mdnahas

My father worked at Bell Labs. He said the rules of the monopoly signed with the US govt drove innovation. AT&T, which operated Bell Labs, could charge cost plus a fixed percentage, but it was based on costs from N years earlier. I believe N=3. Anyway, if AT&T improved costs, it became more profitable.

The profits of the company depended on innovation. The employees knew that. And it innovated.

I live in Austin and, in 2018, I could go west and pass through 4 districts in a few miles. My own one you would exit and re-enter and exit again!

I actually made jigsaw puzzles to advocate against gerrymandering. They were difficult to solve! michaeldnahas.com/doc/jigsaw_puzzle/index.html

I have warm memories of splitting wood at my uncle’s with a sledge hammer and wedge. It is that right mix of physical activity (but not too much) and a little brain work. Great to do early while my aunt is making breakfast.

Advice: WEAR STEEL-TIPPED BOOTS! It saved my toes.

I am interested in your opinion of Southwest Airlines. It had a very specific culture and acted differently than most USA-based airlines. But it was recently bought and changed to behave like all the other airlines. Was that a good thing?

To be pedantic, the S&P 500 is a large portion of the stock market, not the economy. Its value is about 75% of the value in stocks. But stocks are only 25% of all stores value. Real estate is twice the size of the stock market. The rest is mostly corporate and govt bonds.

This is why the real estate crash of 2008 caused the Great Recession, while the Internet Bubble bursting was a small recession.

Vanguard’s VTI uses an index designed by CRSP. I read the rules and, best I can tell, CRSP indices will add the stocks at the next rebalancing in September.

(FWIW, CRSP was run by U of Chicago, but they recently sold it to Morningstar.)

Vanguard doesn’t use S&P, because they wanted low fees and the license was expensive. They use CRSP’s index rules.

I checked and it looks like new stocks get added to the CRSP index at the next rebalancing, which is September. So, even the knockoff S&P adds it quickly.

BTW, CRSP was run by University of Chicago, but got sold recently to Morningstar, a mutual fund company.

I tried to send an SD card loaded with free data (Wikipedia, dictionaries, books, etc.) to a refugee camp in Bangladesh that had no good internet connection. Tried twice with USPS. Neither letter was received.

Legal Eagle does legal analysis on YouTube. They looked at the recent “settlement” between Trump and the IRS. They determined that it is not legal, is not limited to $1.776 (as a press release stated), and does not require disclosure of who got paid and how much.

Right, you should use Lean or Coq. They are cleaner mathematically, which means AI has a better chance with them. And you can have the AI write proofs about their correctness. The proof-checker can verify the proofs and give you more trust in the AI’s work.

This isn’t foolproof - you still have to understand what was proved. And it may take some work to understand the unproven parts of the code. But I believe this is the path forward.

We created databases to keep track of reality. It fascinates me when the database is taken for reality.

Should YC HackerNews put together an offer to buy GitHub from Microsoft?

One throughline of history is database-ization. Some of our older writings are records of ownership and tax liabilities. We keep moving information from the real world into a database. We have done it so much that the database is sometimes more important than the real world. Someone marked “dead” in a database can have a hard time living!

Economist here. The more likely short-term replacement is gold. Not as the reserve currency, but as the currency for denominating trade.

The US has raised tariffs erraticly. Traders seek out a good that can be traded anywhere with predictable low costs and that is gold. So, demand is rising and, if it continues, trades may be denominated in gold.

I don’t know if they do it, but it allows proving properties of the law. For example, that the tax increases with income or that an exception doesn’t accidentally increase the tax paid.

This is a bad idea. I spent a lot of time thinking about git’s snapshot system vs. merge-based system that were promoted by functional programming fans. Auto merging systems are bad for a good reason: because we care about features, which are a property of snapshots not diffs.

If you have a diff that adds a button and a diff that turns existing button blue, the merge of those diffs doesn’t add a button and have all button blue. Because it may not make the new button blue.

Features like “all buttons are blue” are properties of snapshots. Snapshot based revision control, like git, it better for that reason.

I don’t know what caused this, but I’m sure it’s painful. You have my sympathy.

I’ve come to a belief that emotions are a result of evolution. We have evolved drives to avoid death. And since humans get sick and injured, we can avoid death if we have the help of other humans to feed and protect ourselves. Being alone risks death. And our emotions have been evolved a drive that makes loneliness feel like a life-and-death situation.

So, feeling awful when alone is natural. I know that’s little immediate comfort, but it does give direction.

If you fear physical safety, you can get a dog for protection, train in martial arts (I like boxing), and get stronger. Or fortify your house/room.

If you fear being sick or injured, you can stockpile food and medicine.

And make friends.

If you want friends to protect you, find people who do protection everyday. Help a police charity. Go to a gym and meet buff people. Make friends at a group martial arts class. These protectors are usually men. If you’re scared of a particular group of people, go meet and talk to them - you may find they are less scary than you think.

If you want friends to take care of you when you’re sick or injured, find people who do this everyday. Nurses, social workers, etc. Volunteer with churches. Volunteer with food banks or meals on wheels. These helpers are usually women.

Meeting neighbors is good for both of these categories. Have a grill night and invite neighbors. I also like the idea of going to a coworking location, because you might find people similar to yourself and that makes the easiest connections.

Best of luck, Mike

I lived in NYC for a decade. This is very true on the street, but less true waiting in a subway station, and even less true in a neighborhood bar. The more public, there is a “market for lemons” effect in conversation. The more it resembles a private club or a group suffering a common injustice, the more reliably good the conversation is. A crowd on an MTA platform where a train hasn’t shown up in 50 minutes can get pretty chatty.

> How do you know what to say?, usually I can start the conversation but I don’t know where to take it after. Some ideas: Ask what they’re passionate about. Talk about what you’re passionate about. Say you’re trying to improve yourself and ask if there is anything they’ve learned lately about life that you should know. Ask for their advice/opinion on a recent problem you’ve faced or something that surprised you recently.

>How do you get over the feeling that you are wasting their time? First, hold up a mirror: do you feel your time is wasted when someone talks to you? Second, everyone benefits from bonds and talking enables trust. Even if the relationship is temporary, it brings comfort. Think of two people at an airport going out on different planes. Even a short conversation with someone makes them trust enough to let the other watch their heavy luggage while they go to the bathroom.

>Finally, how do you end the conversation when you're still going in the same direction or waiting at the same place? Yeah, this is always a little awkward. You can just say something like “It’s been nice talking to you. I’m going to go back to reading my book.” Sometimes I’ll make a polite fib like saying I’ve got to think about an important presentation or have some pressing emails that I need to read.

I just installed Arch (EndeavourOS) and LLM did not help. The problems were new and the LLM’s answers were out-of-date. I wasted about 5 hours. Arch’s wiki and EndeavourOS’s forums were much better. YMMV

Related: My grad school had a shared bin/ directory with common local tools. Of course, that directory was after /bin and /usr/bin in the PATH so that no one could override “ls” or “more”. So… one grad student added scripts with names that matched common typos: “sl” and “mroe”!

Sure enough, they got run. The scripts didn’t take over your account. They ran “ls” and “more”. They may have also logged your username in a file so he could lord it over you.

I still have an antenna to watch football and the Olympics live. Everything else is streamed.

It is a recurring phenomenon. Venice, Netherlands, and today Singapore. Small countries without resources and, hence, needing trade. They become open trading hubs and grow.

Sadly, countries with a single easy-to-harvest resource —- like oil, gold, or gems —— are more likely to become closed dictatorships.

I started following him after he headed the UK central bank after running Canada’s central bank!

Economist here. (Started as programmer, worked in finance, got Masters in Econ.) Econ is a big field. I think it knows a lot at the microeconomics level. There are impressive mathematical tools and economists have found “natural experiments” which test causality.

Macroeconomists don’t know much at all. We can’t even create artificial economies - the agent-based simulations have dozens of parameters and our tools are bad at studying those imperfect fake economies.

I’ve looked a bit into econophysics. They seem more on the path to getting somewhere. But it’s still a long road.

Same happened in Texas.

For Americans, many foreigners use the word “government” where we would say “administration”. So, a “new government” or “the government falls”, would be a “new administration” or “the administration’s party loses the next election”.

Examples, please.

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