning paper

I agree with this. This article is like a hit piece and I feel sorry for the scientists who were attacked (even if the scientific merit of their paper is questionable).

The author could have made his point in a more diplomatic way.

charmideson The tasting of surströmming

Was that in Flogsta?

charmideson WeWork Will No Longer Let Employees Expense Any Kind of Meat

Yes, people do. What OP described is called fraud and people get terminated for fraud all the time.

charmideson Vista Equity Partners revamps software companies by following detailed protocols

Is that a typo?

charmideson WeWork Will No Longer Let Employees Expense Any Kind of Meat

This isn't about where HN is headed. There has been a social shift happening in many countries in the last few years where veganism has stopped being a fringe movement and is entering the Overton window. You should expect to see more and more articles like this in the media, and to see increasingly positive reactions towards them.

charmideson WeWork Will No Longer Let Employees Expense Any Kind of Meat

Gotcha. By "subterfuge", I assume you meant "risk my employment by committing reimbursement fraud".

charmideson WeWork Will No Longer Let Employees Expense Any Kind of Meat

It's the do-gooder derogation effect: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550611415695

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-love-and-war/2017...

"But what was especially interesting was that those who viewed vegetarians more negatively were also more likely to expect that vegetarians would view them negatively, suggesting that a fear of moral reproach might underlie negative views of vegetarians. Supporting this idea, when the threat of moral reproach was experimentally manipulated, the researchers found that it increased negative evaluations of vegetarians."

charmideson WeWork Will No Longer Let Employees Expense Any Kind of Meat

"A couple hours on a plane can match a few months of meat-free lunches."

I think you are mistaken there. Maybe if you only care about CO2 emissions, but meat production is also incredibly wasteful on resources like water, and is at least objectionable from an animal welfare standpoint.

charmideson Customers who liked this Recommendation Engine may also like its Dequantization

Scott: Your student is brilliant. Kudos to you for not insisting on sharing authorship on the paper, like some academic advisors in your position would do.

charmideson San Francisco: Where a six-figure salary is 'low income'

I suppose that's an entirely valid way to think about it, especially if you have a family.

charmideson San Francisco: Where a six-figure salary is 'low income'

I heard that usually the lowest-paid employees are fired first.

charmideson San Francisco: Where a six-figure salary is 'low income'

Thank you for the clarification. The conclusion that I'm getting out of this is that it still makes sense to move to SF if you're willing to live frugally for some years, save some money, and then move elsewhere. It probably makes less sense if you have a partner and children and you are used to a higher standard of living.

charmideson San Francisco: Where a six-figure salary is 'low income'

Your math is worth little unless you plug the right values into the equation.

He said his salary would be twice as high in SF, so for a 100k salary in Houston, we're talking about 200k - 41k vs 100k - 17k, which is roughly a 70k difference (actually closer to 80k, but I wanted to make a conservative guess).

charmideson San Francisco: Where a six-figure salary is 'low income'

It seems to me that by living as a frugal software engineer in SF, you will be much faster to save money for a $400k house in Texas than if you choose never to leave Houston. Buying a 2 million dollar house in SF makes little sense to me unless you're really wealthy, so I don't understand why this is a better comparison.

charmideson San Francisco: Where a six-figure salary is 'low income'

You are far from the only person who's saying this, but I don't understand how you can reach the conclusion that you would enjoy a lower standard of living in SF than Houston on a salary that is twice as high. The three things you say that you like to blow money on -- luxury cars, international vacations, and making investments -- are similarly expensive in both places. Care to share some of your math?

To elaborate, I looked through this guide: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou... and while a one-bedroom apartment in the centre of SF would cost around $41,000 a year in SF compared to $17,000 in Houston, that means that if your salary is Houston is around $100,000, you would still have around $70,000 more dollars a year in SF after rent has been taken care of, not accounting for taxes. How does the higher cost of living in SF manage to eat up all that money in just a year?