mdnahas

I wonder if that will make the great generation of human coders. Some of our best writers were the generation that spanned between oral education and mass production of books. Late generations read and wrote, rather than memorized and spoke. I think that was Shakespeare’s genius. Maybe our best coders will be supercharged with AI, and subsequent ones enfeabled by it.

Shakespeare was also popular because he was published as books became popular. Others copied him.

I’m convinced we need to move to a world time. The Internet is part of life and we have people coordinating around the globe. Time is time everywhere.

Sunlight is different everywhere. But not everything timed is tied to sunlight. There is no reason that the time should be 12:00 at peak sunlight locally.

UTC is an issue near the international date line. I could see residents of Pacific islands wanting to not have the date change mid-day. Should think about adding hours 24, 25, 26, etc. to Wednesday that are equivalent to hours 0, 1, 2, etc. on Thursday.

(And as a quant who did a lot of time programming for financial markets, fuck Daylight Saving Time and the leap second.)

These economic forces exist in math too. Almost every mathematician publishes informal proofs. These contain just enough discussion in English (or other human language) to convince a few other mathematicians in the same field that they their idea is valid. But it is possible to make errors. There are other techniques: formal step-by-step proof presentations (e.g. by Leslie Lamport) or computer-checked proofs that would be more reliable. But almost no mathematician uses these.

I tried to send Wikipedia (Kiwix) in 3 languages, free ebooks, and other digital goodies to a refugees camp. I mailed it twice on a large SD card that would work in the recipient’s phone. But it never arrived. I presume stole or censored along the way.

Some services, like payment, are most convenient when done by a monopoly. It makes sense to have them blessed by the govt. They could be govt run or regulated monopolies or have the rights to operate the monopoly bid for by competing companies.

Economist here. My biggest issue is with the “news” industry.

Companies provide what the customer wants. And, as the adage goes, if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Advertisement-funded “news” isn’t meant to enrich the reader/viewer — it is meant to attract the reader/viewer.

I think that perverted incentive has always existed with it, but the internet ad technology has really killed the information content. And now we’re have society-scale problems with misinformed citizens.

I don’t think industry will solve the problem. If a company allowed users to opt out and pay, their richest customers would do that and those were the ones most valuable to advertise to. So, offering an opt-out probably loses them money (and increases costs).

I think the news industry should be advertising free. I’d have to think on if it should also have govt funding, but that often gets co-opted.

I like your definitions! My personal definition of science is learning rules that predict the future, given the present state. And my definition of engineering is arranging the present state to control the future.

I don’t think it’s unusual for engineering creations to need new science to understand them. When metal parts broke, humans studied metallurgy. When engines exploded, we studied the remains. With that science, we could engineer larger, longer lasting, more powerful devices.

Now, we’re finding flaws in AI and diagnosing their causes. And soon able to build better ones.

Economist here. You’re not considering agglomeration effects. Smart people near other smart people are more effective. So world GDP growth may be faster.

(Economists have pointed out that US growth is slower because SF is so expensive, young smart people cannot agglomerate there and learn tech faster.)

It is partially true. Yes, the US invents the best medicines. But we spend 17% of our GDP on healthcare and a good portion of that is paper pushing and the prices used to compute GDP are not realistic. The best statistic - median lifespan - is dropping.

As a quant who went back and took the PhD economics classes, I can tell you that macroeconomists are not experts. The number that predicted the Great Financial Crisis is a handful. They study these things, but they know little.

The microeconomists know a bunch and have some powerful mathematical tools. I have some confidence in those studying trade and cities. But comparing and measuring countries is messy and hard.

And I totally agree we should lure other countries’ brains here. The return on investment for a STEM degree is about 3 times the stock market index and we should get as much as we can.

Me too. My progressive lenses give me eye strain and it is much worse at the computer. I have non-progressive lens for work and they’re much more comfortable. (Especially with my large monitor.)

My father worked at Bell Labs. (Take your kid to work day was a blast for me!)

My father points out that the monopoly deal with the US govt turned Bell Labs the profit center. AT&T charged its customers a fixed percentage of its costs … from 3 years prior. The only way to make more profit was to make today’s costs cheaper than those of 3 years ago. This lead to: innovate, innovate, innovate.

Many companies admire research. For AT&T at that time, it was their lifeblood.

Economist here.

If you’re looking for what to tax instead of income, the best things are: land, pollution and consumption.

Land is great because people will not use less of it, no matter how high the tax. Pollution is great to tax, because we want to produce less of it. Consumption (or purchases or spending) is good to tax because economic growth is good and this tax encourages investment rather than spending your wealth. The most common consumption taxes are the sales tax or VAT tax.

You may have heard of consumption taxes described as “regressive “, but that comes from looking at only part of the policy. For example, a universal basic income funded by a sales or VAT tax would see the poor better off than the rich.

Former quant, current economist here.

One policy economists of all stripes agree on is having 0 tax on corporations. We should tax the profits when they show up in the owner’s income. Otherwise, you are taxing owners who are poor.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-...

The XOR light switch is a trick. And, even if you know it is possible, it is hard to figure it out without someone telling you. My uncle and cousin were doing their own electrical work and couldn’t figure it out.

I had seen the trick as a young kid and remembered it 30 years later: install the one of the switches backwards.

One switch takes in power and puts it on one of two wires running to the second switch. The second switch connects one of the two wires to the power wire going to the bulb.

If you don’t know the trick, you get an AND switch.

I emailed the author to correct the section on XOR swap:

Once upon a time, when I was an aggressive young programmer, I tried to show off by replacing this swap:

void swap(int a, int b) { int c = a; a = b; b = c; }

with xor swap:

void swap(int a, int b) { a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^= b; }

and the program broke!

They’re not identical. The program was calling swap on array elements:

    swap(&(array[i]), &(array[j]))

and occasionally i=j. That is, swap was being called with a==b. And that’s the difference: when you try to swap a location with itself. In that case, XOR as you know zeroed out the value in a. But that was also b. The other xors left the zero there. So, the array element was set to zero.

The original swap called on a single location did not modify the value. So, my XOR-swap show off introduced a huge bug!

The best swing dance lesson I ever attended taught the feet work last. The worked first on the feel of leading and following. Leaders took their partner by the hand and just lead them around the room. Then tried to make the follower spin. Couples talked about what felt comfortable and easy.

I forget what came next, but the feet work was considered unimportant. The lesson was in Minnesota in a hanger with WWII airplanes, a big brass band, and happy old vets dancing with young women dressed up in USO outfits.

What I learned from my burnout: “Hope is a zero-calorie meal”. You can keep going on hope and belief for a while, but eventually you need sustenance. And that’s physical and social: good food, natural settings, daylight, being part of a caring group and family/friends, social standing, etc..

I had a belief that I could work for hours in an unnatural room based on pure willpower. And I could for a while. But eventually, without real positive feedback, you collapse. And then your “willpower muscle” is exhausted. You can’t use it. It takes a long time, from small steps, to build that back.

I've been in the trenches trying to change housing policy in Austin and the description in this article is very real to me. It has taken my group, AURA, years to learn the ropes of local politics: what specific policy we want, who has control over that policy, and how to influence those people. It took us 6+ years, but we've elected a pro-housing City Council and are getting laws passed. Elections can be fun competitions, but most of advocacy is slow and boring and often feels like running in a labyrinth or torture with tedium.

The police reform groups have more difficulty. The police union is a well-funded well-organized opposition. The reform groups have a lot of public support, but it has been a long difficult slog. They were forced to passed their laws by ballot measure and, even after they pass, it is a struggle to get the city's staff and police to implement them! As I said, David Ruggles's work to get govt employees to actually do their job feels very real to me.

I think that’s a sign that ASML hasn’t had much competition at that scale. And that the new tech requires buyers willing to take a risk and invest in learning the new process.

I did that once and one contributor had a huge negative value. His team had reimplemented a feature and his major contribution was deleting the old version.

I’m an economist who has looked into something like this. This paper is about intra-company performance. I’ve look at incomes of the whole population. There, you find two distribution. Wages seem to follow a log-normal distribution, while income from investments follows a heavy-tailed distribution, like a Pareto.

Wages tend to be smaller than asset income. Top sports players and musicians work for wages and become billionaires. Startup founders, who own assets, become trillionaires.

Obviously, there are differences. Wages are not productivity. (But the article didn’t say how productivity was measured.). Also, a company can choose who joins and leaves it. So one company’s wage distribution doesn’t have to follow the distribution of the wider economy.

If you have questions, email me at hackernews@mike.nahasmail.com. — Mike

Parchive, a.k.a. “.par2” files

Parchive is a file format for redundant files. If any of the original files are damaged, the redundancy lets them be restored. It is used for transmission over faulty networks (like Usenet) and for protecting storage (like backups).

Version 2 clients had 7+ million downloads. Version 2 had bugs and limitations, so I’ve designed Version 3 with fixes and new features, such as incremental backups. Version 3 needs a reference implementation to be coded and tested.

It could be coded by a single person. The reference implementation just needs to read and write files and compute on the data. A follow on would be a high-performance implementation using threads, heavy optimization, and a static or dynamic library interface. It’s a good project for someone looking to prove their coding skills while doing the good deed of protecting data.

https://parchive.github.io/

Under $100: “PureSleep” a mouth device to treat sleep apnea. I tried CPAP but drooled in the face-mask and had congestion with a nose-mask. PureSleep isn’t perfect, but I’m much healthier and productive with it. (I may spend more for a proper dentist-made device.)

I am economist and former quant. I wrote a report on the gender pay gap for a candidate for Congress. There is evidence of a gap.

Glassdoor has a great report showing that salaries for the same company and same job title are about 7% lower for women. An academic paper on MBA grads showed that hiring salaries for women were lower. So there is evidence for it.

For the MBA grads, the paper show that with training on negotiation, women got salaries similar to men. So, there are policies that help.

I’m helping a YIMBY group in Austin, Texas. In the USA, we’ve tied the legal right of what you can build to the land. So, a housing shortage causes land prices to skyrocket. We need to break those connections (height limits, unit limits, floor area limits, etc.) to bring urban prices back to reasonable values.

Then, people who want denser, walkable, social neighborhoods can create them.

I do data analysis for the group, on land prices and politics. (E.g., campaign donors). If anyone has questions, reach out to me at hackernews@mike.nahasmail.com

https://aura-atx.org/

I’m a transportation activist in Austin. Where did this happen?

Valve has some great talks on monetizing free games. People will pay for social features that don’t change the game mechanics. E.g., make every donor’s avatar visually different, so people acknowledge they’re good people. E.g., wear a gold chain around their avatar’s neck or a feather in their hat. Or render them with more polygons! Larger donation = more polygons?! Makes sense to me. Or sell weapons that are the same as regular weapons but trigger fancy death scenes when they kill.

My new landlord asked me to pay my rent using Apartments.com. The website said 2.75% fee for credit cards and free for paying from a checking account. When you select "checking account", it asked for my bank, login name, and password.

Stripe does the payments. It is "linking accounts" and taking customers's name, address, balances, and transactions. It's website goes on to say: "Stripe and our service providers may also store your financial institution login credentials so we can connect to your financial account and regularly collect updated data that you’ve agreed to share."

The Apartment.com website gave no warning about what was being agreed to before asking for the bank login and password. And once you got to that screen, there wasn't a link to click to pay by routing number + account. After I freaked out, I backed out a few pages and at the bottom of one page was a way to pay by bank routing number and account number.

Stripe trying to hoover 25 years of my financial history and store my bank password is f**ing unacceptable.