papeda

Curious, how does a small commercial janitorial business survive for so long? My naive understanding as a non-business-owner is that small entities can survive or even do well if they offer a product that's hard or not worth it for big entities to replicate at scale. Some examples might be art, or a nice feeling of "buying local" from people you know and like, or a niche product whose market is just not big enough for giants to bother with.

A janitorial business doesn't seem to be any of those things. So it seems like an area where a big company would dominate (because, say, a lot of 1000 janitorial carts is way cheaper than a lot of 10). But, no?

I find this question hard to think about. Who exactly should be pricing in the risk of something like this happening? On both sides there are agents who have taken on risk. Some of the agents paying rent overextended themselves even before the crisis. Some of the agents renting space did the same. So who should take the hit? Nobody (i.e., the government)? Even that solution seems wrong -- do we really want to incentivize agents that leverage their property holdings to the hilt?

My naive reaction is that the agents renting space are somehow "more able" to absorb the costs. Maybe it's because I think banks seem to be doing ok, and in my head banks are the people who lend things to people and charge fees, whereas my friendly neighborhood restaurant seems to be scrabbling harder to make ends meet. Or maybe it's because I think people who own resources are just always doing better than the people who rent them. But that's not a very convincing argument.

If his objective is to "keep this knowledge in Japan", circulating the preprint and then publishing it in the journal he edits is a weird strategy.

Not a mathematician, but I've kept up with this story as a non-mathematician.

> For instance, imagine the proof is made of 50 lemmas. One could check the main theorem derives from the 50 lemmas. And checking each individual lemma could be left to other mathematicians.

To my understanding, some mathematicians have gone ever further and checked the work themselves. Peter Scholze (a 32-year-old who won the Fields medal a couple of years ago and seems to be in the sweet spot of expertise and stamina to really audit this thing) has identified a specific result ("Corollary 3.12") that he says does not follow from the results leading up to it [1]. This is pretty weird because "Corollary" is usually reserved for things that are immediate consequences of previous results.

Based on the featured article, Scholze's position hasn't changed. There is a specific objection and the two sides just...disagree.

For those interested, you can look at the papers yourself if you want to. Here's the one containing the controversial result [2]. Theorem 3.11 is on p153, and the statement alone is 5 pages long. The proof is 3 lines and asserts that it's obvious from definitions and previous statements. Corollary 3.12 is on p173.

As an outsider, I am amazed at Scholze's ability to work through all of this and identify a specific criticism.

[1] https://inference-review.com/article/a-crisis-of-identificat...

[2] http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/Inter-universal%20...

re: "designed specifically", I can see how suburban living might be an obstacle to labor organization, but who is doing the designing here?

It's interesting to take the featured article's bit about the Bill of Rights and think of the procedural emphasis of the USA criminal justice system as a flawed attempt at reconciling the USA's many different constituent cultures. Like, we have no bedrock agreed cultural principles, so we're just going to settle for codifying how the process works rather than the abstract ends ("justice") it should achieve. That's disquieting.

Wikipedia [1] has a more sober figure than the $15 billion claimed from the featured article, which is far below the wealth of modern athletes:

> In equivalent basic good purchasing power, Diocles' wealth would be between approximately $60 million and $160 million.

This appears to be supported by the table at the bottom of this page [2], which claims that a seaside villa in Naples cost about 3mil sesterces/sestertii. That makes the featured article's claim that 35mil sestertii is $15 billion questionable. Adjusting using seaside villa prices, 35mil sestertii (Diocles' wealth) is more like $7mil.

The $15bil figure appears to come from the "enough to pay the whole army for 1/5 of a year" stat multiplied by the modern-day USA figure [3] (by the way, [3] appears to be the source for much of the featured article).

As far as the "enough to pay the whole army for a few months" stat goes, the most common figure I can find for "annual pay for a legionary" during Diocles' life is 1200 sestertii, or 240 for 1/5 of a year [4]. 36mil/240 is 150,000, which does sound like a plausible (even high) number for the size of the Roman army. On the other hand, [2] claims that 1200 sestertii buys about 100 lbs of pork, so that means a soldier could expect to get paid about 1 Roman pig per year?

Cross-era price comparisons are hard!

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

[2] http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~lac61/ASSIGNMENTS/SectionOne/R...

[3] https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/greatest-all-tim...

[4] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40310480

At least in Grothendieck's case, the boundary between "visionary" and "madman" is not so clear. This is a guy who spent decades pursuing targets nobody else could see, and convincing other people to join him, and the end result was a resounding success for mathematics. The combination of 1. the truth-seeking confidence that comes from pulling that off, and 2. what sounds like a deeply traumatizing childhood at the hands of various governments is a...complicated mixture.

I read a few articles about Grothendieck when he died, but I still learned a lot from this one.

Those articles usually skipped over his early years as some version of anarchy. This one better fills in those gaps. For example, I didn't realize how haphazard Grothendieck's early professional progress was, or that it depended on an interview with a French education official who recognized unorthodox talent:

> “Instead of a meeting of twenty minutes, he went on for two hours explaining to me how he had reconstructed, ‘with the tools available’, theories that had taken decades to construct. He showed an extraordinary sagacity.”

It reminds me of Ramanujan, another exceptionally gifted and devoted mathematician who acquired most of his education on his own, and was very nearly lost to history but for the efforts of a few well-connected officials who could see his potential. Conversely, what a bummer it is to think of similar talents who didn't get so lucky.

It also gets at just how much the culture of math education matters to math students, even ones like Grothendieck:

> [Grothendieck] felt free to ask questions, but also found himself “struggling to learn things that those around him seemed to grasp instantly […] like they had known them from the cradle”. The contrast lead Grothendieck to eventually leave Paris, in October of 1949 on the advice of Cartan and Weil who recommended he instead travel to Nancy to work with Schwartz and Dieudonné on functional analysis.

And this was a guy whose internal mathematical drive was strong enough to independently discover measure theory as a teenager!

Then there are all the other "failures" absent from a short biographical blurb: he finished his PhD "with few prospects for employment after his graduation in 1953", then "planned to write a book on topological vector spaces, but it never materialized", spent a year failing to solve the "approximation problem", despaired that the field of his thesis was "dead", pivoted away from analysis, rest is history, etc.

The title is somewhat misleading (and different from the one in the article). They are now allowing opposition politicians to buy ads related to Covid, just as the administration can.

Geez, I thought this might be an overblown piece about algorithms unwittingly optimizing for the wrong things, but the headline is pretty accurate. Discussing how moderators choose content to recommend to people in the “For You” section (not a user — I assume this is something highlighted to users):

> Under this policy, TikTok moderators were explicitly told to suppress uploads from users with flaws both congenital and inevitable. “Abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” dwarfism, and “obvious beer belly,” “too many wrinkles,” “eye disorders,” and many other “low quality” traits are all enough to keep uploads out of the algorithmic fire hose.

A TikTok spokesperson seems to confirm they are real guidelines, but won’t confirm how they were used.

> TikTok spokesperson Josh Gartner told The Intercept that “most of” the livestream guidelines reviewed by The Intercept “are either no longer in use, or in some cases appear to never have been in place,” but would not provide specifics.

Somewhat meta comment, when I read all the conflicting recommendations here (seriously, for almost all recommendations there’s an anti-recommendation somewhere in this thread), it makes me question the value to me in really trying to understand the financial system.

I mean, I’m not completely financially illiterate. I understand compound interest. I stick with sinking most of my money into passive investing, saving x months of expenses in checking for surprises, and not accumulating any debt.

Every now and then I think about getting back into value investing (it was fun in high school) which is a little more active, but the effort required to understand this system seems enormous/impossible. There are simplified expositions of how to read a balance sheet, but then I run into weird edge cases of financial trickery that I’d never be aware of. So I figure I can’t compete with pros and passive investing seems like a reasonable enough approximation in the long run.

When I compare it to all of the other stuff I could learn or skills I could acquire in the same time, so far “learning about the financial system” is so messy and uncertain to me that I never really pursue it.

Has anybody run into this issue? What did you decide?

There are about 1800 UCSC graduate students [1]. From this 2014-15 UCSC budget report [2] there is a very near 2:1 masters:phd graduation ratio. Assuming there are 2 years of masters students and 6 of PhD at any one time, that makes PhD students 60% of “graduate students”. Let’s make this easy by saying 1000 PhD students (if anything I imagine it’s way less than this — as I understand, monetizing masters students has been an increasing trend in American universities). The UCSC grad student union says average pay for the year is about 22k [3] (edit: this appears to be a minimum, not average, wage).

The strikers want 1.4k more per month. With the current 9 month payment system, that’s about 13k more per PhD student per year. So 1k*13k = 13mil overall to put this problem to bed.

That seems...surprisingly little? Aggravating a big chunk of your on-the-ground workers and attracting all this bad press doesn’t seem worth it. Meanwhile, there appear to be a whole lot of UCSC administrators making comfortable six figures [4].

I get that a lot of people on HN probably see the current low wages as a natural function of supply and demand in different academic disciplines. But heck, just looking at this from the point of view of the university, which is allocating resources to fight this, the calculus is odd.

[1] https://www.ucsc.edu/about/facts-figures.html

[2] https://planning.ucsc.edu/budget/reports-overviews/pdfs-imag...

[3] https://gsa.ucsc.edu/things_to_know/funding

[4] https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/

Just last week Terry Jones' obituary received hundreds of upvotes here and in many other places.

I guess users are flagging Kobe but not Terry Jones because they like Jones more. But this is explicitly what flagging is not supposed to be about.

Just last week a Terry Jones obituary received hundreds of upvotes, and I'm not aware of any contributions he made to "computing, science, business, startups, etc.".

I'm not saying Terry Jones obituaries should have been wiped too. I'm saying there's a weird editorial double standard here.

Not parent, but I still think their point is valid: it’s hard to be a careful, ethical journalist and make decent money.

That’s not an argument for abandoning journalistic ethics, but it does illustrate why Lehrer’s rules are not the current equilibrium.

It could be an old one. Wikipedia claims [1] they hang around for decades.

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

> you get nowhere in politics without studying and understanding foundational liberal arts skills such as rhetoric, persuasion, and public debate

I’m skeptical that attainment of political power is easily attributed to a good liberal arts education. I think desire for power, some intelligence, and a relaxed relationship with principles go a long way. Well-crafted rhetoric...eh.

Can someone point me to statistics about this phenomenon? It sounds true that foreign investors use US housing as an investment and inflate prices, but I have no idea how large this effect is.

I enjoyed Tyler Cowen’s interview with Larissa MacFarquhar:

https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-lari...

She writes for the New Yorker and has spent plenty of time around unusual notable people. She also wrote a whole book about extreme altruists. Here is the first bit of the podcast (both transcript and audio are at the link):

> COWEN: First set of question about altruism and extreme altruists. Are very virtuous people easy to dislike?

MACFARQUHAR: Not to me, but to many others. And this was actually news to me when I embarked on the book. I went into it wanting to simply understand the drive and the motives of people who could sustain the kind of extraordinary sense of duty and altruism that some of us have some of the time, moved maybe by a poignant photograph or somebody in front of us, but can’t sustain without those cues in front of us. But there are other people who can, and I wanted to know what made them tick. But in my first foray into this field, I was writing about people who donated one of their kidneys to a stranger, and I discovered . . . I was talking to people about the people I was meeting, and they would say, “Well, those people surely are all mentally ill, right? Or they have some problem, or they are probably very, very censorious or judgmental.” It was very surprising to me. I understand, of course, that not everyone is going to be an extreme altruist, but I didn’t realize the extent of the hostility and suspicion of them until I started writing about them. And I became fascinated by that. It became a major part of the book, trying to figure out where this comes from because I don’t think it exists in every time and place in the same way.

I’m skeptical that America’s forefathers envisioned a future where a reasonable degree of financial security is exclusively for business-owners.

It bugs me that so much more public and media ire is directed toward tech companies than defense contractors when the latter industry is of comparable size, way more opaque, and dominated by very very old companies [1] with excellent lobbying.

I understand that people have far less personal interaction with defense contractors. But hey, it’s your tax dollars.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defense_contractors

Yes, but this is fear of crime. Over the past few decades, in general more Americans have believed crime is increasing than decreasing [1].

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1603/crime.aspx

Or the people lonely enough to jump at any possibility of human contact. It’s unclear.

Man, seemingly every week on HN there’s an article attacking PhDs as monastic pyramid schemes for the foreign, financially gullible, and unemployable.

As a 5th-year computer science PhD student (graduating next semester!) I think this characterization is unfair.

With summer internships, I have made about 40k per year over my PhD, which was more than enough for anything I wanted. I only had to TA for one year. The jobs available to me now are much more interesting than the ones available to me 5 years ago. With the help of a great advisor, a few other hosts and mentors, and fellow grad students and postdocs, I’ve learned a lot about (and now, made some contributions I’m proud of) to a couple of areas of research. As someone who enjoys research, that has been a very rewarding process.

This is not a universal truth. Things might be much worse if I had dependents, had a bad stipend, had a bad advisor, or did not like research. But in my case I had none of these complications, and I’m glad I did a PhD — not just to have the credential, but to have had the fun experience, grown, and now have a research future I’m pretty excited about.

As for many things, there's a nice Knausgaard quote about this:

> That’s what distance does; when the time between conversations gets longer, intimacy diminishes, the little things connected to one’s daily life lose their place, it seems odd to talk about a shirt you just bought or to mention you’re thinking of leaving the dishes until morning when you haven’t spoken to a person for two weeks or a month, that absence would seem instead to call for more important topics, and once they begin to determine the conversation there’s no turning back, because then it’s two diplomats exchanging information about their respective realms in a conversation that needs to be started up from scratch, in a sense, every time, which gradually becomes tedious, and eventually it’s easier not to bother phoning at all, in which case it’s even harder the next time, and then suddenly it’s been half a year of silence.

I'm a guy and I like phone calls to friends, but I let them wander organically with little pressure. Of course, my friends and I have lives where it's not a big deal to set aside an hour or two for meandering conversation, and not everybody does. But wandering conversation is such a high-utility activity for me that I'm happy to do so. At any rate, it beats watching Netflix or whatever by a mile -- I remain confused by how many people say they have no time for friends but also consume a bunch of solo entertainment. I guess if your free time comes in unpredictably scheduled half hour blocks it might simultaneously be hard to plan hangouts and easy to watch TV, but I don't think most people have that kind of life, outside of maybe certain sets of parents of young children?

The rewards are different, too. There is no level of mathematical achievement that will get the kind of broad (but typically local) social status and public approval of being a starting high school quarterback. Math just doesn't tap into anything near as easy and primal.

As a current PhD student in CS -- seconded. I'm fortunate to have a great advisor, and my research career so far has been largely fun and productive as a result. I have also seen equally (or more) talented and hard-working students have worse experiences because of worse advisors. It's just hard to become a good researcher without good mentorship.

As far as practical advice for finding good advisors, track records of previous students can be a helpful first filter once you've made a list of people who wrote papers you like. Probably the most helpful thing is talking to current students at the admitted students day and listening to them. Bad advisors usually have at least one notable case, and there will probably be at least one person who'll take you aside and tell you about it. Listen to them carefully. Even great advisors can have at least one unsuccessful and bitter student through no fault of their own...but they usually don't show up to the admitted student events unless there's a real cause for animus.

I have mixed feelings about this.

It is true that modern funding of scientific research is flawed. Certainly in the US and probably everywhere. Almost any working scientist has plenty of stories about the silliness of bureaucratic requirements for governments, universities, or nonprofits. Almost any working scientist can name some people in their field who they think are severely overrated or even unethical (this seems to be more of an issue in lab sciences, somehow). Almost any working scientist has peer-review horror stories and admits that the process is noisy at best.

Still: there are real benefits to being a non-independent researcher. At this point it’s hard to get to the forefront of research — in pretty much any field — without extensive contact with the people who are there already, most of whom are not independent researchers. Failure to do so doesn’t just mean you want produce hip research that caters to the specific elite tastes of the establishment. It also drastically increases the likelihood that you’re wrong. Good research is hard; it’s even harder in isolation. Ther are hundreds and hundreds of papers about your favorite math/physics/computer science (it does seem easier to be an independent naturalist or something) conjectures floating around out there. Many of them sucked away years of their authors’ lives, and somewhere around 0% of then are correct.

I suppose my two cents for anybody seriously interested in independent research is to make it as easy as possible for credentialed researchers to interact with you. Learn what you can, read accepted literature, acquire some credentials yourself if possible, learn the language on Stackexchange or Mathoverflow. Definitely do not open your interactions with grandiose claims. Most researchers actually like their subjects; if you have something useful to tell them, they want to know. You just gotta make it as easy as possible for them to see you’re not a crank.

It's also easier to give forgiveness than permission, especially in an institutional context. Forgiveness after the fact doesn't imply approval of the act the way permission beforehand does.