gbhn

Is there a reason arxiv doesn't directly manage what would be an analog to paper reputation?

My impression is that journal selection is doing some work of signaling how awesome scientists think a particular paper is, either actually or aspirationally, and so is capturing some sense of group regard. It seems like just keeping track of views, downloads, and "likes" on arxiv might serve much the same function although would clearly require a lot of work to get right to be credible.

It's an agency issue. If I use an attributed channel it's like meeting you and saying "hey remember your friend the CS guy? Our company is looking for someone like that. Could you pass the word along?" vs pretending to be chatting with you when all I'm looking for is relevant recruiting leads which I will then use unbeknownst to you.

For hiring this isn't as touchy a subject, but surely there's a qualitative difference in these two interactions. One is based in an above-biard interaction. The other in subterfuge and hidden motives.

What are the reasons this has been so difficult? It seems like this must have been desirable for decades. Is the config of internal and external just tricky? Does some legitimate traffic use this so it's difficult to get everyone to switch to alternatives?

This makes sense to me. Even with managing orbits you are still having a huge part of the fleet over empty areas. If the idea is to manage high bandwidth needs of autonomous ships, trucks, trains, planes, etc maybe it makes sense...

I visited Japan a few years ago. There are regular extremely fast trains going between large cities and smaller ones. I estimated that the passenger capacity of trains stopping at one smallish city was equivalent to like 3x the passenger capacity of a major metropolitan airport in the US. From a big hub it's probably 10x that (maybe more).

The trains run very frequently, with reasonable fares. It looked to be completely sensible and fast to live in an outlying city and take the train into a larger one for work, whereas the idea of catching a commuter flight from a smaller outlying city into a major metro area in the US (or likely anywhere) is almost completely untenable -- too expensive, too time consuming, too irregular, and too much hassle.

We play a variant without the robber where a 7 means you just draw a resource of your choice. Much preferred if you aren't looking for a competitively enhanced game. :-)

While some important records are public, many are not. It isn't obvious that all debtors want the details of their debt made world-readable, for instance.

Patreon should use a prepaid wallet for this group. It should continue aggregating for the first.

I'm happy to foot a 50c or so service fee per month. I'm not up for paying 35% service fees! That's outrageous and I'm confident someone else will start the right service and creators will simply move there.

This is what I told them in the survey. I'm a newbie to the platform, and I understand the value proposition better than the owner?! That's really screwed up, and it will take quite a while before I trust them. I still kind of think creators should take their accounts elsewhere. How can a group of people just not understand their own product so thoroughly? Baffling. Is there any precedent for people so badly confused able to learn which end is up? It really makes me suspect the company and its users just have irreconcilably different ideas about what is going on.

Ah. JS crashed on my mobile at about 30M clips...

To me this looked like it could be the key to the whole thing...

That is, the idea is that you build a high-speed airline with spaceports all over the world, refueled by huge solar arrays refining Ox and CH4 out of the air. Then it turns out your airliners, by virtue of the fact they are orbiters, can also launch satellites and go to Mars and other interplanetary destinations (where similar spaceport situations can be built).

The key to the whole thing is to make the second stage an orbiter big enough to do re-entry so the whole system is re-usable. Re-usable second stages are a giant pain, but if the secret is to get big, and that means you're kind of "accidentally" running an airliner, then perhaps SpaceX has found the right business model for commercial space flight in such high volume that things like going to Mars and asteroids and so forth are sort of on the cost order of chartering a private flight -- well within the reach of many organizations.

It just did a few years ago.

So, yes.

It's easy to see why poor decisions repeat cyclically.

I think this is a special case of Gresham's law that bad currency drives out good. The problem is information asymmetry. You may be trying to buy SEC securities, but if they are swamped with fakes, it causes huge friction costs to figure out whether to transact and that hurts the market. Only experts (accredited investors?) have the resources to play.

I've known people who have left groups not as intensely controlling as this, but very controlling. There is typically a very long period where they aren't directly controlled by the group, but are very much still "engaged" in the sense that their interests still intersect quite a bit with the group. (Wanting to spread warnings, rescue people they know, etc.)

I'm sure there's a psychological model for this, but I think that's why there's so many "ex-XYZ" groups. Leaving is both abrupt and lengthy. Especially so, I imagine, for a group so totally psychologically consuming.

I think many of us on this site have jobs where presence and productivity are pretty elastic.

Many workers have jobs where human presence is a key part of the job function. Being a cashier, or a nurse, or driving -- it isn't as though these things happen unless you are physically there. The quantum of human presence is "one human" :-) so even if there are no customers, the driving is boring, or the patients are asleep, it still requires you to be there on the job.

True, true, but somehow that's never been much of an obstacle to totalitarian governments. Somehow there's always a soldier who will push the button.

In Nuremberg we developed a way to think about this: people outside the central circles of power have a tremendous amount of pressures they are considering. It's definitely the case that some are sadistic and horrible, but more are just following orders and trying to get by as best they can, and punishing them for war crimes is not appropriate.

The other side of that coin is that it isn't realistic to expect soldiery en masse to resist illegal orders. It's always more complicated than that.

That's happened before (look at articles on the "era of good feelings").

What happens is that factions develop along a new politically-important axis which have different answers for a new pressing problem, and the moderate party bifurcates into two.

Same here. It was a bit baffling that the scenario is apparently a self-drive car with a poison gas capsule attached such that contact with any obstacle kills all occupants. Sheesh.

Thanks, that's a useful phrase!

I think you are right, and I've at times struggled to explain why I enjoy his books as much as I do. I think ultimately he leans regularly on a facet of SF that in that genre, ideas and abstractions can be the equal subjects of character development. Cleverly developing an idea (e.g. mind virii) and circling back on those ideas, exploring how different facets connect in different ways, is the kind of thing one does with a human character, but can also do with an "idea character" in SF.

Obviously the craft and virtue of that kind of thing is in the relationships of the concept to other elements of the tale, both human and non-human. This I think Stephenson does very well, but I can appreciate that for someone who doesn't extend subjectivity largesse to abstractions, it can be tedious to read wikipedia-like explositions, no matter how well done. :-)

This is likely a case of an infamous RFI problem. The spectrum is allocated to DoD, and garage door openers were allowed to use it provided they followed particular guidelines. Some follow them less faithfully and issues like this are the result. (There are other stories of equipment getting turned on that opens nearby garages with particularly bad implementations, but I don't know if they are true.)

plug: check out the 3.5GHz band in the United States. (CBRS)

Can you write more about "sped up time"? I'm reminded of something like this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mnp/travel_through_time_to_increase_...

The EU is chock full of exceptions and asterisks and different arrangements for different territories. It is completely possible that in the withdrawal negotiations Gibraltar, for instance, could end up with some kind of unique status.

I'd suggest this is more of an endorsement of free trade. (That is, no external party forced you to trade goats for seeds.)

Lots of societies have free trade that I don't think would be usefully described as "capitalist." (And anecdotally societies in which free trade is discouraged seem to end up with a lot of black market free trade activity -- it is just too powerful an attractor.)

To me capitalism is a more descriptive of a narrower and more modern development. Free trade is an aspect of it, but not sufficient to describe it.

My recollection is that it was included, but then traded to the relevant industries for their acceptance of the plan we have now. Whether it was always intended as a chip or was a serious part of the plan is open for debate I suppose, but the best chips are ones that are serious, so I'm not sure there's much difference in practice.

Another book you'll enjoy if you liked this post: "The Art of Readable Code" (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Readable-Code-Theory-Practice/dp/0...)

Blindsight is a very compelling exploration of the idea that there may be different roles of consciousness in advanced intelligence. We know that a conscious decision on say the visual processing loop ends up costing 120ms or so. Why is this a good thing? What if you can have advanced intelligence without consciousness? Some work in AI (and some worries people have about AI) suggests this may be a real possibility as well.

The end result for me ends up being a much more intense feeling of the kinds of varieties of intelligence that may exist in the galaxy, or that we may end up creating ourselves.

Probably not. Training for 3-pointers gets you 50% more points for (from what the outside seems like) a basically equivalent training perspective.